SEO BLOG

US results in other countries:

I know many of you have this question especially webmasters and siteowners from other countries doing business with US clients. For us though we have a sales office in CA, US our development team works from india but our 100% our client base is US. We need to target US customers only and for this we need to make sure have best results in US search engines.

Even if you search google.com from here you won't have the best results delivered there will be some geotargeting jumping in based on your IP. So to tackle that we need to find other ways. I can list few of the ways we know of and which we use internally use to check our sites as well as our client sites from US pages.

1. Adding &gl=us to the URL works sometimes. But even if you add this if your IP of your internet service provider is country specific then the result still wont be as accurate as it is served in the US states. SO this will kind of work and worth the try.

2. Using the Google adwords https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool this too works sometimes but it delivers results the same way as the above option it also detects the IP and doesnt give the best results and results are not always similar to the US results.

3. A VPN with US Ip works better we have some VPN connects with some client's offices and we get US Ip where we browse to get exact US based results.

4. Last but not the least the best option infact the option we most use is a US proxy. There are some very good US proxies like

http://www.megaproxy.com/
http://www.hidemyass.com/
http://www.clickgo.info/
http://www.fastwebproxy.net/ etc
They are mostly US proxies and what they see in US is what you see in your country. I recommend using one of those proxies to check results in US,

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When we listened to the live webmaster central live chat which happened on friday they were so tough on sites that are selling links. Also they have a link in webmaster tools to report paid links. Plus they have a good written explanation here.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

According to that document:

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results. Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt fileGoogle works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know.We'll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links."

Infact they did mention in their LIVE chat that sites which sell links will be penalized. Ok now when we go to the official google blog here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ we can see that few of the sites listed here do sell lot of text based links on their site. Though they nofollow those links I feel linking to those sites means they support those sites.
So can we assume that google's friends can sell links. I don't want to rant and I can understand they dont have control over it but still they link to sites which sell links and this is like endorsing those site's Search Engine Spamming efforts. So I feel best way to sell links on your site is to go to Search Conferences make friends with Google Employees and sell links safely on our sites with Google’s direct approval.

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We get questions from users asking whether where we host our website plays a role in search engines. Our answer is yes there are lot of factors when it comes to ranking in search engines and a problem with a hosting company will be an other important factor.
Here are some reasons why you should select a good host.

1. Downtime: Make sure you get the best uptime not just by guarantee but by testimonials of other companies of the hosting company you want to host. We have seen most of the web hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime but a lot of them never keep up that promise. If the site goes down you have to keep going behind them and finally if there is a major fault you site might takes about 3 or 4 days which is a massive negative effect on your site. A long downtime affects your repeated customers if they are regular to your website and find you site is down for a long period eventually they will never return back which is not good for sites which depends on repeated traffic. A long downtime also affects search engine crawling googlebot and other major crawlers are programmed to visit big high quality sites on a repeated trip which varies from inbetween few hours a day to once a day to once in couple of days. If the Search engine crawlers cant crawl the site even after repeated attempts they might boot your site out of index for a short while eventually it will come back but the risk of loosing precious ranking is not good.
Also its not about repeated visitors also first time visitors will be badly affected if you have a bad hosting company and suffer a long term downtime impact in search engines. Imagine potential customers click on a search result and see that your site doesn't exist they will never come to your again.
Bad DNS resolving: I have seem some hosting companies suffer from bad DNS resolving. If the DNS resolving is not good search engine crawlers will have trouble accessing your site from some of their datacenters and a bad crawl will affect your site. A bad crawl is bad for SEO since your site should have good credible crawling capabilites for the crawlers to visit regularly and inaccessible pages on your site due to DNS problem will result in bad distribution of link juice which will cause loss of internal link popularity.
Banned IPs hosting: There are millions websites which share hosting on same Ips with other websites. Though this is a natural phenomenon sharing an IPs with too much banned websites / spam websites / adult websites will hurt your site. There is a limit no-one can prevent a bad site from being in a shared IP but imagine 60% of all websites hosted on your IP are spamming the search engines then your site will be considered part of it and this will loose your credibility with search engine algorithms.

Shared IPs: As mentioned in the above post shared Ips sometimes hurt best solution is dedicated IP but if you cant afford dedicated Ips research more on the host an if their shared IPs are fine go ahead and host.

