SEOmoz can i have an optout / Unsubscribe link please
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Update profile:
Ok i dont see an opt out link in this email. When i click on update profile i am taken to the login page where i have to find the email settings and then i need to remove tick to opt out. Why do i need to do this? . I think SEOmoz should ask whether i opt in for commercial emails from them when i register.
i don't want to receive couple of commercial emails and then run and find a way to opt-out,
Thanks for understanding
Search Engine Genie.
Labels: search engines, Spam
Digitalpoint Forums Down due to overactivity
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Its very rare to see such popular forum go down. I feel its mostly due to over activity recently Google made a Pagerank update. Most of the visitors in Digital point forum are very addictive and passionate about Pagerank updates. I feel this pagerank update made a crazy impact on their server and it let to database crash.
I think we should be hearing from soon about this,
Search Engine Genie,
Labels: search engines, SEO Forum
Pagerank Update April 2008 Happening now,
Enjoy the pagerank update, Hope everyone are doing fine in this update.
Labels: pagerank, pagerank update
SEO Tools to be upgraded with Ajax Technologies
lyfavor we ask from our loyal tools users is please link to the tools, that brings attention to the tools which will result in backlinks which will result in increased traffic and search engine rankings. We are more than happy to live with it. Currently we have around 50 tools. We will be expanding the number of tools to around 75 with an investment of 8,000$. We are happy to do it as long as our users are happy. Again though we invest we will not make the tools paid tools like our competitors. We are in a open source world and we love to give our stuff free.
Text link brokering companies and other Search engine related sites please dont contact us for paid text link or banner advertising on our site we will never now or infuture sell links. We do get lot of requests and all requests go into Trash without any consideration so don't waste your time asking us to selling links.
Search Engine Genie Team
Labels: Search Engine Optimization, SEO Tools
launching inhouse team SEO challenge
Tactics like Controversial articles, top level quality attractive articles, amazing tools, new innovative ideas are all allowed. We are waiting to see who is the best SEO team in our company. All teams have already started working hard and are doing lot trial and error ideas to come up with the best strategies.
Wish our teams good luck
SEG
Most recent SEO related Informative Thread in Google Groups.
I recommend everyone to read this thread and understand how a webmaster was able to over come his penalty and get back his ranking in Google. Accept you are wrong and Google is always ready to forgive. We had a client who came to us with a penalized site. They bought links from TLA and Google has detected those links and imposed some sort of penalty. We reviewed the site and recommended client to remove all paid links and file a re inclusion. You know what his answer was?
"Google is the looser since it has banned his site. Google is unlucky because it doesn't have his company site in their index" . Come on client if not your site Google has millions of sites to index and they are not worried if one aggressive site is not in their index even though it might be world's best. It took us lot of time to convince him to clean up paid BLs. Finally he did but still he was not ready to give up his Ego and submit re inclusion. We on behalf of him filed a re inclusion and finally the site came back to Good top rankings. He was all praises for us but the truth we didn't do anything all we did was explain in detail mistakes that was previously done on site and said that it will never be repeated again. Google accepted our words and included the site so lesson learnt if you want Google to send free traffic for your site play by their guidelines if you going to spam them face the consequences.
Read that thread again its better than my voice
Labels: Search Engine Optimization, search engines, Spam
Yahoo Search Index rankings algorithm update
How was your site performance?
Labels: Yahoo
Effect of Stumbleupon
how to get started with stumble upon
Getting Started with StumbleUpon https://www.stumbleupon.com/guide.html
After you've read the Guide and fully understand the terms and conditions of being a Stumbler, then there are 3 Steps you'll go through to become a Stumbler...
Step 1: Join StumbleUpon and become a Stumbler... https://www.stumbleupon.com/sign_up.php
Step 2: Connect with friends if you have them in that network.
Step 3: Install the StumbleUpon Toolbar... https://www.stumbleupon.com/download.php
Step 4: Start Stumbling.
As with any "social network", you will need to develop a reputation within the StumbleUpon Communities and there are many. With 4.99 million Stumblers, there are all sorts of "arms and legs" inside the community.
Your goal is to of course become a Top Stumbler and that only comes with tenure. Don't expect things to happen overnight. Think of StumbleUpon like a Digg or Sphinn...
what Google says about Most important People in the world
Who is the nicest guy in the world
Worst person in the world
John Fitzgerald Page Is The Worst Person In The World
Sexiest Men in the world
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=sexiest+guy+in+the+world
Smartest Man in the world
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=smartest+man+in+the+world
Most intelligent Man in the world currently living
A good discussion on that here,
Toughest Man in the world:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=toughest+man+in+the+world
Mr T:
Greatest Man in the world
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=greatest+man+in+the+world
World's Sweetest Man
Gary David Goldberg
Most caring Man in the world:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+caring+man+in+the+world
Saddam Hussian
Most Dangerous Man in the world:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+dangerous+man+in+the+world
A.Q Khan
Most wanted man in the world
Osama bin Laden
Most talked man in the world
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+talked+man+in+the+world
http://www.imeem.com/angelo/playlist/EobpP8Le/edison_chen_worlds_most_talked_about_man_video_playlist/
Most adventurous man in the world
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+adventurous+man+in+the+world
http://www.zestforadventure.com/zest_adventure_man.html
Most Clever Man in the world:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+clever+man+in+the+world
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060717052610AA5R5aY
Labels: Google
SEO for Beginners download powerpoint slideshow

Labels: Search Engine Optimization, search engines, SEO Tools
Pagerank Grey bar for pages of a website - why do we see it
1. New pages: When ever a new page is created i don't see a white PR bar anymore. Its grey PageRank display when ever there is a new page created. So as we know if Google has not assigned a PageRank it used to show white bar now its not the case any more we see Grey PageRank display for all new pages which is definitely new with Google.
2. Abandoned Pages: Pages which are not updated for a long time without any update are showing Grey bar i am seeing it across couple of our pages / websites. So probably it has something to do with abandoned pages.
3. Duplicate Pages: When a competitor or some spammer copies contents of that page and duplicates in his site pages the main page might loose its existing value and can display Grey bar. Seeing this substantially duplicate pages do have some reason for Grey Toolbar PageRank display.
4. Potentially penalty to those pages especially link exchange pages since I see more and more grey display in link exchange pages. This is just a speculation though penalty is the least reason I can imagine of since I see lot of grey PageRank pages rank in search engines.
5. A standard reason which has always been is that the communication between your toolbar and Google data center which delivers PageRank to toolbar is some how interrupted. Though this has been a reason given directly by Google employees still i wonder how one page can fetch PageRank from Google data center and other page cannot at the same time. This is a reason but very rare unless you see grey bar for all sites and pages you browse it cannot be justified.
6. Some people speculate Grey bar display has something to do with supplemental index. Google has been into controversy for a long time on supplemental pages debate. Pages in supplemental index never rank and some have seen grey PageRank pages also never rank so it could be a by product of supplemental results. Just an idea only.
7. Bad PR distribution for those pages from internal pages of your site. If those pages don't have good PR distribution then it could cause grey PageRank but for many sites i monitor those pages have ton of internal links. For Example our blog homepage has link from all over our site but shows grey PageRank display. We see this page is crawled regularly, contents from this page is indexed regularly but still it shows Grey PageRank very difficult to say this as a reason.
8. Lack of Good external links or consistent external links to a page: I seriously wonder whether this could be a reason. Most of the inner pages I have seen that shows grey bar has very less or zero external links from other sites coming into it. So i wonder whether this could be a reason for grey bar. PageRank algorithm probably sees that this page is important only for this site and is not a good page for Internet. I do have controversy over this too. Again our blog URL have good links coming to it from external sites but it displays grey bar don't know why. But recently our blog never got Good back links we seriously abandoned our blog for about a year and never posted any new information. So lack of consistent back links could be a reason for Grey PageRank display.
9. TPR ( Toolbar PageRank Reduction ) : Another reason i can speculate is the infamous Toolbar PageRank Reduction penalty which Google applied to sites which buy and sell text links. Is Grey PageRank bar a side effect of it?
My final opinion is if a page is more than a year indexed in Google and has a PR grey bar it could simply be that the page is not of best value for its users. So they dont assign pagerank for that page which might result in that page not passing pagerank to other pages in other words not contributing any link juice to the pages it links to.
Search Engine Genie
Labels: pagerank, pagerank update
Google Update reverts back - Dewey update no more visible
Most of the changes have reverted back and there are no visible signs of changes that happened on those datacenters propagating to other DCs.
Other cool thing is updates are not the hot topic anymore. People used to discuss 100s of pages for any major updates. When I see this dewey update thread i hardly see it go beyond 30 pages which is a good sign. People are becoming more and more aware of the changes and the communication between search engines and users have improved which has resulted in lesser worries for people.
While Google update mania is no more Pagerank Mania still continues.
False Pagerank update alarm has triggered 10 pages of posting in digital point forums
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=808970&page=2
Labels: Google update, pagerank, pagerank update
Pending Spammers - Aggressive affiliate Marketers
Personally affiliate sites are a No-No for me. When I click on Search engine results and end up an a affiliate page first thing I do is to close the browser and find an other result. I hate to buy from someone who is reselling the product than buying directly from the dealer.
Affiliates still spam the search engines using methods search engines are never aware of before. Its very difficult to tackle this industry since lot of money is involved in this industry and many affiliate marketers are not willing to find better ways to do online business. I don't blame all affiliate sites there are some rare sites which do provide Good information while have random affiliate links mixed on their site but most of the affiliate sites don't add any value for any visitor. Also MFA ( Made For Adsense ) sites are an other disgrace to search engine users. When i click on a result and see a page full of adsense ads, affiliate links i never enjoy the site nor will i want to visit the site again.
i hope search engines completely get rid of all sites that have affiliate links and dont add any value for users this is the last type of death to spam I am looking for in Search engines.
Labels: Google, Search Engine Marketing, Spam
Dont teach how to run business for Search Engines.
Text link advertising is not the traditional way you advertise? You do it for Search Engines. Everything you do for search engines be ready to face the consequences. Want to ride behind the back of a Search Engine make sure you play by the rules. Search engines have the rights to penalize text link publishers/advertisers manually, algorithmically by editorial review anyway they want way as long as it improves the quality of their results. Why complain that Search engine's are teaching you to run a business while actually you are the one who is teaching Search engines how to run a business. As the Search Engine experts have stated you are free to do anything on your website and the same way Search engines have every right to do anything with their algorithm as long as its for the best for their users. I am part of a SEO company too and I always Bow to any changes Google make if there is a ranking change for our sites or our client sites we try to see what mistake was done and find a solution. We never put the blame on any Search Engine. As long as we are in Search Engine Optimization industry lets be close to Search Engines and play by their rules. If we move a bit away from their guidelines lets face the consequences.
I humbly request Search Quality engineers like Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts not to try and defend what you are doing, keep doing what's best for your users and don't worry when somebody tries to curse Google for something they do with their algorithm. If 1000 SEOs join together and curse Google for penalizing paid links what does it show? They want Google to stop penalizing paid links so that they can keep buying links and keep manipulating results its as simple as that. I cannot find an alternate reason for it i am sure its not the reason you are looking for that is best for your users. So keep doing what's best for your algorithm and users and please dont justify and try to defend your ideas. People who love Search Engines will know how to appreciate it.
Search Engine Genie.
Labels: Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Spam
Using nofollow on internal pages - Not a spam
Labels: pagerank
Crawl Date in Google's Cache: Matt Cutts Video Transcript
Ok everybody we have a new illustration today. Vanessa Fox of Google webmaster central blog talked about this some people like to learn visually , some people like to learn screen shots, so I thought ill make a little movie so this is going to be a multi media presentation the 2 media we are buying today are skill and peanut butter red ones. So lets talk about Googlebot and how it crawls the web. First off what are the red imminent represent, well everyone knows red is bad so these are going to be 404s. The Googlebot is crawling around the web and it sees a 404 sucks it down and then later on it will come back to try to check it again.
So what are the purples mean well everybody knows purple means a http status code of 200 OK, That's the only thing that it could possibly represent. So in other words Googlebot comes along and it sucks up the page and we got the page just fine. So we got a 404 we got couple http 200s so life is pretty good next, now lets talk about the cache crawl date and what they represent. So we are not able to tell that easily but this is purple we got two greens , purple and the rest greens. So what do you think the green imminent represent? Everybody knows the green imminent are great we know it's the good ones so green represent a status code of 304. So in a browser Googlebot comes to a page they say hey I want to copy this page or you can just tell me if the page has been modified since I indexed and that the page if the page has not been modified since a certain date you can get 304 status back saying that this page hasn't changed and all that Googlebot has to do is to ignore that page. SO this is what Googlebot does , this is going forward in time so in other words we crawl a page we get 200, the next 2 times Googlebot crawl the page it gets a 304 which is the If Modified Since that said that the page hasn't really changed. And later on then here the webmaster actually changed the page and we see this purple that again means the page has been changed since the last crawl and now we get a 200 since the page is actually fetched.
Now going forward the page didn't change so the web server is smart enough to return a 304 status code for each one of the visits by Googlebot. Now the thing that is interesting is if you want to check whether Googlebot cached the page it will show the last date that the page was last retrieved. But the interesting thing is that until recently the post that we checked on this date and this date it will still give us the very first time that we fetched that page. Now you fetch the page again and it would show this cache crawl date and this would continue and may be for 6 months if the page and the page hasn't change we would still show the old cache crawl date. So the change in policy in what we are doing is if we check on this date and on this date to see if the page has changed we will now show that date in the cache crawl date. So in other words as Googlebot comes along , slipping stuff along it might used to a page which might look pretty old we update that so as we know about even if the page is changed or not we update the crawl date in the cached page so the pages look more fresh in the cache crawl date even for the fact we are showing the date to reflect in the fact that we have actually recently checked the pages has changed.
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
Lightning Round matt cutts video transcript
Alright this is Matt Cutts Coming to you on July 31st Monday 2006 this is probably the last one ill do tonight so lets see if I can kind of do a lightning round. Alright Peer rights in and says
Is it possible to search just for homepages? I tried doing minus in URL html and in URL htm , so and so URL php , ASP but that doesn't filter out enough. That's a really good suggestion peter having thought about that, fast used to offer something like that I think all they did was look for a tilde in the URL I would file that as a feature request and see if people are willing to prioritize that if we are willing to offer that. My guess is it will be relatively low on the priority list because the syntax you mentioned subtracting a bunch of extensions would probably work pretty well.
I got to clarify something about strong Vs Bold, Emphasis Vs Italic. There is a previous question where somebody asks whether it is better to use bold or it is better to use strong because bold is where it was used in olden days when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth and strong is what the w3c recommends. And that time last night I thought that we barely , barely like we prefer bold over strong and I said its not the most part that you would worry about it and the next thing is that a engineer really took me to a code and showed me in live and I can see that Google treats bold and strong exactly the same weight. So thank you for that paul I really appreciate it. And also I saw an other part of the code where the M ( emphasis ) and italics are exactly treated the same. So there you have it so mark it like W3C wants to do it, do it semantically well , do it and don't worry about just small tags because Google will treat just the same way of both the versions.
Ok next in Lightning round Amanda Asks " Do we have more kiddy posts in the future"?
I think we will, I tried to bring my cats here around me but they are afraid of lights and just jumped off. Ill see if I can bring them in future.
Tom Html asks, Where is Google SST, Google guest , google weaver, google market place, google RS 2.0 and other services discovered by tony rescow?
I think its very clear for tony to do a dictionary tag again, services check-in but I am not going to talk about what all those services are.
A preview Joseph Hunkins asks what many topics will be there in duplicate contents as yet, a little bit of a preview on one of the other sessions is on video but I think what I basically want to talk about is it will be there lot of people will be there it will be shingling
What I want to say is Google detects duplicate contents all the way from crawl to all the way people see things when searching. We do stuff that's exact duplicate detection and we do stuff that's near duplicate detection so we do a pretty good job all the along the line like detecting dupes and stuff like that.
And so the best advice I give is to make sure your duplicate contents like the page that has contents as much similar as possible to make it look as much different as possible if they are truly different content. A lot of people talked about word versions or .doc compared to html files typically no need to worry about that if it has similar contents on different domains may be French and an other version in English you really don't need to worry about that, again if you do have the exact same content may be for a Canadian site and for a .com site so probably we will roll the dice and see which ever one looks better to us and just show that but it wouldn't necessarily trigger any sort of penalty or anything like that if you want to avoid you can make sure your templates are very, very different but better if the contents are similar its better to show us which ever is the most ideal for representation and guess the best anyway. And Thomas writes in and says does Google index and rank blog sites different than regular sites?
That's a good question not really, somebody asked me whether links from gov, edu's , and links from two level deep govs and edus like gov.pl or gov.in are the same as .gov?
The fact is really we don't have much of a difference in a way to say hey this is a link from ODP or .gov or .edu and so on. There is no some sort of special boost its just that those sites have higher Pagerank because more people tend to link to them and reputable people link to them so blog sites there aren't anything distinct unless if you go off to blog search ofcourse and its blogs and totally restrained to blogs. SO in theory we could rank them differently but most part its just a general search the way it falls out.
Alright thanks.
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
TPR penalty websites still not ready to change their ways
Searchenginejournal was slapped with 3 points reduction to PR4 now are back to PR7, Forbes lost 2 points and was slapped to PR5, now they removed the paid text link ads and are back to PR7, Washingtonpost.com lost 3 points and was slapped with PR5 now they are back to PR8.
So what is the secret behind getting the Pagerank back and remove TPR Penalty.
First if you check Searchenginejournal they removed all text link ads and now all ads pass through a redirect script that doesn't pass pagerank,
Forbes completely removed all text links and possibly the pagerank came by itself or they might have sent a reconsideration to check their site for paid links.
Washington past now has Nofollow on all the text links they sell, if you take the source of their page you can see that the text link ads that go out of their page don't pass pagerank anymore all of them go through a nofollow.
I know there are some sites who are not ready to go friendly with Google when it comes to TPR and are happy to be at PR4 or PR5 and continue to do what they are not recommended to do. Instead they have their usual blogging power to curse Google for what they did to protect their algorithm. I recommend those sites to correct what they did and possibly file a reconsideration request to get back their Toolbar Pagerank or just keep the credit of running website that has lost some trust in Google's algorithm.
Though I would like to stay away from commenting about individual sites one site I personally admire is SEOchat.com they look too silly to have a PR of 4. Being hit with TPR a reduction of 3 points were applied and their regular pagerank was PR7. Obvious reason is their option to sell text link ads on their site without any nofollow which is not a great sign especially for a site which depends so much on Google to discuss in their forum and so many tools that query Google. Their forum's discussion has 75% discussion on Google and remaining about common issues and other search engines.
For all the 100s of 1000s of users who are regular to SEOchat its not a great way to welcome them with a PR4, Pagerank is like a fashion issue for a website. Most of the people out there especially people who are into search engines see Pagerank as a value of quality for a website. I hope SEO Chat a great site for SEOs will get their Pagerank back by no-following text link ads on their sites. They should set an example for all users who visit their site for SEO purposes.
Labels: Google, penalty, Search Engine Optimization
Google Terminology - Matt cutts Google quality engineer transcript
Hello Everyone I am back, Ok Why don't we start off with a really interesting question. Dazzling donna wrote in all the way from Louisiana she says matt I mentioned before I love to see do the fine type of post, find terms that you at Google use that we non Googlers might get confused about. Things like data refresh etc. You may have defined them in various places but one sheet type list will be great.
Very good question, at some point I need to do a blog post about host, Host Vs Domain and bunch of stuff like that. Some of people had been asking question about June 27th to July 27th so let me talk that a little bit more in the context of a data refresh vs an algorithm update versus an index update. So ill use the metaphor of a car. Back in 2003 we were crawling the web and indexing the web once in every month when we did that that was called an index update algorithms could chance, data could change so everything could chance just in one shot. So that was pretty big deal webmasterworld will name those updates. Now that we pretty much crawl and index some of our datas every single day it's a ever flux its always going on through a process the biggest change in the people's tendency are algorithm updates. You don't see any index updates any more because when we moved away from the monthly update cycle the only time you might see them is you might be completing an index which is incompatible with the old index. So for example if you do simulation of CJK its China, Japan and Korea to under stand this you might have to completely change your index and go to an other index in parallel. So index updates are relatively rare , algorithm updates basically are when we change our algorithm. So may be its with the scoring a particular page you said you know Pagerank matters this much less or this much more or something like that. And those can happen pretty much any time so we call that asynchronous because whenever we get an algorithm update and the tally rates positively and it improves quality, in improves relevance we go ahead and push that out and an other smaller change is called data refresh that is essentially like you are changing the input to the algorithm , changing the data that the algorithm works on. So an index update with a car metaphor would be like changing a large section of the car things like changing the car tyre whereas an algorithm update is like changing a part in the car may be a changing out the engine for a different engine or changing or other main parts of the car, a data refresh is more like changing the gas in your car every one or 2 weeks or 3 weeks your change will always go in and will see how the algorithm works on that data. So for most part data refreshes are more common one thing we got to be very careful about is how safely we check them, some data refreshes happens all the time so for example we compute Pagerank continually and continuously so its always back of Machines refining Pagerank based on incoming data and pagerank goes out all the time anytime when we make an update to the index it happens pretty much every day.
By contrast some algorithms are updated every week every couple of weeks so those are data refreshes that are happening in a slower page. So the particular algorithm that people are interested in, on June 27th and July 27th those algorithms, actually those algorithms happen to be live for over a year and a half so you are seeing data refreshes that you are seeing that people see as a way for sites to rank.
In general if your site has been affected go back to your site take a fresh look at see if there is anything that might be exceedingly over optimized or maybe hanging out in SEO forums for such a long time that I need to have a regular person come in and take a look at the site and see if its ok to me. Or if you tried all the regular stuff and still it looks Ok to you then I would keep building regular good content and make the site very useful and if the site is useful then Google should fight hard to make sure its ranking where it should be ranking. That's about the most I can give about June 27th and july 27th data refreshes because it does goes into our secrets also a little bit but that hopefully gives you a little bit of an idea about the scale the magnitude of different changes.
Algorithm changes happen a little more rarely and data refreshes are always happening and sometimes it happen from day to day or sometimes week to week or month to month
Thanks
Matt Cutts
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts
rel= external nofollow and rel=nofollow difference
Nofollow is a co-ordinated efforts from Google, yahoo , MSN to stop crawling links that are considered not trustworthy or spammy. Today many blogs, message boards, forums, news sites use nofollow tag to prevent spam in their comments or other areas of the blogs or forums. Now there is a new tag that is similar to rel=nofollow that is rel=external nofollow, external nofollow works the same as nofollow tag but this tag opens links in a new window instead of the same window. If you want to try just add rel="external" it will open the link in a new window. it sort of works like target=_blank. Target blank opens all hypertext links in the new window and rel=external nofollow, blocks all link juice and opens the link in a new window.
So if you find a blog that uses this dont get too excited, links from these blogs dont count. Move on and better luck next time
Google ( Goog ) Gains more than 12% after Q1 2008 RESULTS
At this moment Google's shares are trading around 13% increase which is a very good sign for Google.

