5 Ways To Protect Your Website from Future Google Updates

With the recent Penguin update that came down a few weeks ago from Google, a lot of site owners are wondering what they can do to recover from a search engine penalty. We know that Penguin was designed to target webspam tactics (Panda was more about content quality), and while glaring black hat tactics like keyword stuffing are easy to spot and fix, it’s not always as simple to find the gray hat SEO tactics that might be contributing (or will with subsequent updates) to a search engine penalty. Many DIY SEO site owners run afoul of the Google Webmaster Guidelines simply because they don’t realize they are doing anything wrong.

If your site has managed to escape unscathed by a Google update so far, don’t assume that you’re free and clear forever. Each search engine update gets a little better at catching and flagging sites that are in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Before you find yourself in emergency mode because your organic traffic was cut in half due to a penalty, here are 5 things every site owner can do to protect their website and ensure that future updates will only help their site perform better in the search engines:
1. Forget About Keyword Density
There is no “right” number of times you should use a keyword in any given piece of content. Forget every piece of advice you’ve ever heard about keyword density (2%, 6%, use each keyword at least three times!) and just focus on writing great content. One of the few hard and fast rules of SEO is that content should always be written for the human reader first, the search engines second. Believe it or not, a well-written piece of content will partially optimize itself because the topic naturally encourages you to use various keywords. You never want to force a keyword into the content to meet some keyword count quota – it’s almost always going to negatively impact the usability of your content. Of course you want to optimize your content for SEO, but worry about targeting keywords AFTER you’ve written the content. You can go back and tweak the post to be a little more SEO friendly in the revision round.

2. Diversify Your Anchor Text
A lot of SEO experts are hypothesizing that exact match anchor text might have been a big flag for the Penguin update. It’s important to diversify your anchor text so the search engines don’t have any reason to suspect that you might be trying to manipulate the SERPs. Branded keywords are probably going to make up a large percentage of your anchor text portfolio, but you don’t want to rely too heavily on a short list of targeted keywords (and please don’t use CLICK HERE as anchor text; it has no SEO value) for your anchor text. Much like with optimizing your content, there is no “right” number of times to use a particular keyword or keyword phrase as your anchor text.

3. Remove Questionable Links From Your Link Portfolio
In the weeks before Penguin, Google started sending out notifications to many site owners warning them about “unnatural links” in their link portfolio. These could be link exchanges, paid links, unrelated links, links from splogs and low quality directories and so forth. If there are any links in your link portfolio that might catch the eye of Google for the wrong reasons, it’s best to do away with them now so you don’t have to worry about it later. Keep in mind that a few “bad” links aren’t going to destroy your SEO, especially if the vast majority of your link portfolio is full of great links. You can’t control who links to you, which has made many site owners worry about the ramifications of negative SEO (a competitor would purposely link from dangerous sites to you to hurt your site). It’s when you have an okay link portfolio or shady SEO past that you need to worry about scrubbing your link portfolio as quickly and effectively as you can.
Some SEO experts have also hypothesized that sites might feel a trickledown effect via their link portfolio. Even if your site wasn’t hit by Penguin, if a lot of the sites linking to yours were those poor quality sites Google penalized, links from those sites become pretty much useless to your SEO. Your site may have escaped unharmed, but your link portfolio took a big hit.

4. Analyze the Value and Quality of Your Content
Ever since the first Panda update last year, just about every Google update since then has been focused on quality, especially content quality. It’s hard to hold a mirror up to our own efforts sometimes, but take a good hard look at your content. Where is there room for improvement? Are there any thin pages that you could combine in order to make a strong page with a great user experience? Are there pages you should just delete entirely? Put yourself in the shoes of your customer – would you want to buy from your brand? Is your content compelling and user driven or is it just a bunch of company mumbo jumbo and ego?
If you haven’t already, now is the time to launch a company blog (or up the number of posts you have going live each week.) Onsite SEO and link building are crucial to long term SEO success, but content is really what is going to propel your brand forward. The more quality content you have built around your website the better you look in the eyes of the search engines. It gives your customers a reason to interact with your brand (and link to your site!), builds your online authority and helps grow your overall online presence.

