Caffeine update - upcoming Caffeine update in Google updated my Matt cutts

Mattcutts Google's web spam head recently revealed in his blog mattcutts.com/blog/ that Google is about to make an update to their index. He named it as Caffeine update. This caffeine update seem to be an upgrade to the way Google indexes site. Not many visible changes to ranks i virtually see zero movement across our sites and our client sites.



He tells us to check Google ranking changes in this datacenter "http://www2.sandbox.google.com/". Only big visible change i see here is the wonderful update timings of sites. Almost all results show updated in few minutes or few hours which is amazing.
But one funny thing i noticed which i searched for "Google blog" i got this funny result with site links.


We usually see the notice "this site may harm your computer" when there is a virus alert and the site is infectious. Here a sitelink for Google blog looks very similar to a virus injection warning. :-) thats funny i hope Google realizes that fast or they might loose some people who are afraid to click a link that says a look alike warning like that.

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Keeping Top ranking for competitive phrase:

You get top ranking for competitive phrase. How to you sustain its rankings? We have used the knowledge gained over the years to keep competitive rankings consistently for more than 3 years but following some simple yet strong SEO tactics.

1. Make sure your links are consistent most of the time ranking drops happen when the existing links lose its value. Keeping looking for quality natural resources to get backlinks. There are many organizations out there willing to link out to quality websites without any monetary benefit. You can approach them and they will eventually link to you.
2. If you have achieved top ranking it doesn't justify you achieved everything. We need to make sure we keep adding quality contents, blogs and whatever you were doing before to come up on top.
3. Also if one phrase is ranking make sure you rank for more relative phrases, synonyms, plurals etc. This will help the search engines understand better your rankings are deserved and they will keep your ranking on top.



4. If a page ranks in search engine for top competitive phrase make sure you don't too much play with it. You can play around it not play with it. We never know what factors contribute to the ranking for a phrase and it's important not to mess it up.
5. Avoid using anything negative that might result in over optimization or penalty. When people get top rankings they get existed and tend to go more aggressive. Aggression not only hurts but your site can disappear from rankings for a long time.

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Some interesting stuffs in Co-op network:

You know anyone can create a custom search engine with Google. I just came across this interesting page where a guy gives out a search engine that can actually find do follow blogs.

https://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010363265520675485990:xjmxcyokkls. . . SO what is the use of do-follow blogs these blogs allow people to comment on their blogs without a no follow . Without a no follow means you can Spam the hell out of that Blog. But most do-follow blogs have effective Spam prevention systems they have pre-moderation enabled in most cases. SO I don't think there is any special benefit finding do-follow blogs. But being in an era of no follow its good to find some do-follow blogs.
When you create a custom search engine you can
# include one website, multiple websites, or specific web pages.
# Host the search box and results on your own website.
# Customize the colors and branding to match your existing web pages.

This custom search engine as it claims doesn't show all do-follow blogs. Some of the blogs coming up are actually no-follow. If you want to find do-follow blogs I recommend doing a search by your own and checking source code rather than counting on these search engines.

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2 sites on same server using same database:

I saw this question asked in one of the forums where I am a frequent reader. So what happens when a product sites use same database. We had a similar problem with one of our client. He has his own dedicated server where he hosts his websites. He is in clothing industry and its difficult to move his whole database that too he is on a dedicated server paying around 200$ a month. So if he decides to move to a different server for one site he needs to shed out huge amount of money. So he dedicated to use same database for 2 sites and we are suppose to optimize both sites and rank them.

One site started doing well and continued to stay on top position for a long time but the other website never came up. We tried all the tactics in SEO but still can't get the other website to rank. One year passed and 2 years passed still we are unable to rank that website. This is a clear indication Google doesn't like 2 sites using same database and hosted on same IP. We even modified 1000s of product descriptions but still we cannot make the site look unique for Google.

So I recommend in case you want to use same database for 2 sites don't host them together. Better move the database to a different hosting write unique product descriptions I am sure you can make the site rank and can gain traffic.

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Removing advertising or not advertising will show credibility:



Advertising on a new site is self-defeating. Shouldn't you be highlighting the quality of the content to show why your site is linkworthy? Removing ads shifts the focus to your content and why someone should link to the site.

In my experience it helps the link building process to remove advertising from a new site because webmasters like to link to quality information that is free. A lack of advertising presents a more positive face because some people tend to overlook the high quality of the content because of the ads, not even give the content a chance. Leaving out the ads puts your content front and center, there's nothing to distract from it. Even Google didn't have advertising when it first started.

New sites with advertising are a turnoff

I receive many requests to link to new sites. Number one reason I'll decline is advertising. It's poison. Advertising sends the message that the reason this person wants my link is so they can make a buck off my traffic. Why should I link to that?

What is the point of trying to monetize a new site with a trickle of traffic? Advertising revenue depends on traffic. Shouldn't you focus on building traffic first then monetizing the site after it's acquired?

Works for older sites with low traffic

Sites that have been around awhile but aren't performing well should be considered candidates for removal of advertising. What you have to gain long term may outweigh what little earnings you'll lose while you focus on building traffic to the site.
Works on established sites, too

Even established sites can benefit from temporarily removing advertising. If a sub-section is not performing well because of a lack of links/traffic, you may want to consider temporarily removing advertising in order to boost the success rate of your link building effort.

Personally I like sites which are ad-free, if you want to have a site link worthy don't show your visitors that you are madly money minded. Looking to always make money through advertising will spoil the trend to attract backlinks to your website. If you want quality links you need to back off on strong advertising on your website.

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Wikipedia wins on the death of Microsoft Encarta:

Encarta encyclopedia the largest and most used before Wikipedia came into existence is now laid to rest. Microsoft had decided to put Encarta to rest after a long and exhausting battle with Wikipedia.

We can call this the death of one monster and the rise of another. According to MSN Encarta website:

"Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Why are these Encarta Web sites and software products being discontinued?
Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft's goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today's consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

Microsoft's vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we've learned and assets we've accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality.

http://encarta.msn.com/guide_page_FAQ/FAQ.html



I remember my school days when I used to run around to get a copy of Encarta, my cousin gifted an encyclopedia book to me and I still have it. We never had a great resource like Wikipedia. Today Wikipedia is the most dominant resource on the website. Its one of the most used website today and the content quality is great. Also big difference between Encarta and Wikipedia is the commercial option. Wikipedia is totally free but you need to subscribe for Encarta encyclopedia. I am happy that encyclopedia is laid to rest. There is no way it's going to compete with Wikipedia and win the race.

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Keywords in URls and domains - is it still useful?

I think most would agree that a keyword friendly domain can be a major help for SEO in various ways. Domains and URL paths are a bit of a different consideration.

The URL itself is less of a signal these days, and so thinking too much about where in the URL keywords appear is probably too finicky.

However, as with any question that affects URLs, you need to make sure your URLs serve their major purpose as a user route into your site. If you have meaningful but short URLs, that should help SEO.

Generally, I would read from right to left in a URL - going from most specific information to least specific. So, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I is not great. www.youtube.com/entertainment/very-funny would tell a user (and a search engine) that you had something very funny, filed under entertainment, in a site named youtube.