Financial results Summary as per Google's investor relations:
Q1 Financial Summary
Google's results for the quarter ended March 31,
2008, include the operations of DoubleClick Inc. from the date of acquisition,
March 11, 2008, through the end of the quarter, and are compared to
pre-acquisition results of prior periods. The overall impact of DoubleClick in
the first quarter of 2008 was immaterial to revenue and only slightly dilutive
to both GAAP and non-GAAP operating income, net income and earnings per
share. Google reported revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March 31,
2008, an increase of 42% compared to the first quarter of 2007 and an increase
of 7% compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. Google reports its revenues,
consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition
costs, or TAC. In the first quarter of 2008, TAC totaled $1.49 billion, or
29% of advertising revenues. Google reports operating income, net income, and
earnings per share (EPS) on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. The non-GAAP
measures, as well as free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of
liquidity, are described below and are reconciled to the corresponding GAAP
measures in the accompanying financial tables.
GAAP operating income
for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.55 billion, or 30% of revenues. This
compares to GAAP operating income of $1.44 billion, or 30% of revenues, in the
fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income in the first quarter of
2008 was $1.83 billion, or 35% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating
income of $1.69 billion, or 35% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2007.
GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.31 billion
as compared to $1.21 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP net
income in the first quarter of 2008 was $1.54 billion, compared to $1.41 billion
in the fourth quarter of 2007.
GAAP EPS for the first quarter of 2008 was
$4.12 on 317 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $3.79 for the
fourth quarter of 2007 on 318 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP
EPS in the first quarter of 2008 was $4.84, compared to $4.43 in the fourth
quarter of 2007.
Non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating margin,
non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP EPS are computed net of stock-based
compensation (SBC). In the first quarter of 2008, the charge related to
SBC was $281 million as compared to $245 million in the fourth quarter of
2007. Tax benefits related to SBC have also been excluded from these
non-GAAP measures. The tax benefit related to SBC was $51 million in the
first quarter of 2008 and $42 million in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP operating income, operating margin,
net income, and EPS are included at the end of this release.
GOOG Financial results.
Labels categories for FTP blogger/blogspot blogs
We wrote a very simply PHP code for adding labels / categories in blogger ftp blogs. Already we have Page Element option in blogspot blogs where you just need to login to your blogger and enable the option. But for many years Blogger don't have a proper solution for FTP blogger / your own domain hosted blogs.
We tried searching for a solution in internet and all the code infact most of them don't work and most of them are too complicated for end users. So here we have a simple solution it has just 4 or 5 lines of coding and BOOM you are there with a nice labes menu on which ever location you include it .
Dowload this zip file and unzip in your local system, just follow the instruction in word document you should be able to work fine with it. If you are facing problems please post in comments we will try to fix the bug,
SEO Blog Team,
Blogger Labels code download Free
Labels: blogger
Interview with Udi Manber Google's search quality scientist
I just read this very interesting interview from Vice president of Search Quality in Google Mr.Udi Manber,
According to wikipedia
"Udi Manber (Hebrew: אודי מנבר) is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. As of December 2007, he is employed by Google as one of their vice-presidents of engineering.
[edit] BiographyHe earned both his bachelor's degree in 1975 in mathematics and his master's degree in 1978 from the Technion in Israel. At the University of Washington, he earned another master's degree in 1981 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1982.
He has won a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, 3 best-paper awards, and the Usenix annual Software Tools User Group Award software award in 1999.
He was a professor at the University of Arizona and authored several articles while there. He wrote Introduction to Algorithms -- A Creative Approach (ISBN 0-201-12037-2), a book on algorithms.
He became the chief scientist at Yahoo! in 1998.
In 2002, he joined Amazon.com, where he became "chief algorithms officer" and a vice president. He later was appointed CEO of the Amazon spin-off company A9.com. He filed a patent on behalf of Amazon.[1]
As of February 8, 2006, he has been hired by Google as one of their vice-presidents of engineering. In December 2007, he announced Knol, Google's new project to create a knowledge repository.[2]
"
Labels: Google
John Muller's example of Google local search ranking
From the time Google's Local Search was introduced people were eager to get into it. Some think its difficult to get into local search but the fact its not. Google sees some factors like User reviews from some popular sites as a ranking factor for local search.
From Mr. John's example here
the No.1 ranking site treetoptoys.com has nothing but a flash homepage and some flash links if that site were to compete for Organic rankings i am sure they wont rank but for local they are doing fine because of the reviews they have on other sites.
Also John points how important its for SEO companies to find local businesses and help them out to go online and rank in local search. Its very good for their business. Just some simple traditional SEO is more than enough to rank in local search since the competition pretty low.
Matt Cutts Warns Against Buying Links
Regarding buying links what we do is we try to tackle things algorithmically but we also try things that are scalable and robust. So when I refer both algorithm and user both actually has to go well. So its more on the line to give people the heads up yeah we do consider buying links outside our guidelines and I just sort of notify that we may take strong action against sites in future. So people want to do that they always have the rights if you are the webmaster its your site you can do what ever you want to do on your site I totally support that idea but we Search Engine think and decide what we feel is best to return a high quality index. So people want to co-operate with Google and users and try to do things in a way that is good for users , good for them and good for the search engines that's fantastic. And we will try to return the best results we can.
Labels: Mattcutts Video Transcript, search engines
Trust Rank Explained by Matt Cutts - transcript mini
Hello Matt: I was talking about the Trust Rank and you said something is going on with the Trademark or I don't know I couldn't concentrate but so can you tell something more about it.
Mattcutts: Yes let me know talk about that a little bit. What is trust rank everybody is curious about that. Its kind of nice to ask , everybody has a vague view about it. So turns out there was someone in Yahoo , Peterson and some other people at yahoo and they wrote a paper about something called Trust Rank and what it does is it tries to treat reputation and like physical mass how it goes around the web and what physical properties does trust have and its really interesting stuff but its completely separate from Google.
And so couple of years ago at the exact same time Google was working on a Anti-phishing filter and part of that we need to come up with a name for it so they filed for a trademark and I think they used the name Trust rank and it was really a coincidence yahoo had a Trust Rank as a search research project and we had Trust rank as a trademark so everybody talks about Trust Rank, Trust Rank and so if you ask five different people they will have five different opinions about exactly what trust rank is.
Labels: Mattcutts, Search Engine Optimization
Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools - mattcutts video transcript
I am up in the Kirkland office today, Up here for an outside little bit planning and they said you see why don't we throw together video and like 10 minutes or less. So we said alright lets give it a shot. So we are thinking about some of the common things you do with webmaster console or some topics webmasters want to hear about people want to go to webmaster console and check their backlinks.
They also like to know if they have any penalties there are a lot of really good stats in the webmaster console. One thing I had been hearing questions about is how do I remove my URLs from Google. So why would you want to do this well suppose you are in school and you accidentally left your Social Security Number of all your students up on the web or your store you left people's credit card numbers. Or you are running a forum and suddenly you are spammed full of porn by a Ukrainian forum spammer which happened to a friend of mine recently. So whatever the reason you want some URLs out of Google instead of getting URLs into Google. Lets look at some of the possible approaches some the different ways you can do it.
What ill do is , ill go through each of these ones and will kind of draw a Happy Face by one or two I think are specially good as far as getting the contents out of Google or perhaps abandoning them from getting into Google the first place. So the first thing a lot of people say is ok I just don't like to a page is a secret server page Google won't know or ever find it that way I don't have to find a way up of showing up the Search Engines. This is not a great up roach and ill give you a very simple reason why. We actually see so many people surf to a page and then serve to an other web server and that causes your browser to create a referrer in the HTTP in browser codes the header status which showed up before will show up on the other web server. And that other web server shows hey these are the top referrers to my page and may be that's a clickable hyperlink then Google can crawl that other web server and find a link to your so called secret web page. So its very weak to say "you know what I don't want to link to it ill just keep it a secret and no one will ever find about it". For what ever reason somebody will call from that page somebody will link from that page, somebody will refer from that page or as I said somebody will accidentally link to that page and that's you know if there is a link on web to that page there is a reasonable reason that we might find it so I don't recommend anyone using that its relatively very weak way. An other way you can do is something called .htaccess. Ok that sounds little, let me tell you very simply. This is a very simple file that lets you do simple things like redirect from one URL to an other URL the thing I am specifically talking about is can password protect a sub-directory or even you can protect your entire site now I don't think we provide a .htaccess tool in the webmaster tools but that's ok there are a lot of them out on the web and if you do a simple search like .htaccess tool or wizard something like that you will find one that will say like a password protective directory and it can even tell a directory and generate one for you and you can just copy and paste that onto your website.
So this is very good why is this strong why am I going to draw a Happy face here. Well you got a password on that directory Googlebot is not gonna guess that password you know we are not going to crawl that directory at all and we if we cant get to it . It will never show up in our index. This is very strong, very robust and efficient for the search engine because someone has to know the password to get into that directory. So this is one of the two ways I really really recommend this is a preventive measure so if already got chance to get into it you already had it vulnerable on your site so if you plan in advance and you know what the sensitive areas are going to be just put a password on there and it will work really well.
Ok here is an other way one that a lot of people know about called Robots.txt. This one has been here for over a decade atleast 1996 and essentially its like a electronic no trespassing sign it says here are areas of your site that Google or other search engine are not allowed to crawl, we do provide robots.txt tool in the webmaster console so you can create one and test out URLs and see if Googlebot is allowed to get to them , you can test out like the different variants of Googlebot like the Image-Googlebot is allowed to get to it and you can take new robots.txt files for test drive so you can say how about I try this for my robots.txt could you crawl this URL, or could you crawl this URL and you can just try it out and make sure it works ok. That's nice because other wise you are going to shoot yourself on your foot say you make a robots.txt and make it like and it has a syntax error and say it keeps everybody in or keeps everybody out that's going to cause a problem. So I recommend you take that tool for a test drive and see what you like and then you can put it live.
Then ok robots.txt is kind of interesting, different search engines have different polices of uncrawled URLs , ill give you a very simple example way, way, way back in days sites like Ebay.com , Nytimes.com don't want anyone to crawl their site so they had a robots.txt file that said
Useragent: *
Disallow: / ( everybody )
So this will not allow any search engines to crawl even if you are a well behaved search engine. So that is kind of problematic so you are a search engines and somebody typed in Ebay and you cannot return Ebay.com it looks kind of dumb and its like what we decided or what we our policy still is we will crawl this page but we will not show a uncrawled reference sometimes we can make it look pretty good about it. Sometimes if there is a entry to nytimes.com in the Open Directory project ( ODP ) we can show that snippet from the ODP and show it for nytimes.com as a uncrawled reference and for users its good even though we are not allowed to crawl and we infact did not crawl it. So robots.txt is to prevent crawling but it wont completely prevent that URL from completely showing up in Google so there are otherways to do it. Lets move on to NOINDEX meta tag. What that simple says for Google atleast is don't show that page at all in search engines so if we find Noindex we will completely drop it from Google search results we will still crawl it but we wont actually show it if somebody does a search in search result query for that page. So its pretty powerful works very well and very simple to understand there are couple complicating factors, yahoo and Microsoft even if you use the noindex meta tag can show a reference to that page, they wont return the complete the full snippet and stuff like that but you might see the link to that. We do see some people having problem with that for example you are a webmaster and you put up a noindex meta tag and put it up on your site been shifting around in developing your site you might forget and might not take that noindex meta tag down so very simple example. The Hungarian version of BMW I think has done this, there is a musician ( harper ) you probably heard about is pretty popular has a noindex metatag its still there and if you are the webmaster of that site we love you to take that down. So there are various people in google would have said may be we should not show the snippet of the url but show a reference to that URL. There is one other corner case on this noindex which is we can only abide by that meta tag only if we had crawled that page of we haven't crawled that page we haven't seen that meta tag and we haven't know its there. So in theory its possible if you link to that page and we don't get a chance to crawl that page we don't see a noindex and we don't drop It out completely. So there are couple of cases where you have atleast the reference which will show up in google and pretty much yahoo and Microsoft will always have a reference to that page if you use the noindex metatag.
So here is another approach you can use that is the Nofollow tag that can be added on individual links. This is an other type weak approve since inevitably say there are 20 links to that page may be I am going to put a Nofollow on all of them may be it's a sign in page may be if you are a expedia.com and you want to add a Nofollow on my itineraries it makes perfect sense right. Why would you want Googlebot to crawl into your itineraries because that's a personalized thing. But inevitably somebody links to that page or you forget to have a page which not every single link with a Nofollow so its very common that, ill just draw a very simple example suppose we have a page A and we have a Nofollow link to page B,
We will follow that link we will drop it out of our link graph we will drop it off completely so we wont discover page B because of this link but now like say there is an other guy on page C that wants to link to page B we might actually follow that link and will eventually end up indexing page B so you can try to make sure every link to a page is no-followed but sometimes its hard to follow that every single link is no-followed correctly so this like the NOINDEX does have some weird corner cases where you can very easily a page gets crawled since not every link has the Nofollow-ed or in the noindex case we can actually get to the page and end up crawling the page and end up later seeing the noindex tag. So lets move on to an other powerful way I tend to use this whenever a forum gets by porn spammer recently. And that's the URL removal tool. So .htaccess is great as a preventive measure you put a password on it no-one can guess what it is, no search engine's are going to get in there, it wont get indexed. The other thing you can do is if you do let the search engines in before and you want to take it down later you got the URL removal tool. We have offered the URL removal tool for atleast 5 years probably more for long time it sat on pages like services.google.com and it's a completely self service that runs 24/7 but just recently the webmaster console team has integrated the URL removal tool into the webmaster console. Much much simpler to use the UI is much better what it helps is it will remove the URL for 6 months and if that was a mistake and if you removed your entire domain which you don't need to then you need to email Google's user support telling them hey I didn't mean to remove my entire site can you revoke that and someone in google have to do that. Now you can do it yourself also its powerful and well accessible in webmaster console. Anytime you can go in to webmaster console and say hey I didn't mean to remove my entire site and remove that request and that request gets revoked very quickly. So to use the webmaster console its not that hard to prove that you are the owner of the site, you just need to make a page on the root of the website , root of the directory or root of the site to say yep here is a little signature in the text file to say that this is my site. Once you prove that this is my domain then you get a lot more stats and this wonderful little URL remove tool. And it can remove a very nice level of speed in there you can remove a whole domain, you can remove a sub-directory thing you can even remove individual URLs and you can see actually the status of all the URLs you have put a request to be removed, initially it will show a status that the request is pending and later it will show that the URL removal has been processed/ removed. This will change the status to revoke. You can give a reason what ever you have like hey I got the credit card numbers, Social security numbers of what ever sensitive you had there removed and you want to revoke the URL removal from Google's index. In other words its save to crawl and index again. So all the ways to remove the URLs or churning up URLs from showing up in Google there are a lot of different options some of them are very strong like the robots.txt, noindex but they do have these very weird corner cases like we might show the reference to the URL in varied situations so that ones that I definitely recommend is the .htaccess that will prevent the search engines and people from getting into the first place and for Google we have the URL removal tool so if you got URLs crawled that you don't want to show up in Google's index you can still get them out and get them out relatively quickly.
Thanks Very much Hope that was very helpful.
Matt Cutts.
Why we prepared this Video transcript?
We know this video is more than a year old but still there are people who have questions about their site and want to listen from a Search Engine Expert. Also there are millions of Non-English people who want to know what's there in this video so a transcript is something that can be easily translated to be read in other languages. We know there are people with hearing disability who browse our site this is a friendly version for them where they can read and understand what's there in this video.
This transcript is copyright - Search Engine Genie.
Feel free to translate them but make sure proper credit is given to Search Engine Genie
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
Supplemental Results - Matt cutts video transcript
Ok we got some supplemental results questions david writes in he says "Matt should I be worried about this, site table1.com returns 10,000 results site:table1.com -intitle:by returns a 100,000 results all supplemental. David in general I wouldn't worry about this I want to explain the concept of beating path.
So if there is a problem with one word search in Google that's a big deal if it's a 20 word search that's obviously a less of a big deal its because its often not a big impact. Supplemental results team takes reports very seriously and acts very quickly on them, But in general in something in supplemental results is mostly off path than our main web results. And once you start getting into negation or negation by a special operator like -intitle then its pretty off the main path and you are talking about results estimates its not the actual web results but the estimates for the number of results. The good news is there are couple of things which can help in bringing up the result estimates more accurate ah atleast I know 2 things that can influence an infrastructure.
Deliberately trying to make the site results more accurate
Other one is the change in the infrastructure to improve our raw quality
But side benefits is the it gives the estimated number of results to be more accurately when it involves the supplemental results. SO there are atleast a couple of changes that might make things more accurate but in general once you start to get really far from the beginning path -intitle all these stuff specially for supplemental results I wouldn't worry that much about the result estimates, historically we haven't worried too much since not many people were interested. But we do hear more people sort of saying yes I am crazy about this so you need to put more effort into that.
Erin writes and says that "I have a question on redirects, I have one or more pages of various moved across various websites I use classic ASP and shows how he gave response for 301. He said these redirects are setup for quite a while and if he runs a spider on them it reads the redirect fine. This is probably an instance where you would have seen this happen in supplemental results, so here is how we can go about things. There is a main web results Googlebot and a supplemental results Googlebot so the next time the supplemental results Googlebot visits that page and sees the 301 it will reindex accordingly and things will refresh and so on historically the supplemental results have been a lot spidered data that is not refreshed as it is done for the normal web results. If you check the cache anybody can verify that the results and the crawl date vary so the good news is that the supplemental results are getting fresher and fresher and the effort is made to make them quite fresh.
For example Chris writes "I like to know more about the supplemental results, it seems while I want in vacation my sites got put there, I have one site that had a Pagerank of 6 and it got put in supplemental results since like May. So like I talked about the fact that there is a new infrastructure in our supplemental results I mentioned that also in blog post and I don't know how many people have noticed it but certainly I have said that before I think it was in the indexing timeline in fact so as we refresh our supplemental results and start to use new indexing infrastructure in the indexing results in supplemental results the net effect is the data will be a lot fresher also I wouldn't be surprised that I have some URLs in supplemental results I wouldn't worry about it that much and over the course of summer the supplemental results team will see all the reports that they receive especially things off the beat infact as I said like site: and operators that are hysteric they will be working on that those return the sort of results that everybody will naturally expects so stay tuned on supplemental results and already its lot fresher and lot more comprehensive than it was and I think its just going to keep improving.
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
Optimize for Search Engines or Users? - Matt cutts video transcript
By the Way I shoot my disclaimer to somebody in Google video's team and he said matt you look like you had been kidnapped so maybe I should be some rocket boom world map or something like that out there you guys worry more about the information that how pretty it looks I am guessing, alright todder writes in my simply question is this "which do you find more important in developing and maintaining a website search engine optimization or end user optimization?"
And that says ill hang up and listen, todder that's a great question well both are very important and I think if you don't have both you wont do the best you want to do, I think search engine optimization its harder to be found if you don't have end user optimization you don't get conversion you don't get people to really stay and really enjoy your site post in your forum or buy your product or anything else. SO I think you do need both the trick in my mind is to try to see the world such that they are the same thing. You want to make it look best so that the user's interest and the search engine interest are as aligned as you can and if you can do that then you are usually in very good shape because you have compeling content you have people want to visit your site. It will be very easy for your visitors to get around and for search engines to get around. And you don't have to do any weird tricks anything you do for search engines are also be shown to users. So I think you need to balance both of them.
Tedsey writes in with a couple of interesting questions "can you point us to some spam detection tools, I want to monitor my site to make sure I come out clean and show that I am valid among the no good spamming competitors. Well if you sure want to check spamming some tools you can use.
First of in Google we have lot of tools to detect and flag spam but most of them are not out side of Google one thing you can look at is Yahoo site explorer which is good it actually shows backlinks for specific pages or per domain I think that could be very handy. There are also other tools that could show you everything in one IP address, if you are going to be on a virtual host you are going to share with a lot of perfectly normal sites but sometimes there might be a lot of bad spam sites on that Ip address and you could end up in the wrong way. So you got to be careful that you are not automatically considered part of something wrong. As far as checking your specific site is concerned I will definitely hit Google sitemaps in webmaster console that will tell you crawl errors or other problems we found.
Second question tedsey asks "What about the cleanliness of code for example W3C, any chance that the accessible problem will leak into the main algorithm?" People had been asking me this for a long time and my typical answer is normal people write code with errors it just happens all the time. Eric one of the founders of the HTML standards said 40% of all html pages have syntax errors and there is no way a search engine can remove 40% of its contents from its index just because somebody didn't validate or something like that. So there are a lot of content especially content that is manmade students that already use or things like that its very quality but probably doesn't validate. So if you asked me a while a go I would have said yah I don't have a signal like that in our algorithms and its probably for a good reason that said now T.V Raman had done the work on accessible search and you know I am sure in future somebody can look at for a possible positive signal. If you have pass through the quality you have to pass through vigorous validation and stuff like that in general its great idea to go and get your site validated. But I wouldn't put that in top of your list, I would put on making compelling content and making a great site at the top of your list and once you have got that you can go back and dug your eyes and check whether you got good accessibility as well. Well you always want to have good accessibility but validating and closing off that last few things usually that doesn't matter a lot for search engines.
Why we prepared this Video transcript?
We know this video is more than a year old but still there are people who have questions about their site and want to listen from a Search Engine Expert. Also there are millions of Non-English people who want to know what's there in this video so a transcript is something that can be easily translated to be read in other languages. We know there are people with hearing disability who browse our site this is a friendly version for them where they can read and understand what's there in this video.
This transcript is copyright - Search Engine Genie.
Feel free to translate them but make sure proper credit is given to Search Engine Genie
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
Matt Cutts on Duplicate Content and Paid Search - Video Transcript
Ya,Ya
Yep
Ya it was funny at the end, That when I laughed, Ok u have seen most of it, so she gave puffy examples instead, good willow bad willow, good centre good centre,
It worked ya it worked
I think its interesting, it's a deep issue, Its kinda tough 1 too, so really good question of claiming your content but then, we were talking about that couple of days ago with a bunch of goggle's, And we always have to worry about how it can be found, and so, what if somebody innocent doesn't claim their content, and then, and then smart man that comes along, and claims everybody else's content,
And so when u have got your whole frequency and u have to worry about people taking your content in between the time u scroll your pages that's a tricky thing, Now nice thing is some thing like blog search, we get a pinning, we get to scroll it, we can see it rite then, so the time frame in blog search is so much faster, so we get to little bit more on ownership, so I think we hoping to try in a lot of different things but it is a difficult issue.
Yep,
Ya absolutely, some people say oh dear Google tell me what to do. And we are not, like your the web master, it's your site, u do whatever u want on your site. And that's your rite. But that's our in depths, and here we are finding what we think are best practices, and if you wanna do really well and good in Google, I think most webmasters do, here are some you can do well but you know people will always have rites to take on more risk but, we wanna tell them that there is a lot of risk involved in that, and so people should think about before they do it
Well, and I think its interesting, because we have said we don't like as early a s 2005 but we have not talked about this recently, so even though it wasn't going to be incredible popular with seos, because seos like to have as many tools in their tool boxes as possible I said it time to revise at this topics, I we can remind people about it, and so even though I knew there would be a lot of comments Its important to reintegrate use the stance and we mite be taking stronger action on it in the future so its sort of giving people the heads up, its like giving them a little bit of notice, They can choose what they wanna do but they should also think about the possible consequences of what they choose to do.
I think we would be good to make a lot of that, I talked about it during the q& A, our guide lines are pretty minimal, I wanna give the people the idea of what to do,. Triangular links, pentagonal links, Hexagonal links n stuff like that
We were saying, how about four way links, no that's against the Google line, some were like 5 way links at some point u wanna think you wanna give the idea n then and people can infer from that but I think it would be nice to have few more details, we have looked at, how can provide few more scenarios, we take some from the we set on the blog and cooperate that into the web master guide lines.
Its possible its, its more like it, we have it at the back of our mind, So for example within the past few months we have revised our webmaster help in general to say no not everything is 100% automatic, No human have ever touched that. Because u need really room for social search so it is an ongoing process we talked about search results and how its not a good process to not have tones of search results that don't add a lot of value so v do go back, for example we also added a spy-ware, Trojan, and that sort of stuff, so it is kind of living document we always go back every few months what we need to add and how are we gonna make it better.
Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
Google ( GOOG ) to Announce First Quarter 2008 Financial Results
Google to Announce First Quarter 2008 Financial Results
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 7, 2008 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) today announced that it will hold its quarterly conference call to discuss first quarter 2008 financial results on Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time (4:30 p.m. Eastern Time).
The live webcast of Google's earnings conference call can be accessed at "http://investor.google.com/webcast". The webcast version of the conference call will be available through the same link following the conference call.
About Google Inc. Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.
The much awaited GOOG first quarter financial results are bound to be released on April 17th. This is big news due to the current status lots of companies are reporting loss of earnings. Google one of the largest company in the world need to prove that its still a very popular and profitable company. Current share price of Google is already hovering around 450$ down from 750$. If they show a less than expected earning their shares are bound to tumble much more
Lets wait and see how it goes on,
pagerank 10 link claim - fake claim in adwords advertisment

