TPR penalty websites still not ready to change their ways

Lots of TPR ( Toolbar Pagerank Reduction ) Penalty websites which got affected in december 2007 update are still not ready to change their ways. Most of them like searchenginejournal, forbes.com, washingtonpost.com got their pagerank back,

Searchenginejournal was slapped with 3 points reduction to PR4 now are back to PR7, Forbes lost 2 points and was slapped to PR5, now they removed the paid text link ads and are back to PR7, Washingtonpost.com lost 3 points and was slapped with PR5 now they are back to PR8.
So what is the secret behind getting the Pagerank back and remove TPR Penalty.

First if you check Searchenginejournal they removed all text link ads and now all ads pass through a redirect script that doesn’t pass pagerank,

Forbes completely removed all text links and possibly the pagerank came by itself or they might have sent a reconsideration to check their site for paid links.

Washington past now has Nofollow on all the text links they sell, if you take the source of their page you can see that the text link ads that go out of their page don’t pass pagerank anymore all of them go through a nofollow.

I know there are some sites who are not ready to go friendly with Google when it comes to TPR and are happy to be at PR4 or PR5 and continue to do what they are not recommended to do. Instead they have their usual blogging power to curse Google for what they did to protect their algorithm. I recommend those sites to correct what they did and possibly file a reconsideration request to get back their Toolbar Pagerank or just keep the credit of running website that has lost some trust in Google’s algorithm.

Though I would like to stay away from commenting about individual sites one site I personally admire is SEOchat.com they look too silly to have a PR of 4. Being hit with TPR a reduction of 3 points were applied and their regular pagerank was PR7. Obvious reason is their option to sell text link ads on their site without any nofollow which is not a great sign especially for a site which depends so much on Google to discuss in their forum and so many tools that query Google. Their forum’s discussion has 75% discussion on Google and remaining about common issues and other search engines.

For all the 100s of 1000s of users who are regular to SEOchat its not a great way to welcome them with a PR4, Pagerank is like a fashion issue for a website. Most of the people out there especially people who are into search engines see Pagerank as a value of quality for a website. I hope SEO Chat a great site for SEOs will get their Pagerank back by no-following text link ads on their sites. They should set an example for all users who visit their site for SEO purposes.

Google Terminology – Matt cutts Google quality engineer transcript

Hello Everyone I am back, Ok Why don’t we start off with a really interesting question. Dazzling donna wrote in all the way from Louisiana she says matt I mentioned before I love to see do the fine type of post, find terms that you at Google use that we non Googlers might get confused about. Things like data refresh etc. You may have defined them in various places but one sheet type list will be great.

Very good question, at some point I need to do a blog post about host, Host Vs Domain and bunch of stuff like that. Some of people had been asking question about June 27th to July 27th so let me talk that a little bit more in the context of a data refresh vs an algorithm update versus an index update. So ill use the metaphor of a car. Back in 2003 we were crawling the web and indexing the web once in every month when we did that that was called an index update algorithms could chance, data could change so everything could chance just in one shot. So that was pretty big deal webmasterworld will name those updates. Now that we pretty much crawl and index some of our datas every single day it’s a ever flux its always going on through a process the biggest change in the people’s tendency are algorithm updates. You don’t see any index updates any more because when we moved away from the monthly update cycle the only time you might see them is you might be completing an index which is incompatible with the old index. So for example if you do simulation of CJK its China, Japan and Korea to under stand this you might have to completely change your index and go to an other index in parallel. So index updates are relatively rare , algorithm updates basically are when we change our algorithm. So may be its with the scoring a particular page you said you know Pagerank matters this much less or this much more or something like that. And those can happen pretty much any time so we call that asynchronous because whenever we get an algorithm update and the tally rates positively and it improves quality, in improves relevance we go ahead and push that out and an other smaller change is called data refresh that is essentially like you are changing the input to the algorithm , changing the data that the algorithm works on. So an index update with a car metaphor would be like changing a large section of the car things like changing the car tyre whereas an algorithm update is like changing a part in the car may be a changing out the engine for a different engine or changing or other main parts of the car, a data refresh is more like changing the gas in your car every one or 2 weeks or 3 weeks your change will always go in and will see how the algorithm works on that data. So for most part data refreshes are more common one thing we got to be very careful about is how safely we check them, some data refreshes happens all the time so for example we compute Pagerank continually and continuously so its always back of Machines refining Pagerank based on incoming data and pagerank goes out all the time anytime when we make an update to the index it happens pretty much every day.
By contrast some algorithms are updated every week every couple of weeks so those are data refreshes that are happening in a slower page. So the particular algorithm that people are interested in, on June 27th and July 27th those algorithms, actually those algorithms happen to be live for over a year and a half so you are seeing data refreshes that you are seeing that people see as a way for sites to rank.