A quick test that can help you evaluate the search engine impact of keywords in URLs is to compare results for a keyword to results for the same search without the keyword in the URL. But I would say instead of concentrating on these stuff if you can do what is best for your users I am sure you will do fine.

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Best CMS for adapted copywriting and search engine performance:

A content management system is a software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don't have to.

Joomla: Joomla is currently the best and leading content management system that will help you to build great content rich websites with ease. Joomla is an open source software means you get it totally for free from www.joomla.com , It is currently the best and most easy to use software it have got various awards for best performing CMS.

Drupal: Drupal is an other quality CMS that helps to easily publish , manage and organize variety of contents including blogs, content sites etc. You can use Drupal to build :
  • Community web portals
  • Discussion sites
  • Corporate web sites
  • Intranet applications
  • Personal web sites or blogs
  • Aficionado sites
  • E-commerce applications
  • Resource directories
  • Social Networking sites

Umberco: If you use .net hosting you can go for Umberco a friendly CMS which again is easy to use and comes with a load of great features.

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Quote for SEO criteria.

1. Competition: Competition is one of the most important factor when deciding a pricing for SEO. If the competition of the keywords is lesser then I am sure you can get ranking in a shorter period of time which will result in lesser price.

2. Keywords: Lots of sub factors are involved when it comes to keywords to determine the price for SEO service. Keywords can be global , regional , very much targeted, country wise and lot more. If you can get a clear picture of the keywords that will be targeted it will be easier to give a price.

3. Niche: You need to analyze the website thoroughly to know the niche the site targets its an important factor before deciding the price for SEO.

4. Time: SEO is a time consuming process it cannot be done in a day or week or month some sites take years to rank and some can be ranked in 2 months before quoting a price it's important to know how much time its going to take to rank a website.

5. Website quality: Some clients will come to you with a low quality website and will want you to rank, its much easier to rank quality websites with quality unique crawl able content than sites which doesn't have sufficient information pages. Make sure you set this as a criteria when you give a price quote.

Deciding the right price is very important you can scare away customers by quoting very high yet you can't burn your hands by quoting less. Make sure you have sufficient experience in giving price quotes. I have been giving price quotes for more than 6 years and it hardly takes me 10mts to decide the price for SEO for a website but it cannot be the same for amateur people. Research more I am sure you will get more ideas.

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Webmaster help videos : a must watch:








http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp

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Site: operator reporting lesser number of pages.

I am sure if you run a website and actively monitor it you will be aware that sometimes site: operator reports lesser number of results. Site: operator is used to find the number of pages indexed for a particular website for example: site:www.searchenginegenie.com will reveal all the pages that Google indexed for the website searchenginegenie.com .

Few of our clients and some of our external users have reported that site: operator sometimes report lesser number of pages than it usually used to show for their website. Some of the people who come to us with this question are also concerned that this could be another penalty. Ok, from our experience there is no reason to worry if site: operator reports lesser number of pages. This has always been the case Google has 1000s of clusters of computers spread throughout the world in different data centers they have, and not all the datacenters are update some of them have old data some have standard data and some have very fresh data. So when you make a query you tend to hit different datacenters and this will result in you hitting different results so if you see that your indexed pages are showing different don't worry about that it should just be that you are seeing a different set of results.

But you should be worried in one case if you see consistent drop of your indexed pages over a period of time then there is something you definitely need to worry. See if there is something wrong with your site and in case your site disappears after consistent drop in indexed pages 90% it's a penalty check for potential penalty in Google webmaster tools. If you find your site is penalized submit for reinclusion. Other than that there is nothing to worry about site: operator.

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Is SEO dead?

When I was going through webmaster world I came across an interesting featured post where the author says SEO is dead and it has been completely replaced by PPC, Social Media Marketing and Link building. Well running an SEO company for more than 5 years I am well aware that SEO has slowed down a bit. But the truth SEO is never dead or no where near to be in death bed. I am sure it will go on for at least 10 more years to come.

Yes I agree that traditional SEO is not there anymore. Now people are more SEO savvy and they are more educated than before. But better education and understanding is actually good for ethical SEO companies like us. We don't have to explain the whole process of SEO to them. Most client come to us by word of mouth referral and they are still coming because we did a good job for our current and past clients. Traditional SEO is dead for sure people don't seek us to write meta, title tags or rewrite URLs etc we are doing work completely different from what we used to do before. We are more concentrating of setting up one way links which is the most difficult part of SEO. Its not easy to get free one way links these days so we need to invent new innovative ideas to get one way back links. Though this is a difficult part we are able to find some really quality ways.

Especially we were able to get a lot of success for our clients by widget optimization, social media optimization etc. I want to remind the author of the thread that SMO, link building has always been part of SEO. In fact SEO is the mother of all new innovative tactics that come online now. SEO will never die at least for another 10 years but it will keep evolving like the way we see the world. Its not the same world that we saw 10 years back and it's the same case with SEO 10 years down the road you will see stuff which you never had seen before.

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Is it necessary to look at competitors while implementing SEO?

All the growing businesses all over the world discover that search engine optimization help them gain a competitive edge. But the marketing experts say that it is also equally important to know what the competitors are doing to achieve the goal.

It is possible for any one to develop the SEO strategy without knowing about the competition taking place around you. But it is always better to have the information of the competitors in order to perform better from their rivals. Before implementing any strategy it is better to do some researches on the search engine optimization, so that they can learn more about themselves as well as the competitor?

This research will give you an idea about the competitors like who are they, where are they, what are they doing, what is right or wrong about their campaign, is their campaign effective. These ideas if taken in to consideration will help you to develop better search engine optimization. Which will help you perform better than your competitor and will lead you to success.

So it is always better to look at competitor and their strategy to for implementing better SEO.

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Ten important myths for search engine optimization

1) All the Meta tags are equally important.
2) There should be a timely submission of new post in order to drive traffic to your site.
3) SEO involves less expenditure when compare to the PPC as SEO clicks are free. It is always more cost effective than sponsored or banner advertising. You just need to pay page set up and monitoring charges.

4) SEO is better than PPC for long term. Because in PPC you are visible in search page for short period of time but if you get good ranking in organic SEO. You will definitely drive good traffic to your web site.
5) Always try to hire SEO firm than in house SEO as it involve lots of other expenditure. Hiring a SEO firm provides you with different specialists writing, submitting, redesigning, and posting your site by just paying certain amount.
6) You should optimize all the pages of your website with keywords.
7) Content plays a major role for ranking the site high. You need to implement off site and on the site SEO to get better search engine optimization.
8) Always try to target competitive keywords in order to improve your site ranking.

9) Lots of SEO firm guarantee ranking and optimization but in reality no firm can guarantee ranking in any search engines.
10) Most of SEO firm also demand commitment but you should not rely or agree on any long term commitment. Just tie up yourself only with monthly commitments unless or otherwise you are satisfied with firm and its progress.

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What's the best way to determine a web page value?