https://www.w3.org/
https://www.macromedia.com/
https://www.nasa.gov/
https://www.google.com/
https://www.nsf.gov/
https://www.real.com/
I dont think any of the above sites are willing to sell text link on their website, US government website, Department of energy, science foundation , white house, real player site, adobe all these guys done need to make money selling text links. So you figure out what these guys are upto,
Cloaking still works in Google Blog search - cloaking in Google
This is the spammer's website check the redirected and cloaked URL,
So how will Google stop spamming and cloaking in blog search
Got to wait and see,
Search Engine Genie.
Matt Cutt Discusses Snippets - Mattcutts Video Transcripts
So just to remind everybody, I am visiting the Kirkland office and they said you know what lets grab a video camera and just talk about a few things and have a little bit of fun and put these videos up on the web.
So one of the things that we thought we'll talk about is a snippet, what are the different parts of the snippet? How do we choose which part of the snippet to show and not show?
So since we are up in the specific North West let's talk a little bit about Walkthrough this snippet of starbucks and what that it looks like and talk through the different parts.
Alright the first thing you'll see is the title and that's typically what you set on the title of your webpage. So "starbucks Homepage" is what Starbucks use for www. Starbucks.com. Now in general Google reserves the rights to try to change the snippet and make it as useful as possible for users always doing all kind of different experience. Like is it more helpful to show two dots or three dots, you want to end with dots, you want to start with leading spaces, how do you find the most relevant part of the page? And try to say this is what we should be showing. But the majority of the time you have a great deal of control of how about how things get presented.

So in this case starbucks uses the title "Starbucks Homepage" and just a quick bit of SEO advice for starbucks, "Home page" na a few people might search for that but I might say something like "Starbucks coffee" where people are more likely to search for that okay enough of the free advice for starbucks. The next thing that you see is something that we call as the snippet

So next thing that you see is something that we call has the snippet, "Starbucks coffee company is the leading retail coaster and brand of specially da dad
Now where does that snippet come from? It can come from many different places, suppose for example we weren't able to call the URL, May be for whatever reason it was down and we couldn't get a copy of it, we don't have anything from the page not even the Meta description tag nothing at all. In those cases we sometimes do rely on the open directory project. So starbucks I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the open directory so if we weren't able to call the page we might pull the description form there. Another thing we sometimes do is pull the description from a place within the page. So suppose you got a phonebook and you're looking for somebody's name and the name is way down at the bottom it's a lot more helpful to show that person's name from the bottom of the page and may be a few words from either side of that person's name than it is to show like the first fifty words of the page, so we do try to find the most relevant parts of the page Some times its single snippet, sometimes its multiple parts of the page and combine that together and people are little bit of context that this page is really I am looking for. But neither of these two is at the open directory project or directly from the within the content of page body itself. And in this case I looked into it and view source that this is the Meta description tag.
So we did post on the Google webmasters blog just for a while that how these snippets get picked, and it turned out you can use your own Meta description tag and in many cases that is exactly what we will choose to use as a snippet. But you want to be careful because this is a very fine snippet, but maybe there is some other snippet that can work better. You know people would read it and say oh I really want to click through and find out more about that. You can experiment with different Meta descriptions and see that the one that gets more clicks is the one that works better. But we use several different sources of data when deciding how to pull things together. In this case starbucks is also a company so we show a little + box where if you want you can click the plus box and you can expand and see a stock chart for Starbucks. You can see if they are doing well in the market.

There are a lot of these different options. For example if you are having an address on your page many times it will show a plus box and it will say view a map of and then you can have your address. And we are always looking for new ways to surface interest in data. If you go to google.com/experimental we do have views where you can look at search results on a time lines, search results on a map, you can even see all the search results for images and even measurements. So if you going to search for Koalas or Koala bear, you can say show me the measurements. Then it will show you all the things like oh Koala bears are 20 pounds and stuff like that which is really helpful.