Hosting company Search engine rankings: If you are search engine user and looking for a web host mostly you will use search. Most of the time sites that rank in top will have good credibility since they should have worked really hard to reach what they are right now.

Mod_rewrite: Though rewriting is not important now a rewrite to the dynamic URls will make search engines job easier and your users will remember URLs better. I recommend check your host first to make sure they offer good URL writing whether its PHP, or Perl or ASP

There are other factors too but above are important and can be researched before buying with a hosting company,

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We never heard or know anything about Earth hour unless we noticied the Homepage of google. When we saw the new darkend homepage and followed the link from it we were able to understand the importance of spending time with nature for atleast an hour. Yesterday we had some employees working even due to weekend and we turned off all the lights including Air conditioners to make sure we support a good cause.
We all know google always support good causes. Global warming is threatening the very existance for the world we live in and its important everyone realizes how important its to reduce the pollution we inflict on Mother nature so that it doesn't backfire us through Climate changes and Global warming.
We thank Google wholeheartedly for helping us understand a good cause.

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Google webmaster central live chat log full unedited version.
Please read the log here,
Update Full Raw Unedited version of Audio transcript.
We are now posting the full chat log which we were able to save during the live chat conversation between Google's Search quality / webmaster central engineers and webmasters around the world. It was very interesting session and this is the first time in the history of Search engines did we see live online chat between a search engine company and the webmasters.

This is a raw chat log we never had time to clean it due to weekend. In the coming week we will able to select the best answers from this and will be posting in a seperate blog posting till that time enjoy reading this log its interesting. We have some very good industry experts comment in this LOG apart from Google's panelists.
Already we posted the full text based Question and Answer Session here
Please read the log here.
We are preparing the transcript from the 90 minutes audio its gonna take time, we will also post the full audio though its not of the best quality. :-)

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Google Answers 150 questions in today's live chat session between Google's webmaster central search quality team and webmasters around the world.
Google panelists had celebrity Googlers like MattCutts, Adam Lasik other panelists are Evan ,Jessica,John Mueller,Jonathan Simon,Liza,Maile Oye,Mariya,MattD
Ramya,Ried,Susan,Wynz.

Text Based Question and Answer session happened between Google's expert panelists and
Webmasters, This is a raw unedited conversation to make it more accurate. There
are some casual conversations please ignore them.

UPDATE: Raw Live casual chat Log Posted here
Update: Raw Unedited version of Full Audio transcript posted here

Document Prepared by Search Engine Genie Team

1. Webmaster (Rahul Doshi ): what is the process?


2. Google Expert (MattD) : :
   Rahul, You will want to log out completely
   and back in. If you end up not getting onto the call, you should still be
   able to follow along in the chat windows.


3. Webmaster (Gabe) :
   What is the criteria for getting the 'more results' for the 1st search result?
   It's not just appearing first and having a sitemap recognized by Google because
   I've seen both for a given site with no 'more results', so what is it?


4. Google Expert (MattD) : : Gabe, are
   you talking about Sitelinks?


5. Webmaster (Laurent):
   About SiteLinks, what would be your advice to get results appear. I see them
   in the GWC, but not in SERPS


6. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334


7. Webmaster (Gabe):
   The first result returning specific sitelinks below just after 'more results'.


8. Google Expert (MattD) : : Gabe, Sitelinks
   are purely algorithmic, you can find some more information here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334


9. Webmaster (Linda Farm):
   Is Website Tools verifying site not working? i've tried verifying my site
   and it just doesn't work


10. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Linda, the
    team is working on something with verification, it seems to be affecting some
    sites.


11. Webmaster (Cassiano Travareli):
    I wanna know about social media optimization! what is the Google opinion about
    that?


12. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Social media
    is a great way of attracting relevant visitors!


13. Webmaster (Mark Kaufman):
    Would you recommend no following the sorting links?


14. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Mark, if those
    links lead to duplicate content, you can either add a nofollow to the links
    or block indexing through meta tags or a robots.txt entry.


15. Webmaster (erik) : One of my clients has a thumbnail next to their serp result instead of the
    sitelinks that were there before....what gives?


16. Google Expert (MattD) : : erik, Sitelinks
    and Universal Search results are query-specific.


17. Webmaster (Terence):
    If RSS feeds have near identical content as HTML pages, might that cause duplicate
    content penalties?


18. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : RSS feeds
    do not need to be indexed, you can block indexing through your robots.txt


19. Webmaster (ali merchant):
    how does the search engine treat an https (secure) page versus an http


20. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Ali, we treat
    https the same as http -- however, https puts a bigger load on your server,
    so you might want to check that it can handle it on your side.


21. Webmaster (Mark Kaufman) :
    Kind of depends on what duplicate content means -- if the sort is different
    on a results screen, different products/items will appear on a given page...but
    overall it's the same set of products as the default sort.


22. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Mark, if the
    content is generally the same but just in a different order, I don't think
    it would provide much original value in the search results for the user.


23. Webmaster (Carlos) :
    We are a comparison shopping website, healthpricer.com, and we power the ecommerce
    section of 4 different sites, i.e. marketplace.healthcentral.com those sites
    have identical content to our main site, can this get me penalized?


24. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Unfortunately
    we can't do individual reviews for every site, but you could start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359


25. Webmaster (Terence) :
    Confusion about robots.txt vs rel=nofollow. I don't want to pass PageRank
    to my Privacy Policy. Suppose I already blocked /privacy/ in my robots.txt.
    Do I also have to use rel=nofollow when linking internally to /privacy/ to
    prevent the pass of PageRank?


26. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Pages that
    are blocked by robots.txt can still have and pass PageRank, so if you don't
    want that page to get PageRank from your Privacy Policy page, you should nofollow
    that link.


27. Webmaster (Terence):
    Confusion about robots.txt vs rel=nofollow. I don't want to pass PageRank
    to my Privacy Policy. Suppose I already blocked /privacy/ in my robots.txt.
    Do I also have to use rel=nofollow when linking internally to /privacy/ to
    prevent the pass of PageRank?


28. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Pages that
    are blocked by robots.txt can still have and pass PageRank, so if you don't
    want that page to get PageRank from your Privacy Policy page, you should nofollow
    that link.


29. Webmaster (dockarl) :
    Why's he using ALT TEXT on text at the bottom of his site - is that wrong?
    LearningGuitars.com


30. Google Expert (Evan) : : Hi Dockarl,
    the site Wysz was talking about was learningguitarnow.com


31. Webmaster (erik) :
    my client has the same issue as this: search for buzznet.com in google and
    you'll see the same thing


32. Google Expert (MattD) : : Thanks for
    the example erik. This site is triggering an image as a Universal result.
    Both Universal and Sitelinks are determined algorithmically, so you can't
    opt-in to either. You can opt out of Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools if that
    helps the situation.


33. Webmaster (Andrew) :
    What are your views on image replacement versus using alt= on an image. Is
    it a bad thing if used legitimately?


34. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : There are
    many high-quality sites that use image replacement techniques (such as Fahrner
    image replacement) to provide a better user experience. If you're using this
    technique in a legitimate way to benefit your users, you shouldn't have problems.


35. Webmaster (Nancy) :
    Any chance that Google will develop its own directory that folks can directly
    submit their website to?


36. Google Expert (Evan) : : Hi Nancy,
    we use the ODP (open directory project), to learn more go to dmoz.org


37. Webmaster (Mark Kaufman) :
    Can I ask a video sitemap question? We sumbitted a video sitemap back on Feb
    19th. In Webmaster Tools, total URL is 11k, but Indexed URLs are 0. Of the
    115 sitemaps off the index, 2 have warnings. Do video sitemaps just take a
    long time to get indexed?


38. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Video sitemaps
    take some time to get approved -- it can take up to 2-3 months.


39. Webmaster (Jaan Kanellis) :
    So duplicate content can cause page rank issues? I thought you were able to
    filter duplicate content?


40. Google Expert (JonathanSimon) : : If you have
    mutiple URLs for the same content within your site, each URL could be attracting
    it's own links. It would be better to instead have one page for everyone to
    link to thus consolidating the value of all the external links.


41. Webmaster (Gary Carpenter) :
    I setup a webmaster account an submitted my url. I also setup a Sitemap.xml
    file. Google reports that the url is indexed and the Sitemap file is OK yet
    when I google search my url the result is "No Documents Found".
    What have I done wrong???


42. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : It can take
    a bit for sites to get indexed, you might want to post in the webmaster help
    groups for detailed suggestions.


