Adwords keyword suggestion tool now shows real numbers

Before it was not the case. We just see a bar estimating the competition and search volume for a particular phrase now we see real numbers. We can estimate traffic for a particular phrase for past month as well as average all time.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I am sure all paid keyword tools will disappear now since google gives their own authoritative data and all other data are just a waste of time now.

Interesting post in webmasterworld on how punctuation in keywords affect results.

Andy of webmasterworld made an interesting post on how punctuation in keywords affects search results and search engine rankings

Read the post

“Various punctuation characters have a noticeable impact on search results – mostly from a searcher perspective. As a webmaster, you may find that your users include punctuation in some keywords, and so it can be of use to know what the effect on the results they see is. And besides, knowing how to search Google is one step towards understanding how Google works. This is a spot check of the current handling of punctuation by Google.
Indexed punctuation
Key_word
Underscores are treated as a letter of the alphabet, which is why you can search for an underscore directly. Use underscores in content if your visitors include an underscore when searching (e.g. if you had a programming site).
Key&word
Ampersands or ‘and symbols’ have fairly unique handling. They’re both indexed and also treated as the equivalent of word “and”. If there are no spaces separating the symbol and the adjacent letters, the search results are an approximate equivalent of combining results for [“key and word”] and [“key & word”] (note the phrase matching). Use ampersands in copy as is natural for your target audience.
Explicit search operators
Many punctuation characters are explicit search operators, with a documented effect on results. Search operators are not indexed (or at least, they can’t be searched for) and so are usually treated as word separators when found within website copy:
Key¦word
An (unbroken) pipe character is the equivalent of boolean OR: a search for [key OR word]. It can be a handy shortcut when conducting complex queries.
Key”word
A double quote triggers an exact or phrase search for the proceeding words (whether you include a closing double quote or not). So in this instance, it’s the equivalent of a search for [key word] since a single word can’t be a phrase. [“key word] is the same as searching for [“key word”].
Key*word
An asterisk is a wildcard search for zero or more words: [key … word]. Putting numbers on both sides will trigger the calculator. Occasionally, Google delivers (strange!) results if you search for an asterisk directly.
Key~word
A tilde triggers Google’s related word operator – in this instance, a search for both ‘key’ and ‘word’, as well as other words related to ‘word’ – like ‘Microsoft’, ‘dictionary’ and others.
Search operator oddities
Key-word
A hyphen (as is probably consistent with language use) returns a mix of results for the words both used separately, and joined together – somewhere between [key word] and [keyword]. It’s the preferred word separator within website URLs, since other punctuation characters that are treated as a word-separator have specific functions within a URL.
Others
A few punctuation characters have a strange impact on results – returning far fewer results than for either separated or concatenated words. They are neither known search operators, or indexed characters. These are . / \ @ = :
As far as I’m, aware, all other punctuation characters are treated as simply a space or word separator.
So, do I have too much time on my hands? Probably. But why not confuse whoever looks at Google’s search logs by trying a few punctuation searches yourself? 😉
Do you know any punctuation with an effect on results not discussed here, or more about the effect on results of the punctuation above? “

Google guide on reclusion request after penalty

Google Webmaster Central Team comes up with an other useful posting on how to submit your site for reinclusion in care you fear your site banned or penalized by Google. Google has recently been imposing lots of penalties to a site though they are not totally visible to users. If you suspect your site is in someway penalized read this post on how to remove the penalty.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/07/requesting-reconsideration-using-google.html

Google comes closer to ethical SEOs and SEO companies

Google recently rewrote their SEO page in Google Webmaster help. Before it used to focus on unethical SEOs now they have a more standard document where they give credit to companies who help Search engines deliver better results and webmasters / site owners develop better websites . According to Google good seos

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Well those are good points are most of them are basic stuff handled by any SEO company or SEO consultant. Apart from this good SEOs provide ethical ways to build quality back links. As we know Back links plays a very important factor when it comes to Search Engine Rankings especially in Google. Getting natural links through traditional ways are an important way for top rankings in Google.

1. Write articles which are useful and unique for users. This will help relevancy of the website as well as attract visitors which will result in back links.

2. Provide widgets that are useful and for free which will pay by itself through quality back links.

3. Impress the big authority and GOV sites by providing what they want they will link to your site if you can provide things they want to see and use often.