In general or whatever interesting information you have on your page that user will be interested in well try to surface that or show relevant information like stock quote or stuff like that. There is also something like that's a little subtle and unnoticed is that we have bolded the starbucks, that's because someone has queried for starbucks. So often times if you do a query and if those keywords are on the page, well make them bold so that people know what you typed is actually on that page. We know about morphology, we know about synonyms. If you typed in car, we can sometimes return search results that have automobiles. But that wouldn't be bolded, or wouldn't be likely to be bolded and what more likely is whatever you typed in is what's going to be bolded. So in that case it gives you little more information and shows how relevant that page.
Working down a little bit you can see the URL which you are actually going to end on, 12K stands for 12 kilobytes which is relatively small page that means it will load pretty quickly. And then you see the cached links, imagine for example the site is down. May be you are the webmaster of the page and you accidently deleted it, but then you can look at the cache page and you could recover the source of that page, then you could put it back up again. The cache page also has really interesting features. If you click on it, It shows us the last crawled date, you can say ok well today is October 7th look at the cached page and oh we last crawled the page on October 6th then you know how precise the search results are.
Sometimes if we are very precise, then we can show an indicator right on the snippet here below ( next to 12k) that we crawled 17 hours ago to let you know that we are very precise.
Similar Pages shows you related pages to start about may be other businesses or other pages that you might be interested in. And a lot of time if you are logged in to Google you will "NOTE THIS"

If you are a student of if you are doing research it's really handy it works with Google note book and all it does is that it saves this off, as I am doing my research I want to save this result can be able to come back to it and may be aggregate it later and may be aggregate all the stuff together on some research chapter.
And then this is really nice, this is what actually to be a little indented on the snippet. But what we call this is site links. There are a couple of things we need to know about site links. First off, no money is involved. Somebody always asks, "So did starbucks pay some money to get them?" No it's purely algorithmic.

And the second thing is it is purely algorithmic it's not done by hands so it's not like we go to store box and say may be we are interested in store locator and then nutrition and stuff like that. But there is a lot of sophistication going on here for example on this page the title is actually Starbucks Store Locator but you don't need to see that most of the times so we can say store locator and if you look at this page the title is actually like Beverage details and something and in fact the link to that page is nutrition.
So we are sort of selective we try to pick the sort of little description that gives people enough information and make sure where they can say "Oh! The store locator is what I want and I am going to go directly there" or I wanted to find out if I get a Mocha how many calories is that so I can go straight to the nutrition. So it's completely algorithmic and no money is involved in that. And then when we get to the bottom if we have a lot of results for a page may be we show one or two and then we will say you know what may be you want to see more results from Starbucks and what that lets you have is a more diversity so you can see one or two results from starbucks and maybe you want to see other results for that query. That sure helps in clear diversity of that page and at the same time lets you dive deeper if you want to.
So that's a very quick tour on what a Google snippet is. Hopefully it was helpful.
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How to structure a site? - Mattcutts Video Transcript
Ok As you can this is the closest I can get to a World Map, Did you know there are 5000 languages spoken across the globe, how many does Google support? Only about a 100 still a long way to go.
Alright, Lets do some more questions. Todd writes in he says Matt I have a question, One of my client is about to acquire a domain name very related to their business and has a lot of links going to it. He basically wants to 301 redirect to the final website and the acquisition. The question is will Google ban or impose a penalty for doing this 301 redirect. In general probably not you should be ok, because you specify its closely related, anytime there is a actual merger of two businesses together, two domains very close to each other do a 301 redirect and merge together its not a problem. However if you are a Music site and you are suddenly getting links from Debt consolidation and online cheap YAHYAHYAH, that should be problem but what now you have planned to do is fine and you should be ok.
Barry writes in "What's the right way to theme a site using directories you put the main keyword in the directory or on the index page? If you are using a directory do you use a directory for each set of keywords?
This is a good question, I think you are thinking too much about your keywords and not about your site , this is just for me I prefer a tree like architecture, so everything branches out even, nice like a branch sort of thing and also it will be good if you are breaking down by topics so if you are selling clothes and you have sweaters as one directory and shoes as an other directory and something like that, if you do something like that what you will end up with is your keywords do end up in directories, So as far the directories vs the actual Html file it doesn't matter with Google screwing up with it, So actually I think if you break it down by topic and make sure that your topic is broken down by keywords. Then I think if your user type of keywords and find your page then you are in pretty Good shape.
Aright Joe writes in, If a Ecommerce site has too many parameters say it has punctuation marks, dots etc and its un index able is it ok to be within Google's guidelines and serve static html pages to Googlebot to index instead. This is something that I will be very careful of because if you end messing this up you will be doing something called cloaking which showing different content to users and different content to Googlebot and you need to show the exact same content to both users and Googlebot. So my advice is to go back to the question I asked about whether or not the parameters in URLs are indexable and unified so that both users and Googlebot see the same user directory. And if you are going to do something like that, definitely that's going to be much better saying that what ever html paying you are going to show to the Googlebot , if users go to that page and if they stay on the same page and not redirected or sent to an other page then you are fine. They need to see the exact same page that Googlebot saw that's the main criteria you got to be careful about that.
John writes in he says "I would like to use AB split testing on the static html pages, will google understand my PHP redirect for what it is or will Google penalize my site for assumption of Cloaking, If there is a problem is there a better way to split test?. That's a Good question if you can I would recommend split test in a area where search engines aren't going to index it. Because when we go to a page and you reload and show different content then it does look a bit strange so if you can please use robots.txt or .htaccess file or something that Googlebot doesn't index it. Saying that I wouldn't do a PHP redirect , I will configure in a server to serve 2 different pages parallel. One thing to be careful about and I touched on this a while ago in a previous session that you should not do anything special for Googlebot just treat it like regular user that's going to be the safest thing in terms of not being treated as cloaking.
And lets wrap up, Todd asks an other question he says hi Matt here is the real question, Ginger or Marian? I am going to go with Marian.
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Qualities of a good site - Matt cutts Video Transcript
Hello again lets deal with a little more questions, I hope its work lets give it a shot. Raf writes in some comments on Google sitemaps please. He says does updates on sitemaps depend on page view of the site? I feel that's not the case page views are not the factor on how things are undated in sitemaps, you know there are different pieces of data in sitemap so imagine you know there are a file of different sets of data. They could all be updated in different times and in different frequencies and typically they should be updated within days or worst case within weeks however as far as I know it doesn't depend on page views.
Lets deal an other one "What are your basics ideas and recommendations on increasing sites ranking and visibility in Google? " Ok this is a meeting topic definitely a longer issue ok so lets go ahead and dive into it? So Lets go and see the number one thing most people make mistake on SEO is the they don't make the site crawlable. So I want you to look at your site in search engines eyes or user text browsers do something and go back to 1994 and use lynx or something like that. If you could get through your site only in text browser you are going to be in pretty good shape, because most people don't even thing about crawl ability. You want to also see on things like sitemaps on your site or also you can use our sitemaps tools in addition to that once you got your content, content that is good content, content that is interesting, content that is reasonable that's attractive and that will make some actually link to you and then once your site is crawlable then you can go about promoting, marketing, optimization your website. So the main thing that I would advice or thing about the people who are relevant to your niche and make sure they are attracted. So if you are attached to a doctor since you run a medical type of website make sure that doctor knows about that website if he knows about your site it might be appropriate for him to link to your website.
You also should be thinking about a hook some thing that holds your visitors it could be really good content newsletters, tutorials, I was trying to setup all these video stuff trying to make it look semiprofessional and there is tutorial by a company called photo flex something they said here is something like keylike, throw etc and BTW they say you need to by our equipment to do that. That's really really smart, infact another photography site that I went to I saw they syndicated the other site tutorials to add on their website. That could be a great way to get links you can also You should also think on places like reddit, digg, Slashdot you know social networking sites myspace this sort of stuff. Fundamentally you need to have something that sets you apart from the pack once you have something like that you are going to be in very good shape as far as promotion your site is concerned. But the biggest step making sure your site is crawlable after that , making sure you have good content and finally make sure you have a hook which makes people really love a site return to it and really bookmark it.
Alright lets do an other one "what condition asks
Alright this one is a good one. Laura McKenzie says does Google favor bold or strong tags. In general we probably favor bold a little bit more but just to say it more clear its so slight that I wouldn't really worry about it. When you do it do what ever is best for yours and oh I don't think its going to give a little bit of boost in google or anything like that. Like I said its relatively small so I recommend you do what is best for users and what ever is best for your site and then not worry about that much after that.
I think that's it,
Thank you,
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We know this video is more than a year old but still there are people who have questions about their site and want to listen from a Search Engine Expert. Also there are millions of Non-English people who want to know what's there in this video so a transcript is something that can be easily translated to be read in other languages. We know there are people with hearing disability who browse our site this is a friendly version for them where they can read and understand what's there in this video.
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Percentage of share for top 500 websites over other sites in internet
In my Opinion No, Alexa users are mostly site owners, webmasters, techies etc. Mostly its a webmaster baised traffic its never a reliable one to gauge the real traffic to a website. Though too much baised still Alexa is a good place to start. Some the sites that are listed in Alexa top 500 websites are the best in internet. So I wouldn't complain too much on alexa.
If you do a Google search for https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=top+internet+websites
top websites you will come across a bunch of good lists which will give the top sites in internet. But its very difficult to understand and analyze what type of traffic a real site gets unless those sites care to share their log data which I feel is never possible
Search Engine Genie
Labels: search engines, website
How to stop my site from showing up on non-US Google results
How to stop my site from showing up on non-US Google results
Wow one second it took me by surprise I seriously want to checkout why someone really wants to block access to their site from non-Google results. Here is the post from that person
"First, I want to make clear, I am not worried about bringing my page rank up at
all, I just want to stop showing up on non-US google results. So this isn't
about SEO.
I have a site serving the SE United States. However, 80% of my
visitors come from Ireland, Israel, China, Japan, Italy, South America, and of
all places, Botswana?
I used some google tool (I can't remember which) that
showed my page rank on non US google indexes varies from 4 to as high as 7.
That would explain the off-continent percentage, because I have a white bar
/ page rank 0 here. So...
1. Is there really a different feed for different
countries?
2.Can I keep google indexing for US users but not others?
3.Is it one googlebot gathering data for all places, or are there different
ones? (That would explain why there is some google-thing on my msg boards every
day. Or there is one google bot and he lives at my place.)
4.To block them
or it, do I have to know the name of every bot and spider by IP or nickname or
whatever?
5.Is that done by htaccess or robots.txt?
"
From reading the post it looks the poster really wants to stop traffic from all countries other than Google. I don't think this is possible since google.com results are served in almost all countries though ranking might vary.
A good response by senior member lammert was made which was very informative
"Geographic targetting boosts ranking in one region compared to others, but it"
doesn't remove a site from foreign search results. My experience is that it has
no greater power than a country TLD like .de for Germany or .fr for France, or
hosting your site on an IP address which is locate in the country to target.
1. Is there really a different feed for different countries?
No, every
Google datacenter can produce the results for all countries and languages in the
world by just changing a few parameters in the search URL. Google tries to sort
the results based on relevancy, matching languages and geographic origin of
incoming links to a site, but in principle every URL can appear in every SERP on
every visitors location. There is no such thing as totally separate feeds.
2.Can I keep google indexing for US users but not others?
3.Is it one
googlebot gathering data for all places, or are there different ones? (That
would explain why there is some google-thing on my msg boards every day. Or
there is one google bot and he lives at my place.)
There is just one
Googlebot crawling for all countries and data centers. If you are on one Google
data center, you are practically speaking in all, because they exchange pages on
the fly. There is even data sharing behind the scenes between different Google
spider technologies. If Googlebot doesn't visit a specific URL but Mediabot
which is used for AdSense ad matching is, the pages fetched by Mediabot may be
examined and used by Googlebot.
There is no way you can block your site from
showing up in Google results for one country and not for others, unless your
site is China related and happens to trigger a filter in Google's China
firewall.
The only way to tackle this reliably is to block the foreign
visitors at your door, i.e. use some form of geo targeting where you map the IP
address of the visitor to a geographical location and allow or deny access based
on that. But geo targeting is not 100% reliable, especially with some larger
ISPs like AOL which use a handful of proxies for all their customers and you may
end up with some foreign visitors slipping through, and worse, a number of
legitimate visitors who can't connect anymore.
My advice is not to fight the
battle against foreign visitors, but to monetize the traffic. Many people are
fighting for traffic and you--wanting to kill 80% of your traffic because it
doesn't match the current content of the site--are really an exception. Why not
monetize this traffic in some way instead of blocking people? This is free
traffic which is in principal targeted audience, based on that they found you
through Google search, and not some form of shady traffic generation scheme.
In my view there is no use blocking users from other countries they can be a valuable resource at times our site www.searchenginegenie.com gets about 50% of the traffic outside US and we really enjoy that traffic as much as the US traffic we get. Traffic from France, Germany , Spain are very useful traffic since they love Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization a lot. There are some french forums which send us traffic to our tools or blog posting, traffic is sometimes 10 times more than the traffic sent to us by active forums like searchengine watch, Digitial point forums etc. This shows their passion towards online business, Search engine optimization and the art of making money online.
Labels: Google
Lots of sites depend on Google toolbar pagerank to judge the value of a link apart of other things like number of backlinks in yahoo and Alexa ranking. Google toolbar pagerank is a very important when it comes to buying or selling these days. A PR9 link goes for around 800$ a month which is a huge amount for a link. I am sure this industry is not flourishing anymore due to the introduction of TPR. TPR reduced text link advertising to atleast 40 to 60% I would say. It sent bubbles in link publisher's stomach and many advertisers who were selling links for their site or buying links to their site panicked and removed all of them to make sure they don't loose any further trust in Google.
I know being part of a SEO company that this TPR affected lot of sites that didn't buy links but inside I appreciate Google for taking strong efforts to protect their Algorithm from being manipulated through text link advertising. I have always said Text link advertising is for the rich and famous for competitive keywords and it should stop or real quality sites that don't buy anchor text links will not get the exposure in Google that they deserve.
Forum discussion in webmasterworld.
Labels: Google, pagerank, pagerank update
Matt Cutts Discusses the Importance of alt Tags - Mattcutts Video Transcript
But the general problem of you know, detecting what an image is and been able to describe it, is really really hard; so you shouldn't count on computer being able to do that, instead you can help Google with that. Now let's see what this image might look like, if you look at the right this might be a typical image source "img src - "DSC00042.JPG" you know, you got your image tag, u describe what the source is, here is DSC because it is a digital camera, you know blah blah blah 42.JPG, that doesn't give us lot of information, right? You won't be able to say this is cat with a ball of yarn we don't want to say, here is number that gives a virtually zero information, if you go down a little bit, here is sort of information that we want to show up, you won't be able to say this is Matt's cat, Amy Cutts, with some yarn; right? & you know that's not a lot of words but it adequate describes the scene, it gives you a very clear picture what's going on.
It includes words like yarn, a word like Emmy Cutts, which is all completely relevant to that image and it isn't stuffed with tons of words like cat, cat, cat, feline, lots of cats, cat breeding, cat fur with all sorts of stuffs. So you want to have a very simple description, sort of included with that image; how do you do that? If you look here,
You can also look for alternative tags like tidal and things like that but this is enough to help Google to know whatz going on in the image. You can go in advance, you could think about naming your image something like 'Cat and Yarn.JPG' but we are looking for something light weigh and easy to do, adding an ALT tag is very easy to do and you should pretty much do it in all of your images, it helps your accessibility and it can help us (Google) to understand whatz going on in your image.
Why we prepared this Video transcript?
We know this video is more than a year old but still there are people who have questions about their site and want to listen from a Search Engine Expert. Also there are millions of Non-English people who want to know what's there in this video so a transcript is something that can be easily translated to be read in other languages. We know there are people with hearing disability who browse our site this is a friendly version for them where they can read and understand what's there in this video.
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Some SEO Myths - Mattcutts Video Transcript
Alright, I am trying to upload the last kick to the Google videos. So we will see how it looks while I am waiting I think I can do a few more questions and see if we can knock a few out I am realizing that with this video camera that I have got I can do about 8 minutes length of video before I get to the 100 megabytes limit then I have to use the client uploader so ill probably make it into chunks of 5 to 8 minutes each.
So Ryan writes - He says can you put us out of some myths where having too many sites on the same server, for having sites on IPs that look similar to each other, but having them include the same Javascript of a different site. In general if you are a average webmaster this is something that I haven't have to worry about. Now I have to tell a story about Tim Mayer and I on a penalty panel. Someone said hey you took all my sites out he said both Google and Yahoo did and I didn't really have that many, so tim saw that guy and asked so how many sites did you have?
And the guy looked little sheepish for a minute and then he said well I had about 2000 sites so well there is a range right? Say if you have 4 or 5 sites and if they are all different themes or different contents you are not in a place where you really need to worry about. But say if you have 2000 sites you ask yourself do you have enough value added content to support 2000 sites the answer is probably not. Its just that if you are a average guy I wouldn't worry about being on the same IP address and I definitely wouldn't worry about being on the same server that is something that everyone does. The last one Ryan asked about Javascript there are a lot of sites that do this, Google adsense is javascript included this is something that is common on the web I don't have to worry about it at all, but now again if you have 5000 sites and you are including the Javascript that does some sneaky redirect then you need to worry but that is something that you do on a few sites that is entirely logical and using Javascript I wouldn't worry at all.
Alright Aaron write in - its kind of interesting question? I am having a hard time understanding the problems that we face when we launch a new country. Typically we launch a new country with millions of new pages at the same time additionally due to our enthusiastic PR team we get tons of backlinks as well as press news during every launch. So they say the last time they did this they didn't do very well they launched a site for Australia and they didn't do very well at all.
Aaron this is a good question primarily because the answer to this somewhat changed since the last time we talked someone asked this question when we were in a conference in New-York and I said just go ahead and launch it you don't have to worry about it , it may look a bit weird but it will be just fine. But I think if you are launching your site will millions of web pages you got to be a little more cautious if you can. In general if you are launching with that many pages its probably better to try and launch a little more softly so a few thousand pages and add a few thousand more and stuff like that it could very well be, millions of pages are a lot of pages. Wikipedia is like say how many 5 or 10 million pages so if you are launching that many pages make sure you find ways to scrutiny and make sure those are all good pages. Or you might as well find yourself not as good as you hoped for.
Alright quick question; classic nation writes in and says What's the status on Google images and whether we will be able to hear about the indexing technology of the future?
Actually there was a thread about this on webmasterworld we just did an index update, just did I think last weekend for Google images, Actually I was talking to someone on the google images team they are always working hard, there is a lot of stuff you may have seen there might be new updates in future where we will be bringing new images that the main index has and stuff like that but they are always working on making Google images index better.
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Static vs. Dynamic urls - Matt Cutts Video Transcripts
Hi everyone again, Alright here we go again I am learning something everytime I do one of these, For example its probably smart to mention today is Sunday July 30th 2006.
Alright Gerby writes in "Does Googlebot treats dynamic pages different than static pages? " My company writes perl and there are query strings in URLs yahyahyah?
That's a good question, my first opinion we do treat static and dynamic pages equally so let me explain that in a little bit more detail. Pagerank flows in dynamic URLs the same way they flow in static URLs so if you got nytimes linking to a dynamic URL you will get the pagerank benefit and will still flow the Pagerank benefit. There are other search engines in past who said ok we go one level deep from static URLs so we are going to crawl a dynamic URL but we are going to go one level in dynamic URL, so the short answer is pagerank still flows the same between a static and a dynamic URL, lets go into a more detailed answer. The example you gave has like 5 parameters and one of them is like a product ID 2725 and you definitely cant use too many parameters I would recommend 2 or 3 at the most if you opt for using them , not to go for too long numbers because we might confuse them with session IDs any extra parameters you can get rid of its always a good idea. And remember google is not the only search engine out there so say if you have the ability to do a little of Mod_Rewrite I am going to say make it look like a static URL and I am going to say this is a very good way to tackle a problem. But pagerank still flows but experiment if you see any URLs that has the same structure and same number of parameters as you will think of doing its probably better to cut short some number or parameters or shorten them in URLs, or try to use Mod rewrite. Alright Mark writes in this is an interesting question he has a friend who's site was hacked he did not know about for couple of months because of they had taken it out or something like that. So he asks can google notify the webmaster of the site basically when its hacked within sitemaps and inform them maybe say that inappropriate pages were crawled. That's a great question my guess is we don't have the resources to have something like that right now in general if somebody is hacked if they have a small number of sites they monitor, they will get to know about it really quickly, the web host will alert them about it. So webmaster console team is really going to work on new things but my guess is this is really not right now in the priority list.
Ok james says, "Hey Matt , in the fullness of time I am going to use Geo-targeting software one that will give different type of messages to different type of people in different parts of the world. So for example this kind of pricing structure are we safe to use these type of Geo-targeting software clearly we don't want to avoid any suspicions of cloaking. That's a very interesting question, SO lets talk about that a little bit Google webmaster guidelines very clearly says showing different type of content than what you show to Search engines. Geo-targeting by itself is not cloaking under google's guidelines. Because what you are doing take an IP address and hey you are from Canada we will show you this particular page, take the IP address hey you are from Germany we will show you this particular page, this thing that will get you in trouble is if you treat Googlebot as a special guest and do something special for it. So Geo-targeting for Google bot like Googlebotistan is bad. So what you can do is instead just treat Googlebot as a regular user. So if you are targeting by country and if Googlebot is coming from United states just show what people in United states will see so google for example does geo targeting we don't think that's cloaking its all about playing the cards pretty well. So again as I said cloaking is showing different contents to users and different contents to search engines. In this case just treat Googlebot as you treat like any other fact that they got this particular IP address and you should be totally fine.
Alright its time for another break
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We know this video is more than a year old but still there are people who have questions about their site and want to listen from a Search Engine Expert. Also there are millions of Non-English people who want to know what's there in this video so a transcript is something that can be easily translated to be read in other languages. We know there are people with hearing disability who browse our site this is a friendly version for them where they can read and understand what's there in this video.
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Labels: Mattcutts, Mattcutts Video Transcript, Video Transcripts, Videos
Googlebot now digs deeper into your forms - Great new feature from Google smart guys
Remember forms had always been a user only feature when we see a form we tend to add a query and search for products or catalogs or other relevant information. For example if we go to a product site we just see a search form, Some product sites will just have a form to reach the products on their website. There will not be any other way to access the inner product pages which might have valuable information for the crawlers. Good product descriptions which might be unique and useful for users will be hidden from t he users. Similarly imagine a edu website I personally know a lot of Edu websites which don't provide proper access to their huge inventory of research papers, PowerPoint presentations etc.
Only way to access those papers is through a search button in Stanford website, you can see at least 6000 useful articles about Google which are in Stanford site. If you scan through Standford website you will not find these useful information connected to the website anywhere. They are rendered directly from a database. Now due to the advanced capability of Google bot to crawl forms they can use queries like Google research etc in sites like Standford and crawl all the PDFs, PowerPoint's and other features that are listed there. This is just amazing and a great valuable addition.
I am personally enjoying this addition by Google. When I go to some great websites they are no where never optimized most of their high quality product pages or research papers are hidden from regular crawlers. I always thought why don't I just email them asking to include a search engine friendly site map or some pages which has a hierarchical structure to reach inner pages. Most of the sites don't do this nor do they care that they don't have it. At last Google has a way to crawl the Great Hidden web that is out there. When they role out this option I am sure it will be a huge hit in future and will add few billion pages more to the useful Google index.
Also the Webmaster central blog reports Google bot has the capability to toggle between Radio buttons, drop down menus, check box etc. Wow that is so cool wish I was part of the Google team who did this research it is so interesting to make a automated crawler do all this Magic on your website which has always been part of the user option.
Good thing I noticed is they mention they do this to a select few quality sites though there are some high quality information out there we can also find a lot of Junk. I am sure the sites they crawl using this feature are mostly hand picked or if its automated then its subject to vigorous quality / Authority Scoring.
Another thing that is news to me is the capability of Google bot to scan Javascript and flash to scan inner links. I am aware that Google bot can crawl flash but not sure how much they reached with Javascript. Before couple of years Search Engines stayed away from Javascript to make sure they don't get caught in some sort of loop which might end up in crashing the server they are trying to crawl. Now its great to hear they are scanning and crawling links in Javascript and Flash without disturbing the well-being of the site in anyway.
Seeing the positive site we do have a negative side too, There are some people who don't want their pages hidden inside forms to be crawled by Search Engines. For that ofcourse google crawling and indexing team has a solution. They obey robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives and I am sure if you don't want your pages crawled you can block Googlebot from accessing your forms.
A simply syntax like
Useragent: Googlebot
Disallow: /search.asp
Disallow: /search.asp?
will stop your search forms if your Search form name is search.asp.
Also Googlebot crawls only get Method in forms and no Post Method in forms. This is very good since many Post method forms will have sensitive information to be entered by ther users. For example many sites ask for users email IDs, user name, passwords etc. Its great that Googlebot is designed to stay away from sensitive areas like this. If they start crawling all these forms and if there is a vulnerable form out there then hackers and password thieves will start using Google to find unprotected sites. Nice to know that Google is already aware of this and is staying away from sensitive areas.
I like this particular statement where they say none of the currently indexed pages will be affected thus not disturbing current Pagerank distribution:
"The web pages we discover in our enhanced crawl do not come at the expense of
regular web pages that are already part of the crawl, so this change doesn't
reduce PageRank for your other pages. As such it should only increase the
exposure of your site in Google. This change also does not affect the crawling,
ranking, or selection of other web pages in any significant way."
So what next from Google they are already reaching new heights with their Search algorithms, Indexing capabilities etc. I am sure for the next 25 years there wont be any stiff Competition for Google. I sincerely appreciate Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, Crawling and Indexing Team for this wonderful news.
What is the next thing I expect Googlebot :
1. Currently I dont seem them crawl large PDFs in future I expect to see great crawling of the huge but useful PDFs out there. I would expect a cache to be provided by them for those PDFs.
2. Capability to crawl Zip or Rar files and find information in it. I know some great sites which provide down loadable research papers in .zip format. Probably search engines can read what is inside a zipped file and if its useful for users can provide a snippet and make it available in Search index.
3. Special capabilities to crawl through complicated DHTML menus and Flash menus. I am sure search engines are not anywhere near to doing that. I have seen plenty of sites using DHTML menus to access their inner pages, also there are plenty of sites who use Flash menus I am sure Google will overcome these hurdles , understand the DHTML and crawl the quality pages from these sites.
Good Luck to Google From - Search Engine Genie Team,
Labels: Google, search engines
Conversion client report from Search Engine Genie
some of the sites we did SEO it was a huge success. We had clients rank for some
very competitive keywords and some industries gave our clients an ROI in the range
of 1000 to 1500%.
Here is a small list of conversion rates from the sites we monitor:
Search Engine Optimization in the following industries | Lead from click throughs % | Conversion | ROI from the investment client made with us. ( Average per year ) | Success rate in Organic rankings. |
Automobile industry: | 12% | 8% | 800% | 98.7% |
Jewellery: | 8% | 6% | 1200% | 94% |
Real estate: | 11% | 4% | 400% | 85% |
Vacation and Tours | 12% | 9% | 600% | 99% |
Painting Industry | 7% | 2% | 1400% | 85% |
Loans and settlements | 12% | 1.5% | 700% | 75% |
Motorbikes | 15% | 3% | 1800% | 99% |
Web Development | 9% | 7% | 900% | 90% |
We will continue to monitor and will come up with a bigger list in our future
blog post,
Nofollow in image links and Image maps – Does search engines follow it?
Ok so we know about rel=Nofollow in text links are followed I don't think many of you will know that search engines can crawl image maps and links from images very easily and any extra tagging in Nofollow tag is followed.
Search Engines have no trouble following image map links and links from on images. Any Nofollow tags from image maps is followed without hindrance.
Here is an example:
for example:
Too much dreaming - Thanks mother to wake me up.
" I got a call from Sergey Brin founder of Google, The caller Said" Hey man we are getting too rich and lazy its too tough to run Google.com we want someone responsible to take care of our site. I feel you are the most ideal person for that, if you are Ok with it we will give you ftp and control panel access you can login and make changes as you like"
I got very excited, immediately the login details arrive first thing you know what I did logged in to the website and added our site link to the Homepage. Next day boom our server goes down due to massive traffic from Google.com" . So what next???????//
Its my mother calling for me since I overslept and its 9.00 AM. Heck had it been real, Sorry think I am blabbering too much
SEO Jeff,
Labels: Google Adwords
Search Engine Friendly headers - Headers that help search engine rankings.
1) 2oo OK: This is the primary headers that needs to be for all working sites. Search engines will understand 200 ok to be ideal for crawling and indexing a site.
2. ) 301 Permanent redirect: This is again a search engine friendly header return, 301 redirect is used where you want to permanently move a particular page to an other page or an other URL. This is search engine friendly since your redirect won't affect any search engine crawlers since they will understand that your page has moved to a new location.
3. 503 status code: 503 is best to prevent search engine crawlers from crawling your website If your site is hacked or attached by a virus best is to prevent the search engines from crawling , Google's webmaster central blog has some useful information on that here.
Search Engine Genie
Labels: Search Engine Optimization, search engines
Search engines love fresh contents - New contents a gift for search engines.
I recommend keep updating the site regularly add a blog / article or news section and constantly update this area with fresh information so that search engines when ever they come to your site finds fresh information. To get the best results from the updated information make sure you write it unique, content syndication from other blogs or news sites dont work to the best. Unique information is a hit with search engines they love to see great information from your website that is fresh for their users. Our blog postings get crawled in about 2 hours time not more than that. This is because of quality fresh information we provide for the crawlers.
SEO Blog Team.
Labels: Search Engine Optimization, search engines
No short cut to Dmoz Heaven, Patience and determination Pays.

