Are you in wikipedia’s spam blacklist,

Do you have your site in wikipedia’s blacklist then I recommend get it removed immediately. Personally we don’t know any of our sites or client sites in wikipedia blacklist.
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist

Wikipedia has a strong relationship with Search engines, Wikipedia does share this information to Search engines and it will result in your site loosing credibility with search engines.

Mattcutts of Google denies any automated penalty

“
If you do a search for [wikipedia spam blacklist], the first result is helpful. It gives pointers to various strings and urls that Wikipedia has blacklisted on their site.
I’d characterize that list as much like a spam report: the data can be useful, but at least in Google it wouldn’t automatically result in a penalty (for the reason that site A might be trying to hurt site B).
That could be one of the things jehochman was referring to.”

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wikipedia-spam-resulting-in-google-yahoo-penalties/5854/

Even if matt denies he does say its kind of like a spam report so I recommend staying out of the list always,

Yahoo team’s up with you vlingo for Mobile voice search

Mobile voice search is about to be introduced in Yahoo where a user can search for information using him Mobile phone just by using his voice.

According to Marco Boerries, an executive vice president for Vlingo said people using BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series can use their voice over the phone to search the web. Yahoo’s Mobile search engine is called Onesearch and has been in Industry for a while.

As per expert’s reviews Vlingo’s voice recognition is the best of its kind in industry. Though Still it has no where reached a level comparing with real human voice still its competiting strongly.

SEO Tools blocked by Google – Google blogs online tools temporarily

Recently we have seen a surge of google blocking online tools to check pagerank or positioning or other stuff in search engines. We have a bunch of tools here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm. We query Google for many of those tools like pagerank checker, sanbox checker, IP checker, backlink checker, future pagerank checker etc. At this moment Google is preventing many online tools from quering their database. We are having trouble with our tools too. But we have seen this happen before its mostly temporary and we are expecting it to get fixed soon,

Update: Tools are working perfectly fine Google has released the block on online tools.

Search Engines love webmasters and siteowners

I am seriously surprised how the trend has changed from completely ignoring what people shout about their sites to a full customer care by all the search engines. I belong to one of the old member group of webmasterworld and before about 3 years search engines rarely care about a webmaster or site owner’s cries. People used to shout, cry and express their pain in forums like webmasterworld and i help you but no search engine employee gave their ears on looking into their problems.

But now its a total different world I would say. Looking at the prompt responses people get from search quality engineers about their site problems it makes me seriously amazed.

For Google we have mattcutts blog, webmaster central blog, adwords rep in webmasterworld forum , John Muller participating in forums, Mattcutts goes around in webmaster / SEO blogs and responds to any specific problems or concerns ( ofcourse his blog is great ) , we have Google Groups where many employees like John Muller, Jonathan simon, Adam Lasnik, Susan, Mariya etc hangout, Most of the google experts are always around when a webmaster is serious about their problems,

Back in 2003 we just had one ghost like representative from Google named GoogleGuy in webmasterworld who comes around and asks for feedback. If there is some update to their algorithm or search index occasionally he will respond with a lot of ambiguity. His answers are like answers from the Google god itself and his posts are followed so much. People just come to webmaster world to search for his posts. Till today 95% or more webmasterworld active members don’t know who the real person with the nickname Googleguy is. Many suspect Googleguy is Mattcutts but he denied to be the original Googleguy. But today things have changed we now have Google employees answering questions all over the place. They recently hosted a webmaster live chat session first of its kind which was a success attended by more than 250 people.

For yahoo it used to be Tim Mayer nick named Yahoo Tim he just comes around and gives a weather update ( Yahoo’s index update ) or answers some rare questions but now they have a wonderful place for webmasters to seek help.

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=SiteExplorer

This place gives much better support than what Google does. I rarely see a question that is not reviewed by a yahoo site explorer employee. That is a very positive sign and a huge step forward in bringing webmasters/White hat SEOs and site owners closer. Its great that Yahoo a search engine which used to be very reluctant to help webmasters now have a place where they provide instant solution for Site owner’s problems.

