First-ever Google Webmaster Help Group Chat – tomorrow friday 28th March 2008

Google’s webmaster central team is hosting the first webmaster live group chat. This is a great opportunity to throw your questions to the great google webmaster team

First-ever Google Webmaster Help Group Chat (beta :)Friday, March 28, 2008
Nickname: “Can You Picture That?”
Agenda*… 8:45 Doors open This is a great time to get logged in to the chat! 9:05 Welcome! Introductions, and how to get the most out of the event. 9:15 Site Clinic: Emphasis on good fundamentals We’ll examine and give feedback on one of your sites. 9:40 Advanced topic: Images in search results Presented by our own Maile Ohye. 9:50 Additional Q&A time We guides will tackle your questions about images and other webmaster issues. 10:00 End Time to say goodbye.*All times listed are PDT. Start time is 16:00 GMT.
How to join us…
Check requirements You’ll need the following:
A telephone that can receive calls directly (no extensions) or a phone that can call a U.S. toll-free number or one of these global call-in numbers.
A computer and browser meeting the requirements on this page .
Sign in and install the chat application
Visit this URL.
Sign in with your name and e-mail address. Neither we nor WebEx will contact you using this information. Your name, however, will show up in the chat room.
You’ll be asked to install a small program from WebEx, which runs the chat software in your browser. It should take less than two minutes to install.
Join the call so you can hear us :)You have two choices: you can either have WebEx call you (the default) or call us (toll-free from most places).
Option 1 – Have WebEx call you: When the chat application loads, a window will pop up asking you to enter your phone number. A moment after you do so, WebEx will call you and ask you to press ‘1’ to be connected, and then you’ll be all set.
Option 2 – Call in: Hit cancel on the window asking for your phone number. Then dial 1-866-469-3239 from the U.S. and Canada or use one of the global call-in numbers and enter this meeting number when prompted: 573 630 075.
Listen and type You’ll be able to…
Listen to us Guides speaking
Type to fellow Webmaster Help Group members
Type (webmaster-related) questions to us during and after the Site Clinic and Maile’s presentation
If you have technical troubles during the event…In the Chat section of the application, type a note and we’ll do our best to help you.

Global calling numbers”

Australia toll free
1800-093-897
Australia toll
61 (0) 2 8223 9525
Austria toll free
0800-295-240
Austria toll
43 (0) 179 576 053
Belgium toll free
0800-71083
Belgium toll
32 (0) 2700 1703
Brazil toll free
0800-891-1716
China – North toll free
10-800-712-1281
China – South toll free
10-800-120-1281
Denmark toll free
80-884912
Denmark toll
45 3832 2993
Finland toll free
0-800-1-12585
Finland toll
358 (0) 969379744
France toll free
0800-90-5571
France toll
33 (0) 171230434
Germany toll free
0800-101-6943
Germany toll
49 (0) 695007 3857
Greece toll free
00800-12-6759
Hong Kong toll free
800-90-3575
Hong Kong toll
852 3002 7806
Ireland toll free
1-800-882019
Ireland toll
353 (0) 12421854
Israel toll free
1-80-9214652
Italy toll free
800-780-632
Italy toll
39 026 968 2079
Japan toll free
00531-12-1688
Japan toll
81 (0) 335708258
Luxembourg toll
352 3420808135
Mexico toll free
001-866-622-9902
Netherlands toll free
0800-022-6826
Netherlands toll
31 (0) 202 01 5078
New Zealand toll free
0800-44-8147
New Zealand toll
64 (0) 99120651
Norway toll
47 23162956
Singapore toll free
800-120-4239
Singapore toll
65 64155103
Spain toll free
900-97-1417
Spain toll
34 914 53 3442
Sweden toll free
020-79-7251
Sweden toll
46 (0) 8587 69451
Switzerland toll free
0800-561-201
Switzerland toll
41 44(0) 800 9672
Taiwan toll free
00801-13-7644
Taiwan toll
886 (0) 221924554
UK toll free
0800-028-8023
UK toll
44 (0) 207 365 1860
South Korea toll free
00798-14-800-6581
South Korea toll
82 (0) 234831041
India – Bharti landline toll free
000800 440 1176
India – Tata landline toll free
000800 440 1099
India – Bharti mobile toll free
000800 440 1177
India – Tata mobile toll free
000800 440 1100
Luxembourg toll free
800-24981

Affiliate Marketing and Duplicate content – How do they relate,

So how does affiliate Marketing relate to duplicate content. Here is the case scenario. If a website runs a particular business and sells a product they might be the authority they also might need to run affiliate system for their site.

If that is the case some affiliates give their own website contents / design for their affiliates to sell the products this is a common strategy happening among lot of affiliate businesses so what about duplicate content how do we avoid it?