5. Imagine There are No Search Engines
Speaking of overall online presences (and this is going to sound strange coming from an SEO professional), treat your online marketing like there were no search engines. It’s important to diversify your traffic sources so your entire online livelihood isn’t based on the mercy of the search engines. If Google didn’t exist, what other online activities would you invest into connect with your audience? Build up these other channels so that if your site is impacted by an update, you can survive until you figure out and fix the problem. Google doesn’t owe you anything, and even though they want site owners to do a good job with their SEO (it helps clean up the SERPs, which gives Google a better product) they aren’t obligated to make sure your site survives. It’s up to you to learn the rules of the online world and give your website the best chance at online success!
There are many, many things a site owner could so with their SEO that could trigger a penalty from Google. But these are 5 things a site owner can (and should) do to not only protect their sites from future updates, but actually benefit from them!

Recovery Tips Google Penguin Updates

Recovery Tips for Google Penguin Updates

I have collected some tips here.

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.

4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

6. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

8. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

IF Your site Deranked by google

IF Your site Deranked by google, Read this

    Hi,

    Many of you might facing this problem, site deranked by google. Well here is the guide for you to identify the problem and fix it. Maybe some of you has seen this on other forum, but i think its very useful for some one that did not seen it before. Well here is it:


    1) Penalty recognition and removal:

    A) Did you got some private blog network backlinks?

    If you see a penalty some time after you got some private blog network post backlinks - even some long months later - it could meant that blog network got de-indexed (check your reports and forums for any comments about de-indexing networks).

    Penalty recognition:

    - sudden drop in rankings without any reason (sometimes it could be 3-5 spots, sometimes 100-200 spots)
    - un-explained dancing (no backlinking/onsite optimization done in last 2 weeks)

    Solution:

    If you see only dancing/small drop in rankings then it means your backlink diversity is low. Go and grab some different types of backlinks - mix of Manual Bookmarks (a lot of them from different providers) and unique article submission to article directories will help to regain your position - even stronger than before.

    B) Did you pinged your website/got some Whois posted to it?

    You can notice huge dancing (even tens of positions back and forward) or sudden drop way below top100.

    Penalty recognition:

    - sudden drop in rankings or heavy dancing
    - drop in just few keywords or group of related keywords


    The main causes could be two:

    B1) your onsite optimization is really poor
    B2) you have nasty backlinking (some really poor backlinks/spam/porn links)


    To determine which one is right - simply check what backlinks Google sees by checking Alexa backlink checker and Google search engine. If Alexa is not showing anything of ppor quality (spammed websites where you link is located) then search for your website as - domain.com (without quotes and without www or http://). If you can see any spammy links (use your common sense to determine) within first 5 pages - then go ahead with B2 solution. If not - use B1 solution.

    Solution:

    B1) Check your inner linking (for any dead ones), correct 301's, proper site map, proper coding of website (no serious errors). I would suggest getting some webmaster to check your coding (he do not need access to your hosting - he should be able to work by reading your sites code with his browser) or using IBP (expensive but extensive) or SEOmoz (less expensive but really user friendly) - I didn't tested other options so just check reviews on SEO non-affiliate forums/blogs/review sites.
    After you are done hit your site with ping services (pingomatic, feed burner) and whois sites (hit it with like 1000-10.000 sites to get your site noticed by crawlers to re-check it).

    B2) Build some high authority backlinks - perfectly 2-3 types of links.
    I would suggest high PR backlinks at first (any high PR backlinks will do really). Once you have some good number of them get them indexed at once (build SB links to them or run them by one of the indexing/crawling programs like Linklicious/Backlinks Indexer/Lindexed etc.)
    [For example - build some High PR (PR4+) forum profiles, High PR blog posts and High PR Web 2.0 properties]




    C) Did you created a lot of backlinks lately?

    You have created a lot of backlinks recently and your site is jumping around or lost a lot of rankings.

    Penalty recognition:

    - heavy dancing, moving up and down (from top position to out of top100 and backwards)
    - most of the keywords changed position right after backlinking (possibly for worst)
    - your website lost all rankings (but you can still see it in Google as top3 when you search for your own domain name without spaces etc.)

    Solution:

    C1) You are not in top3 results when you search for domain.com (where domain = your domain name, .com = your extension - do not use www/http when searching for it in Google)

    It means your website got serious penalty from Google - possibly soft one.
    DO NOT ask for reconsideration within Webmaster Tool in Google.