43. Webmaster (Korpis, LLC) :
    Would there be a problem with doing a large number of 301 redirects at once?


44. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : I would recommend
    against doing "chained" redirects (a page redirects multiple times).


45. Webmaster (Kevin Rogers) :
    For the Guitar lesson site, shoule they 301 the learnguitarnow.com/index.shtml
    page to learnguitarnow.com?


46. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : If that URL
    is not linked, it should not need to be redirected. If it's linked, it would
    be best to remove the links, a 301 could help to speed up the removal.


47. Webmaster (Laurent) :
    I see nofollow links in my GWC. Why is that ?


48. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : That's by
    design.


49. Webmaster (Hasit Ruparel) :
    I have alread reviewed that, however I have problems in which my websites
    are not considered for higher ranking, ever after following all the steps
    on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769


50. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : You might
    want to post about it in detail in the help groups.


51. Webmaster (Terence) :
    Thanks Susan, but I'm actually asking about internal links pointing *to* /privacy/,
    not links from /privacy/. Will internal links pass PR to /privacy/ even if
    /privacy/ is blocked by robots.txt?


52. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Yes.


53. Webmaster (Scott) :
    what site is he talking about now?


54. Google Expert (Jessica) : : Hi, Thanks
    for your question. We're now discussing images in Google Search results


55. Webmaster (Jaan Kanellis) :
    Also can we get any comments on paid link re-inclusion process? Once the paid
    links are removed is the next step Google re-inclusion through Google Webmaster
    Tools?


56. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Yes, a reconsideration
    request is the next logical step once everything is cleaned up. Please include
    all details in your request so that we can handle it appropriately.


57. Webmaster (Allison Kulage) :
    Related to the robots.txt issue - if you've placed a no robots tag on every
    page of a site and a disallow for all in the robots.txt file, but the home
    page still shows up in the top 10 for a competitive keyword, how else can
    you get the site removed?


58. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : If you are
    blocking crawling with robots.txt, we won't be albe to see the robots meta
    tag. If you want the URL removed, it would be better to allow crawling (not
    block it in a robots.txt) so that the meta tag can be read.


59. Webmaster (Raffi) :
    would you suggest subdomains or folders for state specific content for a US
    site? i.e. az.domain.com or www.domain.com/az ?


60. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Both work.


61. Webmaster (Cassiano Travareli) :
    i wanna know about duplicate content inside blogs. about categories, archives,
    authors, have the same content of the article. in my webpages im blocking
    using robots txt, i blocked categories and archives. is it good?


62. Google expert (MattD) : : Cassiano, If your content is the original, I wouldn't recommend
    blocking it. If you have content fed in from another site, it might be smart
    to use robots.txt as you've said. I'd recommend taking your site to the Webmaster
    Help Group as well.


63. Webmaster (Terence) :
    What are the benefits of submitting a sitemap if our site is already crawled
    well by Google? In other words, what are we missing out if we don't submit
    a sitemap?


64. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : By submitting
    a Sitemap we see which URLs have been added and changed. We can crawl those
    earlier than if we had to accidentally "stumble" upon them.


65. Webmaster (Jaan Kanellis) :
    Lastly can we download this cat log?


66. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : You should
    be able to use File - Save to save this log.


67. Webmaster (Rob) :
    Is there any major issue with using CMS, e.g. Joomla?


68. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : If the CMS
    is compliant with the normal web standard it should be no problem. However,
    each tool is only as strong as the person using it -- all CMS can create great
    sites and they can create bad sites.


69. Google Expert 2 (MattD) : : Rob, from personal experience, CMS packages are great, though
    you will want to make sure you customize the templates and page titles so
    your snippets are unique.


70. Webmaster (Phil Peterman) :
    I was hoping y'all would address the use of display:none and some basic guidelines
    for it's use


71. Google Expert (JonathanSimon) : : As long as
    the use of display:none is not abused to selectively hide content from site
    visitors while at the same time showing it to search engine crawlers, it should
    fine to use this.


72. Webmaster (Gijs Nelissen) :
    are you recording this conference for later reference ? i missed some of the
    advice on my website (digitalbase.eu).