What's the best way to determine a web page value?
The best way to determine web page value is treating the outdated pages and getting rid of multiple pages.

It is believed that out-of-stock product pages are not at all useful to any visitor but still carry a lot of weight. So it is necessary to do something worthwhile for the visitors and to take SEO power for granted. Outdated pages can be made worthwhile by the following:
Preserve the page and add "Related product" section.
Put some new content on the old URL and move the old content to a new URL.
Delete the pages and let the return from 4o4 header (if any of the page that has no value at all).
Move the pages to archive and amend internal linking to "leak" less internal PR.
Keep the pages but remove all references from the site; if they have to little value then think about that.
Redirect the pages to new relevant version of 301.
Next is to get rid of some multiple web pages without loosing rankings or getting in to any sort of penalties. WebMasterWorld thread discusses the issues of removing multiple low quality pages as a benefit to the users.
But before deciding what to be done to these pages it is necessary to first define its SEO value. At the WebMasterWorld forums a thread was discussed on how to evaluate the worth of page, so how can a page SEO value can be determined?

Having a toolbar PR, Organic Ranking and Traffic are bad indicator. Pages with Graybar PR get many Google referred traffics and back links too. Organic Ranking cannot be a good performance indicator because ranking come and goes as and when. There are many criteria that influence rankings like Google personalization, Geo targeting, new "Search Wiki" Google feature, new competing pages, etc. just like ranking traffics are also temporary. Traffic comes and goes accordingly. Therefore, with help of this SEO value of pages cannot be determined. But external in-links can probably be a good indicator and with the help of external in-links SEO value of page can be determined because if the page is able to pass PR it does have value.

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SEO experiment keyword rich links webmasterworld member

A webmaster world member asks "Hi guys, I am doing an interesting experiment on two of my more throw away domains. The experiment is testing to try and determine more information about how linking to the homepage affects rankings. The testing involves various controls - linking to the root domain from the nav only using 'home', linking from the nav using 'main keyword', linking from nav using 'variations' of keyword, linking from content only (while nav links saying home) to home using 'keywords' etc, etc.

First, I should mention some points about the domain.
4 years old Owned by me Dedicated IP Canonical comdomized HTML only Ranks top 5 in Google.com for main, second and third keyword phrases. Total of 90 pages, all unique content (written by me)
Testing was done over a 3 month period, with grace periods in between testing.
Here is so far what I have found. Might tell us a little about the threshold and re ranking filters
1. Linking home from every page in content using the same keyword caused 6 page drop in rankings.
2. Linking home using keyword in nav on all pages caused the same drop.
3. Link home from every page in content using variations caused a 3 page drop.
4. Linking home from the first 10 pages listed in google.com for site:domain.com/* brought increased ranking (from 5th to 3rd)
What is really interesting is that I gotten this down to the 'by page' factor. When I *slightly* cross the threshold and add links to two extra pages, and then wait until they are cached, I tip the scales and drop, to page 6.
What is further interesting is that linking home from content using variations of keywords WAS quite effective to a point, after which the site plummeted.

As well, this might point to a 'hard line' being crossed in terms of threshold, at one point I had the website going between position 4 and 51-60 for the same keyword every second day (flipping back and forth)
My test will be about trying to -950 the website by being ridiculously deliberate in nav linking, and then seeing if I can reverse the results by removing those (and how long it takes for the trust to be reinstated to the website) "

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SEO firm sued by attorney General - Washington business

SEO firm sued by attorney General:

"
Visible.net and Captures.com accused of violating consumer protection and telemarketing laws
SEATTLE – The Washington Attorney General's Office is suing a Redmond-based seller of e-commerce services whose failed promises to rev up Web traffic for small businesses drove many customers to file complaints.
"When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull rank," Attorney General Rob McKenna said. "Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn't always receive the top listings and other services they were promised."

The lawsuit announced today by the AGO was filed late Wednesday in King County Superior Court. It accuses Visible.net, Captures.com and their owner, Gilbert Walker, of violating state consumer protection and telemarketing laws.
The defendants also do business as WebMarketingSource.com and sell Web site design, search-optimization and other Internet marketing services, along with providing e-commerce services to process online purchases for merchant customers. They promote their services through their Web sites and by telemarketing. Packages include an initial startup fee of $3,749.99 up to $9,749.99 plus a monthly fee of $39.99 to $99.99.
Senior Counsel Paula Selis, an assistant attorney general who heads up the Attorney General's Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit, said the Attorney General's Office and Better Business Bureau have received nearly 90 complaints about the defendants, showing a pattern of recurring problems since at least 2005.
The suit accuses the defendants of the following violations, among others:
Failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor and failing to provide written confirmation of a consumer's rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act.
Misrepresenting the ability to significantly increase traffic to customer Web sites by achieving top search-engine rankings and failing to deliver other promised services.

Falsely claiming an affiliation with other marketers including Specialty Merchandise Company, a so-called drop-ship wholesaler.
Claiming that its customer service representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls.
Failing to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests.
Continuing to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitting alleged debts to collection agencies.
The state is seeking civil penalties and consumer restitution in addition to a court order halting the deceptive practices."

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SEO Spam again needs to stop to get good name for SEO industry

We need to top these Spam SEOs and SEO companies from sending out bulk mails to get some good name for ethical SEO companies. Their claims are ridiculous.

"Hi,

The purpose of this letter is to introduce "88888888888Solution." - an India
based company and Our link popularity service.

We have been handling SEO and link popularity campaigns since last 2.5
years for our numerous satisfied clients across the glob. We've strong
and experienced team of Link popularity experts, who has expertise to provide
high quality, ethical and theme based links. We do not use any shortcut
tricks, software and FFA/Spam/web rings site while creating links and most
importantly, we charge very nominal for phenomenal service, please see
below to get an idea about our methodologies for link popularity campaigns
:

Our Approach for securing links :

(a.) First of all of we analysis the campaign to get familiar with current
statistic, relevant industry and competitors, It makes us easy to approach
right link partners.
(b.) Second step includes creation of database of relevant websites which
are to be requested for Link Exchange through emails and form submissions
- if they have implemented form for link exchange.
(c.) In 3rd step : we manually draft emails as a link exchange request
to webmasters through Outlook express, we offer our web directories/site
to webmasters for link back basically, we follow 3 way link exchange process
which yields a ONE Way link for client's campaign.
(d.) Finally, we provide link backs to those webmasters who revert us positively
to finished off with link exchange.

We ensure that we never indulge in any Spam activities as we never send
follow up to webmasters who do not respond to us in our first email and
If someone doesn't agree with 3 way exchange we simply delete his/her id
from database.

Please get back to me for any information/queries.

Eagerly looking for your earliest reply.

Thanks & Regards,
--
Sales Team

:

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Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website-Trust & Creditability

Seven Building Blocks of a Destination Website-Trust & Creditability:
The initial six building blocks in creating a Destination Website; proficient information, usability, website design, distinctive value proposition, time and presence, and voice are all things that we, more or less, have straight control over. The exemption is time. We don't control time but we do control how we build up our presence over time.
Trust and credibility are also partly in our control but also two of the hardest things to attain. We find out whether we move forward in a reliable way, and whether or not to act in a plausible manner, but no matter how hard we try, we cannot wish those two things into existence. We cannot force someone else to believe us. We cannot tell someone to find us plausible and expect them to do so on our word.

