How To Avoid A Fight With Penguin [Infographic]

Google has said Penguin 2.0 will be the most-talked-about algorithm update of 2013 for brands’ SEO strategies. The search-ranking signal targets websites with low-grade backlink profiles. In preparation for Penguin 2.0, Brafton,

North America’s largest news and content marketing agency, put together a guide to help you fend off potential PageRank downgrades. After all, no one wants to be in a fight with a Penguin.

Source : BRAFTON

Various Search Engines And Directories

Since years search engines are used and are served to provide various results according to the billions of queries raised by people. Even today also, search engine market has remained mostly similar like it used to be before a decade. Only change is that the algorithm used in these engines. Still the search giant Google is there followed by other search engines namely Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL, which combine for hundreds of billions of searches every month in United States. A lot of search engine companies came to market meanwhile and vanished also due to their improper focus and approach on search engine market.

We will discuss on some of the major search engines, the history and the facts :

Google : 

It was started in 1998 as a university project by Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Now no need for any introduction, Google is the dominant search engine used by billions of information seekers. In fact, in June of 1999 Netscape Search was updated and AOL/Netscape search began to be powered by Google bringing their search volume to approximately 3 million per day. The number was really huge at that time.

On June 26, 2000 Yahoo Selected Google to provide its organic search results which was known as Inktomi with its impressive index of more than 25 million pages. Again a huge number for that time. Now the word Google is used as a synonym with the word "search" and we very often say "Google it" instead of search it.

Bing : 

It was founded in May 2009 as an upgraded version from Microsoft's MSN Search. After the launch of Bing, Microsoft's share of the search marketplace has more than doubled. Recently the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo for Bing to power Yahoo's organic results and Bing crosses over 25 percent of search.

After merging up of Microsoft/Yahoo alliance also came the affect that Yahoo's paid search platform would be used to power both Yahoo and Bing's paid results. 

Yahoo :

It was founded in March 1994 and once upon a time Yahoo was a major leader in the search field. Before Google was introduced, Yahoo was the only popular search engine avaible over net. It declined its position by making multiple bad decisions, announcing layoffs unnecessarily and proved their moves as one of the worst business decisions in history when they turned down a takeover from Microsoft valued at $33/share. Yahoo shares turned down after that and have never been anywhere close since.

Since years until 2012, it seemed that everything was going on wrong directions. But in July 16 when the announcement came that they had appointed Marissa Mayer from Google to become CEO. This one was obviously the biggest news and might be a very good news. It made people wondering whether this effort would change of direction that the company has been waiting for.

Other Major Search Engines :

We all know that Google dominates most of the part in the world, but not everywhere. Yahoo and Bing together also found very hard to make footprints in Google's search market share on other continents, but a couple of search engines in other countries have managed to stay ahead. 

Here are the search engines :

Baidu :

Baidu is the major player in China with more than three of every four searches conducted on their engine. Baidu uses a hybrid approach wherein they have pay for performance (P4P) results. P4P is basically an approach where users bid to have their websites place at the top of what would appear to be the organic results.

Along with search, Baidu offers PPC which, similar to AdWords, is displayed at the top or right of the standard results. But looking at the interface one can say that the existence of the PPC-like results further confuses the users clicking on the standard results area into believing they are organically generated.

Some investors consider Baidu to be overvalued as a stock, their earnings are consistently high. Understanding Baidu to market into China is not an easy but if used properly can be useful for business.

Yandex :

Yandex is the best and most popular of all Russian-language search engines with significant market in Russia.  On October 1, 2012, Yandex launched their own browser and mobile app to keep their position secure against competitor Google in Russia. Yandex's advantage in Russian seems to be based on an algorithm that performs better and used unique syntax and integrating that into the results the user is likely looking for ; like the search string a question or simply keyword entry.

Directories

Directories are very useful and very interesting topic. It creates an repository which proves billions of links into it and resulting page rankings.

Yahoo Directory :

The Yahoo Directory was started in 1994 under the name "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" which is laten on named as Yahoo. It used tobe a directory with search functionality. The unique part was that there was no such SEO practice was carried out at that time.

Later on it was found that Yahoo tried releasing a web portal and in 2000 even signed a deal with Google that would see Google power Yahoo's search functionality. Their focus at the time was to acquire users through acquisitions such as GeoCities which was later on discontinued.

