Adsense not affected moving to https

Barry of Seroundtable.com pointed out that he is facing problem with adsense revenue after moving from http to https. We recently moved to https but relatively new to adsense. We never wanted to stuff our sites with ads but penguin update made us do it. I moved to https because I don’t care about back links. Many webmasters are worried they might lose back link value if they move to https. The whole purpose or one of the most important purpose for Google to make this initiative is to make sure back links don’t play that vital role anymore. We have 100s of 1000s of natural links coming to our blogs, free tools and we are not worried of any unnatural links. Only people are having many un-natural links should be concerned with losing their back link power.

Our traffic has increased after moving to https and people trust us more now than how we were before. And NO our adsense revenue has not dropped a bit. Make by the CPC is a bit low but our revenue has been steady. From our site. Barry I think you need to look elsewhere for problems. I don’t the problem is with your https.

I recommend going for https. Now we recommend almost all our clients to move to https. It is not just for Google it also reduces hacking attempts because all data transfer is secure. I support this great Google’s initiative everything they did were for the welfare of internet except yes the killer update you know what I mean

Google has some specific instructions for webmasters who run adsense on their sites and planning to move their site to https

Sandbox tool questions ask in our forum

Every day we get questions from people asking us how to get out of Sandbox. Time and again we have stressed the point. Sandbox filter exists in Google and our tool tries to relate a keyword with your current keyword ranking. If there is a big difference where you are supposed to rank then our tool will alert that your site is in sandbox. We always give free advice for site owners have problem with Google sandbox filter.

If you have problem with your site being in sandbox ask in our Sandbox tool forum

I am personally giving advice in our SEO forum. If you have questions shoot me a PM or post in our forum and I will answer your questions promptly.

Remember not all sites are in sandbox. People have asked us questions why facebook.com is in sandbox for a particular keyword. Understand we don’t have time to run a tool with 100 factors integrated. If you query for “auto transport” and you want facebook to come in 1st page then you are insane. Our tool will say facebook.com is in sandbox for such weird searches. So please be clear and understand we provide free service. We ask you to post in our forum for free advice. We never charge a penny for the advice you are getting from us. We are one of the best resource for articles, tools etc out there. We are not moz.com to charge for something that is freely available online. A FREE advice is always free take it or leave it.

301 redirect search engine friendly redirect

I am describing here how to setup 301 redirect in various servers. We have posted various helpful articles and tools on our site. We keep getting requests from people for an article on making redirects search engine friendly. When you are moving one page to other or moving site from http to https or fighting canonical issues 301 redirect is the way to go.

301 redirect setup is not same for different servers. Each server works in a different way. For IIS servers you need to make changes directly on the server. Mostly you need dedicated server or remote server access. But for other servers it can be done just through FTP. Here are some sample coding for important servers.

If you are moving pages it is important to keep your rankings intact. Remember search engines rank pages not websites. You need to make sure none of the pages have 2 versions because it will create duplicate issue. Learning about search engine friendly redirects is the way to go.

Apache Server

Doing redirect in php files is a simple way to do on an apache server if you want to redirect only one page to an other page.

Here is a sample how to redirect in PHP
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.example.com” );
?>

Adding redirect in .htaccess is another efficient way to redirect in an Apache server. .htaccess is an efficient file used for both server access and SEO purposes. Most of URL rewriting , URL redirects can be done in .htaccess file.

htaccess redirect

There are many types of redirects you can do using htaccess

To redirect from one domain to another domain. There are various reasons you want to redirect from one domain to another domain. You want to move your site to a new domain name, you want to just replace existing domain name for other purpose but use new domain as main site. Like that there might be many uses to redirect from one domain to another domain name. You can do that in .htaccess file. .htaccess is a server file so handle with care. If you don’t know how to handle it leave it to an expert. You can create a htaccess file with your notepad. Just past this below code in notepage and save it as .htaccess.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*)
http://www.yournewdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Just replace yournewdomain.com with the URL you want to redirect.

Search engines like Google used to have problems figuring out the difference between www and non-www versions of a site. John Muller even suggested verifying both versions in webmaster tools to see data. This shows Google is still struggling with www and non-www version of a site. We have an option in webmaster tools to select which version we want to use. We can select either of the 2 versions. But to avoid confusion and play safe you can just 301 redirect from one version to the other. This way Google will not have problem identifying the right version to use.

Just include the below code in your .htaccess file to redirect all requests to example.com to be redirected to www.example.com

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Just change example.com in the above code to your own site URL. That’s boom you are done fixing www and non www versions.

Remember .htaccess works only on Apache servers. Just because PHP can run in IIS and other servers htaccess will work. htaccess doesn’t have anything to do with PHP. It is an apache server file.

Windows Server.

Redirect using ASP pages. Sample like PHP pages you can redirect from one page to another page in IIS server using this simple ASP code. Just include this code in the top part of your ASP page.

