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Everyone knows yahoo directory charges 299$ for regular site submission for a year and Adult sites it costs 600$. This is huge compared to what other paid directories are charging out there. So is it worth it? I recommend an Yes and a No YES if your site a well established site and want to improve your yahoo search engine exposure to the maximum YES if you are looking to spend money on a good paid directory. You can't find a better paid directory than yahoo out there. YES if you want google to treat you better, Both Google and Yahoo consider a yahoo directory listing an authority backlink since all sites listed in it are subject to manual review. YES if get a good category to list your site listing your site 10 levels deep is not the greatest thing to do when submitting to a directory. YES if you have an adult site and need a quality backlink. I dont think many sites appreciate adult sites other than yahoo directory. YES if you want yahoo LOVE , they love your site if you pay them 299$ NO if you are a small Mom and Pop business and have limited budget on online business NO if you have good cheap alternatives for backlinks NO the sky will not fall and you can always have good rankings even if you dont have a yahoo directory listing. NO if you don't want editorial review of your site sometimes if your site is too spammy with too many affiliate links they will ban your site in the main index. That is all I can think of for now Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,
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Recently MSN Live Search crawler bot is hitting us hard its most probably because we are working hard on unique contents on our site, as well as the tools, blogs etc. We are getting lot of new natural backlinks and this could be an important reason we are seeing increased crawler activity from all the crawlers. Also our SEO forum has started to pick up we have seen some new posters become regular in our forum they have posted some interesting postings. Also we have started 5 new blogs A web design blog, PPC blog, Link building blog, Programming blog , personal company blog etc. Also we have a new search engine experts directory where listing your site is for totally free even you can include your phone numbers and email IDs. Only adding active URLs are chargable its just launched with about 60 profiles are exisiting search engine experts. Our Chief technical Officer who goes by the name Tara has started a blog on our own and she will be sharing her personal thoughts from tomorrow, Also we are launching our newsletter from this month and we are accepting subscriptions from tomorrow, there are ton of new things coming to our website. This is just an effort to catch up to our competitors. Keep visiting our site to see great new innovative things coming up, Good day Search Engine Genie Blog Team,
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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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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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 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 herePlease 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. :-) Thanks, Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,
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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 hereDocument Prepared by Search Engine Genie Team
- Webmaster (Rahul Doshi ): what is the process?
- 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.
- 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?
- Google Expert (MattD) : : Gabe, are
you talking about Sitelinks?
- Webmaster (Laurent):
About SiteLinks, what would be your advice to get results appear. I see them in the GWC, but not in SERPS
- Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334
- Webmaster (Gabe):
The first result returning specific sitelinks below just after 'more results'.
- 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
- Webmaster (Linda Farm):
Is Website Tools verifying site not working? i've tried verifying my site and it just doesn't work
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Linda, the
team is working on something with verification, it seems to be affecting some sites.
- Webmaster (Cassiano Travareli):
I wanna know about social media optimization! what is the Google opinion about that?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Social media
is a great way of attracting relevant visitors!
- Webmaster (Mark Kaufman):
Would you recommend no following the sorting links?
- 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.
- Webmaster (erik) : One of my clients has a thumbnail next to their serp result instead of the
sitelinks that were there before....what gives?
- Google Expert (MattD) : : erik, Sitelinks
and Universal Search results are query-specific.
- Webmaster (Terence):
If RSS feeds have near identical content as HTML pages, might that cause duplicate content penalties?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : RSS feeds
do not need to be indexed, you can block indexing through your robots.txt
- Webmaster (ali merchant):
how does the search engine treat an https (secure) page versus an http
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- Webmaster (dockarl) :
Why's he using ALT TEXT on text at the bottom of his site - is that wrong? LearningGuitars.com
- Google Expert (Evan) : : Hi Dockarl,
the site Wysz was talking about was learningguitarnow.com
- Webmaster (erik) :
my client has the same issue as this: search for buzznet.com in google and you'll see the same thing
- 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.
