December 1st SEO tip of the day,

There has been a debate for a while of google’s 950 penalty in webmaster world. People kept asking us what we think about Google’s 950 penalty. Our personal opinion a site gets
booted mostly because of over optimization. Especially too much back links from low quality sites with same anchor text or sudden boost in back links from known spam network.
Google does have a radar of sites that interlink a lot and if you get back links from these network your site might bet booted or otherwise called 950 penalty. This is purely our
opinion based on working with our client sites.

Best ways to avoid duplicate contents from being indexed

1. Block certain pages from site getting indexed by adding the robots meta tag.
eg:

2.You can prevent crawler from indexing pages you don’t want to get indexed by blocking in robots file. Especially your search pages can be blocked in robots file.

3. De link pages which doesn’t need to be indexed. Search Engine crawlers find pages based on links and pages without links cannot be indexed.

4. Embed links into flash or javascript most of the time search engines don’t take trouble of crawling flash or javascript links. So hiding them inside javascript or flash will
prevent crawlers from accessing those pages.

SEO tip of the day to resume from December 1st

We were providing tips on SEO for couple of months before we stopped due to inadequate resources to write this blog. Now that we have enough staff we are resuming tip of the day from 1st of december. We guarantee there will be a tip everyday so keep visiting to improve your SEO skills.

If you have questions that need to be answered please contact us via email or just post your question in comments it will be replied immediately.

or also we have forum where you are free to ask your questions,

SEO blog team.

SEO copywriting blog being launched this month.

Search Engine Genie is launching a new blog on SEO copywriting. It will be written by our in house SEO copywriter. Our inhouse copywriter has experience in writing contents for
more than 2 years. It will be an interesting start. URL to our new blog will be posted here after its live. Please check back.

SEO People Directory to be launched this month,

Our SEO people directory first of its kind will be launched this december 2007. It will have free profile listings of SEOs. Listing your profiles in our SEO people directory is
completely free. Requirement is to write atleast 100 word unique information about you. This is not a company directory its for individual Search engine optimizers only. You can
write about your company in your profile. All listings can contain a complete biography about you. Your biography can contain non-hyperlinked URLs but it cannot contain
hyperlinked URls unless you pay us. We allow upto 3 URLs to be listed from your biography page for a cheap 55$ per year. Paid members will have access to edit their profile 24
hours a day, 7 days a week they can change the link URls from their profile when ever they want to. It will be announced here as soon as the directory is launched,

SEO Blog Team.

Search Engine Genie SEO Blogs resumes posting this december

SEO tip of the day to resume from December 1st

Due to overwhelming amount of jobs all our team members in Search Engine Genie were busy with projects. Especially our CEO Mr.Vijay who writes this blog was busy on an active US
trip to meet clients. Now that things have settled down we are resume our work for all our blogs as well as we are adding new tools to our site. Please check back soon to see
some exciting changes to our site.

Is yahoo slurp misbehaving?

Complaints
Webmasters complain that yahoo slurp is not tripping the filter given in robots.txt for the following

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Yahoo slurp obeys the agent specific rule and hence does not crawl the directories /bloop/ and /blop/directories where as it crawled the directories in the generic rule.

Discussions and Suggestions

Webmasters figured out that not only yahoo but even other search engines behaved in the same manner.

All the SE BOTS and slurps do not obey the Generic rule.

Suggestion 1: Put the wildcard ones first that has generic rule to less specific bots and then place the agent specific code.

Suggestion 2: main theme behind this is that the major bots get to their corresponding user agents and the rest carry on with wild card user agents.

Conclusion

All bots do trip and filter the specifications. They are tripped by the server configuration.
The fact is that major bots and slurps get to their respective user agents and the rest continue with the generic rule.

The exact rule for the above case would be

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

This can be shortened to

User-agent: Slurp
User-agent: msnbot
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /bloop/
Disallow: /blop/
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/
Disallow: /forum/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /badbottrap/

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.

Do virtually hosted sites get banned by Google?

There had been discussions on virtual hosting versus dedicated IP addresses that multiple sites having same IP addresses will have its page rank affected and Google penalize sites which are virtually hosted.

It’s a myth if people say that Google penalize sites which are virtually hosted and is a false intuition that multiple sites page ranks are affected if they are hosted on the same IP address.

Virtually hosted sites and domains with dedicated IP address are handled equally by Google.

The statement confirmed in mattcutts blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) indicating a conversion slashdotted.

“Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases.”

A joint venture by search engines for sitemap submission

Google, Yahoo and msn together provide one sitemap protocol (http://www.sitemaps.org/) where you could submit your site pages to major search engines jointly in one submission.

MSN search and win – Is it true.

When i searched for a keyword and as MSN search and win page said the result said i won some prize

when I clicked on that we got the following URL: http://www.msnsearchandwin.com/_v6/9326-059-713/g=92@13/98775785

it said sorry search again to win, so what was the problem,

Got the above page