73. Google Expert (Adam Lasnik) : : Hi Gijs, we
    weren't able to record the audio, unfortunately, but I believe at least one
    blogger was doing a transcript :) ( Ofcourse we did :-) )


74. Webmaster (Jonatas Leonel) :
    So, how google see websites what receive a lot of good links, by natural way
    but use rel="nofollow" in all of its external links?


75. Google Expert (Evan) : : Hi Jonatas,
    could you clarify? Good Site A links to Good Site B, and Good Site B has rel="nofollow"
    links?


76. Webmaster (Ian M) :
    Will Google provide audio and text of this chat after?


77. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : We'll do our
    best to put this content online, though I'm not yet sure in what format.


78. Webmaster (Leslie Ding) :
    Regarding subdomains, I understand google can determine country codes from
    the URL, e.g. jp.mysite.com. What about japan.mysite.com?


79. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : No those are
    not recognized automatically. You can however use Webmaster Tools to set geotargeting
    for it.


80. Webmaster (Hasit Ruparel) :
    Thanks for the reply John, do you know which is the BEST place to post any
    problem?


81. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/topics?start=
    is where the official Webmaster Help group is located.


82. Webmaster (Raffi) :
    John, I work for a site where I think a competitor is trying to buy links
    "for us" to try and get your google bomb algo to kick in...what
    can I do about this?


83. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : That's generally
    no problem as we always look at the bigger picture and try to assess the intent.


84. Webmaster (John) :
    One or two panelist mentioned they were part of the google health team, but
    I did not catch their names?


85. Google Expert (Adam Lasnik) : : Hi John, nope,
    sorry, we must not have spoken clearly... -- we're all in Search Quality,
    not Health


86. Webmaster (ParksC) :
    With regards to the paid links question above about asking for inclusion,
    would it be the same to nofollow the paid links instead of just having them
    removed?


87. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Yes, if you
    had paid links and added rel=nofollow to them, you can explain that in your
    reconsideration request.


88. Webmaster (Nancy) :
    Yes, I've been trying for 2 years to get a listing, but there is no editor
    for my category... so things have been slow. I guess I thought that Google
    might be a bit quicker in adding entries. That said, I've had good luck in
    getting my site listed.


89. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : It sounds
    like you're talking about Google Directory, which our team doesn't really
    work with. If you're referring to Google search results, there isn't an "editor"
    process to get in. Check out our Webmaster Guidelines for help getting into
    search results.


90. Webmaster (Terence) :
    We have a regional sudomain, canada.domain.com (we don't have domain.ca).
    We set the geo location to Canada in Google Webmaster Tools a few weeks ago,
    but site is still not indexed as a Canadian site. How long does it take? Any
    other steps we should take?


91. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : This can take
    some time to take affect. If the setting is set, you should be fine in the
    long run.


92. Webmaster (Terence) :
    Does Google rank "static" URLs better than dynamic URLs? Ex. /q-digital-camera.html
    vs /search?q=digital+camera


93. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : There's no
    preference.


94. Webmaster (paavan) :
    When can available option pay per call in India


95. Google Expert (ramya) : : You can post
    your question with respect to Pay per call on http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-help,they
    should be able to help you better


96. Webmaster (Jeremy Rivera) :
    Will Universal Image search results REPLACE links to sites? I.e. Instead of
    10 sites plus images, will we see 1 image, 1 video and 8 sites?


97. Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : We're constantly
    testing what works well in our search results, including whether differenty
    types of universal results are "additive" or will replace one of
    the 10 web results. For now I'd say, stay tuned. :)


98. Webmaster (Richard Hearne) :
    Is there any process for confirming a TBPR penalty? Working with authority
    site which recently went PR7 -> PR3


99. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : If you know
    that the site did not comply with the webmaster guidelines, you can clean
    that up and file a reconsideration request.


100. Webmaster (webado - Christina) :
     I don't know where I can ask my question if I may even - down hre or up there
     or nowhere ?


101. Google expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Down here!


102. Webmaster (paavan) :
     thanks


103. Google Expert (ramya) : : Thanks for
     the question Paavan :)


104. Webmaster (jtbandes) :
     How about <meta name="keywords">? Worth it? Or just let the
     search engines get it from the content?


105. Google Expert (John Mueller) : : We do not
     read the keywords meta tag -- but if you want to use it for yourself, feel
     free to keep them.


106. Webmaster (Amit Agarwal) :<