Clean your backlinks Google penguin almost here

It is time to clean up your back-links if you have already not done so. If you still have lot of unnatural links built by you or your SEO company it is time to clean them. You had 2 plus full year for it. Google’s penguin update was launched in Early 2012 and it is almost end of 2014 now.

We at Search Engine Genie stopped doing most of the link building strategies out there. We don’t do social bookmarking, link exchanges, article syndication, slide sharing and a lot more that search engines consider unnatural. We never buy links for our clients this has been our strategy since the day we launched in the year 2004. We feel buying links destroys the very method the internet works. It helps people manipulate their rankings with money. Money should never influence any sites rankings. Only quality and hard work should be rewarded.

If you want to follow about penguin update look at my friend’s blog http://penguinkills.com . It has ton of information about the upcoming penguin update. We should expect a penguin this weekend. Google is getting ready for some praises and bashing.

So what you think this update will target?

Supporting negative SEO petition

Recently I got an email from one of my friend saying he opened a negative SEO petition. Though I don’t 100% agree negative SEO has huge impact, i agree it exists and does some damage to competitors.

Please help spread the word and let Google know negative exists. Hopefully the upcoming penguin update addresses this issue.

Change.org negative SEO petition

Penguin 4.1 downs lyrics, games blogs and more

Latest Panda update is a huge step forward. We like Google because of these great updates. Google took down a lot of spam websites in recent update. It is not just spam websites that lost it’s rankings. Lot of blogs, free sites, lyric sites, game sites, directory listing sites etc were downed.

Two types of penalities were targeted.

1. Pure spam penalty

2. Thin content

Pure spam applies to sites that uses automatically generated gibberish, cloaking and scraping content from other websites.

Thin content sites are sites that has pages with very little or no contents. Google rarely penalize sites for duplicate or thin content. This is one of priority update from Google because it targeted low quality, thin, duplicate contents in a site.

Sites that might just replicate a big brand by selling their products are hit badly. I have seen sites seilling the same products across 100s of sites. Problem with these sites is that they have exact duplication product description, title price everything. Only the template design might be different everything else including the images of individual products will be similar. Google has pushed down these kind of sites low down their listings. It is not just these sites that are affected there are many more times which have just one line or 2 link contents that were taken down.

Google always takes excellent steps to improve search quality and we at Search Engine Genie appreciate this excellent effort from Google.

Some screenshots of sites taken down in the last 5 hours.

Search engines face more and more problems everyday with different types of spam. Now we have seen Panda update we want the much awaited penguin update. We know penguin update will be biggest update of the year from Google.

Latest panda update targets thin contents

Yesterday Google officially announced they rolled out the latest update in Panda. Both Private blog networks and sites with little or no contents were targeted. There are many sites run with very low quality contents and Panda has killed most of them before. This is the latest attack on those sites and there are discussion in various forums about this update. Many report loss in 100s of sites they own.

Panda update has always been the best update Google ever made to their algorithm. We support Panda update

SEO is common sense Not Rocket science

Is SEO a qualification. Many think so but no it is not a qualification. There is no degree required for this or does have any position related. I see in countries like India they call themselves SEO analyst, SEO senior expert etc. Those sounds really funny. Who gave these people these titles? Those who gave this name are just trying to scam people. There are no posts related to SEO. The maximum you can call yourself is Search engine optimizer. There are no better titles than this.

Same SEO is not rocket science it requires patience, dedication and lot of your time. If time is money for you then doing SEO is not your cup of tea. You need to find some good SEO companies so don’t have to use up your time. But if you have time in your hands then it is all Do It Yourself SEO. Don’t spend a penny if you have time there are lot of online materials to read and understand the way SEO works these days. If you spend 3 months you will read most of the details required for SEO. 6 months you can update yourself on past trends too. It is important to know the current situation and past so that you don’t make mistakes that was penalized by search engines before.

I stress again SEO is not rocket science anyone can do it. Anyone calling themselves SEO analyst or what ever crap don’t believe there are no terms like that. SEO is important but Search engine optimizers are not always important. fake watches copy rolex golden replica watch fake replica watches rolex for sale online

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.