We can go about doing all we can to build both trust and credibility, but, in the end, whether we are trusted or not lie not with our individual efforts but other people's perceptions. If you spend months and years showing you can be trusted and proving that you're plausible, but one knows or believes it to be true, then you just aren't. These are not physical things that can be touched; they simply must be understood to be factual.
How to build trust and credibility:
Answer phone calls and return emails:
I'm astounded at how often I run across businesses that don't do this. You would think that this is one of the fundamental no-brainers of doing business. Heck, if you can't return a call or reply to an email, what signals are you sending to the prospective customer? First question: are you a lawful business? Second question: if I have a problem, which's going to be there to help me out?
It's bad enough that prospective customers call and get a voice mail during business hours. Shoddier when those calls are not returned. Rule of thumb, you have about 24 hours to reply to messages and emails before your trustworthiness is questioned. However, if you really want the customer, you should reply much faster. Twenty-four hours is a long time on the web and if you wait too long, you very soon might have lost them to a competitor.

Keep information secure:
Security is vital to conveying trust. Whether you are selling products or just capturing leads, visitors need to know that their information is going to be kept safe and it won't be used for nefarious purposes. Using trust symbols such as Thawte, Better Business Bureau, and HackerSafe can all provide further feelings of trust. Linking to solitude and security policies from your forms can help as well.
Open communication:
Keeping communication open between you and your clients is crucial. This is more than just returning calls, but its dynamic participation. Both in meeting customer's needs but also in foreseeing them. It means finding where your audience is and engaging with them in discussion, chat rooms, blogs and the like. Keeping communication open gives you opportunity to be truthful with your shortfalls, own up to your mistakes, and to present yourself as you truly are, a real person who cares genuinely about the needs of your audience.
Put the customer first:
We've all heard it said that "the consumer is always right." Now I don't certainly believe that's true in all situations, but the point is, to survive in a consumer oriented business, we have to put the customer first. This means going out of your way to make certain the customer is satisfied with their purchase and transaction and if not, finding out what areas they are displeased in and provide a solution to make them satisfied.
Exceed expectations:
One of the best ways to build hope and trustworthiness is to simply exceed the expectations of your audience. This can be both easy and hard. It's easy to find little ways to go the extra mile. To give a little extra service or extra benefit. It can be difficult, however, if you over-sell yourself. If you do that then you make it hard enough just to meet expectations. Look for opportunities to do something your clients or prospects don't expect. Ways to prove to your customers that they are special to you.
Of course, all this isn't just about building perceptions, but proving those perceptions to be factual. Creating a perception of trust, only to have it proven fake is far worse then never having built the aura of trust to begin with. If you fool visitors into thinking you're plausible, they'll soon find out you're not. Both are difficult to rebuild than to build in the first place.
Putting them all together:
When building a Destination Website, all six other building blocks can be in place, but without this seventh one the first six are futile. Usability, voice, design, expert information, etc., all just become part of the hoax. But, if you are really building up trust that can be trusted and credibility that is credible, the first six building blocks all lend a hand to that end. They all play a role at helping to establish and prove your credibility.
Very unbeaten businesses, both on-and offline have been built on this last building block alone. In fact, only this last one is necessary for success, though all seven are essential to build a Destination Website. Like any good foundation, all seven building blocks provide support for the other six, with faith and credibility being the most vital piece of the pie.

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Publicis to buy performics from Google

Performics a search marketing firm and formerly a part of Double click is now being sold to Publicis for an undisclosed amount. Industry experts had been debating about a potential buy out performics due to the conflict of interest of Google's polices. Google has the policy Dont be evil and if they run performics many of the other companies will complain that performics customers will get a boost from Google.

Also Search Engine Experts believe if Google runs performics some employees in performics will learn the GOogle search ranking algorithm and this will make their life easier in ranking their client sites.

Washington post reports
"Publicis, which aims to generate 25 percent of its sales from the Internet by
2010, said it would acquire Chicago-based Performics Search Marketing from
Google for an undisclosed amount.
The unit will boost Publicis's strategic
entity unveiled in June called Vivaki, aimed at spurring growth at its digital
advertising units such as Digitas and Zenith-Optimedia.
In a statement,
Publicis quoted the research house Jupiter Media saying the global search market
was worth an estimated $9.9 billion in 2008 and is projected to grow at 12
percent compound annual growth rate through 2012. "


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Google's Amit Singhal talks about technologies behind Google

Amit Singhal - Google Fellow and senior Google scientist has come up with a beautiful explanation on how well the technologies work behind the ranking algorithm of Google,

I agree with Amit that Search has come a long way from being a just a search engine to understanding more of users queries on what they want. Now Search engines can understand synonyms, complicated queries, language queries and a lot more of these type of stuff that were once far away from Google.

As per Amit Google has grown to a massive index from what it had been before. Now they have an index in multiple tera bytes before it used to be some Gigs Only. Now Google's advancement in understanding pages had come a long way before it used to just be the keywords on the page title, and the backlink anchor text now it has become much more better. As he points out in the article even without the phrase "galleria sprovieri londra" the site sprovieri.com ranks No.1 because Google has much more sophisticated system to identify the authority of
a site.

Some of the examples he has given for understanding queries is excellent. Kofee annan is for someone searching for kofi annan and Google does say whether you are looking for it, similarly when someone searches for Dr.Zhivago then he is actually searching for a Dr with the name Zhivago where as when he is searching for "rodeo dr" he is actually searching for Rodeo Dr a road . similarly he talks about other queries like "back bumper repair" ramstein Ab, b&b ab which searches for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta.

The most surprising query is the one where he talks about the new york times square's famous church. Obviously New york times or Ny times refer to the famous magazine or website Nytimes.com. Now when a search like "new york times square church" Google has to figure out that its actually about the church in Madison square New york. Now when you check the query Google actually understands it pretty well and guides to the right site. Similarly as Amit Points out understanding the users are an other major factor. Google has to be the best in figuring out where the users actually came from that way they have the option to understand and deliver relevant results based on their local area requirements. Google does this very effectively.

Overall Google has been doing a great job and i wish Amit and everyone behind Google's algorithm to bring more innovative things

Official Blog post here
Vijay,

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Search engine optimization URL change is it recommended?

Search Engine optimization URL change from static to Dynamic

Many have asked the question what happens if the URL is changed from html to PHP or ASP or vice versa. Well in Search engine optimization URLs shouldnt be changed often. Search engines recognize a page based on the URLs so once they are indexed its not recommended to play with them much. Google assigns pagerank to individual URLs based on backlinks to that page from other pages from the site or from external sites. So if a Url is changed it will affect Search engine optimization. The pagerank of that page is lost and Google also have to drop that page from the index. Also till the page is dropped you need to wait or Google will index the new page with the new URL which will result in lots of confusion happening. Duplicate pages will be created and at times the version you want to have will drop off. So its important to decide which version of urls you want to use whether php or asp or html or htm or what ever decide before you start designing the site. There is no difference between a PHP url and a html URL so if you think in future there will be dynamic contents in the page better name it PHP or ASp or any dynamic extension of the code you want to use.