Dmoz the Mother of all directories is the only directory in the whole internet that is regarded as a favorite by all top Search Engines. For Google sites in Dmoz get a small level of positive score since all the sites accepted in Dmoz are hand picked and reviewed under strict conditions by Dmoz editors.
I have seen this when Dmoz had a official forum named Resource-zone people used to whine and complain that their submission is not accepted. Also people just bash Dmoz in various forums and message boards for giving credit to some sites and accused of Dmoz editors of even taking bribes to get listed sites listed in corresponding category.
From my past experience with getting sites listed in Dmoz I tell you there is no short cut to a listing in Dmoz, also dmoz is the most genuine directory out there and the corruption rate from my analysis and experience is some where around 0.0001%. That is equal to one out of 10,000 Dmoz editors are corrupted. If you see as per the Dmoz blog at any given time there are around 7000 active Dmoz editors. With a corruption rate of 1 out of 10,000 editors I am sure there are no corrupt or cheating editors for dmoz. If you think Dmoz has not accepted your submission stop whining about it and see what are the areas you have problems with your website. Remember today you come to internet and tomorrow you want your site getting listed is not with Dmoz there are more than 1000 cheap zero value directories out there who will list you for nothing ( fact they are good for nothing directories ) . Dmoz likes good quality sites to be listed no Dmoz editor is against listing any site as long it satisfies their quality guidelines.
Dmoz remains to be most comprehensive directory on the web only directory that is anywhere near to it is the Yahoo directory. But still yahoo directory is not the best directory you can come across since its paid. You pay 299$ for review of your site and most of the sites pass through this review but with Dmoz this is not the case you can never buy a listing in Dmoz.
Dmoz is not run for listing all commercial websites. Dmoz is here to provide best value to its visitors. Dmoz editors don't just rely on site submission for entry into Dmoz. Most of the editors are Web Savvy and they score the Internet in search of quality websites and quality articles to list them in their category. In fact some of my previous discussions with some Meta Editors revealed there will be atleast 30% of articles / news / websites / other stuff listed in Dmoz are through Scanning the internet.
So let me get you a checklist on what it takes to get into Dmoz.
- First and the most important point is Dmoz Quality guidelines make sure your site doesn't violate it. If it does there is no point in even submitting the site to dmoz since it will never be accepted. Some of the guidelines. Duplicate sites - Sites that has mirrors or duplicates and has an exact copy currently running your site cannot get into Dmoz
Affiliate sites - A site fill with affiliate links and affiliate information will not be accepted into Dmoz. There is no exception for this make sure your site is not a MFA ( Made For Adsense ) or affiliate site.
Status of Website: Make sure your site is current and that its fully completed an incomplete site when reviewed by a editor will mostly be rejected or will be put in backlog. Its very important that you impress the editor by the first look if the site has pages which says under construction or broken links or incomplete information I am sure your site will never be listed.
Multi level marketing related websites, Affiliate reseller sites, sites that use cloaking, sites that promote illegal stuff like child pornography, Bootlegs, Warez, pirated software etc are not included in Dmoz - Contact Information: Most of the editors see this as a important factor for site credibility most of the time a site without proper verifiable contact information is rejected. Make sure you have the current contact information and that its legitimately visible on the page. It can either be on a contact page or other pages you prefer make sure it is easily accessible when a editor reviews your site.
- Value for users: See how much value your site will provide for users Dmoz as I said is here to provide best value for users they are not here to list your site which has 50,000 products selling actively online. Say the same site has community areas like forums, reviews etc then your site has more chance of getting listed in Dmoz.
- Find the right category: This is a very important factor most of time a listing is delayed or rejected if its submitted to the wrong category. Remember Dmoz editors are not paid almost all of them except a top few are all doing work as a volunteer service so make sure you don't trouble them too much. Take time to research be best category. Say suppose you are a Car Dealer in California. Go to Dmoz and type in Car dealer California "http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=car+dealers+california", you will see a lot of sites showing up which are related to the query you submitted. Now just take time and go through some of the categories which showed up for the Search. This particular search is complicated since the categories that came of are too vague. Here are some of the topics that came up.
Regional: North America: United States: California: Regions: Northern California: Business and Economy Regional: North America: United States: California: Counties: San Joaquin: Business and Economy
Business: Automotive: Recreational Vehicles: Retailers: North America: United States: California
Above I picked some categories which showed up which looked relevant. Now by look we can eliminate California/counties/san Joaquin since is more specific to a city and you are selling whole of California. Next I can also eliminate Northern California since again you are selling whole of California. So mostly the ideal topic is Retailers/North America/United states/ California. So are you convinced that you can submit here. STOP: Don't do it yet since there might be other categories which never showed up search which can be relevant to your website. So I recommend now going through the regular way, Just click the categories and browse and see if you can find any other category that is relevant to your site if you are convinced that there cannot be any more category relevant to your website then proceed to submission. - Submission Guidelines: Make sure you have a well written title tag and a good descriptive description tag. Always avoid the idea of a optimized title tag. There is nothing like that for Dmoz. Most of the time best title will be your company name itself. For example if your company is California Auto Dealers Inc then that will be the best title for your website. When it comes to writing description make sure you don't read it like a advertisement, don't stuff your keywords in it don't repeat your title, prices etc. Best description will be something which doesn't fall into any of the categories that is pointed out here in Dmoz submission guidelines. http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/describing.html
- Multiple listings: Sometimes Multiple listings are allowed for example you can submit your site if you eligible for the main category as well as your regional sub category. This is rare research before you do this.
- Patience: After you submit your site please wait. Wait for atleast a year before any sort of panic there could be 1000 behind the scene reasons for your site not listed. If your site is not listed find out whether you have anything that violate Dmoz guidelines if you find anything just fix it and keep waiting. Don't go an resubmit all resubmissions will make your existing submission being pushed to the bottom of the website backlog. If the category you submitted has 100s of websites waiting then your wait time will be longer best option is to be patient and wait.
- Finally stop talking bad about Dmoz or bashing them in forums this is one of the most important thing they see. Dmoz editors are some of the most active members of internet and they will find you regardless of which forum or message board you are bashing them. Stop false accusations against Dmoz they are the best out there. Just for the sake of backlinks don't ever try anything like shoemoney did here (shoemoney.com/2007/08/26/dmoz-extortion/ ) . Your site will never get into Dmoz for atleast the next 100 years.
- P.S: See if your site really qualifies to be listed in Dmoz. If your site is listed in Dmoz does it add atleast a small value to dmoz. I will personally see that before submitting to Dmoz if you are new to internet and just build a site take time for the site to grow make it best for your users work atleast 6 months on the site. Once you feel you are good enough submit to Dmoz this increases the chance of acceptance into Dmoz more easily.
Lets all make Dmoz a better place to be.
Some Good resources : http://blog.dmoz.org
http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/
Search Engine Genie.
Labels: Search engine directories
Does clickthrough from Google affect search rankings
In My humble opinion Yes Google does track clickthroughs and NO - Google does not use it for ranking purposes.
Take this scenario just taking traffic log of our site we get about 3 to 4 million hits a month and its so difficult to go through just a month of data for a single site. Google is handling billions of queries a day and they need to billions of information per day. This will result in a lot of clickthrough data which will be very very difficult to sort out. Also if Google allows clickthrough data for favour in search engine results then anyone can have a automated bot that will open a search engine results page and generate 1000s of clicks. Or better then can even a hire a group of people and make them click their search results day and night.
Google also has the Toolbar which has been installed in millions of systems. They can actually track the presence of visitors on a site. Say you generate a million clicks but those clicks never results in strong presence on your site then it will send a red alert to google that the users don't like after click through on what they see on that site. Google definitely have the capability to do this and most probably this might play a small factor in Search engine rankings though I feel this will be a very small factor.
Also one possibility with all the click through data they collect they can put that to a system where it will analyze the clickthrough / real presence on website resulting from clickthrough/ position of sites that were there on a particular SERPs. etc put that to some algorthmic analysis and come out with a data Good enough for their users. This is definitely possible since Google want's to send their visitors to the best results and most relevant sites.
One area where I see Google might definitely see the popularity of a page as well as clickthrough data is the sitelinks. We have over 75 links going out from the homepage but Google selected a sitelink that is not in the homepage itself but is linked from a inner page. We know that page is very popular since its a rank checker tool and many people had linked to it.
SEO Blog Team,
Labels: Search Engine Optimization
Catching a bee in a forest full of bees - Unpredictable Search engines.
Before say some 6 years search engines had so less spam to fight against. People are not aware of innovative ideas to spam the search engines all they know is FFA ( Free for all links ) , Keyword stuffing , Hidden keywords / links, html content keyword stuffing ( abusing the loop holes in html to stuff keywords ) . automated link exchanges, comment spamming , cloaking / content delivery etc. At that time since the search engine algorithms were not so complicated all these tactics worked. All these are not anywhere near to working in Search engines any more. All these loop holes were closed but still people spam the search engines
Lets see some 3 year back techniques which are against search engine guidelines.
- Blog Spamming: Spamming blog with comment spam most targeted sites were big University sites like Stanford.edu where they allowed people to post comment for their articles or news section
- Aggressive / Automated Link exchanges: Aggressive Link exchanges were still working but not to the level it used to work around 2002 or 2003. Automated link exchanges became a huge industry and people were using very aggressive link exchanges to gain a upper hand in backlinks
- Forum spamming: Spamming forums through signature links , links in their posts, links through automated forum spam etc. This was a very popular tactics where people just visit forums to have their links in signature or in their post to gain search engine benefit.
- Cross-linking: A major search engine spam where a spammer starts 100s of sites and cross link them to get link benefit in search engines.
- Dmoz clones: Huge number of dmoz clones started arising and became people since it can generate 100s of 1000s of pages instantly for search engines.
- Directory spam huge number directories started coming out with zero value to visitors built just for search engine benefit
- Links from lots of blogs. This was something which came into existing in 2004 but still in existence to a certain extent.
- Links and contents hidden on page, behind images, in noscript tag, in hidden contents etc.
- Spamming wikipedia by inserting links ( Nofollow was introduced mostly for wikipedia ) .
- Text link ads: Buying your way to the top of search engine organic rankings. Buying text links and gaining search engine benefit due to the search engines dependency on backlinks and anchor text power to rank a website.
If I list it out I can keep on listing lots of things people used for spamming the search engines. But if you today most of the above tactics dont work anymore with search engines. Search engine like Google has closed its algorithm for these sort of loop holes. I can tell you with some sort of background with search algorithms. Just to close the above 8 tactics they need to implement 30 different factors. Its not that easy to detect a spam without hurting millions of websites out there who might have something similar to it but is not considered spam.
To combat these problems search engines role our algorithmic changes very carefully after a lot of testing so that it doesn't affect any search rankings of innocent webmasters who never did anything against search engine guidelines. At this point I can imagine atleast 150 factors playing into ranking competitive keywords in Google.
Lets see what's the 2007/2008 search engine spam tactic
Social bookmarking which has picked up so much these days has been a target of search engine spamming for sometime now. People want to bookmark only interesting pages but now everyone bookmarks everything. This is done mostly for search engine benefit. Search engines love sites like delicious or Digg and they tend to crawl links from these sites better. So people tend to target these sites.
Search Engine Spamming in the name of link baiting, Link baiting a very commonly used word these days has been a subject of abuse. People imagining to be creative use some really aggressive methods on their sites to gain natural backlinks. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't . Bad PR ( public relations ) is a main problem here. People tend to write crap about others or about other sites so that they can gain the sympathy of the other party. This is definitely not the healthy way for gaining back links.
Pay per post , pay for blogging – an other tactic which was subject to spamming . Now people are buying posts in blogs. They make good bloggers write about their site and provide a back link to them. Most of the time this is just like a paid text link advertisement.
Adding a page on a established site about your site with anchor text backlinks
Reviews on established blogs are similar to Pay per post where you pay a blogger to review your site and link back in return for Money.
1$ articles – This is a very difficult to combat spam where advertisers are paying 1$ for articles which are of very low quality and stuff their site with junk information to show search engines that they have contents.
This is just a small list of new ideas to spam search engines. I can go on to list more so we cannot blame the search engines in anyway for doing something like this.
One wonderful thing is the death of Anchor Text link advertising in 2007/2008. I am personally Happy about it. It makes the rich and famous dominate Search Results. Its not anymore the case. Search Engines dont see text link advertising as a search engine friendly one and are ready to impose strong penalties for sites that buy or sell links. Though Search engines like Google like to fight search engine spamming algorithmically I am sure some manual review especially on paid links or renting links will bring more success and quality to the index.
Considering all these new tactics coming up I am sure in future Search Engine Optimization is going to be one of the hardest industry to work on. Saying that if there are no innovating ideas to get a site ranked I am sure search engine quality engineers will go Jobless. So let us keep them working harder to fight search engine spamming algorithmically.
Search Engine Genie.
Labels: search engines
Best ideas for attracting back links - Any thoughts?
We have been finding it hard to attract natural backlinks to our site. This industry is so diverse and complicated we just don't know what's the best way to build links. We already tried the following ways
1. SEO tools: We have one of the best and long list of SEO tools around. We provide everything totally free. We did pick some good links but not enough to compete in a very competitive industry like this. We are launching 10 more new tools in couple of months lets see if we can get some attention there.
2. Blog: We have some active blogs and they do gain some attention but not good enough to gain maximum backlinks.
3. Articles: Rarely works these days though we have some good ones they just bring in a handful of links not the amount of links we are looking at.
4. SEO comics: We just introduced a new comics section to attract links its working but gaining little attention not the way we would like it to perform.
5. Transcripting: We have planned to do a lot of transcripting of videos of various search engine experts and SEOs. We are expecting attention to this definitely. we already did the webmaster live chat transcript and in process of completing some search engine expert's transcripts which will be live soon. Should be a mild hit definitely.
6. Introduced Search engine expert directory where we give free listings for all search engine experts around the world. We charge only for active links back to their site. Still not yet given full attention but it should be a hit pretty soon.
We are currently working on various other ways to attract people to link to us. Some of them cannot be discussed since our competitors are watching us. Already we tag some important pages to bookmark sites, but Search Engine related information are not the type of hit people are looking for. Its very hard to make people link to us next I think I need to do something really crazy