In general if your site has been affected go back to your site take a fresh look at see if there is anything that might be exceedingly over optimized or maybe hanging out in SEO forums for such a long time that I need to have a regular person come in and take a look at the site and see if its ok to me. Or if you tried all the regular stuff and still it looks Ok to you then I would keep building regular good content and make the site very useful and if the site is useful then Google should fight hard to make sure its ranking where it should be ranking. That’s about the most I can give about June 27th and july 27th data refreshes because it does goes into our secrets also a little bit but that hopefully gives you a little bit of an idea about the scale the magnitude of different changes.

Algorithm changes happen a little more rarely and data refreshes are always happening and sometimes it happen from day to day or sometimes week to week or month to month

Thanks
Matt Cutts

rel= external nofollow and rel=nofollow difference

I have seen many people ask in forums what’s the difference between rel=external nofollow and rel=nofollow,

Nofollow is a co-ordinated efforts from Google, yahoo , MSN to stop crawling links that are considered not trustworthy or spammy. Today many blogs, message boards, forums, news sites use nofollow tag to prevent spam in their comments or other areas of the blogs or forums. Now there is a new tag that is similar to rel=nofollow that is rel=external nofollow, external nofollow works the same as nofollow tag but this tag opens links in a new window instead of the same window. If you want to try just add rel=”external” it will open the link in a new window. it sort of works like target=_blank. Target blank opens all hypertext links in the new window and rel=external nofollow, blocks all link juice and opens the link in a new window.

So if you find a blog that uses this dont get too excited, links from these blogs dont count. Move on and better luck next time

Google ( Goog ) Gains more than 12% after Q1 2008 RESULTS

Google’s ( GOOG ) Q1 financial results are released and breaking everyone’s expectation Google has gained 42% profit over the first Quarterly of 2007 and has gained 7% over the last Quarter of 2007. This is much better than everyone’s expectations especially after decline in value of many company’s shares.

At this moment Google’s shares are trading around 13% increase which is a very good sign for Google.

Financial results Summary as per Google’s investor relations:

Q1 Financial Summary
Google’s results for the quarter ended March 31,
2008, include the operations of DoubleClick Inc. from the date of acquisition,
March 11, 2008, through the end of the quarter, and are compared to
pre-acquisition results of prior periods. The overall impact of DoubleClick in
the first quarter of 2008 was immaterial to revenue and only slightly dilutive
to both GAAP and non-GAAP operating income, net income and earnings per
share. Google reported revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March 31,
2008, an increase of 42% compared to the first quarter of 2007 and an increase
of 7% compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. Google reports its revenues,
consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition
costs, or TAC. In the first quarter of 2008, TAC totaled $1.49 billion, or
29% of advertising revenues. Google reports operating income, net income, and
earnings per share (EPS) on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. The non-GAAP
measures, as well as free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of
liquidity, are described below and are reconciled to the corresponding GAAP
measures in the accompanying financial tables.
GAAP operating income
for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.55 billion, or 30% of revenues. This
compares to GAAP operating income of $1.44 billion, or 30% of revenues, in the
fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP operating income in the first quarter of
2008 was $1.83 billion, or 35% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating
income of $1.69 billion, or 35% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2007.

GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2008 was $1.31 billion
as compared to $1.21 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. Non-GAAP net
income in the first quarter of 2008 was $1.54 billion, compared to $1.41 billion
in the fourth quarter of 2007.
GAAP EPS for the first quarter of 2008 was
$4.12 on 317 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $3.79 for the
fourth quarter of 2007 on 318 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP
EPS in the first quarter of 2008 was $4.84, compared to $4.43 in the fourth
quarter of 2007.
Non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating margin,
non-GAAP net income, and non-GAAP EPS are computed net of stock-based
compensation (SBC). In the first quarter of 2008, the charge related to
SBC was $281 million as compared to $245 million in the fourth quarter of
2007. Tax benefits related to SBC have also been excluded from these
non-GAAP measures. The tax benefit related to SBC was $51 million in the
first quarter of 2008 and $42 million in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP operating income, operating margin,
net income, and EPS are included at the end of this release.
GOOG Financial results.

http://investor.google.com/releases/2008Q1.html

Labels categories for FTP blogger/blogspot blogs

Blogger Labels code download Free
We wrote a very simply PHP code for adding labels / categories in blogger ftp blogs. Already we have Page Element option in blogspot blogs where you just need to login to your blogger and enable the option. But for many years Blogger don’t have a proper solution for FTP blogger / your own domain hosted blogs.

We tried searching for a solution in internet and all the code infact most of them don’t work and most of them are too complicated for end users. So here we have a simple solution it has just 4 or 5 lines of coding and BOOM you are there with a nice labes menu on which ever location you include it .

Dowload this zip file and unzip in your local system, just follow the instruction in word document you should be able to work fine with it. If you are facing problems please post in comments we will try to fix the bug,

SEO Blog Team,
Blogger Labels code download Free

Interview with Udi Manber Google’s search quality scientist

I just read this very interesting interview from Vice president of Search Quality in Google Mr.Udi Manber,

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4259137.html

According to wikipedia

“Udi Manber (Hebrew: אודי מנבר‎) is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. As of December 2007, he is employed by Google as one of their vice-presidents of engineering.
[edit] BiographyHe earned both his bachelor’s degree in 1975 in mathematics and his master’s degree in 1978 from the Technion in Israel. At the University of Washington, he earned another master’s degree in 1981 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1982.
He has won a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, 3 best-paper awards, and the Usenix annual Software Tools User Group Award software award in 1999.
He was a professor at the University of Arizona and authored several articles while there. He wrote Introduction to Algorithms — A Creative Approach (ISBN 0-201-12037-2), a book on algorithms.
He became the chief scientist at Yahoo! in 1998.
In 2002, he joined Amazon.com, where he became “chief algorithms officer” and a vice president. He later was appointed CEO of the Amazon spin-off company A9.com. He filed a patent on behalf of Amazon.[1]
As of February 8, 2006, he has been hired by Google as one of their vice-presidents of engineering. In December 2007, he announced Knol, Google’s new project to create a knowledge repository.[2]
“

John Muller’s example of Google local search ranking

John Muller in one of his recent blog post explains how easy its to get into Google local search and how important its for business.

From the time Google’s Local Search was introduced people were eager to get into it. Some think its difficult to get into local search but the fact its not. Google sees some factors like User reviews from some popular sites as a ranking factor for local search.

From Mr. John’s example here

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=toy+store&near=Kirkland,+WA&fb=1&view=text&latlng=47674330,-122129701,11298439279698530468&dtab=0

the No.1 ranking site treetoptoys.com has nothing but a flash homepage and some flash links if that site were to compete for Organic rankings i am sure they wont rank but for local they are doing fine because of the reviews they have on other sites.