4. Make your site link worthy by making it as a useful hub for targeted users / customers. Good contents, attractive graphics, tools, forum, blog will all help If you have regular repeated visitors then you have achieved something. Repeated visitors are important since word of mouth referral is important for spreading the word which will result in quality back links.

According to Google some useful questions you can ask a SEO company:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

I agree with all those questions they are pretty straight forward and covers a lot of things. If a good SEO gives a clear answer for these questions i am sure he can relied upon. I respect Google and will live by their stance on SEO even before this updation i never had anything against their rules. Its their search engine and they set the rules for it. We need to live by it. If we can’t and if something wrong happens we need to face consequences. This is how it is and this is how it should be.

Vijay

Google uses Search Logs effectively to combar Webspam

Fighting web spam using effective tracking of logs and click through data.

Matt Cutts Senior Software Engineer and Lead of Web Spam Team in Google recently made an interesting post on how Google effectively fights spam using Data collection.

Web Spam is the most annoying part of Internet today. Especially more than 85% people uses search engines to land on any site for the first time Search Engine Spam should be totally avoided when it comes to user search experience. Search engines have always had the taunting task of fighting web spam from the day they came into existence. Google is one of the search engines which used effective anti-web spam methods to combat search engine spam. This is one reason they are keeping their position on top of all search engines.

First time i have seen Google really acknowledge that they are using log data in their algorithm to combat spam. According to Official Google blog

“Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight web spam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam). Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.”

As per Matt cutts IP address and search logs do play a role in judging the quality of results delivered to users. I personally feel this is a good option i know there are some IPs that spam the search engines more than the regular IPs if Google is able to monitor the IPs pretty well they can effectively block automated queries and this can be used in search algorithm. Some keywords will always be spammed more than others, Google as they say can use these type of tracking to impose more filters to those kind of phrases. As a person with more than 5 years of experience with search engines i can see Google imposes stronger filters for certain phrases than others. For keywords like Cancer, mesothelioma more gov, org authority sites rank which for keywords like auto transport, real estate commercial sites do a better job. Really enjoy the way the results are displayed since i don’t like to see a commercial site when i search for medicine related information. Most of the time commercial sites provide much lesser value to users than non-commercial sites. There are areas where we need to see more commercial sites and there are areas that needs more information sites to be dominant. Only way to get this right is to check through the hysterical data and search logs and see what keywords are searched more from where, what the user did after clicking the data etc. User tracking can be done effectively using strong filters and effective methods.

Search Engines are facing problems every day. Apart from Web spam and search engine spam they see DDOS attacks, excessive bot activity, scrappers etc. To stand on top they need to keep working on stronger methods to combat spam.

Official Google Blog post here

Use Custom Search And Adsense For Search Live better – Google Says

Here in Google we are passionate about Search we are passionate about users and passionate about what they are looking for. obviously Google.com. As a search user you love the Google’s powerful search platform but what about putting a custom Google search engine on your site and now our custom search offers more custom options than never before not only have you control over the look and feel of your search result you now have full control of what’s being searched. Also with relevant search results Google will deliver relevant search results on what you are looking for where you can earn revenue as well as have a positive search experience on your own site. To tell you about some of our new features, i would like you to introduce to matt one of our search engineers who has been actively working on Adsense for Search.

Matt: With the new custom search engine you can customize Adsense for Search used just for your site. A collection of sites you specify say all travel blogs or the entire web we are also working on improving the color of site search so that you can
display a better format which will be good looking for your site.

That’s great matt tell us about getting relevant Ads and results on your site. Ofcourse with the new keyword feature you can continue search engine to your sites topic you have an other website say that is looking for Yoga class. So when you search matt in search box instead of getting results for Yoga maps you will also get results for commercial Mats and forum mats. I am not sure you have the yellow color for the floor mat.

So you define your search engine for keyword such as Yoga, Exercise and Meditation. So next time when you search for results for mat you will get results related to Yoga. That’s perfect

Ofcourse users will get quality and relevancy of Google search results. More customization means more control to you and better experience for your users. And its quick and easy to setup just click on the setup tab and under adsense account click Adsense for Search and if you don’t have an account today sign-up under www.google.com/adsense or www.Google.com/afs

Vijay

Google Leads the table in helping out webmasters

Google has picked up its efforts to help out webmasters for their website related problems. They now guide webmasters to effectively maintain a website so that it gets its deserved rankings. Google gives support in Google groups and other various forums, by employee blogs ( Matt cutt’s blog ) , Official Google blogs ( especially webmaster central blog ) , Google live webmaster chat ( 2 already over ) and now we have Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer coming up in July. We are very excited about this and thought we can create some cartoons representing Google’s good work.

