Does TLDs matter for US or global keyword ranking,

There has been enough discussion about this yet people keep asking. Yes TLD matters you have a .co.uk domain and want to rank in google its gonna be a very difficult job there are sites which are doing it but its very rare and extremely difficult.

other factors that affect global keyword rankings are

1. Hosting: If you site is hosted some where in the european union or Uk and you want to target US customers then you need to move your website to a US hosting. Search engines have geotargeting and they can clearly figure out where your website is hosted.
2. Backlinks: its an other important factor if you have too many backlinks from other countries then it will be difficult to rank in UK results its very important to get backlinks from US sites to rank for US audience.

Google – webmasters Live chat – we are participating

We will be participating today on GOogle’s webmaster live chat. Our team has been asked to stay back and listen to the conversation happening , ask questions to experts like Adam Lasik etc about Search engine optimization and search engine marketing. We are excited and looking forward to this.

Google ads robots.txt generator to its webmaster central

Google had been providing a robots.txt validator for a long time. Its a very effective tool since the verification is done right from google’s month itself. What ever gets verified in Robots.txt validator is what Googlebot sees. That made robots.txt tool a very attractive tool and almost every webmaster who has validated their site in webmaster central has one point or the other used robots.txt validator to validate their website robots.txt.

I am sure everyone knows what robots.txt is its mostly placed to stop bad robots from entering a website , stealing your email IDs , scraping your website etc

Now google has a robots.txt generator where we can generate a valid Google accepted robots.txt file.

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

Google’s advanced language specific search – New technology

Google’s Engineers are constantly researching to bring the best user experience for their search engine users.
According to official Google blog
“One of the most important uses of data at Google is building language models. By analyzing how people use language, we build models that enable us to interpret searches better, offer spelling corrections, understand when alternative forms of words are needed, offer language translation, and even suggest when searching in another language is appropriate.”

According to them People searching around the world for the abbreviation GM search in a different way. For the US, UK , Canada and other english speaking countries GM means General Motors. Most of the time this is the fact whereas in french searches GM can mean “Guerre Mondiale” (World War), whereas in STI GM it means “Génie Mécanique” ( In english Mechanical Engineering )

More according to official google blog “To provide more relevant search results, Google is constantly developing new techniques for language modeling and building better models. One element in building better language models is using more data collected over longer periods of time. In languages with many documents and users, such as English, our language models allow us to improve results deep into the “long tail” of searches, learning about rare usages. However, for languages with fewer users and fewer documents on the web, building language models can be a challenge. For those languages we need to work with longer periods of data to build our models. For example, it takes more than a year of searches in Catalan to provide a comparable amount of data as a single day of searching in English; for Estonian, more than two and a half years worth of searching is needed to match a day of English. Having longer periods of data enables us to improve search for these less commonly used languages.
At Google, we want to ensure that we can help users everywhere find the things they’re looking for; providing accurate, relevant results for searches in all languages worldwide is core to Google’s mission. Building extensive models of historical usage in every language we can, especially when there are few users, is an essential piece of making search work for everyone, everywhere. “

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,

Adding Multilanguage on your website – Is it duplicate Content,

Adding multiple languages is a common and effective business practice. Lots of websites do this to make sure they cover the Majority of the crowd who dont speak English Language. In US a recent census says 15% of the people are Hispanics that is almost 50 million people.
It is not possible to ignore those people when it comes to doing busines. Most of the Hispanics dont speak good English and this shows the importance to have a website in both spanish in English.

Same way in European union not all countries speak English targeting the regional language is a very important factor to reach the local business. Having a website in various languages are becoming mandatory these days so how does the search engines treat when they see the same information in different languages. From our experience search engines see only the contents and different language contents are unique to themselves.

Spammers from Japan – website spammers from japan hitting us hard

Recently we have seen a surge in comment spamming and contact form spamming from Japanese guys. We get at least 10 to 15 contacts a day from Japan trying to spam our contact form. We always wondered what they get from it. When we see a contact spam we immediately delete it without notice so what are they looking for.

Most probably they are thinking that our contact form is a type of comment spamming weird guys. Some spam contacts we got,

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Shigeru Kurisu
EMAIL_Address : kurisu03@carrot.ocn.ne.jp
Website_url :
Phone no :
Discovered seg from : Google
Comments :

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Takatoshi Kaneko
EMAIL_Address : puyopuyo@mippi-mail.com
Website_url : an-idol-beautiful-woman.blogspot.com
Phone no : Discovered seg from : Google
Comments :

HOME PAGE LOGIN FORM INFORMATION
Prospect_Name : Kouya Kubota
EMAIL_Address : ocecib276khkm205@yahoo.co.jp
Website_url : snowboarderkk.blogspot.com
Phone no : Discovered seg from : Google Comments :

Highest paying keywords – list of highest paying keywords

According to cyber wire a website which monitors online highest paying keywords mesothelioma and loans still top the list. Lawyers are still the highest paying bidders. Accident attorneys, DUI lawyers, mesothelioma attorneys all pay huge sum due to the stiff competition in their industry,

I just dont want to stuff our blog with all these high spammed keywords. It will make our blog look like one major spam for top paying keywords. SO I am posting a screen shot to avoid the keywords getting crawled

Spying on your competitors – Tried doing it – Spyfu claims to help it out

Spyfu a online ad monitoring company claims to monitor competitor ads and keywords and provide us. Is it true according to spyfu

“SpyFu lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying and which ones they optimize their site for. Once you understand the competition, you can beat them at their own game or your can exploit their weaknesses.
We get our data directly from the source; there are no middlemen. Every month, we extract 125 million ads and search results directly…”

Anyone tried using Spyfu before, We want to give it a try and see how it really.

Imagine a real estate company in phoenix area wants to know what an other competitor in the same area spends on his online ads. They can go to spyfu buy the basic CPC keywords for their area and it will give them an insight on how much their competitor is spending on the keywords. To calculate results Spyfu uses google’s ad estimator and their own collection of 2 million keywords and compare them with real competitor sites. Other major sources from where data is extracted include dmoz, Dunn&Brad Street, Hoovers, and Wikipedia.

A spending data for geico looks similar to what they did in their SEC filing. Experts predict a 80 to 90% accuracy with spyfu data,