Also John points how important its for SEO companies to find local businesses and help them out to go online and rank in local search. Its very good for their business. Just some simple traditional SEO is more than enough to rank in local search since the competition pretty low.

Read in detail on John’s view here http://johnmu.com/untitled-document/#more-117

Matt Cutts Warns Against Buying Links

Regarding buying links what we do is we try to tackle things algorithmically but we also try things that are scalable and robust. So when I refer both algorithm and user both actually has to go well. So its more on the line to give people the heads up yeah we do consider buying links outside our guidelines and I just sort of notify that we may take strong action against sites in future. So people want to do that they always have the rights if you are the webmaster its your site you can do what ever you want to do on your site I totally support that idea but we Search Engine think and decide what we feel is best to return a high quality index. So people want to co-operate with Google and users and try to do things in a way that is good for users , good for them and good for the search engines that’s fantastic. And we will try to return the best results we can.

Trust Rank Explained by Matt Cutts – transcript mini

Hello Matt: I was talking about the Trust Rank and you said something is going on with the Trademark or I don’t know I couldn’t concentrate but so can you tell something more about it.

Mattcutts: Yes let me know talk about that a little bit. What is trust rank everybody is curious about that. Its kind of nice to ask , everybody has a vague view about it. So turns out there was someone in Yahoo , Peterson and some other people at yahoo and they wrote a paper about something called Trust Rank and what it does is it tries to treat reputation and like physical mass how it goes around the web and what physical properties does trust have and its really interesting stuff but its completely separate from Google.

And so couple of years ago at the exact same time Google was working on a Anti-phishing filter and part of that we need to come up with a name for it so they filed for a trademark and I think they used the name Trust rank and it was really a coincidence yahoo had a Trust Rank as a search research project and we had Trust rank as a trademark so everybody talks about Trust Rank, Trust Rank and so if you ask five different people they will have five different opinions about exactly what trust rank is.

Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools – mattcutts video transcript

I am up in the Kirkland office today, Up here for an outside little bit planning and they said you see why don’t we throw together video and like 10 minutes or less. So we said alright lets give it a shot. So we are thinking about some of the common things you do with webmaster console or some topics webmasters want to hear about people want to go to webmaster console and check their backlinks.

They also like to know if they have any penalties there are a lot of really good stats in the webmaster console. One thing I had been hearing questions about is how do I remove my URLs from Google. So why would you want to do this well suppose you are in school and you accidentally left your Social Security Number of all your students up on the web or your store you left people’s credit card numbers. Or you are running a forum and suddenly you are spammed full of porn by a Ukrainian forum spammer which happened to a friend of mine recently. So whatever the reason you want some URLs out of Google instead of getting URLs into Google. Lets look at some of the possible approaches some the different ways you can do it.

What ill do is , ill go through each of these ones and will kind of draw a Happy Face by one or two I think are specially good as far as getting the contents out of Google or perhaps abandoning them from getting into Google the first place. So the first thing a lot of people say is ok I just don’t like to a page is a secret server page Google won’t know or ever find it that way I don’t have to find a way up of showing up the Search Engines. This is not a great up roach and ill give you a very simple reason why. We actually see so many people surf to a page and then serve to an other web server and that causes your browser to create a referrer in the HTTP in browser codes the header status which showed up before will show up on the other web server. And that other web server shows hey these are the top referrers to my page and may be that’s a clickable hyperlink then Google can crawl that other web server and find a link to your so called secret web page. So its very weak to say “you know what I don’t want to link to it ill just keep it a secret and no one will ever find about it”. For what ever reason somebody will call from that page somebody will link from that page, somebody will refer from that page or as I said somebody will accidentally link to that page and that’s you know if there is a link on web to that page there is a reasonable reason that we might find it so I don’t recommend anyone using that its relatively very weak way. An other way you can do is something called .htaccess. Ok that sounds little, let me tell you very simply. This is a very simple file that lets you do simple things like redirect from one URL to an other URL the thing I am specifically talking about is can password protect a sub-directory or even you can protect your entire site now I don’t think we provide a .htaccess tool in the webmaster tools but that’s ok there are a lot of them out on the web and if you do a simple search like .htaccess tool or wizard something like that you will find one that will say like a password protective directory and it can even tell a directory and generate one for you and you can just copy and paste that onto your website.