Are you in wikipedia's spam blacklist,
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist
Wikipedia has a strong relationship with Search engines, Wikipedia does share this information to Search engines and it will result in your site loosing credibility with search engines.
Mattcutts of Google denies any automated penalty
"
If you do a search for [wikipedia spam blacklist], the first result is helpful. It gives pointers to various strings and urls that Wikipedia has blacklisted on their site.
I'd characterize that list as much like a spam report: the data can be useful, but at least in Google it wouldn't automatically result in a penalty (for the reason that site A might be trying to hurt site B).
That could be one of the things jehochman was referring to."
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedia-spam-resulting-in-google-yahoo-penalties/5854/
Even if matt denies he does say its kind of like a spam report so I recommend staying out of the list always,
Labels: search engines
Yahoo team's up with you vlingo for Mobile voice search
According to Marco Boerries, an executive vice president for Vlingo said people using BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series can use their voice over the phone to search the web. Yahoo's Mobile search engine is called Onesearch and has been in Industry for a while.
As per expert's reviews Vlingo's voice recognition is the best of its kind in industry. Though Still it has no where reached a level comparing with real human voice still its competiting strongly.
SEO Tools blocked by Google - Google blogs online tools temporarily
Update: Tools are working perfectly fine Google has released the block on online tools.
Labels: SEO Tools
Search Engines love webmasters and siteowners
But now its a total different world I would say. Looking at the prompt responses people get from search quality engineers about their site problems it makes me seriously amazed.
For Google we have mattcutts blog, webmaster central blog, adwords rep in webmasterworld forum , John Muller participating in forums, Mattcutts goes around in webmaster / SEO blogs and responds to any specific problems or concerns ( ofcourse his blog is great ) , we have Google Groups where many employees like John Muller, Jonathan simon, Adam Lasnik, Susan, Mariya etc hangout, Most of the google experts are always around when a webmaster is serious about their problems,
Back in 2003 we just had one ghost like representative from Google named GoogleGuy in webmasterworld who comes around and asks for feedback. If there is some update to their algorithm or search index occasionally he will respond with a lot of ambiguity. His answers are like answers from the Google god itself and his posts are followed so much. People just come to webmaster world to search for his posts. Till today 95% or more webmasterworld active members don't know who the real person with the nickname Googleguy is. Many suspect Googleguy is Mattcutts but he denied to be the original Googleguy. But today things have changed we now have Google employees answering questions all over the place. They recently hosted a webmaster live chat session first of its kind which was a success attended by more than 250 people.
For yahoo it used to be Tim Mayer nick named Yahoo Tim he just comes around and gives a weather update ( Yahoo's index update ) or answers some rare questions but now they have a wonderful place for webmasters to seek help.
This place gives much better support than what Google does. I rarely see a question that is not reviewed by a yahoo site explorer employee. That is a very positive sign and a huge step forward in bringing webmasters/White hat SEOs and site owners closer. Its great that Yahoo a search engine which used to be very reluctant to help webmasters now have a place where they provide instant solution for Site owner's problems.
MSN it used to be MSN dude he started from the day MSN separated from Yahoo to become an independent Search Engine. He comes for some feedback but never used to be regular but now even the big Microsoft has a forum for webmasters to talk about problem with their sites. When I visited this forum I can see people like Brett Hunt a Live search employee actively answering questions of site owners. This is great.
So seeing the world change so much I can just say one thing finally search engines have understood the importance of Good relationship and communication with webmasters and site owners to maintain the quality of the index. A Good communication and setting up strong guidelines help webmasters go in the right direction when it comes to ranking their sites in Search Engines.
I like to thank wholeheartedly all top Search engine Engineers for taking this bold step of helping us webmasters.
Search Engine Genie
Labels: search engines
Yahoo site explorer and .asia domains - problem still
"Hi,I am trying to submit my .asia domains that I have registered and I
keep getting error messages. (error 3) My new .com domains go through fine. Any
ideas or reason why I cannot get my .asia domains entered for a crawl?"
Yahoo! Site Explorer employee Tim has replied asking for the URLs,
Please let us know your site URL or your y_key contents and we'll be happy
to investigate.
suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=SiteExplorer
Will Buying adwords help Google rankings ,
No it does not nor had never been that way nor will it ever be like that in Future. Google has been know to be a highly ethical search engine their Motto says "Don't be Evil" if they give boost to adwords advertisers in organic rankings then it simply means they are being evil.
Adwords has been a very successful program from Google and today google's No.1 revenue comes from adwords their pay per click program which displays sponsored results besides organic search engine results. Adwords results are inside iframes and embedded inside JavaScript so those links are not crawled. Also the links go through a redirect which is prevented from passing any link popularity or Pagerank to the targeted site.
SEO Blog Team,
Labels: Google
Expired domain do they help in search engine rankings.
According to me yes it does exist and mattcutts of Google has discussed about this. So will a expired domain help, In my humble opinion no a expire domain don't help for getting traffic to other sites.
If you buy a expired domain even if it has some pagerank it will eventually be PR0ed since Google imposes a expired domain penalty as soon as it sees a new site coming up on the old domain. When there is a content change on the expired domain search engine algorithm is designed in such a way that it will detect it and impose a penalty.
Also if the domain has any existing backlinks it will not be given as a credit to the domain. Also there is an other possibility that the backlinks will eventually drop off by itself if the people who already link to that site visits that site and realizes that this is not the site they were linking to before.
Also there a risk that the domain might have been banned or blacklisted in Search engines before you might just buy it without knowing it and eventually its not going to help and a new domain will be much better compared to a domain which had a history of wrong doing.
Labels: Search Engine Optimization
Reasons for Google not catching a page: A SEO checklist for Google's cache problem
Reasons for Google not catching a page: A SEO checklist for Google's cache problem
- If a page is password protected and the search engines cannot access it but find many links coming to it they will keep the URL in search results but there wont be any cache since the page cannot be accessed by Googlebot.
- If the page is too large for indexing we discussed this before in our blog Googlebot has problem caching large pages. For example large PPT, large PDFs or large Docs are not cached by Google. From our research they have a indexing limit of 1.5 Mb and I have personally not seen a page more than that being cached again understand indexing and caching are two different things I am discussing about indexing only here.
- If a page has errors and not rendering properly for Googlebot they fail to index that page. This might sometimes happen with dynamic pages some servers when the Googlebot is visiting might not render the page problem and this will result in Googlebot not caching the page.
- If you are suffering from a page penalty then it will affect page caching.
Also if Googlebot has not visited a page for a long time but the page is still in index it will loose its credibility in the index and will loose the cache. - Accidental blocking of a page in robots.txt or in Meta tags will stop search engines from caching a page. For example the Nocache meta tag syntax will tell the search engine robot not to cache the web page.
Labels: Google
Acceptable downtime for Search Engines
But that being said if your site is down for a long time then you have reasons to worry. Search engines if they repeatedly hit a site and see that its down they will remove the site from the index or prevent the site from ranking all together. They do this to prevent users from visiting a site from their SERPs ( Search Engine Results Pages ) and returning empty handed . So I recommend if your site is down don't wait too long just make sure the host solves the problem promptly or switch host and change DNS immediately.
This will save a lot of headache with search engines.
Labels: search engines
What caused indexed pages to disappear: A SEO checklist for problems with indexed pages
What caused indexed pages to disappear: A SEO checklist for problems with
indexed pages
A indexed page can disappear temporarily if they are very newly indexed and that they are not added to the main database of search engines. For search engines like Google they maintain many clusters of computers to store data and sometimes the data that is freshly collected from their crawler is not directly added to the main database but to a small cluster. So when this data propagates to other clusters the pages might become temporarily unavailable for a certain period of time but will eventually come back after a few days when the propagation is done with the Search Engine.
- A page can disappear if Google finds something wrong with that page we discussed about this on page specific Google penalty here.
- A page can disappear when suddenly it attracts 1000s of backlinks. This might suddenly trigger a filter with Search engine algorithms and that page might go through a strong search engine spam filter and once it clears it will be available again.
- If a page has any server related problems and not accessible by search engines it will disappear from search engine index
- If a page has problems with the html or dynamic code and again not properly rendering for the search engines it will be booted temporarily from the index.
- If a page has hidden links and if detected by spam detecting Googlebot it will assigned a temporary penalty and will be booted from the index.
- Manual review by certain search engines have made pages disappear. This is though very rare but it does happen and search engines do this to make sure users are not led to the wrong page.
Labels: Google
Does all links count in Search Engines - A SEO checklist
Checklist of links that count, that count and pass link juice and links
that don't Count
There is a difference between links that count and links that help rank a website, also there is a set of links that never count.
Links that count and help rank a website;
1. Links from good authority websites like major news sites, major blogs and other quality sites.
2. Links through link exchanges from quality sites many argue that reciprocal links don't work but in my point of view , reciprocal links do work if done with the right websites
3. Links from article syndication through this plays a small role in helping a website rank but still it helps. The problem with these sites is that due to the large amount of syndication that happens Google devalues links from too many duplicate copies but still some links work.
4. Links from directories. Directories like dmoz, yahoo provide the maximum link juice but some paid directories or other human edited free directories also pass link juice to a website
5. Links from press releases: Yes links from press releases still work and they do help a site push its rankings
6. Text based links – Today this is the hot topic since Google is finding it hard to combat text links bought for link juice and Pagerank they are penalizing sites for buying and selling links. Penalties include loose of trust in Google, looking some value of toolbar pagerank, totally removed from search engines etc. But ofcourse they do work and links bought from big sites tend to pass a lot of link juice.
7. Links from social linking where people link to your site because they link you, this also plays a important factor and does help in rankings
8. Link from some sponsors, say you sponsor a event and they link back yes it helps if the linking site is non-profit or high quality site with already good reputation in Google.
9. Links inside PDFs and word Docs also count for link popularity if they are from good recognized sites.
10. Links from forum footer do count but to a very small extent, Its important the forum doesn't do anything to stop spreading of link popularity
Links that count but don't help in boosting rankings:
1. Link from social bookmarking sites like Digg, delicious, technorati etc. These links as far as our research goes are crawled very well by Google and other search engines but they don't pass pagerank or link juice since most of the links are NOFOLLOW. Nofollow is a syntax added to the HREF tag for search engines to understand that the linking site is not trustworthy or simply that they are links that are beyond editorial control.
2. Link from wikipedia yes it counts but again not for Pagerank or link juice but good for Google love, Wikipedia also has Nofollow in most of its pages but all search engines pick links from wikipedia and crawl it.
Links that don't count nor help in Search Engine Rankings:
1. Links from sites banned by search engines. If a search engine finds a link from banned site it don't even follow it mostly and they never count as a link nor pass link popularity.
2. Link from Spam sites which again is blacklisted by search engine algorithm don't count.
3. Link from blogspam, comment spam are not counted as link popularity links anymore with search engines.
4. Links that are embedded in Javascript don't count since JavaScript is not crawled by search engines.
5. Links inside Adsense ads are not crawled since its embedded in JavaScript and they also are in IFRAME.
6. Links inside some complicated Flash files are not crawlable since search engines don't understand complicated flash.
7. Links inside password protected pages / password protected PDFs don't count.
8. Links from pages which are inside search results and only accessible by searching through a search button don't count.
Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,
Labels: Google
Age of domain SEO - Role of age of domain in SEO
Of this Inception date of backlinks and age of backlinks is the most important factor. When sites like digital point started rotating text link ads ( Co-op ad-network ) on different websites based on link weight Google immediately stood up to the occasion and started seeing the date when the link to an other website was crawled for a particular date and when it sees the same link again on the page and compares it with the previous data. This is what we call the age of Backlinks and the pattern of change of links over a period of time.
When we say inception date of a website into Google it simply means when Googlebot first crawled a website and added it to its index. This also plays a important role with Google.
Now coming to the age of domain this plays a very important role when it comes to search engine algorithms. A person can register a domain before 10 years but the site might have been included into Google results only before a year so even if the domain's age is old still for Google the inception date is the most important factor. So we don't have to worry too much about age of domain name understand that its important to get the domain name indexed by Google as soon as possible and getting permanent backlinks getting indexed by Google as soon as possible. These 2 factors play a important role with Search engines especially Google.
SEO Blog Team,
Labels: Google
Microsoft threatens to take on Yahoo if it doesn't meet its deadline