Ok if you have unavoidable reasons where you want to change the page extensions then make sure the old pages are 301 redirected to the new pages that are created that way you won't loose the value of the old page. 301 redirect for all coding is available online you can use it.

Best recommendation don't change URLs unless you have unavoidable reasons. That is the best for Search engine optimization purposes.

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Avoid Sponsoring Wordpress theme - Beware of wordpress theme sponsoring

Google has been very tough recently on sponsoring wordpress themes. I know at least one company who actively seeks business to place links on sponsored wordpress themes. I recommend to stay away from those shady tactics. Sponsoring wordpress themes and getting link from the footer is same as buying links there are lot of sites affected by this activity. If Google sees unbalanced links coming to commercial sites from wordpress themes. They will devalue it so there is no point in paying for it. Also there are situations where a site resulted in plus 60 or 950 penalty after sponsoring wordpress themes.

So is it worth to sponsor theme pay for it and finally get banned? I recommend instead of using your resources on tactics like that find innovative ways to make people link to your site. This is 10 times more benefit able than sponsoring themes.

If you develop a word press them you have all the rights to get the necessary credit for it. But if you are using it for commercial gains and manipulate search engine rankings then you should be ready to face the consequences. I recommend stay away from ideas that are hurting search engines badly. Search engines do have a tolerance level but if 1000s of sponsored links are damaging the reputation of results then they will act against it.

vijay,

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Selling links not wrong when you are Matt Cutt's Friend.

Barry of Seroundtable.com has been selling links on his site for a long time. If you go to "www.seroundtable.com", you can see a bunch of text links without Nofollow. Even he has the TPR penalty where his Toolbar Pagerank is reduced from 6 to 4 which is an indication that her has lost trust with Google. But it seems Matt Cutts doesn't care about all these stuff since Barry is his friend.

Barry is a long term friend to Matt Cutts and now in recent Matt's Post https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-webmaster-chat-tons-of-fun/ he gave a bunch of links to Barry for posting the 2nd webmaster live chat transcript. He does this because Barry is his friend and if anyone else posts the same script he just ignores them.

When the first Google webmaster live chat happened we were the first to post the script here . Even Matt Cutts knew we posted but he just ignored them as if it never existed. I can understand now how important its to attend Search Conferences and make Matt your friend.

You can have 2 advantages.

1. Sell as much text links as you want and still Matt cutts will ignore you and will be happy to be your friend.

2. Will give bunch of links from his blog since he likes you.

Lets follow the new rule of Text link advertising be friend with Google and you will be ignored even if you sell 1000 links.

Vijay,

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Maile Ohye of Google defines IP delivery, geolocation, and cloaking



Hi My name is Maile Ohye and I am a support Engineer with Google webmaster central. Today I want to discuss a fairly advanced topic of IP delivery well talk about the background and some considerations if you choose to use IP delivery on your site.

Today's topic will consist of 4 areas. First we will discuss the background on IP delivery and this is why a webmaster choose to implement technique such as IP delivery. Next Ill talk about how Google.com serves our users. And you can see some of the ways we server users based on their IP addresses. And after you see some of the techniques at Google.com ill show you some ones not to use. These are examples that are post in the case of major websites that uses IP delivery but on sub-optimum methods. These are things to shy away from and last our recap on design considerations. So when you want to design your site for IP delivery first you would have a question why would a webmaster have to choose IP delivery.

One major reason is IP delivery helps target information to users. So lets say you have a .com URL and your Business is all in English and you are doing very well in United States and if you want to broaden your market place and perhaps server users in Europe then you realize a potential customer in Germany will have different needs than a American user. For example they might have different languages as well as different regional concerns such as what's your shipping tax when you ship product to my country. That's where IP delivery comes into play, IP delivery is the process of delivering specific contents to users based on their IP address. So if you can detect a users IP address when a request comes in and understand what region they are coming from then you will be able to target specific content such as Ads that are more pertinent to their region so this might be say you have a user coming from California based on their IP address you might say we have low shipping cost to California or if they are detected to be from Germany you might say oh you don't have taxes for handling for users in Germany. So lets make this more concrete by seeing what Google bot does. So that this scenario where you have a user in Switzerland by detecting their Switzerland based IP address and your browser is set to german which is the language of the region if you then visit www.google.com rather than being shown the content of www.google.com you are actually likely will be redirected to www.google.ch and this is Switzerland's top level domain. And here you see the content and it will be in German as well, so in this instance google not only utilizes the IP address but also the language settings. Now a slight variation on this scenario lets say your users are in Switzerland and you are just vacationing actually in America which is just there. So you still have the Switzerland IP address but you might have your browser set as English settings. So now lets say this user visits www.google.com instead of being redirected as a formal user their URL might usually remain www.google.com .

And they see similar contents as most of us see in United states but this page will be updated since they have Switzerland IP address and it will have a link saying go to Google Switzerland. So here is an area where Google uses an IP address to serve this user better information. So now you saw some things what Google uses. What are some of the How not to's. Well these are some of the mishaps we see on the web and one idea is a website might choose to bought in the market place and by translating all of their existing content but serving all these modified contents on their same URL but haven't modified their site structure. But this is going to be problematic because URLs has to be probably unique should be largely same content for URL. There will some issues that will arise when these things happen. For example users cannot share their URLs among different people if they are not from the same IP range so I see a great product on your URL and I am in America and I want to share the URL to my friend in Japan you might want to do something totally different or update the complete thing in Japanese but that might not the way we want to share it we might want to see the same content and an other side-effect of using the same URLs for different content such as different languages is that you need to remember search engine crawlers can come from all over the world.
We can have a number of IP addresses so lets say your .com site serves 90% of your users in English and you tried to reach 5% that are in German so you rather have search results show English Contents. But lets say a search engine crawls you from German IP and you give them all german contents for those URLs its very possible that a search engine can overwrite your English data with that German content which can result in titles and description in different language than you desire. An other how not to is to serve Googlebot specifically different contents than you do for users. This is called cloaking and it's a violation of our webmaster guidelines so remember if you are implementing IP delivery then you want to server Googlebot the same content you serve to users with a similar IP address. So how you have some things that Google uses and also some of the things How not to use lets just consider some design considerations. AS we discussed earlier keep each URL consistent serve largely same content on each URL, this means that if you have dynamic portions that you contain them or limit them to small areas.