- Webmaster (Andrew) :
What are your views on image replacement versus using alt= on an image. Is it a bad thing if used legitimately?
- 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.
- Webmaster (Nancy) :
Any chance that Google will develop its own directory that folks can directly submit their website to?
- Google Expert (Evan) : : Hi Nancy,
we use the ODP (open directory project), to learn more go to dmoz.org
- 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?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Video sitemaps
take some time to get approved -- it can take up to 2-3 months.
- Webmaster (Jaan Kanellis) :
So duplicate content can cause page rank issues? I thought you were able to filter duplicate content?
- 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.
- 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???
- 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.
- Webmaster (Korpis, LLC) :
Would there be a problem with doing a large number of 301 redirects at once?
- Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : I would recommend
against doing "chained" redirects (a page redirects multiple times).
- Webmaster (Kevin Rogers) :
For the Guitar lesson site, shoule they 301 the learnguitarnow.com/index.shtml page to learnguitarnow.com?
- 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.
- Webmaster (Laurent) :
I see nofollow links in my GWC. Why is that ?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : That's by
design.
- 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
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : You might
want to post about it in detail in the help groups.
- 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?
- Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Yes.
- Webmaster (Scott) :
what site is he talking about now?
- Google Expert (Jessica) : : Hi, Thanks
for your question. We're now discussing images in Google Search results
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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 ?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Both work.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- Webmaster (Jaan Kanellis) :
Lastly can we download this cat log?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : You should
be able to use File - Save to save this log.
- Webmaster (Rob) :
Is there any major issue with using CMS, e.g. Joomla?
- 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.
- 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.
- Webmaster (Phil Peterman) :
I was hoping y'all would address the use of display:none and some basic guidelines for it's use
- 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.
- Webmaster (Gijs Nelissen) :
are you recording this conference for later reference ? i missed some of the advice on my website (digitalbase.eu).
- 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 :-) )
- 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?
- Google Expert (Evan) : : Hi Jonatas,
could you clarify? Good Site A links to Good Site B, and Good Site B has rel="nofollow" links?
- Webmaster (Ian M) :
Will Google provide audio and text of this chat after?
- Google Expert (Susan Moskwa) : : We'll do our
best to put this content online, though I'm not yet sure in what format.
- 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?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : No those are
not recognized automatically. You can however use Webmaster Tools to set geotargeting for it.
- Webmaster (Hasit Ruparel) :
Thanks for the reply John, do you know which is the BEST place to post any problem?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/topics?start=
is where the official Webmaster Help group is located.
- 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?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : That's generally
no problem as we always look at the bigger picture and try to assess the intent.
- Webmaster (John) :
One or two panelist mentioned they were part of the google health team, but I did not catch their names?
- Google Expert (Adam Lasnik) : : Hi John, nope,
sorry, we must not have spoken clearly... -- we're all in Search Quality, not Health
- 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?
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : Yes, if you
had paid links and added rel=nofollow to them, you can explain that in your reconsideration request.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- Webmaster (Terence) :
Does Google rank "static" URLs better than dynamic URLs? Ex. /q-digital-camera.html vs /search?q=digital+camera
- Google Expert (John Mueller) : : There's no
preference.
- Webmaster (paavan) :
When can available option pay per call in India
- 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
- 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?
- 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. :)
- Webmaster (Richard Hearne) :
Is there any process for confirming a TBPR penalty? Working with authority site which recently went PR7 -> PR3
- 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.
- Webmaster (webado - Christina) :
I don't know where I can ask my question if I may even - down hre or up there or nowhere ?
- Google expert (Susan Moskwa) : : Down here!
- Webmaster (paavan) :
thanks
- Google Expert (ramya) : : Thanks for
the question Paavan :)
- Webmaster (jtbandes) :
How about <meta name="keywords">? Worth it? Or just let the search engines get it from the content?
- 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.
- Webmaster (Amit Agarwal) :<
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