Labels: Yahoo
Phishing emails target Google adwords customers
Beware of phishing emails to adwords. We are into adwords for both our sites as well as client sites and we have seen a increase in phishing emails to adwords advertisers. There are some adwords advertisers who spend more than 200,000 a month in Google Adwords. If any of these account holders fall for the scam they will loose their personal information and possibly some money .
Here is how a recently Scam phishing email to adwords advertiser look like
Dear Google AdWords Customer,
Please sign in to your account at https://adwords.google.com/select/login
, and update your billing information. Your account will be reactivated as soon
as you update your payment information.Your ads will show immediately if you
decide to pay for clicks via creditor debit card. If you decide to pay by direct
debit, we may need to receiveyour signed debit authorization before your ads
start running, depending on your location. If you choose bank transfer, your ads
will show as soon as we receive your first payment.
We look forward to
providing you with the most effective advertising
available.
Sincerely,
———————————————————————————-
The Google AdWords
TeamPlease be aware that lot of people lost their personal information and money to phishing scams. If you find a email on this scam forward to adwords-support@google.com
Labels: Google Adwords
Sites and businesses banned from adwords,
1. Academic Aids:
You are NOT suppose to promote or encourage provide service for
writing thesis, academic paper writing, prewritten Academic
aids advertising for applying for exam on behalf of
someone else.
2. Aids to pass Drug Tests:
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of products designed to help
someone pass a drug test. This includes products such as drug cleansing shakes
and urine test additives.
3. Alcohol:
Different countries have different laws when it comes to alcohol ads. US don't
allow hard alcohol ads and countries like India bans all alcohol ads. Wine and
champagne are restricted in some areas.
4. Anabolic Steroids:
Advertising steroid related produced for Muscle enhancement is strictly
prohibited.
Automated Ad Clicking:
This is targeting Google itself. This destroys search engine's natural tendency
to send potential leads to sites. Automated ad clicking ads are banned.
Bulk Marketing:
Bulk email marketing, EMail marketing software and non-opt in lists are banned
from advertising.
Copyright: Copyrighted information is not allowed in Adwords.
Counterfied designer Goods, Data entry affiliates and programmes are banned from Adwords advertising.
Dailers:
Dailers are mostly malwares or spywares which try to connect to a premium number
and you will be charged huge if you are not aware of what's happening.
Drugs and Drug Paraphernalia
Don't promote drugs and drug paraphernalia.
e-Gold
In the past one year e-currencies especially egold have become very popular in
Nigeria. E-gold is an electronic currency backed by real gold stored up in a
bullion somewhere in the United States and accounted for by weight. E-gold was
established by Douglas Jackson in 1996.
E-gold is used as a medium of
exchange on the net. Many businesses now accept e-gold as a form of payment for
their services or products all over the world. Our very own Nigeria caught the
bug about a year ago with people using it especially to fund their forex trading
accounts, hyip programs and muli-level marketing programs.
The main
attraction perhaps for Nigerians is the fact that the process of opening and
operating an e-gold account takes just a few minutes and verification is never
required unlike payment systems like paypal.
Another controversial feature of
the egold system is their non-repudiation policy which regards all spends as
being final. There are no charge-backs with egold. To fund an egold account, all
a user has to do is find an Independent exchanger whom he pays cash in exchange
for his egold account to be funded.
The two features of e-gold stated above
has made it a preferred medium of operation by fraudsters. The fact that no
verification is needed and that once the egold gets into their account, it can't
be retrieved makes the system a perfect one for fraudsters. These limitations
notwithstanding, millions of people all over the world have continued to use the
system.
With its growing popularity in Nigeria, the egold system gradually
became a target of fraudulent activities by criminally minded Nigerians. Today,
egold fraud in Nigeria has become an issue. Perhaps it is the next level of
internet fraud in Nigeria.
Fake Documents
Don't promote fake documents.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion
of false documents such as fake IDs, passports, social security cards,
immigration papers, diplomas, and noble titles.
Fireworks and Pyrotechnic Devices
Don't promote fireworks or pyrotechnic devices.
Advertising is not permitted
for the promotion of fireworks and pyrotechnic devices.
Gambling
Don't promote online gambling or related sites.
Advertising is not
permitted
for the promotion of online casinos and gambling activities.
This includes,
but is not limited to, the following:
sports books
lotteries
bingo
poker
sites that provide tips, odds, and
handicapping
software
facilitating online casinos and gambling
gambling tutoring online
gambling related eBooks
'play for fun'
gambling or casino games of skill
including sites where the primary
purpose
is 'play for fun' gambling
affiliate sites with the primary
purpose of
driving traffic to online
gambling sites
Hacking and Cracking sites;
Google has always been against hacking and cracking sites. its illegal to promote a hacking website in Google Adwords. Sites if found will immediately be banned. You can actually find Hacking and Cracking sites in Organic results though since its very difficult to filter sites in Organic results.
Miracle Cures
Don't promote miracle cures.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of miracle cures, such as 'Cure cancer overnight!'
Mobile Subscription Services
Mobile subscription sites must display the required service details.
Prescription Drugs and Related Content
The promotion of prescription drugs and related content is restricted.
Google AdWords only accepts pharmaceutical advertising from pharmacies that are based in the U.S. or Canada. Pharmacy-related ad campaigns can only target the U.S., U.S. territories (American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands), and/or Canada. Ads for prescription drugs will not be displayed in other countries. Additionally, Google AdWords requires all online pharmacy advertisers and affiliates to be a member of the PharmacyChecker Licensed Pharmacy Program. Ads ill not run until a valid PharmacyChecker identification number is provided.
Note that pet pharmacies and affiliates advertising pet prescription drugs when targeting the U.S. or Canada must also be PharmacyChecker approved.
Prostitution
Don't promote prostitution.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of prostitution.
Scams/Phishing for Personal Information
Don't use phishing or other scamming tactics.
Advertising is not permitted for sites collecting sensitive personal information or money with fake forms, false claims, or unauthorized use of Google Trademarks. Examples of personal information include email addresses, user names, passwords, and/or payment information.
Template Sites for Ad Networks
Don't promote template sites for ad networks such as AdSense.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of template sites for ad networks. This includes products and services that create template or pre-generated websites solely intended to profit from ads.
Tobacco and Cigarettes
Don't promote tobacco and cigarettes.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products, including cigarettes, cigars, tobacco pipes, and rolling papers.
Traffic Devices
Don't promote illegal traffic devices.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of radar jammers, license plate covers, traffic signal changers, and related products.
Weapons
The promotion of weapons is restricted.
Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of certain weapons, such as firearms, firearm components, ammunition, balisongs (switchblades), butterfly knives, and brass knuckles.
Labels: Google Adwords
An other April Fool Joke From Google
I recently came across this particular posting by Google Blogger Team on their new announcement of Google weblogs with loads of features favouring Search Engine Optimization. This is such a weird posting you will definitely laugh if you are into blogging or Search engine optimization or search engine marketing.
"Announcing Google Weblogs (beta)
Today we'd like to offer you a sneak
peek at an exciting new product we've been working on: Google Weblogs. Since
Google bought Pyra Labs in 2002, we've been dreaming, planning, and implementing
the next revolution in personal publishing: Google Weblogs. Google
Weblogs, or "GWeblogs," or "Gblogs," which will launch later this year in a
public beta, is the next revolution in personal publishing. Here's what you can
expect:
Don't limit yourself to "reverse chronological" publishing. Our
advanced Google algorithms put your best content at the top of your blog. Even
if your later work goes downhill your previous posts will still shine.
No
more template languages to mess with or sidebars to get right. Our advanced
Google algorithms automatically populate your blog's sidebar with the most
relevant possible content.
Stop worrying about your PageRank or your search
engine optimization. Post directly into Google search results for maximum
visibility.
Save your readers time and effort. We'll automatically extract
the most relevant sentence from your post for the index page, along with any
necessary ellipsis. We'll also put some words in bold!
Your blog's header
will stay fresh with new images from our team of artists, each and every
anniversary of a scientific achievement.
Unsure of what to post about? Just
click "I'm Feeling Lucky" and we'll "take care" of the rest!"
Labels: Google
Google's stock ( GOOG ) rise among speculation by an analyst
Google (nasdaq: GOOG )'s stock rose $17.99, or 4 percent, to $473.27 among early trading on Friday after Analyse Jeffery Lindsay predicted higher sales and revenue for Google from its search engine advertising programmes. Lindsay said after Google's new approach to AdWords its sales will be increasing in the coming Months.
According to Lindsay Google has been slapping low quality advertisers from their AdWords advertising platform which gives opportunities for reforms to the AdWords campaign. Com score a leading company which tracks clicks in search engines reported lesser number of clicks in February and march but Lindsay says this is mostly due to Google slapping lower bidding advertisers and increasing its price facilitating for higher advertisers. Google has been changing and increasing its AdWords bid prices for a long time and according to Lindsay Com score don't record all these information.
Linday also predicts Google's shares might rise as high as 750$,
Source:forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/04/04/ap4856278.html
Labels: Goog
Google super fast indexing and ranking
We recently added a new SEO comics section to our site and I personally blogged about it. Google was super fast in indexing and ranking the page I still cannot believe my eyes Google is truly amazing.
Check this screen shot,

Long live the King Of Search Engines ,
Labels: Google, Google update
New SEO comics Section in Search Engine Genie Live now,
We are right now in process of adding upto 40 images. After we complete with that we will be updating a new image every week to make sure we keep the page upto date on latest happenings.
All images are watermarked and proprietary to Search Engine Genie, Feel free to vist the comic page often and enjoy our sense of humour on the Search engine industry we love,
https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm
Search Engine Genie Blog Team,
System and method for supporting editorial opinion in Google results.
"An editorial opinion parameter for a favored source may, for example, cause the score of the associated web page to be upgraded by a percentage of its previous score or by an absolute value. Similarly, for non-favored sources, the applicable editorial opinion parameter may cause the score of the associated web page to be downgraded by a percentage of its previous score or an absolute value. In extreme cases, the applicable editorial opinion parameter may cause the web page to be moved to the top of the ranked list or removed from the list completely. In another case, the applicable editorial opinion parameter of a web site may selectively affect one of the scores used in determining the final ranking (e.g., the text match score, the connectivity-based score, or the popular opinion score). Once updated scores have been determined, the server 120 may provide the updated ranked list of search results to the user [act 660]. The updated ranked list may be provided to the user via the output device 270. If, in act 630, the search query does not match any of the query themes stored in database 400, the server 120 may provide the original (i.e., non-updated) ranked list of search results to the user [act 660]. Implementations consistent with the present invention allow editorial opinion to apply to entire web sites. The techniques described herein also provide integration with other parameters in computing an overall ranking. For example, editorial opinion may be considered as an additional input parameter that combines with other factors such as textual-matching, connectivity analysis scoring, etc., for determining the overall ranking. This provides for a better result than conventional processes that simply return web pages on favored sites that match the query. In particular, implementations consistent with the present invention could assign a higher rank to a web page that is on a web site that has not been identified as a favored source in comparison to a web page from a favored source, if it is found to better match the query. "
Upgrading and downgrading a websight is based on editorial opinion compared to other factors in Google's search algorithm. Search engines had moved a lot of towards editorial opinions, google has team of quality testers around the world who are supposed to check their results for quality and any possible search engine spamming,
Also editorial opinion depends on monitoring visitor behavior through their toolbar or analytics or through cookies. Google has ways of understanding through toolbar day a user behaviour and the time a user stays on a website.
Some points from the patent as noted by tedster:
1. Get a bunch of people to find and rate really good websites and really spammy websites for certain searches
2. Make their rating into a parameter
3. Look at what the algo says the top results "should" be for a particular search
4. See if that search is in one of the topic areas that has an editorial rating
5. If so, look to see if there is some relationship to either the good guy list or the bad guy list
6. Shift the search rankings according to whatever parameter the editors generated.
7. Serve the shifted results to the user.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7096214.PN.&OS=PN/7096214&RS=PN/7096214
Internet software stocks rise even after the overall market is looking down,
Here is how key Internet software and services companies performed Friday morning:
Google Inc. rose $6.43 to $461.55.
Yahoo Inc. fell 38 cents to $27.75. Yhoo YHOO
EBay Inc. rose 60 cents to $32.32.
VeriSign Inc. fell 13 cents to $34.31.
Akamai Technologies Inc. rose 23 cents to $31.57.
Google Announces - GOOG Internet Availability of Proxy Materials
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the Internet availability of proxy materials for its 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's new Notice and Access rule. Google's proxy materials can be found on its investor relations website at http://investor.google.com/.
Pursuant to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's new Notice and Access rule, companies may now satisfy their proxy materials delivery requirements by delivering a "Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials" to stockholders, providing Internet access to the proxy materials, and providing a printed set of proxy materials by mail to any stockholder who requests them. Google has elected to take full advantage of these new rules in order to minimize impact on the environment and maximize cost savings relating to the printing of the proxy materials. By implementing the procedures permitted under the new Notice and Access rule, Google reduced the number of printed copies of its annual report and proxy materials this year by more than 84 percent.
Google's 2007 Annual Report on Form 10-K and proxy statement for its 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders have been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and may be viewed on Google's website at http://investor.google.com/ . Google's stockholders may obtain hard copies of these proxy materials free of charge by following the instructions provided on its website or in the "Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials".
Google's 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be held on Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 2:00 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time, at Google's corporate headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California 94043. A webcast of the Annual Meeting will be made available at investor.google.com.
Meet between Microsoft and yahoo
Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. senior authorities met this week to talk about Microsoft's offer to obtain the Internet giant Company yahoo but were unsuccessful to determine any of their differences, according to people familiar with the matter.The Microsoft executives had no interest to increase their cash-and-stock offer, and the Yahoo camp went on to say no to enter formal negotiations without a sickly bid, people known with the matter say. Yahoo's board discarded Microsoft's original bid in February, and Yahoo's senior executive might see no point in investment talks on the basis of that offer.
Microsoft's cash-and0stock offer was designated at $44.6 billion during Jan. 31, but a drop in the software maker's share price has decreased the value to about $42 billion, or $29.29 a share. On Thursday, Yahoo shares traded at $28.13 at 4 p.m. Nasdaq Stock Exchange composite trading.
Want to be a friend of Vanessa Fox - EX Vanessa Fox Google webmaster central Team
She is a very good speaker and her presentations were very interesting.
If people don't know who vanessa Fox is she was a former employee of Google and founder of our favourite https://www.google.com/webmasters/ also she is one of the main backbone behind the Google Webmaster Central blog, she left google in June 2007 to join zillow now works for Ignition Partners as an 'entrepreneur in residence'