So for Google we have link that says go to Google Switzerland. An other thing that you can use is the same product that everyone use like regional coupons which says low shipping cost to Germany. In tandem with that idea you can create separate URLs with more varied content so if you translated your contents to different languages remember you also want to create sub-domains, sub-directories or even obtain a top-level domain for that information and if you choose to do that say you have German content now you might put that on example.com/de or on a Top Level Domain example.de. And if you use sub-domains or sub-directories remember that if they are verified you can use webmaster tools for Geo-location and there you can take example.com/de and target that to the location of Germany. And last keep in mind all your users ip address and utilizing IP delivery doesn't solve all your problems. You need to understand users and their browser settings because you might have a English user who might be on a vacation in Germany. So keep in mind that you can use the except language header that comes with the request. To give your users the most optimize results. So thanks so much for watching this section on IP delivery. For more webmaster information please checkout webmaster central at google.com/webmasters

Maile Ohye

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Martin Buster Good post on Brett's Link theme pyramid.

Martin Buster Webmasterworld Moderator made an interesting post where he discusses about links using Brett Tabke's Link theme Pyramid he says

"1. Anchor text should match the page it's linking to. If the anchor says red widgets, particularly for a page meant to convert for red widgets, it should have the phrase red widgets on the page.
I know some people will say this opens you up to OOP but I think as long as there are variations in the links, then you're good to go. Because of the natural non-solicited links I've received on some sites, I've become a believer in the ability of the linking sites relevance to a query being able to transfer over to the linked-to page.

Why would one consider a page about red and blue widgets to be relevant for blue widgets? Looking at it from the point of view of relevance to the query, does it make sense to return a page about red and blue when the user is looking for blue? Looking at it from the point of conversions, if someone is querying for blue doesn't it make sense to return a page dedicated to blue?
PPC advertisers understand the value of having a landing page that matches the query. PPC advertisers understand the value of an optimized ad for inspiring targeted and converting click-through. Organic SEO should follow suit. A dedicated organic page can utilize a specific title and meta description for the same purpose. This means building specific links to specific pages.
I don't think it's adequate for the search user to query babysitting for boys and get a page for babysitting in general. So why build links to a general page when a specific page will not only be more relevant but convert better?
2. Hubs Getting back to Brett's theme pyramid, imo general anchors should point to general pages. Specific anchors should point to the specific pages. I don't understand why people are trying to obtain specific anchors to general pages.
Why are hub pages being created that are simply a big page-o-links to specific pages? Hubs are great starting points, imo they should be more than a page of links. I think this is especially critical for e-commerce where high level topics include brands or kinds of products and sub-pages include models or specific manufacturers.

These second level pages can be cultivated to perform for more general terms, but also in conjunction with, for example buy-cycle long tail phrases like reviews, comparison, versus, etc. Take that into account for the link building.
3. Is the home page really the most relevant page of the link? Here is another place where link building is wasted, imo. I think it makes sense to focus on relevance/links to supporting pages that then create a groundswell of relevance back to the home page for the more general terms.
Reviewing affiliate conversions and AdSense earnings, it's been my experience that specific pages perform better than general home pages. If you're lucky or by design people will click through to the pages they are looking for. But shouldn't you be showing those pages to the user first? And don't you think the search engines want to show those specific pages too? I think this may explain some ranking drops some people are experiencing for home pages that used to rank for multiple terms.
4. Longtail Matching This is where on page SEO comes into play. This refers to geographic and buy-cycle phrases. Building partial matches works, imo. Someone showed me a site that was a leader in specific searches but those pages would perform better if they had the names of cities and provinces on the page. Ranking for Babysiting for Boys is fine, but Babysiting for Boys + (on page) Tampa is better. "

Source: webmasterworld.com/link_development/3676520.htm

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matt cutts says widgets are ok as long as its not abused

In a recent interview with Eric, Matt Cutts Google's Web Spam Head has agreed that widgets are a type of link bait if used in a proper way.

We at Search Engine Genie provide PageRank Button a useful Widget where users don't need to have Google toolbar to view the PageRank of your page. They can just view the PageRank from the button we provide you. Our PageRank Button users our custom coding to query Google's Database to query for PageRank of a page and will display it for you on your website. We are in process of developing more widgets especially a widget which will query Google, Yahoo, MSN for Number of pages indexed, number of back links and will display it on your page. It will be released in a week.

Matt Cutts also re-iterated Widgets for the purpose of Spamming the search engines cannot be accepted. Some of them are like hiding links in a Web Counter or linking to any random site for the benefit of pushing the linking page's rankings etc. Also links in non-embedded tag or no script when using widgets is spam. We at Search Engine Genie never resort to those type of tactics.

We already discussed this before many aggressive SEOs contact word press theme developers and insert their link as a credit back to their site. This is again an aggressive tactic and Matt Cutts has warned not to use such tactics to boost Search Engine Rankings.

You can expect lot more widgets from Search Engine Genie in coming future. Our programmers are working towards it. We want Search Engine Genie to be an useful hub webmasters and site owners.

Good Luck,
Search Engine Genie Team

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Mcdar.net site suspended and the infamous datacenter watch tool gone

Mcdar.net was the first site to give Google datacenter comparision of results. We do have a similar tool like the way they had https://www.searchenginegenie.com/data/index.htm . For some reason mcdar.net tool is no longer available their site shows a suspension notice i am not sure what's the reason whether its temporary or they are gone for ever.

Though they just left it unmaintained i am sure the site owner still runs the site active lets wait and see whether they will be back our not. Till that time use our tool and our tool is totally Ad free.

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Danny Predicts HP Search Engines for the future

Danny Sullivan the owner and operator of Searchengineland.com and a well renowned expert in Search Engine industry has predicted future Search Engines will more rely on Human editing and decision making in Search results.

According to him Human Powered Search engines will be the future

Search 1.0 back in 1996 was concentrating on Onpage factors.

Search 2.0 ( Birth of Google ) around 1998 started off as a year for offpage Optimization

Search 3.0 2007 is the year for Universal results.

In future Search 4.0 will be more about Human editing in Search results to deliver best results.

Article is here http://searchengineland.com/080528-131813.php and its very interesting to read. Read the article and follow the link from it to Sphinn to discuss it.

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Is TPR Penalty back - Google's Toolbar Pagerank Reduction Seem to be visible again

It seems Google's TPR penalty is back, Google around February this year brought a new type of penalty for sites that buy / Sell links. Its called the TPR penalty. In this type of penalty Google will reduce the pagerank of sites that are suspected of Buying or Selling Backlinks. It seems the penalty is back and more sites are affected.

A member has reported Pagerank reduction to his website forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=862890 here.

If you see TPR affecting your site please post here. We are doing some research on this and would love to hear feedback from others. We want to see whether TPR penalty affects only sites that Buy and Sell links or it affects innocent sites caught up inbetween. We have seen some sites loose TB PR without any link selling or buying that is why we need to ASK.

SEG

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Can links from foreign sites hurt your Google US rankings?

I have seen more and more people getting worried about their US ranking affected just because they get links from sites hosted in foreign countries. I recommend there is nothing to worry because of this.

Google ofcourse geo-targeting buy they also have ways to relate links to sites regardless of where they come from. If your site is hosted in US and have enough US backlinks i wouldn't worry about links from other sites.

Its very normal to get backlinks from other language sites especially if you run an information site. We get ton of backlinks from Japanese, swedish, german, spanish and lots and lots of other language sites still our rankings never moved. So i wouldn't worry about it. Just keep improving your site and always lookout for natural backlinks it will be a hit.