    Follow those steps:
    - remove Google Analitycs from your site
    - close your Google Webmaster Tools account (cancel it)
    - log out from Gmail/Youtube (from now on always log out from them before accessing Google search results or your site)
    - opt out/log out from any Google owned business that could lead to YOU or to your website

    Perform full onsite optimization - (Check step B1) but do not do Whois linking.
    Build quality backlinks to your site - Facebook, Twitter and whole group of Reputation Management business sites (Linkedin/Merchant Circle/YouTube/MySpace...). Do it manually or get a guy that can do this for you.
    Get some social backlinks (High PR Manual Bookmarks or Re-Tweets with your link in it).
    Get all links crawled (use Pingomatic or more advanced crawling service)
    After all this - wait for ~5 days and then submit your site to good list of Whois websites (minimum 1.000).

    C2) You are on position 2-3 when you search for your domain name.
    Build more diverse backlinks - create "Raw backlinks" (no anchor links) to your main page. You can use for this AMR - get some quality article from Ezine, do not spin it and submit it to article directories. As a link use your homepage url (not inner pages, just homepage).

    C3) You are on position 1 when you search for your domain name.

    This is just a dance. You can get few of crawling services (Pingomatic etc) and submit your site to them to speed up process of ranking selection.
    DO NOT submit your site to Whois sites at the beginning of dance as this can mislead you with further investigation on whats the problem.



    D) Did you maintained status Quo for last 2 months?

    You have done nothing in last 2 months but all suddenly all your keywords started to falling in rankings.

    Penalty recognition:

    - sudden drop in rankings without doing anything to the site by you
    - complete lost of rankings by all the keywords

    Solution:

    D1) Your keyword is easy/medium competition

    You lack link building - keep building backlinks on weekly or even daily basis. Try to diversify backlinks and fetch some high quality manual ones (Linkedin/Merchant Circle/YouTube/MySpace/Tumblr/Tweeter/Ezine...)
    You need to re-build your whole SEO campaign so create a plan of backlinking and start getting them in proper quantities - use your common sense on how many of them. Regular site will use 3 different backlinks provider/sources a month (for example - Manual Bookmarking, Manual Web 2.0 and Scrapebox blast with 10K links - change strategy/providers each month).

    D2) Your keyword is in high competitive niche

    You need to check your backlinks.
    Go to Alexa.com and Google.com and search for your backlinks.
    When in Google.com search for domain.com (without quotes, where domain.com is your domain name).
    Go through first 10 pages (if there is as much as that) and look for backlinks you do not recognize.

    D2-A) You found backlinks that you do not recognize (made by your competitor) - you need to make them weaker or stronger:

    D2-A1) Make them stronger - build backlinks to those bad links (do not do it if the anchors are nasty ones like - "Porn", "Fuck", "Cocaine" etc or there is more than 1.000 outgoing links from the page). Get some proper Scrapebox blasts to those links in order to create authority in them. Around 100-500 backlinks per bad link is enough. Get all the backlinks created to badlinks crawled (use Linklicious/Lindexed/BacklinksIndexer).

    D2-A2) Make them weaker - to do so you need to make your website authority one. Create high authority backlinks to your website comming from popular social sites + Wikipedia (if you can - possibly as a source link or in-article anchor) + Wiki sites (there is many service providers offering such a Wiki submission). Build few hundreds of high PR backlinks to your site without anchor ("Raw Link"). Get all the backlinks crawled using popular pinging/indexing services.
    If none happened - submit your site to Whois database after 2 weeks of creating major backlinks.
    Keep building backlinks constantly and take care of diversity so this wont happen again.


    2) Avoiding Penalty and Google reviews:


    A) Onsite Optimization
    B) Offsite SEO
    C) Overall Quality Score



    A) Onsite Optimization

    You are required to keep a very good onsite optimization.
    You need to prevent having serious coding loops or errors as Google will detect it easily. Any dead links (within a site or going to other sites) can affect your rankings and cause problems.
    List of things to look at:

    - Check your websites code for any serious errors. Your code should be W3C validated: http://validator.w3.0rg/
    - Check for dead links - Google hates them: http://www.brokenlinkcheck.c0m
    - Interlink your inner pages to main page (Inner Page linking to main page with one of your main Anchor) or other way around (main page linking through footer with Anchors to most valued inner pages - not too many though)
    - No excessive advertising - 2 ad blocks are enough, 3 is a lot, 4+ can affect your rankings
    - No linking out to Scam/Spam/Illegal sites - one link to Scam e-commerce shop can drain out your authority
    - Proper content quantity/quality for crawlers to index - 300 words article is not enough to fill whole website. Every site, even MNS should have more than 1 page and more than 300 words article
    - DO NOT post spinned content on your website - Google will index copied content as long as it is quality and related. Spinned content can get you de-indexed or penalized
    - You do not need to link to authority sites - by doing so you will pass some juice on them but also you will get more Google trust. Evaluate which option is best for you.