Ofcourse if 2 websites are identical then Search Engine duplicate content filter kicks in and only 1 website will survive. To avoid this even though the other website runner is a affiliate we need to make sure he gets a unique site not a duplicate of your own website. If your own website is duplicated then you have the risk of loosing all the Business coming to your website. Search engines don’t like duplicate contents and if your site gets caught up in duplicate content filter then it will be lost for a very long time. Today many websites suffer from dupe content filter. We have already discussed about this in our Supplemental pages article.

What is the solution for this?

Best option if you have affiliate who needs website like yours just hire a web designer or buy a simple template setup a website that has information different from yours and give them. Don’t duplicate your website since search engines don’t like them. We had a client who has lot of real estate affiliates and he used to duplicate websites and provide it to his clients we stopped him from doing it since most of the websites he provide his affiliates dont even get indexed. Please avoid all possible duplicate content on your website.

SEO Blog Team,

Creative ideas to break the 1 million dollar turn over business

So what do you do to break the 1 million dollar mark, Can you share your here,

Skibum of webmasterworld says “While going over 1M in sales is a nice goal, its short term thinking unless he’s just compensated on sales in which case the incentive structure needs a little work. The best way to get to 1M in sales is to sell more than 1M in product for 1M. The term profits should be in there somewhere.
Offer something off the next order with a current order at regular price. Preserve the initial margin and help ensure those people will come back and buy again.
Send to a friend coupons is a great idea.
Isn’t FREE shipping supposed to be the number one thing people want or close to it?
If the PPC search campaigns are running at a profitable ROI and there are budget caps in there, then lift those budget caps and keep the bid prices the same.
Landing page & offer testing.
Bundling products.
Any hot new products to be released in the next few months? Order #*$! now and be guaranteed to get this hot new gadget at the wonderful price of #*$!. Probably anything that involves a Wii would bring in some traffic at least. “

More ideas

1) Financial plea – you need this because it’s on sale. Or this deal won’t last forever. 2) Emotional #1 – you need this because your business is in danger without it. 3) Emotional #2 – you need this because you like to be on the bleeding edge 4) Emotional #3 – your competition uses this – shouldn’t you? 5) Emotional #4 – it’s sexy. 6) Safety – you need this because your company/job will fail without it.

Froogle – Easy and Economic to enhance a business

Details on sites reviewed – Pubcon 2006

Various sites were reviewed by the site review panel of 6 members along with Matt cutts. Each and every site was thoroughly analyzed by the site review panel. Then provided with explanations on the issues (details on the drawbacks of the site, where the sites are lagging behind and the areas neglected by the site owner) and suggestions on how to fix the issues and improve the site performance and ranking. The details of each site review and suggestions given are as follows.

1. The promotional gift company

The promotional gift company site had 20+ other sites running simultaneously with the same content overlapping one site content and pages to each other resulting in the confusion of various sites having same content for few words selected for discussion.

Suggestion: Include user feeds back such as comments, suggestions and forums rather than adding extra sentences, jumbling the existing words or changing the presentation to avoid duplicate content detection.

2. The Dollar Stretcher site

Issue: Doing well in Google but is banned in Yahoo

Reason: The site maps had hundreds of good articles all linked in the same page as the site was started in 1996. Next the site showed case mismatch in title displaying upper case URL titles to the user and lower case to Yahoo crawler and was banned in the suspect for cloaking. But the site had nothing to do with cloaking it was an issue of the site explorer.

Suggestion: Break up the site map chronologically, alphabetically or by topic and link to the site.

3. Real estate site

Real estate site had hundreds of pages where all the pages were in the format of about us or contact us.

Suggestion: Include lot of articles survey’s and construction happening of the state, province or locality.

4. Chiropractor site

The Chiropractor site was good but had no pages with keywords. They wanted to rank for a particular keyword which did not appear any where in the home page of the site

Suggestion: Think of the keywords that the user would use and use the key phrases appropriately in the home page for which you want to rank. Rewrite each and every page with suitable key phrases that you wish to rank.

5. Real Estate licensing

Real Estate licensing site had 100’s of varied topic domains under one person.

Comment: Running numerous sites doesn’t get the attention got from the person running single site and hence doesn’t show well.

6. Computer peripheral site

Issue: The computer peripheral site, a real good site with good content and unique back links but had long URL’s of about 14 to 15 words of description along with the session id.

Suggestion: The URL’s was asked to be shortened with 4 to 5 words and drop the session id if they possibly could.

Issue: The site had various categories whose URL’s were “/s-subcat-NETWORK~.html”.

Suggestion: Better if the category URL’s were in the folder format as /network/…

7. The HiFi store also had 40+ varied sites as the real estate licensing site. As discussed earlier it will not obtain the attention that is required to do well in search engines.

8. Spa site

Issue: The Spa site had problems accessing the pages of the site hence she loaded her home page with loads of content. Even though it had problems the site was doing well in Google and Yahoo as it was a real good one. She specified that she was in search of a good seo for a long time.

Lot of people willingly agreed to do seo for this site for free and the site owner choose the right convention required for her site.