1. Matt Cutts , Adam Lasnik and other Googlers are Desperate in impressing webmasters with their active participation in various forums and Blogs.

2. Matt Cutts Speaks in various conferences to make webmaster understand the way Google works.

3. Google is becoming increasingly popular among webmasters and site owners for their effort to become closer to them. Two successful Google Webmaster Live chat is a proven strategy.

4. Matt Cutts Answering Q and A in Webmaster Conference

5. Google has been actively promoting Google Webmaster Central BLog them want webmasters and site owners to read it. Also their Webmaster Tools are becoming increasingly popular.

6. Calling all webmasters to participate and visit Google Webmaster help Groups.

Vijay
Search Engine Genie.

How to prevent Google Bowling – Interesting discussion in WMW

I came across an interesting discussion in webmasterworld about how to prevent damage to a site by links from other sites. You can read more about the discussion here. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3677877.htm

Tedster a long term member and webmaster world Administrator answers pretty well. I am very impressed with his answer and agree 100%.

Even if you block IP addresses or redirect pages, the links that point to your
website are still there, and they’re on other sites that you can’t control.
Those links will have whatever effect they have with Google’s also.
There is
one thing that protects a website against Google Bowling – a solid backlink
profile of its own. The more your “real” quality backlinks grow, the less anyone
else’s malicious actions can affect it.

Regardless of spam backlinks or now as tedster says a good backlink profile will automatically remove any bad PR received from bad links.

June Ranking drop reported for lot of sites

Webmaster world members report ranking loss for lot of sites in first week of June. We had some of our client sites shaken but not to the extent discussed in that thread here

www.webmasterworld.com/google/3668739.htm

A member posted the following message which will give a little insight on what is being discussed

“Initially, I thought there were some problems with the geo filtering being screwed up with regards to the UK, but I’m not sure about this statement in isolation. Maybe it’s a bug and maybe it’s not.
Since it’s hard to pinpoint we really need a lot of information to decipher the problem or adjustment that G has put in place . If it is only UK related sites, then my hunch is that this could be rolled out in other regions with more aggressive filtering.
Some things I’d like to know or qualify , especially from the long established members here or folks with long established sites, are things like this :
– is this purely selective – is it only high PR sites and if so what level of PR – is it only UK related sites and does that mean the TLD and/or hosting [ chief suspect is geo filtering issues ] – do these sites have an inbalance of linking techniques e.g. lot’s of navigation IBL’s , footer IBL’s , – do these sites publish frequent content
My observation so far is that it has been
– highly selective in a competitve niche to a minority of sites [ total stability around the site i watch ]
– effected by a combination of factor [ not sure what right now ie one factor in isolation isn’t enough to send a site down, more one event combined with another is. This is because I’m observing others using the same techniques which are unaffected ]
-effected by introduction of high PR link/s , leading to – recent upward PR increases [ not visible on toolbar ]which have caused a re assessment of the site’s “trust” rank. – it only effects UK TLD’s [ need more info on this ] – a further discounting of low value pages bringing the overall PR down – thin affiliate sites or sites with aggregated content been only effected [ not 100% on this – just some sites I’m watching ] – linking stagnation or momentum altered – lack of fresh , original content
Actually, my feeling is that it’s nothing new , it’s just more aggressive in it’s selection of sites
In the case of one site I’m observing, for any phrase or content [ exact match and broad match ] the whole site has been tanked to between -40 to -60 on phrases that should rank. Not one single exception. When it initially disappeared from Google it was completely off the index for 3 days.
This might correspond to recent discussion by Googler John Mu about the – 60 penalty which appears to have been acknowledged , which would seem to be based on a recent change at G. Some folks have reported improvements coming back quickly with a site clean up.
But there’s not enough reports to be sure.
My concern is that the recovery could be indefinite and have effected the trust rank of effected sites – and of course communicating with G through WMT leaves webmasters are exposed to hand checks which could expose other inadvertent nasties and one way communication. “

Sergey plans his space invasion