Acceptable downtime for Search Engines

Downtime of website, Hmm everyone should have gone through this if you are running a website. Lots of people are worried if the site goes down then they will loose their search engine traffic and loose their rankings altogether. This is not totally true search engines don’t penalize or just drop a site just because a site is down for couple of days. Even if a site is down for couple of days and during that time Search Engine Robots visit’s the site its not a problem they will come again they are programmed to do that. Me having written my own search engine robot program have done that way.

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.

New SEO comics Section in Search Engine Genie Live now,

We have always wanted to bring a comic section in Search Engine Genie, After a long wait we were able to bring in a comic section in our website. Our designers have done a wonderful job of bringing in some great comical work on today’s happening in Search Engines. Lots of comic images will be posted in this page very soon. Our SEO comics page will be one of its kind and the only colored comic pages for the SEO industry.

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,

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm

Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Google NO competition with SEOs – search engine marketing company performics to be sold

Performics a search engine marketing company which was part of Doubleclick acquistion by google will be sold. This is great news since many were afraid google will come into search engine marketing industry which will be virtually killing the organic rankings since they know their algorithm on how to rank and if they sell search marketing they are virtually manipulating the search results.

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,

What is the maximum length of anchor text suitable for search engines?

Anchor text plays a very important role in search engine rankings. Search engines give a lot of weight for keywords in anchor text. Due to this I have heard search engine spammers using 15 or 20 words in anchor text to give weight to all the keywords.

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

One of the most asked question in forums and in message boards what is the maximum depth a search engine can crawl for a page. What is the maximum size Of html /pdf that can indexed by top search engines.

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.

Some people have questions whether misspellings of words you target of your company name or any products or services you sell really helps. I would say misspellings are a natural part of the web, but there is a limit for it.

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.

“

Searching US specific results from other countries –

US results in other countries:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britney still leads in searches – beats Jolie and paris

Britney the troubled celebrity mother still leads 2007 celebrity searches compared with Angelina Jolie and Paris Hilton. Google trends a cool new tool shows graphics of the 3 celebrities
how often they were searched around the world for the past 4 years

Google Trends , Google trends comparision software

Tried printing search result pages,

How many of you tried printing your yahoo, MSN and google search results. We always do it for research purposes in our company. Recently a bug with yahoo search was preventing us from printing their search results. Not sure whether it was a bug or a deliberate attempt to stop printing their results.
Things look of now we are able to print everything fine now,

Does google and yahoo regional search engines use different algorithm than the primary .com search engines. seo blog tip of the day dec 8th 2007

Does google and yahoo regional search engines use different algorithm than the primary .com search engines.
Answer to this is ofcourse yes. All geotargeting search engines needs to operate on a different algorithm than the .com ones to identify potential regional links and regional domains. Various factors affect geotargeted rankings.
Domains hosted, backlinks, domain name itself, visitor tracking, trust network in geotargeted domains, topical directories etc.
So if you want to rank for regional domains be prepared to do something different don’t use same .com and .regional extension domains for 2 different rankings.