MSN it used to be MSN dude he started from the day MSN separated from Yahoo to become an independent Search Engine. He comes for some feedback but never used to be regular but now even the big Microsoft has a forum for webmasters to talk about problem with their sites. When I visited this forum I can see people like Brett Hunt a Live search employee actively answering questions of site owners. This is great.

So seeing the world change so much I can just say one thing finally search engines have understood the importance of Good relationship and communication with webmasters and site owners to maintain the quality of the index. A Good communication and setting up strong guidelines help webmasters go in the right direction when it comes to ranking their sites in Search Engines.

I like to thank wholeheartedly all top Search engine Engineers for taking this bold step of helping us webmasters.

Search Engine Genie

Yahoo site explorer and .asia domains – problem still

Yahoo is still process of fixing the problem where .asia domains are not verifiable in their site explorer, A poster in yahoo site explorer suggestion board points out this problem,

“Hi,I am trying to submit my .asia domains that I have registered and I
keep getting error messages. (error 3) My new .com domains go through fine. Any
ideas or reason why I cannot get my .asia domains entered for a crawl?”

Yahoo! Site Explorer employee Tim has replied asking for the URLs,

Please let us know your site URL or your y_key contents and we’ll be happy
to investigate.

suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=SiteExplorer

Will Buying adwords help Google rankings ,

This is a question often asked in forums not just in forums but even we get same question from potential leads and current clients. Every one who is new to this SEO world might have a wrong assumption that buying Adwords will have a positive impact on Organic Google search engine rankings.

No it does not nor had never been that way nor will it ever be like that in Future. Google has been know to be a highly ethical search engine their Motto says “Don’t be Evil” if they give boost to adwords advertisers in organic rankings then it simply means they are being evil.

Adwords has been a very successful program from Google and today google’s No.1 revenue comes from adwords their pay per click program which displays sponsored results besides organic search engine results. Adwords results are inside iframes and embedded inside JavaScript so those links are not crawled. Also the links go through a redirect which is prevented from passing any link popularity or Pagerank to the targeted site.

SEO Blog Team,

Expired domain do they help in search engine rankings.

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.

Reasons for Google not catching a page: A SEO checklist for Google’s cache problem

Reasons for Google not catching a page: A SEO checklist for Google’s cache problem

1. If a page is password protected and the search engines cannot access it but find many links coming to it they will keep the URL in search results but there wont be any cache since the page cannot be accessed by Googlebot.
2. If the page is too large for indexing we discussed this before in our blog Googlebot has problem caching large pages. For example large PPT, large PDFs or large Docs are not cached by Google. From our research they have a indexing limit of 1.5 Mb and I have personally not seen a page more than that being cached again understand indexing and caching are two different things I am discussing about indexing only here.
3. If a page has errors and not rendering properly for Googlebot they fail to index that page. This might sometimes happen with dynamic pages some servers when the Googlebot is visiting might not render the page problem and this will result in Googlebot not caching the page.
4. If you are suffering from a page penalty then it will affect page caching.
   Also if Googlebot has not visited a page for a long time but the page is still in index it will loose its credibility in the index and will loose the cache.
5. Accidental blocking of a page in robots.txt or in Meta tags will stop search engines from caching a page. For example the Nocache meta tag syntax will tell the search engine robot not to cache the web page.

What caused indexed pages to disappear: A SEO checklist for problems with indexed pages

What caused indexed pages to disappear: A SEO checklist for problems with
indexed pages

1. A page can disappear if Google finds something wrong with that page we discussed about this on page specific Google penalty here.
2. A page can disappear when suddenly it attracts 1000s of backlinks. This might suddenly trigger a filter with Search engine algorithms and that page might go through a strong search engine spam filter and once it clears it will be available again.
3. If a page has any server related problems and not accessible by search engines it will disappear from search engine index
4. If a page has problems with the html or dynamic code and again not properly rendering for the search engines it will be booted temporarily from the index.
5. If a page has hidden links and if detected by spam detecting Googlebot it will assigned a temporary penalty and will be booted from the index.
6. Manual review by certain search engines have made pages disappear. This is though very rare but it does happen and search engines do this to make sure users are not led to the wrong page.