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Hilarious image of yahoo's bragging on Petabyte database

Yahoo's bragging about their new improvement in database size of their petabyte database. Its a very cute image designed by our designer with great inside knowledge in SEO,

yahoo petabyte database

Yahoo's petabyte database cartoon



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SEO Fight - Shoemoney , Greg, Graywolf , Ian , Taylor


A nice image portraying current fight whether SEO is here to stay or No future for SEO. Our designer did a pretty good job on designing a nice cartoon on this event


Enjoy the image and feel free to comment
For more Search Engine related Humour images and cartoons visit https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm
https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-1.html
https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-2.html
Feel free to keep visiting our mail SEO blog and SEO cartoons page we will be updating latest events as cartoons twice every week,

Good Luck
SEG Team,

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Random text / Rotating text is it good for Search Engines?

I am sure you would have wondered whether showing random text to search engines are a good index and whether it helps in search engine benefit.

As fas as i know i don't see any special search engine benefit for this i have seen many blogs that are updated few times a day so mostly the search engines don't see the content they saw today the next day. Ofcourse this page can also be considered showing random text but search engines love those blogs since they are constantly updated.

So random contents as long as it is done for Good reasons will be good for search engines. I recommend not to abuse it since there are people who use methods like Cloaking where one type of content is showed to the search engines and an other type of content is showed to the users. Also remember the random contents are unique contents instead of contents syndicated through feeds. When you are using feeds to show random contents i am sure the same content is already shown up in a different site so there won't be any benefit from it.

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What will you ask a SEO firm

There is a discussion going on highrankings forum about questions that needs to be asked to a SEO firm . People keep asking this questions and i have already covered about this in my previous postings here. The SEO thread starter asks what is the best question to be asked.

Well there are 1000s of SEOs who call them companies, 1000s of SEO teams who call them companies. So what makes a good SEO company well first research what is the expertise of the company how many employees they have, how many work full time in SEO etc.



Here are some valid questions you can ask.




  1. What is the most competitive keyword your company has ranked and how long it has stayed or is staying in Google top 10 rankings?

  2. Can you explain some of the methods you use to gain ranking for our sites, is there something against search engine guidelines?

  3. Give us some of your clients who are doing great in search engines, getting maximum traffic with good ROI and is with you for more than 2 years?

  4. What is your client retention rate and success rate in search engine rankings?

  5. What is success when it comes to search rankings?


I can imagine more but these will be on my top priority list

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SEO Tools to be upgraded with Ajax Technologies

We have the best , most comprehensive list of SEO tools for FREE here https://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm , All tools are provided Adfree to give the best experience for our users. Right now we are in process of upgrading all our SEO tools to the latest Ajax Technologies. Remember we will continue to provide all our tools Adfree which has always been our policy.

lyfavor we ask from our loyal tools users is please link to the tools, that brings attention to the tools which will result in backlinks which will result in increased traffic and search engine rankings. We are more than happy to live with it. Currently we have around 50 tools. We will be expanding the number of tools to around 75 with an investment of 8,000$. We are happy to do it as long as our users are happy. Again though we invest we will not make the tools paid tools like our competitors. We are in a open source world and we love to give our stuff free.

Text link brokering companies and other Search engine related sites please dont contact us for paid text link or banner advertising on our site we will never now or infuture sell links. We do get lot of requests and all requests go into Trash without any consideration so don't waste your time asking us to selling links.

Search Engine Genie Team

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Most recent SEO related Informative Thread in Google Groups.

I have already read this thread in detail but i keep reading it again and again. Just one single thread and it has ton of information from some of the best Search Engine Experts. Especially I enjoy the SEO expert's friendliness with Search Engines. Most of the forums i see there will be a huge crowd ready to bash Google. But this thread is so much fun to read just because it has real valuable information from experts like Matt Cutts, John Muller, Aaron Pratt, JLH, SEO101 etc.

I recommend everyone to read this thread and understand how a webmaster was able to over come his penalty and get back his ranking in Google. Accept you are wrong and Google is always ready to forgive. We had a client who came to us with a penalized site. They bought links from TLA and Google has detected those links and imposed some sort of penalty. We reviewed the site and recommended client to remove all paid links and file a re inclusion. You know what his answer was?

"Google is the looser since it has banned his site. Google is unlucky because it doesn't have his company site in their index" . Come on client if not your site Google has millions of sites to index and they are not worried if one aggressive site is not in their index even though it might be world's best. It took us lot of time to convince him to clean up paid BLs. Finally he did but still he was not ready to give up his Ego and submit re inclusion. We on behalf of him filed a re inclusion and finally the site came back to Good top rankings. He was all praises for us but the truth we didn't do anything all we did was explain in detail mistakes that was previously done on site and said that it will never be repeated again. Google accepted our words and included the site so lesson learnt if you want Google to send free traffic for your site play by their guidelines if you going to spam them face the consequences.

Read that thread again its better than my voice

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SEO for Beginners download powerpoint slideshow


A Very simple slide show on SEO for beginners, Download and enjoy the slide demonstration i am sure its good for beginners and Newbies into SEO.


Please make sure to give appropriate credit if you like the slide show.


Leave a comment if you have questions about the slide,




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Dont teach how to run business for Search Engines.

So what's up with the paid text link debate. I have seen enough places where people complain Google is teaching them how to run their website and Business. Is that considered Joke of 2008. SEOs are here because Google and other search engines are here. There is no special technological industry named SEO. This whole industry is here because of flourishing Search engines so why complain them.

Text link advertising is not the traditional way you advertise? You do it for Search Engines. Everything you do for search engines be ready to face the consequences. Want to ride behind the back of a Search Engine make sure you play by the rules. Search engines have the rights to penalize text link publishers/advertisers manually, algorithmically by editorial review anyway they want way as long as it improves the quality of their results. Why complain that Search engine's are teaching you to run a business while actually you are the one who is teaching Search engines how to run a business. As the Search Engine experts have stated you are free to do anything on your website and the same way Search engines have every right to do anything with their algorithm as long as its for the best for their users. I am part of a SEO company too and I always Bow to any changes Google make if there is a ranking change for our sites or our client sites we try to see what mistake was done and find a solution. We never put the blame on any Search Engine. As long as we are in Search Engine Optimization industry lets be close to Search Engines and play by their rules. If we move a bit away from their guidelines lets face the consequences.

I humbly request Search Quality engineers like Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts not to try and defend what you are doing, keep doing what's best for your users and don't worry when somebody tries to curse Google for something they do with their algorithm. If 1000 SEOs join together and curse Google for penalizing paid links what does it show? They want Google to stop penalizing paid links so that they can keep buying links and keep manipulating results its as simple as that. I cannot find an alternate reason for it i am sure its not the reason you are looking for that is best for your users. So keep doing what's best for your algorithm and users and please dont justify and try to defend your ideas. People who love Search Engines will know how to appreciate it.

Search Engine Genie.

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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.

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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.

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Search Engine Friendly headers - Headers that help search engine rankings.



There are very few headers that we call search engine friendly.