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<% Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.example.com/” %>

ASP .NET Redirect
<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender,System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader
(“Location”,”http://www.example.com”);}
</script>

PERL

Below code will help you redirect in a perl server code. Copy the below code and replace example.com with your own code.

CGI PERL Redirect
$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.example.com/”);

Simple 301 redirect on Ruby on Rails

def old_action
headers[“Status”] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.example.com/”
end

JSP server

Java Server Pages an important serve side code used in Java enabled servers. Many sites use Java as their backend platform and they will need a SEO friendly redirect if they are moving one page from the other. Copy the below code to your server and it should work best for your SEO purpose.

JSP (Java) Redirect
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”,”http://www.example.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”,”close” );
%>

IIS server

Setting up redirect in IIS is the most difficult part. When I first started doing SEO I always found it difficult to setup redirect in IIS. We use to buy a simple software called ISAPI redirect. But things have changed now. It is much easier to setup 301 redirect on server side. If you have access to a dedicated server through remote server access you can do the following edit. It is simple and you don’t need any programming skills to do it. Just loggin to your remote server.

1. Go to Internet Services Manager and right click on the folder you want to setup a redirect.
2. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
3. Enter the redirection page
4. Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
5. Click on ‘Apply’

Cold Fusion Server

There are couple of methods you can use to setup cold fusion redirect.

First method is to use

CFlocation. You can use both cflocation and cfheader.

Just add this below code on the page you want to redirect. Replace newpage.cfm to your own page name or page.

<cflocation url=”newpage.cfm” statuscode=”301″ addtoken=”false”>

Using CFheader just use this below code.
<cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.example.com/newpage.cfm”>

Redirect from http to https on an Apache server

With Google’s new algorithm tweak which helps https sites, there is rush to setup https and redirect http pages to https. I will write a seperate article on this. For now here is a simple example how to redirect on an Apache server.

Apache recommends using RedirectSSL as the preferred method. But to use that method we need to have direct access. For shared hosting it is not possible to gain direct access. So I recommend using .htaccess redirect.

To redirect your whole site to https use this code. This code will redirect which ever page being opened to be redirected to the https version of it. For example www.example.com will redirect to https://www.example.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

This code can be used to redirect a specific page or directory.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^/?secure/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/secure/$1 [R,L]

If you have questions email me at webpromotions@gmail.com I am more than willing to help if I have enough time in my hands.

Bing URL keyword stuffing penalty

Finally Bing is going after spammers for keyword stuffing in their URLs to gain higher rankings. Keyword stuffing in URLs is common these days. Search engines have used various methods to combat this spam. Keywords in URLs have always been a ranking factor in search engines. It has long been believed Search engines like Google, bing give good weight-age for keywords in URLs. But many SEO spammers have taken advantage of it and are spamming the search engines with sub domain keyword stuffing and other aggressive spammy methods.

If you read the post here you can very well understand how well Bing combats this spam without damaging the reputation of good sites.

https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2014/09/09/url-keyword-stuffing-spam-filtering/

Some of the ranking signals they use to detect this spam are reported in their blog

As I mentioned in the previous blog, we will not be giving out specific details on detection algorithms because spammers are likely to use that knowledge to evolve their techniques. I can, however, tell you that we look at a number of signals that suggest possible use of URL keyword stuffing, such as:

• Site size
• Number of hosts
• Number of words in host/ domain names and path
• Host/ domain/ path keyword co-occurrence (inc. unigrams and bigrams)
• % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host/ domain name keywords
• Host/ domain names containing certain lexicons/ pattern combinations (e.g. [“year”, “event | product name”], http://www.turbotaxonline2014.com)
• Site/page content quality & popularity signals

I am impressed in efforts Bing is taking to target SEO spammers. Bing is the No.2 search engine now even though their market share is well below Google. There are people who still use Bing regularly. I am one who use Bing when I use my Internet explorer because it is the default search engine for IE and I did not bother to change it .

I wish one day Bing search engine with the help of Yahoo will gain much bigger market share.

SEO 301 redirect from http to https

Recently our site was moved from http to https. Moving a big site like ours was not easy. It took us a lot of time to move. We had too many static pages which made our life difficult. When we move our site from http to https it is important that move everything to the secure section.

Areas to consider are CSS, images, JavaScript and any other client side includes should be from secure section. If your URLs are relative you don’t have a problem but if your URLs are absolute then you have a problem in your hand. Make sure you search and replace all URLs that have absolute links. We search for pages with URLs like

http://www.searchenginegenie.com,

http://searchenginegenie.com,

http://facebook.com etc.

These type of URLs are replaced with https instead of http.

But before moving into all these details make sure https works perfectly on your site. Next important thing is to 301 redirect all http pages to https pages.