SEO not the easiest thing the world - SEO not so easy,
We have clients get back 1500% ROI from the investment they made to us. For example one particular client pays us 1200$ monthly with an initial fee of 8000$. Now his business from Organic search is 70,000$ with a net profit of 15,000$. Imagine the potential of search engine optimization. Same client has been paying about 30,000$ for Google PPC advertising per month and his ROI is 4,000$ a month from PPC. PPC profit is 10 to 15% while his SEO ROI is 1,500 per cent. SEO works and works best for sites that are built best both for users as well as search engines.
First thing in SEO is to make sure client believes the company that work on SEO for them. A good SEO company will deliver results its very important client researches and finds the best and right company for them. Also its important they understand the way SEO works its not like PPC where they setup the ad today and get traffic tomorrow.
SEO is all about improving the quality of the site to get the best reputation for that particular query which is being searched in Google. To do that it requires a lot of patience and work for the website. No one can build Google or yahoo or MSN in a day. Google took 3 years to become a good brand, Microsoft took 10 years and yahoo took 6 years that is how Internet works. A good brand cannot be build in a day.
Search Engine Genie today is one of the most visited SEO related websites on the web and top 10 most visited SEO firms according to alexa we never did this in a day it took us years of hard work to reach this level. SEO for other sites are the same for competitive areas it takes time/ money/man power and resources to be on top of the world's best search engines.
Search Engines are happy to send their visitors to sites that have the quality they are looking for. We at Search Engine Genie strive to build quality and we never resort against techniques which affect search engine quality.
Look at this particular thread in webmasterworld it really impressed me
SEO art a possible representative or owner of a SEO company says
"We started an seo campaign about 6 months ago.
We did all on-page optimization and started link building. The first 3 months saw significant increases in Google's rankings, then a small decrease.
Now, for the past 3 months, despite continued link building (all permanent, relevant one-way links), the rankings haven't budged.
Btw, the site has been around for years, and we examined "trust" factors pretty thoroughly to build on those as well. The site doesn't have any history of spam or black hat stuff.
We plan on holding steady, and continuing with the link building for this site. It's just been frustrating not to see any changes for so long.
Anyone ever seen this before? "
That is what SEO he has stressed he has been doing a lot of stuff but no improvement in Search engines that is absolutely true. SEO for competitive areas is not something you can do in 6 months it requires at least 6 months of building quality link reputation / site reputation with Google.

P.S: Believe in SEO and understand the difficulty behind it, Good SEO companies will definitely perform.
Search Engine Genie Blog Team.
Labels: Search Engine Optimization
Google NO competition with SEOs - search engine marketing company performics to be sold
Its great news that google is selling performics and not entering the organic search engine optimization industry. Hats off to Google for doing this http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/selling-performics-search-marketing.html
According to official google blog
"We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we've received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold."
SEO Blog team,
Labels: Search Engine Marketing
Google's new sitelinks feature - A very useful addition.
A Search for our company name Search Engine Genie has sitelinks to pages like our SEO plans , tools, pagerank 10 sites list, why us and the Google rank checker free tool. Actually its very good we know these are some of the most important pages of our site and its no surprise these URLs are picked up as sitelinks for our site. Based on what we are seeing sitelinks are selected based on pagerank and quality of external and internal links to those pages. Our Google rank checker and pagerank 10 sites list are 2 of the most important pages of our site and has good number of external links to it.
Sitelinks can be deleted in google webmaster tools login. That is again great on part of google to offer something like to webmasters a great platform for editing our sitelinks.
What is the maximum length of anchor text suitable for search engines?
SO what is the good number. Answer is simple do what is best for users do you think your users will like to have 20 keywords in anchor text when linking to a page, I am sure no so please use what is better for your users. Maximum I recommend is to have not more than 6 words in anchor text when you are linking to an external page or a page within your website. Good anchor text links adds value to both users as well as search engines.
The whole concept of Googlebombing was based on this, People used to just add keywords which you want to attack some and just link to that page. We used to have the most infamous anchor text bombs like " miserable failure " which used to link george bush page, French military victories page which used to link to a page which talked about french military loses.
More on Google bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
Maximum page limits Search Engine crawlers can crawl
1. For google: As per our latest research Google has a maximum crawl and cache depth of 1 MB only ( excluding images / graphics ) . It Used to be 100 kb then they increased to 250 kb then to 500kb and the latest update is 1 MB per file.
2. Yahoo overtakes Google by a long way, Their indexing and caching limit is 5 MB, check the screen shots below,


3. MSN Search engine: Its very unpredictable for MSN but from our experiment MSN can cache upto 3 MB, we never tested about that probably someone in their search quality team can answer that.
I dont think we worry about any more search engines. I am sure at some point this data is useful for anyone out there. I know we do have some PDFs and large doc to be indexed. Its very important we know the cache limit for that,
SEO Blog Team,
Misspellings and SEO - Is it Good for Search Engines.
Misspelling SEO has been part of strategy for many Search Engine Spammers for a very long time. Because of this search engines see misspelling on pages especially done on a high level as a major Search engine spam. If you want to misspell your company name for 4 or 5 words then you are perfectly fine with it. But if you are looking to spam then you are not going to win against search engines.
Don't misspell your competitor names on your pages there were spammers who used to do it and you might be sued by big corporations if you are misspelling their names.
Google says
"Keyword stuffing
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.
"
Mathew Marlon - alias matt marlon where is he now
i thought he is in Las Vegas but Matt cutts reported here that Matt Marlon is in Jail for Home foreclosure fraud. Matt wrote beautifully that if people are doing one type of scam most probably they are fully into major scamming in all businesses. This became true in case of Matt marlon. So where is he now is he still in Jail?
text link brokers dont send Pagerank or anchor text links any more.
Especially sites like text link ads and text link brokers were advertising pagerank links all over their site now its not the case anymore with them. If you see there sites
this is what they advertise
text link ads
"Why Buy Text Link Ads?
1.
Text Link Ads are served as static links that can help your natural (organic) search engine rankings.
2. We have an exhaustive inventory of quality niches that can send targeted traffic to your website.
3. Flat price per ad for a 30 day ad run. Never worry about cost per click or CPM rates.
As per text link brokers:
Our Standard link building products
Blog Reviews
Hosted Marketing Pages™
Social Media BookMarking
Advanced Article Marketing
Text Link Ad Inventory
SEO-Friendly Directory Submission
Custom Link Acquisition
Dedicated Link Builders
Link Baiting a.k.a. Viral Content Promotion
Permanent One-Way Links™
If can see none of them mention about pagerank in their advertising.
but their archives say otherwise
http://web.archive.org/web/20070814085014/http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/
I hope this trend continues where there is a delicate balance for all sites and not just link mongers who dominate the search results.
Page specific Google ban / penalty - Does it really exist?:
1. Links to a bad neighbourhood from that page. Say you have a grea site and you run a grea forum in that, one day some spammer posts an adult spam post. If googlebot sees this and see that your site is linking to an other highly spammed site then mostly that page will be penalized and stopped from entering google's index. This is particularly tough when you run a good site and only one page is all adult stuff. Googlebot is designed to understand potential reasons how adult content came into your forum and they will impose a penalty only for that URL. we have seen this in our very own site's forum.
2. Too many spammy links to sites that google considers spammy will hurt that page.
3. Duplicate content across the web or within your site if you have a particular page that is replicated as multiple versions within your site then it will hurt the duplicate page copy and Google will impose penalty or ban on duplicate version of the page / pages and keep just one copy of the page. Ban can simply be for the duplicate pages.
4. Strong filters applied by google on specific pages can also boot a page from rankings or prevent it from ranking. Google has very strong ranking filters and this could stop a page from ranking or penalizing it for reasons that are in the filter.
5. Hidden links or hidden images /gifs or hidden content can also cause page ban please make sure you do a complete review of that.
SEO Blog Team,
Payperpost blogging no more for link juice and pagerank
if you go to payperpost.com most of the blogs listed there are PR0, it seems google is aware of those blogs and imposed their powerful PR0 penalty on them. Google is looking into all possible areas of exploitation on their algorithm, So probably they will be killing almost all sites which sell excessive links from passing any link juice or pagerank,
Cross linking 1500 sites - Isn't that seriously insane
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html#c9006371411647145471
"Michael Clark, cross-linking between your own sites can be perfectly fine, especially if the links are relevant and you have a small number of sites. At a site review panel, an audience member once claimed that he had been deindexed by two major search engines for only cross-linking. Tim Mayer from Yahoo asked how many sites he had. The audience member sheepishly replied that he had 1500 (!) sites. I definitely wouldn't recommend heavy cross-linking if you've got that many sites. That's a lot of sites no matter how you slice it.
"
Isn't that insane crosslinking 1500 domains. We are afraid to cross link even 5 domains just to make sure google don't think that we are spamming the Search engines but this guy has cross linked 1500 domains and complains that his sites got booted. Mattcutts has confirmed in the same post that cross linking to a small limit is perfectly fine especially if the sites are on topic and they don't have duplicate contents.
Google's April fool 2008 Joke project virgil
Remember their previous prank like the Lunar job or the pigeon rank instead of pagerank
From their FAQ that was very well written statement,
How are you planning to reach Mars?
During the first couple of decades Virgle will use standard technology of the day - chemical rockets to ferry cargo and crews to Mars. As the bootstrap plan stands today, in order to reach Mars (once the tri-module is assembled in LEO) the Virgle 1's cruise stage will start a burn for insertion into a lunar trajectory and then back toward Earth for final insertion into a modified Hohmann Transfer Orbit. This multi-day round trip will use a variant of the Oberth effect, the Krasnokutskaya periapsis maneuver, to increase the final Earth-to-Mars transfer velocity through a periapsis delta-v burn performed at the closest lunar and subsequent Earth approach, with the additional delta v gained on account of the potential energy from the mass of expended propellant. The total useful mass sent this way to Mars will be 569 metric tons, meaning (obviously) that it will take four launches to complete the assembly. The design does allow for easy reconfiguration for varying payload capacities and transfer duration times. This round trip is also a final test and verification of the cruise configuration, assuring mission support that all systems are running within their nominal values. The design also provides for several orbital abort modes, decreasing significantly the probability of any mission losing a payload, human or otherwise.
Google update April 2008- Update Dewey names by matt cutts of Google
Here is Matt's post
"Hey all, I asked a few people to look into this and they weren't seeing many large differences in rankings between these datacenters. The issue with discussing on this thread is that specific urls/queries aren't allowed. If anyone wants to mention a search where they see large-scale differences, feel free to send feedback to Google in the usual way. I'm going to pick a random-but-pretty-unique keyword so that I can look up reports. Let's use "dewey" as the word. So if you want to mention a search where you think the results are very different at one data center compared to other data centers, use the spam report form at ihttps://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html\ and make sure to include the word "dewey" in the "Additional details" text area. Or feel free to point out differences in other ways: do a blog post, leave specifics on the Google webmaster help group, or whatever way you want to point out specific searches that look different to you.
The usual rules of thumb apply: you probably won't get a personal reply, but I'll try to get someone to check out reports that get sent in. There shouldn't be much difference between data centers, so I'm curious to find out what queries people seem to be seeing different results on. "
Dewey what a weird name for an Update, I hope people never forgot the great updates like Google florida update, Austin update, Jagger and more.
Forum discussion and ramblings as always here webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-3-30.htm
Google webmaster central full audio transcript raw unedited version
Atlast we are done with audio transcript from the Google webmaster central live chat audio which was recorded last friday when webmasters around the world had live chat session with Google. we have posted that here its about 11,000 plus words which is equal to 20 plus 500 words article. Google did a great job and we were able to record the full audio ( transcript here ) as well as the full Q and A session as well as full chat log. The audio came out to be of very poor quality since it was recorded with a Mobile phone and the mobile phone was placed near the laptop computer through which we were monitoring and listening the session. Laptop's speakers messed up the audio but still we were able to get the transcript read which you can read it here. Please read the disclaimer and NOTE before proceeding on reading the transcript.
Feel free to link to the document, don't copy it.
Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,
Getting indexed in MSN checklist - MSN indexing criteria

1. As always we say good backlinks are similar to guaranteed paid inclusion into any search engines. There is no exception for MSN search engine get good links get listed in leading directories like Dmoz, yahoo directory etc your site is sure to indexed.
2. Submit your URL through webmaster.live.com a platform like google webmasters where you can validate your site and submit your URL,
3. Create a good html sitemap and link it from your homepage most of the search engines including MSN live bot like to crawl a site not too deep unless you have very good site. SO make sure most of your pages are accessible from the top level important pages like the Homepage.
4. Get listed in Dmoz like google MSN too loves Dmoz a listing in dmoz will guarantee a listing in MSN search.
5. Sometimes MSN live bot have problem reading your robots.txt, make sure you don't mess too much with your robots.txt file it could cause problem for MSN live bot in crawling your site.
6. Check for canonical issues. MSN live bot still has some problem with canonical issues. Make sure you just use one version of the site either www or non-www. You can redirect either one to the other one.
7. MSN has problem with affiliate links so if you are part of an affiliate or offer affiliate services make sure your links coming in our going out have any problem with MSN live bot crawler.
8. Also if you made major changes to your URLs like changing shopping cart then you need to wait since it takes time for MSN bot to pick up new URLs. if you don't see good crawler activity try submitting a sitemap.
9. Make sure your site is not banned or penalized from MSN search. A penalty will definitely affect your website crawling by MSN search crawler.
Search Engine Genie Blog Team.
Yahoo sitemap - how to submit yahoo sitemap to yahoo search
There are some people who have trouble submitting their sitemap to yahoo or don't know where to submit their sitemap. Yahoo accepts the standard sitemaps.org xml protocol. Sitemaps created with sitemaps.org protocol is much standard now and is accepted by yahoo, google and MSN search engines. They also accept urllist.txt through their site explorer.Go to site explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites authenticate your site by following yahoo's authentication process and submit your sitereemap there, You can also submit your blog or your site as a feed to yahoo,
"What kinds of feeds do yahoo support?
You can provide the feeds in the following supported formats. Yahoo do recognize files with .gz extension as compressed files and decompress them before parsing.
RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0,
Sitemaps, as documented on http://www.sitemaps.org/
Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
A text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt; for a compressed file the name must be urllist.txt.gz.
Yahoo! supports feeds for Mobile sites. When submitting a feed that points to content on the mobile web, please indicate the encoding of the content—either xHTML or WML. (From the Manage Sites page, click the arrow to the left of Add Feed to select feed type.) Submitting mobile feeds directs our mobile search crawlers to discover and crawl new content for our mobile index. "
Ranking in First page in google not in top 1000 in yahoo - yahoo banned
I know many of you wondered why they don't rank anywhere in yahoo but are in top 10 in Google results. Most of the time yahoo's ranking criteria is same as google's but there are somethings which will prevent your site from ranking in yahooHere is a simple checklist criteria that you need to make sure for your no rankings problems with yahoo:
1. Make sure your site is not penalized or banned by yahoo, Yahoo is very good at doing this they are more tougher than google when it comes to penalty. Check whether your site gets indexed in yahoo make sure your pages are there. If you just see your homepage and not your inner pages then its still a problem. If you feel that your site is banned or penalized file for a reinclusion into yahoo. We do offer a reinclusion services in our company for Google, yahoo and MSN. We don't have any tie up with any search engine but we will make sure we follow all their guidelines clean up every single possible mess with the site and submit it to the for a reconsideration request. Have a banned site in yahoo or feel its banned feel free to contact us through our contact form and please explain what you did or doing on your site,
2. Remember to have backlinks from sites which yahoo feels are important. Both search engines don't value backlinks the same way. For example yahoo places a lot of weight on their directory link much more than google. So you can possibly try adding your site to yahoo directory and see the impact.
3. See if your site has any redirect issues if your site has redirect problems and yahoo's crawler is unable to pickup then still your site can be in trouble. Make sure to check all possible external links coming into your site for wrong 302 type redirects. If you feel suspicious about a link hurting you contact the webmaster and tell them to remove your link. Google has become very efficient in handling redirects I don't think yahoo is doing the same way.
4. Add a sitemap and link it to your homepage ( if you don't already have one ) as well as submit a sitemap to yahoo through yahoo Site Explorer it might show some difference.
5. You can fine your presence felf to yahoo by featuring in their articles, added to their newsletter etc.
6. Make sure your Web hosting company don't have any problem with yahoo's crawler sometimes this could a problem where yahoo's crawler have problem accessing your site because of bad DNS resolving with your hosting company.
7. Make sure you don't do anything against their guidelines on your site check for yahoo's search engine guidelines policy
8. If you are an affiliate site you need to be careful, Yahoo don't enjoy affiliate sites in their index.
9. Yahoo loves content rich sites unique content and not a directory type of site with millions of URLs without any added value to the users.
10. Last but not the least check for potential violations of yahoo's guidelines on your site which google didn't detect but yahoo did. Yahoo is more efficient and strict when it comes to some search engine spam make sure its not there on your site. Also check for any potential restrictions in .htaccess or robots.txt or other areas where you might cause problems for yahoo's crawler.
Good luck
Search Engine Genie Blog Team,