1) 2oo OK: This is the primary headers that needs to be for all working sites. Search engines will understand 200 ok to be ideal for crawling and indexing a site.

2. ) 301 Permanent redirect: This is again a search engine friendly header return, 301 redirect is used where you want to permanently move a particular page to an other page or an other URL. This is search engine friendly since your redirect won't affect any search engine crawlers since they will understand that your page has moved to a new location.

3. 503 status code: 503 is best to prevent search engine crawlers from crawling your website If your site is hacked or attached by a virus best is to prevent the search engines from crawling , Google's webmaster central blog has some useful information on that here.

Search Engine Genie

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Search engines love fresh contents - New contents a gift for search engines.

Search Engines love new contents being added to site everyday. We hav tested this on about 25 different sites. Contents where the pages are updated regularly are crawled on a regular basis. Pages like the homepage which rarely changes gets indexed probably once in a week or at times once in a month.



I recommend keep updating the site regularly add a blog / article or news section and constantly update this area with fresh information so that search engines when ever they come to your site finds fresh information. To get the best results from the updated information make sure you write it unique, content syndication from other blogs or news sites dont work to the best. Unique information is a hit with search engines they love to see great information from your website that is fresh for their users. Our blog postings get crawled in about 2 hours time not more than that. This is because of quality fresh information we provide for the crawlers.

SEO Blog Team.

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Does clickthrough from Google affect search rankings

Many of you have wondered whether a clickthrough from a search engine result gives any boost in overall ranking of a site. This debate has been on and off for a while. Google has admitted tracking user clickthroughs from their results. The ultimate question is do they use it for ranking or boosting ranking for a website,

In My humble opinion Yes Google does track clickthroughs and NO - Google does not use it for ranking purposes.

Take this scenario just taking traffic log of our site we get about 3 to 4 million hits a month and its so difficult to go through just a month of data for a single site. Google is handling billions of queries a day and they need to billions of information per day. This will result in a lot of clickthrough data which will be very very difficult to sort out. Also if Google allows clickthrough data for favour in search engine results then anyone can have a automated bot that will open a search engine results page and generate 1000s of clicks. Or better then can even a hire a group of people and make them click their search results day and night.

Google also has the Toolbar which has been installed in millions of systems. They can actually track the presence of visitors on a site. Say you generate a million clicks but those clicks never results in strong presence on your site then it will send a red alert to google that the users don't like after click through on what they see on that site. Google definitely have the capability to do this and most probably this might play a small factor in Search engine rankings though I feel this will be a very small factor.

Also one possibility with all the click through data they collect they can put that to a system where it will analyze the clickthrough / real presence on website resulting from clickthrough/ position of sites that were there on a particular SERPs. etc put that to some algorthmic analysis and come out with a data Good enough for their users. This is definitely possible since Google want's to send their visitors to the best results and most relevant sites.

One area where I see Google might definitely see the popularity of a page as well as clickthrough data is the sitelinks. We have over 75 links going out from the homepage but Google selected a sitelink that is not in the homepage itself but is linked from a inner page. We know that page is very popular since its a rank checker tool and many people had linked to it.

SEO Blog Team,

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Expired domain do they help in search engine rankings.

Expired domain do they help in search engine rankings.
Many have argued on this whether there is a expired domain penalty that really exist.

According to me yes it does exist and mattcutts of Google has discussed about this. So will a expired domain help, In my humble opinion no a expire domain don't help for getting traffic to other sites.

If you buy a expired domain even if it has some pagerank it will eventually be PR0ed since Google imposes a expired domain penalty as soon as it sees a new site coming up on the old domain. When there is a content change on the expired domain search engine algorithm is designed in such a way that it will detect it and impose a penalty.

Also if the domain has any existing backlinks it will not be given as a credit to the domain. Also there is an other possibility that the backlinks will eventually drop off by itself if the people who already link to that site visits that site and realizes that this is not the site they were linking to before.

Also there a risk that the domain might have been banned or blacklisted in Search engines before you might just buy it without knowing it and eventually its not going to help and a new domain will be much better compared to a domain which had a history of wrong doing.

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SEO not the easiest thing the world - SEO not so easy,

Search engine optimization as many people think is not something wrong or even its not something easy for everyone to do. It requires a lot of patience and constant and consistent work to move to the top and stay on. This is especially a fact for competitive areas we have some clients rank for very competitive keywords and it took us more than 18 months to reach there. We did this through search engine friendly organic search engine optimization and now the same sites which took so long to rank has been in top 5 for competitive keywords for more than 2 years. That is the power of search engine optimization if client believes in us we will make it work though it takes a bit longer time and once it reaches the peak there is no turning back.

We have clients get back 1500% ROI from the investment they made to us. For example one particular client pays us 1200$ monthly with an initial fee of 8000$. Now his business from Organic search is 70,000$ with a net profit of 15,000$. Imagine the potential of search engine optimization. Same client has been paying about 30,000$ for Google PPC advertising per month and his ROI is 4,000$ a month from PPC. PPC profit is 10 to 15% while his SEO ROI is 1,500 per cent. SEO works and works best for sites that are built best both for users as well as search engines.

First thing in SEO is to make sure client believes the company that work on SEO for them. A good SEO company will deliver results its very important client researches and finds the best and right company for them. Also its important they understand the way SEO works its not like PPC where they setup the ad today and get traffic tomorrow.

SEO is all about improving the quality of the site to get the best reputation for that particular query which is being searched in Google. To do that it requires a lot of patience and work for the website. No one can build Google or yahoo or MSN in a day. Google took 3 years to become a good brand, Microsoft took 10 years and yahoo took 6 years that is how Internet works. A good brand cannot be build in a day.

Search Engine Genie today is one of the most visited SEO related websites on the web and top 10 most visited SEO firms according to alexa we never did this in a day it took us years of hard work to reach this level. SEO for other sites are the same for competitive areas it takes time/ money/man power and resources to be on top of the world's best search engines.

Search Engines are happy to send their visitors to sites that have the quality they are looking for. We at Search Engine Genie strive to build quality and we never resort against techniques which affect search engine quality.
Look at this particular thread in webmasterworld it really impressed me
SEO art a possible representative or owner of a SEO company says

"We started an seo campaign about 6 months ago.
We did all on-page optimization and started link building. The first 3 months saw significant increases in Google's rankings, then a small decrease.
Now, for the past 3 months, despite continued link building (all permanent, relevant one-way links), the rankings haven't budged.
Btw, the site has been around for years, and we examined "trust" factors pretty thoroughly to build on those as well. The site doesn't have any history of spam or black hat stuff.
We plan on holding steady, and continuing with the link building for this site. It's just been frustrating not to see any changes for so long.
Anyone ever seen this before? "

That is what SEO he has stressed he has been doing a lot of stuff but no improvement in Search engines that is absolutely true. SEO for competitive areas is not something you can do in 6 months it requires at least 6 months of building quality link reputation / site reputation with Google.

seo difficult work to do space


P.S: Believe in SEO and understand the difficulty behind it, Good SEO companies will definitely perform.

Search Engine Genie Blog Team.

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