BOTW :

Best Of The Web is one of the most favourites of the general directories. They allow for a permanent listing. It was founded in 1994 as a listing of the best of the web. In 1998, the site seemed down to the market trends and when purchased in 2002, it is known as general web directory.

BOTW is a human edited directory. They will decline your listing if they don't like the site. A submission is $150 annually or $300 for a permanent listing.

DMOZ :

DMOZ needs no introduction as this is one of the best directories over net. DMOZ was founded in June 1998 as Gnuhoo. Later on Netscape purchased it in October of the same year and discovered as Open Directory Project. In 2000, it finally surpassed the Yahoo Directory in number of URLs in it's index and currently sits at about 5.2 million.

Business.com :

Business.com was founded in 1999 as a search engine for business and corporations categories. Unfortunately they were about to bankruptcy during the dot-com bubble bursting. Later on,  after doing major layoffs and restructuring of the organization they started making profit in the year 2003.

Link building is a better strategy which would be useful to get maximum output from the directories. We would suggest you to save this page and submit to a few and as you're building more links using different strategies.  Starting with 1 or 2 directory submissions would give you better result. Find below some free and paid directory listings :

• Jayde – Submission is free.
• 01 Web Directory – Free submission option or $49 one-time.
• JoeAnt – $39.99 one-time fee.
• Ezilon – $69 annual fee of $199 permanent.
• Alive – $75 annual fee or $225 permanent.
• Aviva – $50 annually or $150 permanent.
• SunStream – $29 annually or $49 permanent.
• Wow Directory – $43 for a permanent listing.'
• GoGuides – $69 one time.

General Directory Tips :

Top 4 common and universally applicable directory tips are as follows :

• If a directory list you automatically then it's not an editorial link and either doesn't carry weight. It should be avoided.
• If it requires link back when a paid is available then it should be avoided.
• If a directory with a PageRank of 3 or less carries no weight. You should always look at PageRank 3 directories in the case of niche directories. And don't even consider anything less than a PageRank 4.
• If a directory does make sense that this link should have weight for your site then you can be pretty much sure that it would be an useful link.

There are a lot of great niche directories. Try to put them all on a list and add to 1 or 2 each month while at the same time you have an updated site for Google. You should have good content liked by directory editors, bloggers and most the educated readers.

Google Announced Hummingbird Update

On it's 15th birthday, Google moved all their searches to Secure Search. The reason behind this is that Google will now show all organic traffic in your  analytics tool originating from the keyword. So Google has rolled out a vital update to their algorithm and announced this modification as Hummingbird Update.

What is Hummingbird Update?

Hummingbird Update is an upgrade to Google algorithm which processes and analyzes more complex queries. In 2010, Google update Caffeine was aimed at crawling and indexing but Hummingbird is meant for improvement matching for relevance.

In an event recently took place, Google SVP of Search Amit Singhal talked about the new things happening nowadays  on Google. Here are some highlights from Q&A sessions which were addressed by Amit Singhal himself. Forbes.com has documented some Q&A on their site. Find below some highlights of them.

Q: How big a change is Hummingbird? 

it’s as big as the change to the last algorithm, known as Caffeine. It happened about a month ago.

Q: How specifically is Hummingbird better?

It’s essentially to better answer the much more complex queries people are making. It impacts all kinds of queries, but far more effective on long, complex questions that we are getting many more of now. 

Q: Examples? 

Hard to be specific, but essentially, with more complex queries, the algorithm can better understand concepts vs. words as well as relationships between concepts.

Q: How is this different in nature from Caffeine? 

This is clearly more focused on ranking sites better for relevance, while Caffeine was more focused on better indexing and crawling of sites.

Hummingbird For Search Visibility :

Google already explained as it will impact up to 90% of SERPs. This update is meant to rank content better with respect to relevance, and to match in a broader population of queries, we are optimistic that it will improve the quality of the SERPs.

Considering the lack of visibility into keywords (Secure Search), we can come to a decision that Google is finally forcing our hands with the move to semantic search and SERPs based on user intent as opposed to keyword matching as a whole.

People who practise and take advantage of content marketing, especially those that include authorship markup and other semantic markup, are already ahead of the game in the Hummingbird time.

This is just a beginning; so we can expect much more analysis coming out in the days ahead. Share your experience and add comments below. If you find additional information that people would like, you can add those resources or links in the comment section.