The topic that evolved through out the discussion was link exchange and its impact. There were lot of sites which had done excessive reciprocal link exchange which was of no use.

Suggestion: Instead of wasting lot of time in exchanging links one could concentrate on making the site more attractive and well marketed that would truly help in the site betterment.

We love Big Daddy Update

We love Big Daddy,
Google’s new datacenter results are spectacular completely free from spam and we are pleased that our ethical methods got good ranking for all our client sites.
We LOVE BIG DADDY

Re-inclusion timeline – one site’s experience – google 30 penalty experience shared by a webmasterworld.com member

a member in webmasterworld.com shared his experience on the 30 day penalty for sites imposed by google, Matt cutts blogged about this piloting sites idea here

A sample mail you will receive when your site suffers hidden text penalty or
doorway page penalty,

Dear site owner or webmaster of *******************,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your
pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines,
which can be found here: google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently

pages from ***************/ are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

On http://www.chefrevival.com.au/, we noticed the following hidden text: “seo
, search engine optimization, seo company, search engine optimization company,
search engine optimization companies ********** ***************** *******************
”

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you
wish to be

reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our

quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion

request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website”
and then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in
ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion
Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

This is what chinkchink of webmasterworld.com said in his posting

“am one of those thousands who get the Google email about the 30-days
out-of-index penalty. Just want to share the timeline of re-inclusion I experienced
for others to reference:

1/4/2006 – Got email from Google about the hidden text on our website. Home
page PR 5, interior pages PR 2-4, over 700 pages indexed. Googlebot visited
daily. On some weekends, Googlebot request count was between 200-300.

1/8/2006 – website disappeared in SERP, PR drop to 0 for the entire site. Search
with “site:www.mysite.com” returned 0 match.

1/9/2006 – removed all hidden text in question.

1/10/2006 – Submitted re-inclusion request.

1/9 – 2/7 – Googlebot visited about 2-4 times a day during this period. No
email or other communication from/to Google.

2/8/2006, noon – exactly 30 days after our site disappeared from SERP. Home
page PR back to 5. Log file from 0:00AM to 12:00PM shows 22 visits from Googlebot.

Back in SERP for most of our keywords but over all ranking dropped about 2-10
slots (this is natural without the hidden text). “

Interesting how google is actively seeking webmasters to clean up good sites,

Have Sitemaps killed my site? – interesting thread in webmasterworld

An interesting thread in webmasterworld.com was discussing about a site’s pages which went URL only after signing up for google sitemaps, so did google sitemaps affect his site’s indexing of pages,

Webmasterworld.com member mrmister says

“I noticed that there are about 8 pages that are URL only. I’ve never seen this happen before. I did a standard Google search for my “green widgets” category page by searching for [green widgets]. It used to appear somewhere on page 1 but it was no longer there. I clicked to page 2 and I found my “history of green widgets” page sitting at the top of page 2. The “history of green widgets” page is the only subcategory page that is still listed as non-URL only. I checked my logs and Google has yet to crawl this page.
The site itself is a small site (about 80 pages). It’s been going in various guises for about 10 years and therefore has a fair amount of inbound links (mainly to internal pages rather than the home page). For most categories it gets to page 1 of the SERPs for two work keyphrases. I gave it a design overhaul about a year back to convert it from tag soup to clean valid HTML and CSS. I changed the linking structure and the URLs using 301s. I also improved the prominence of Adsense ads (that I’d been trailing for about a year previous) It weathered the change fine (some previous number 1 results dropped down a few places but nothing major).
There have been no major changes since then. I’ve added a few categories. It’s all been fine, every page has been indexed in a timely fashion.
However a week ago, I signed up to Google Sitemaps. I am wondering if this is connected in any way with the URL-only pages that I’m starting to see. “

So what could have caused this, Submitting to google sitemaps might have been a coincidence,

Getting banned from adsense for running clickbots,

A webmaster reports in a forum saying that his adsense account was closed because of fraudulent clicks on his site,

He said

“An ex-friend of mine recently created a both. This both visits a site, clicks on a ad, changes its IP and comes back to click again. I was wondering why my adsense revenue for that day shot up so dramatically. My google account has now been banned and revenue lost for several of my sites. Presumably there is no chance of getting my account reinstated? Additionally, whats to stop him running this both on sites he wants to get banned? I am very very unhappy with this guy. “

this is really unfortunate, we recommend everyone monitor their adsense account actively, if they see fraudulent clicks we recommend them to shutdown their ads temporarily, Google is very strict on this issue,

Picasa now available in 25 different languages,

Picasa google’s image editing software is now available in 25 different languages,

Google blog reports on this here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/picasa-x-25_30.html

new interface languages for picasa are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Tagalog, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Catalan, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Picasa is a great photo organizing software, it is a must download for people who want to organize their photo effectively,

Download picasa here picasa.google.com