So this is very good why is this strong why am I going to draw a Happy face here. Well you got a password on that directory Googlebot is not gonna guess that password you know we are not going to crawl that directory at all and we if we cant get to it . It will never show up in our index. This is very strong, very robust and efficient for the search engine because someone has to know the password to get into that directory. So this is one of the two ways I really really recommend this is a preventive measure so if already got chance to get into it you already had it vulnerable on your site so if you plan in advance and you know what the sensitive areas are going to be just put a password on there and it will work really well.

Ok here is an other way one that a lot of people know about called Robots.txt. This one has been here for over a decade atleast 1996 and essentially its like a electronic no trespassing sign it says here are areas of your site that Google or other search engine are not allowed to crawl, we do provide robots.txt tool in the webmaster console so you can create one and test out URLs and see if Googlebot is allowed to get to them , you can test out like the different variants of Googlebot like the Image-Googlebot is allowed to get to it and you can take new robots.txt files for test drive so you can say how about I try this for my robots.txt could you crawl this URL, or could you crawl this URL and you can just try it out and make sure it works ok. That’s nice because other wise you are going to shoot yourself on your foot say you make a robots.txt and make it like and it has a syntax error and say it keeps everybody in or keeps everybody out that’s going to cause a problem. So I recommend you take that tool for a test drive and see what you like and then you can put it live.

Then ok robots.txt is kind of interesting, different search engines have different polices of uncrawled URLs , ill give you a very simple example way, way, way back in days sites like Ebay.com , Nytimes.com don’t want anyone to crawl their site so they had a robots.txt file that said

Useragent: *
Disallow: / ( everybody )

So this will not allow any search engines to crawl even if you are a well behaved search engine. So that is kind of problematic so you are a search engines and somebody typed in Ebay and you cannot return Ebay.com it looks kind of dumb and its like what we decided or what we our policy still is we will crawl this page but we will not show a uncrawled reference sometimes we can make it look pretty good about it. Sometimes if there is a entry to nytimes.com in the Open Directory project ( ODP ) we can show that snippet from the ODP and show it for nytimes.com as a uncrawled reference and for users its good even though we are not allowed to crawl and we infact did not crawl it. So robots.txt is to prevent crawling but it wont completely prevent that URL from completely showing up in Google so there are otherways to do it. Lets move on to NOINDEX meta tag. What that simple says for Google atleast is don’t show that page at all in search engines so if we find Noindex we will completely drop it from Google search results we will still crawl it but we wont actually show it if somebody does a search in search result query for that page. So its pretty powerful works very well and very simple to understand there are couple complicating factors, yahoo and Microsoft even if you use the noindex meta tag can show a reference to that page, they wont return the complete the full snippet and stuff like that but you might see the link to that. We do see some people having problem with that for example you are a webmaster and you put up a noindex meta tag and put it up on your site been shifting around in developing your site you might forget and might not take that noindex meta tag down so very simple example. The Hungarian version of BMW I think has done this, there is a musician ( harper ) you probably heard about is pretty popular has a noindex metatag its still there and if you are the webmaster of that site we love you to take that down. So there are various people in google would have said may be we should not show the snippet of the url but show a reference to that URL. There is one other corner case on this noindex which is we can only abide by that meta tag only if we had crawled that page of we haven’t crawled that page we haven’t seen that meta tag and we haven’t know its there. So in theory its possible if you link to that page and we don’t get a chance to crawl that page we don’t see a noindex and we don’t drop It out completely. So there are couple of cases where you have atleast the reference which will show up in google and pretty much yahoo and Microsoft will always have a reference to that page if you use the noindex metatag.