How To Get Higher PageRank In Google

Have you ever thought that billions of posts are published daily over the net and how many of the websites get higher rank in SERPs? Actual answer is very few. PageRank (PR) comes in numbers which can be less or more but one thing is sure that we can easily make difference in numbers by following some regular SEO activities.

Why Not Getting Higher Rank ?

This is a common question from a large number of bloggers who posts regularly with rich content but don't get noticed in Google SERPs with higher PageRank.

There is no specific answer to this question because a lot of things are involved to rank higher : like - unique content, regular posts, proper page design and loading on browsers, regular SEO jobs on blogs and some more.  

We have tried our best to figure out some of the reasons. Here we go :

1. Googlebot Crawling :

Google' algorithm "Googlebot" or Google spiders don't search for the links what all bloggers post or don't roam the web. They request web servers to provide specified pages, then they scan them for hyperlinks, which in turn will lead them to the new documents that they fetch in the same way. In short Googlebot crawls for the links.

2. Google Indexing :

Even after crawling, we can't search the pages because they are not properly indexed. It totally depends on the keywords that we use for the articles. Google builds indexes for the articles with specific keyword. If you use the keyword "technology" in some of your blog posts, then Google will index them under "technology" keyword.

3. Google Ranks Articles :

It depends on the relevancy of the articles posted and Google rank them accordingly. 

If you search with the string "android tablets", it will show in search engine result pages (SERPs) by following two steps :

a) It will find the "android tablets" related pages.

b) It will rank them with relevant topic.

How Relevancy Is Ranked By Google ?

The most asked question for website owners is "why is my not ranking high on SERPs? " Normally it is found that  Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. 

How Do You Know The Website Relevancy ?

 It basically depends on the concept that how well you optimize the page itself that will determine whether and how highly it’ll show up in Google search results. Usage of keywords, meta tags, description help to optimize it.

What to Do In This Situation ?

1. Focus On Niche :

Readers for your blog and Google would love you if you stay on the niche on which you write. Suppose your niche / topic is "technology" then don't write articles on topic "traveling". Keep focussing on your niche "technology" only. Google ranks web pages only and not the websites.

2.  On-Page Optimization :

It is the process by which you can inform Google that what your page contains. If you update the title, meta tags and description of the web page then it will be easier for Google bot to list the pages in SERPs accordingly. 

Use specific keywords, tags and description for the pages you are publishing over net so that Google bot can find your pages relevant to the search made by viewers.

Improving Web page Factors :

Here we would like to suggest some on-page factors which can be useful for getting higher ranks in Google SERPs :

1. SEO Optimization : 

You have to work on the SEO factors to get more engaged with Google SERPs. You can explore the page's SEO opportunities like page title, description, post related info, keywords, tags etc.

2. SEO Tools :

You can use the SEO tools because Google keeps changing its algorithms very often. If you use the SEO tools then no need checking recent Google algorithm changes as your SEO tools will be doing it for you.

3. SEO Outsourcing :

It would be a costly option but again time saving. If you want to focus more on content writing rather than SEO optimization then hire some company to do it for you.

4. Leave it to Google :

Once you have done with your SEO optimization practices then leave it to Google where your pages would be crawled in an organic way with increasing your ranking on SERPs.

Top 10 SEO Tips For Bloggers

A lot of articles are there which help us to do a better SEO job for your website ensuring that your website will be available to search engines and easy to find it.

Tim Resnick of (SEO) Moz, has suggested 10 SEO tips for bloggers as follows :

1. Stay Tuned On SEO Job:

If you get success from your blog then you should stick with the SEO opportunities and working on them.

2. Don't Press "Enter" : 

Always use Google Suggests to auto fill keywords and check what comes on the dropdown list. For example, if you type "Ice". You may find Ice Age then Ice Cream etc. Don't press Enter. Its better to use Soovle.com to find out the automatic suggestions on all search engines in one page.

3. Don't Make Duplicate : 

Google doesn't like duplicate contents and they can penalize you. To avoid this so you can search for your post's duplicates. You can either take your post's first sentence and put it in Google or you can use copyspace.com to find duplicates.

4. Follow @twitter :

Building links in good circles with the help of established connection will definitely help your blog to grow. So try to follow the right people in social media connection. Share your links with great influencers.

5. Timing For Tweet : 

You can tweet at the time when your followers are on twitter. But how? There is a tool from MOZ, bufferapp.com which helps to analze and find the online twitter people.