Because we are on an Apache server we used this code in our .htaccess file.\

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

This code worked great till we went into our wordpress pages.

We have about 8 wordpress blogs.

Insert code here

Then we need to login to our wordpress section and change the htaccess files there. We replaced above code in .htaccess in each wordpress blog root section. Boom it worked. We never had any problems after that.

To make sure browsers don’t throw insecure content error for wordpress blogs. Use “wordpress https” plugin. It is freely available for download.

If anyone need help moving site to a secure server contact us we are more than willing to help you.

Why we monetize our SEO blog

Well Search engine genie has provided free tools, blogs, forums for many years without making a single penny. All our revenue came from our once successful SEO Business. We were proud to be one of the best free SEO resource site. We always want to continue that way. But Google literally killed our Business. We used to get regular Business from existing and past clients but things have changed after Penguin update. Especially the October 2013 Penguin update killed 75% of our SEO business.

We are not worried about it. You cannot depend on Google all the time. It is their search engine we were lucky and happy to do Business using Google. Now things have changed, SEO has changed. It is mostly Do It Yourself SEO now. We also planned to move into other web related areas. We run a decent network of sites all good quality sites. Now we are pushing to monetize all our sites. Search Engine Genie is one of the high traffic sites we own. We don’t want to resort to selling links. It has always been against our policy to buy or sell links. So we thought Adsense will be ideal for us. For a site like ours where we don’t stuff our pages with ads people like to bid more. So we get some decent income from Search Engine Genie and other sites we own. We are pushing more towards a much bigger Adsense revenue Business. Google still pays us but more directly. Before we indirectly made money now we make direct revenue from Google.

We are grateful to Google and will make sure we abide by Google’s webmaster guidelines and Adsense guidelines.

Search Engine Genie site to monetize now

Penguin UPDATE 2014 – Why Google is scared to unleash penguin again

Google to replace Penguin with POLAR BEAR:

There is a reason for Google not updating Penguin algorithm. The last penguin update or the unnatural link penalty update happened in October 2013. It has been over 10 months and we did not have a single update. It seems Google has shot its own foot by penalizing sites based on backlinks. With excessive attack on webmasters and site owners for bad link practices, Google has got itself into a mess. The big mess of negative SEO. If anyone thinks negative SEO doesn’t exist or sky rocketed after the last penguin update they are fools. We as a SEO company face ton of problems with junk links. Few of our client sites consistently receives over 1000 junk links a month. The problem is mainly with sites that do well in search engines. It has become a pain for us to request junk sites to remove links or make a huge list of links to disavow. The problem now if Google even updates it’s penguin algorithm it will hurt those sites badly. Google might think the junk links are built by us or at least the machine might think so.

Though it is positive for Google not updating algorithm the affected sites are dumped in Sandbox for ever. Sites that not affected by October update are doing great. But the ones that were affected seem to be doomed forever. Those sites don’t have an option to submit re-inclusion because the site was affected by algorithm not by manual penalty. Before a site can recover in 2 to 3 months then it became 5 to 6 months. Now it has been over a year and some of the sites that were affected by penguin update October 2013 never recovered. It is important for Google to give sites that got affected a change to fix itself. They should make their algorithm smarter in understanding negative links. IMHO this penguin update works with both machine and human intervention. It seems machine takes decision based on human input for specific sites or specific niches.

Hopefully this time Google comes out with a fantastic algorithm that can identify real spammed links and don’t penalize sites that were affected by competitor link attack. Also it is time for Google to release penalized sites from October 2013. There is 100s of 1000s of sites sitting in sandbox after that update. They show a similar pattern and never come back to rankings.

Google unleashed innocent looking penguins to kill bad seals. Now it seems the good seals are made to look nasty by blood thirsty parasites unleashed by some crazy aliens. Hope Google wakes up and understands penguin are not the right choice. We feel Polar bear can be a better choice because it can eat anything but still being selective. Hopefully the new polar bear update will tackle the blood thirty parasites we are seeing today.

Is this how Google’s panda update works

Google panda update works this way or that is how Google’s patent says.

Negative SEO – does it really work

Negative SEO has been the talk of the town these days in SEO industry. Many SEOs claim it works and we do believe the same way. We have seen our high ranking clients come under negative SEO attack. We did not see major impact our client rankings but we do see problem when a particular keyword is targeted for negative SEO. We have seen some major keywords that face negative SEO attack fall from 1st page to 2nd page. Other keywords remain unchanged.

Google recommends to disavow if we find negative links in our backlinks. But what happens if the links are from a very large network that Google crawls.

For example the guys at negativeseoguy.com are selling 2,000,000 million links for $450. If it is possible to get that many spam links we have to work a life time to remove or disavow all those links.

Please Google wake up and tweak your algorithm to avoid negative SEO attack because it WORKS.

Facebook’s fatal attack on Orkut

Facebook’s fatal attack on Orkut