Pagerank update – Is there an update going on in Google

A webmaster world member has reported pagerank change to his site. It seems his site has lost some pagerank and is now downgraded from PR5 to PR3. This looks like the New Google “Toolbar Pagerank Reduction” or TPR policy. Google introduced TPR around December 2007 to go after text link buyers and sellers. Text link advertising which passes pagerank is against Google’s policy and they introduced TPR to tackle.

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.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3625049.htm

Googlebot now digs deeper into your forms – Great new feature from Google smart guys

Google’s crawling team has made a major step forward a step which everyone thought the Search Engine crawler will never go to. According to the Official webmaster central Blog now Google has the capability to crawl through HTML forms and find information this is a huge step forward.
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, Look at this Query 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,

Too much dreaming – Thanks mother to wake me up.

What a dream I had today. I slept very late to my bed after attending clients. It was a late night job and probably my body got too much heated. I had a very peculiar dream.
” 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,

Will Buying adwords help Google rankings ,

This is a question often asked in forums not just in forums but even we get same question from potential leads and current clients. Every one who is new to this SEO world might have a wrong assumption that buying Adwords will have a positive impact on Organic Google search engine 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,

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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

1. A page can disappear if Google finds something wrong with that page we discussed about this on page specific Google penalty here.
2. 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.
3. If a page has any server related problems and not accessible by search engines it will disappear from search engine index
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

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,

Age of domain SEO – Role of age of domain in SEO

Many over a course of 2 years had been debating whether Age of domain name plays a important role in Search Engines. From my point of view yes Google takes into play age of domain , inception date of a domain into google’s search results, inception date of backlinks for a site etc.

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,

Phishing emails target Google adwords customers

Recently we have seen a surge in adwords phishing scams, phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay, PayPal and online banks are common targets. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging,[1] and often directs users to enter details at a website, although phone contact has also been used.[2] Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users.[3] Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical measures.

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 http://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
Team

Please 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

Sites and businesses banned from adwords,

List of Google’s banned areas of advertising with adwords and Adsense,

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.