6. Find Keyword :

Keywords are one of the best source of traffic to your blog. use google Webmaster Tool to work with keywords.

7. Rich Snippets :

To know your blog better, Google has to have microdata for your blog. You can use Rich Snippets for this.

8. Generate Sitemap :

For all bloggers, it is compulsory to submit the sitemap which help your blog pages to be indexed in google and other search engines. Go through the guidelines.

9. Authorship : 

If you have good content in your blog with your photo, then it will be helpful for your blog's faster visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Use Google Authorship.

10. Get Google+ Circled :

Get your blogs circulated via Google Plus circles then you will get more engagement.

The above SEO tips are mostly useful for your blog's visibility on SERPs. Now here is the presentation of Tim Resnick.

Should We Include rel="nofollow" To Infographics, Widgets

Do you think that Google considers all the infographics, widgets, counters, badges and embedded codes as good SEO practices? it has been a topic for discussing since couple of months among webmasters. Now Google's Iconic Matt Cutts has explained about it and advised webmasters with the things they can do.

What should we do with embeddable codes in things like widgets and infographics? Should we include the rel="nofollow" by default? Advert the user that the code includes a link and give him the option of not including it?

Yes! this was the question asked to Matt Cutts and he has come up with some interesting information.  Cutt says “My answer to this is colored by the fact that we have seen a ton of people trying to abuse widgets and abuse infographics. We've seen people who get a web counter, and they don’t realize that there’s mesothelioma links in there."

Check out the video for more details on Matt Cutts' awesome tips to bloggers and webmasters. 

“Is the keyword text sort of keyword rich and something where the anchor text is really rich or is it just the name of your site? That sort of stuff.”

Cutts replied “I would not rely on widgets and infographics as your primary way to gather links, and I would recommend putting a nofollow, especially on widgets, because most people when they just copy and paste a segment of code, they don’t realize what all is going with that, and it’s usually not as much of an editorial choice because they might not see the links that are embedded in that widget".

As per him a lot of issues come from people who are using counters, widgets, badges and don't relaize the fact that there are some embedded codes with link back to some site. 

He also added “Depending on the scale of the stuff that you’re doing with infographics, you might consider putting a rel nofollow on infographic links as well. The value of those things might be branding. They might be to drive traffic. They might be to sort of let people know that your site or your service exists, but I wouldn’t expect a link from a widget to necessarily carry the same weight as an editorial link freely given where someone is recommending something and talking about it in a blog post."

Continuing his sugesstions, he also explains "I know plenty of sites have tried to use infographics as link bait, but I do feel like there are a few inforgraphics out there that deserve follow links simply because they are so useful and full of great information,” he adds. “Unfortunately spammers abused the potential of infographics and the rest of us have to play by the new rules."

Do you think that Google has gone too far with nofollow usage? Or it will be a fair practice for SEO purpose.

How To Configure Google SERPs

Google Search Engine is an elephant in the room, when it comes to providing data we are generally searching for. Just switch to Google.com and search whatever you are searching for. But, if you are a learner like me, who like to search and learn new things all day long, then you would be pretty much annoyed with search results not opening in the new window by default. But here’s a simple tweak using which users can configure their Google SERPs to open in new Windows every time.

Lets find out how to configure Google SERPs quickly :

1. First of all, login to your Google Accounts and move over to Google.com.

2. Click on the wrench icon to the top right, , choose Search Settings from the drop down menu.

3. Scroll a bit, there you’ll find the option, Where results open.

Just check it. Click on Save button to save your preferences.

And voila, you are done configuring your search results to open in new tab every time.

Testing time, whether you are signed out or signed in, from now onwards your Google search results in open in new Window every time. Try it.

And that’s the simple tutorial to open Google SERPs results in new Window every time. Facing any issues, ping me.

Changes In Google Search

Google is working on the most drastic overhaul of its search technology in its history, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Image Credit : Google

The Journal alleged that this update will shift Google search to rely heavily on technology called "semantic search," which taps into the actual meaning of words. However, it will not ditch the current keyword-based search, which determines the relevance of a site based on items like the words it uses, how often other sites link to it, among other criteria.

Google Search would also display more facts and answer direct questions at the top of the page, rather than just presenting links to other sites.

The Journal stated that this will directly affect between 10 and 20 percent of queries, which comes down to billions upon billions of searches every month.