So here is another approach you can use that is the Nofollow tag that can be added on individual links. This is an other type weak approve since inevitably say there are 20 links to that page may be I am going to put a Nofollow on all of them may be it’s a sign in page may be if you are a expedia.com and you want to add a Nofollow on my itineraries it makes perfect sense right. Why would you want Googlebot to crawl into your itineraries because that’s a personalized thing. But inevitably somebody links to that page or you forget to have a page which not every single link with a Nofollow so its very common that, ill just draw a very simple example suppose we have a page A and we have a Nofollow link to page B,

We will follow that link we will drop it out of our link graph we will drop it off completely so we wont discover page B because of this link but now like say there is an other guy on page C that wants to link to page B we might actually follow that link and will eventually end up indexing page B so you can try to make sure every link to a page is no-followed but sometimes its hard to follow that every single link is no-followed correctly so this like the NOINDEX does have some weird corner cases where you can very easily a page gets crawled since not every link has the Nofollow-ed or in the noindex case we can actually get to the page and end up crawling the page and end up later seeing the noindex tag. So lets move on to an other powerful way I tend to use this whenever a forum gets by porn spammer recently. And that’s the URL removal tool. So .htaccess is great as a preventive measure you put a password on it no-one can guess what it is, no search engine’s are going to get in there, it wont get indexed. The other thing you can do is if you do let the search engines in before and you want to take it down later you got the URL removal tool. We have offered the URL removal tool for atleast 5 years probably more for long time it sat on pages like services.google.com and it’s a completely self service that runs 24/7 but just recently the webmaster console team has integrated the URL removal tool into the webmaster console. Much much simpler to use the UI is much better what it helps is it will remove the URL for 6 months and if that was a mistake and if you removed your entire domain which you don’t need to then you need to email Google’s user support telling them hey I didn’t mean to remove my entire site can you revoke that and someone in google have to do that. Now you can do it yourself also its powerful and well accessible in webmaster console. Anytime you can go in to webmaster console and say hey I didn’t mean to remove my entire site and remove that request and that request gets revoked very quickly. So to use the webmaster console its not that hard to prove that you are the owner of the site, you just need to make a page on the root of the website , root of the directory or root of the site to say yep here is a little signature in the text file to say that this is my site. Once you prove that this is my domain then you get a lot more stats and this wonderful little URL remove tool. And it can remove a very nice level of speed in there you can remove a whole domain, you can remove a sub-directory thing you can even remove individual URLs and you can see actually the status of all the URLs you have put a request to be removed, initially it will show a status that the request is pending and later it will show that the URL removal has been processed/ removed. This will change the status to revoke. You can give a reason what ever you have like hey I got the credit card numbers, Social security numbers of what ever sensitive you had there removed and you want to revoke the URL removal from Google’s index. In other words its save to crawl and index again. So all the ways to remove the URLs or churning up URLs from showing up in Google there are a lot of different options some of them are very strong like the robots.txt, noindex but they do have these very weird corner cases like we might show the reference to the URL in varied situations so that ones that I definitely recommend is the .htaccess that will prevent the search engines and people from getting into the first place and for Google we have the URL removal tool so if you got URLs crawled that you don’t want to show up in Google’s index you can still get them out and get them out relatively quickly.

Thanks Very much Hope that was very helpful.

Matt Cutts.

Why we prepared this Video transcript?

We know this video is more than a year old but still there are people who have questions about their site and want to listen from a Search Engine Expert. Also there are millions of Non-English people who want to know what’s there in this video so a transcript is something that can be easily translated to be read in other languages. We know there are people with hearing disability who browse our site this is a friendly version for them where they can read and understand what’s there in this video.

This transcript is copyright – Search Engine Genie.

Feel free to translate them but make sure proper credit is given to Search Engine Genie