    B) Offsite SEO

    To impress Google you need proper diversification and constant backlinking.

    - Create different types of backlinks. There is no "Miracle Backlink". You cant dominate results with just one backlink type and hope for Status Quo. You need to diversify your campaign so Google wont see any spam attempts. Even if you are #1 keep building diverse backlinks (if #1 was achieved by blog posts from
    private network - build some quality Web 2.0 and .Edu links for diversity and security).
    - Keep constant backlink flow. You cannot create 100K Scrapebox backlinks at once and expect best. Keep building backlinks daily, weekly or even monthly to maintain your good authority and trust within Google.
    a) Monthly backlinking example - buy automatic bookmarking, 10K Scrapebox blog comments and wiki links in one month - then in next one create new "campaign"
    b) Weekly backlinking example - create 1-2 different backlink types like Private Blog Network submission and Forum Profiles first week, .Edu backlinks and Linkpushing other week.
    c) Daily backlinking example - build daily amount of backlinks like blog comments, forum profiles bookmarks and manual high PR backlinks
    - Mix quality with quantity - Scrapebox or Xrumer links are good as long as you will mix them with high authority (or high PR) backlinks. Do not worry about getting 10K Scrapebox links - but add some extra high PR Bookmarks or Articles same week you done them for fast and secure results.
    - Get high authority backlinks indexed using indexing/crawling systems - any high authority (or high PR) backlink can be artificially forced to cue for crawling by Google without any negative penalty.


    C) Overall Quality Score

    Look at your website as manual reviewer will do it.
    He have less than a minute to evaluate your website and he will look for following:
    - code/keyword report
    - relevance of content to keyword
    - ad spam/affiliate spam attempts
    - content lockers (do not use content locker if 100% of your traffic is from Google unless you are experienced in what you do)
    - misleading information/links
    thats all, hope that help. Dont forget the thanks button

Beware SEO Is down - new goggle algorithm changes very important

Google’s long anticipated over-optimization penalty is now live. Except Google called it an algorithmic update that’s targeting web spam – a.k.a., keyword stuffing and link schemes, in the process causing some big search ranking upheavals.
 

    Webspam Algorithm Update

    Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team, yesterday announced that Google had pushed out the new algorithm. Cutts said this “improvement” better identifies websites using “aggressive web spam tactics” (that have been against Google’s quality guidelines for years) for the purposes of gaming their way to top spots in Google’s rankings.

    Cutts specifically noted that websites likely to lose rankings are those that practice keyword stuffing and sites that have “unusual linking patterns,” such as links from spun content with anchor text that is completely unrelated to the actual on-page content.

    The web spam algorithm update will affect about 3.1 percent of English Google queries, but noted it would have a bigger impact in heavily-spammed languages, such as Polish.

    Additionally, Cutts emphasized the importance of “white hat” SEO in his post, as well as the importance of creating great websites filled with high-quality, compelling content that provide a good user experience. Google’s guidance on high-quality content consists of these 23 questions you should ask yourself when evaluating website content.

    SEO by the Sea has a good rundown of Google’s patents related to combating web spam.

    Early Assessment of Damages

    There are lots of theories floating around at the moment about what types of sites took the biggest hits, but it seems a bit premature to make conclusions with so many conflicting reports. It seems a few “innocents” may have be caught up in this (though, honestly, it’s easy to blame Google for not ranking your site), and some pages that shouldn’t be ranking are now, according to various reports in forums since last night.

    Some are arguing that Google’s results are worse now. If that sounds familiar, many people were saying the same thing after Panda launched last year. Pretty sure those who saw their search rankings increase aren’t complaining.

How Do You Organize Your Online Business

 I'm finding myself getting a little overwhelmed with so many projects and tracking all of them. I'd like to know what tools you guys use to track:

        Projects
        Stats (SERPs, backlinks, etc.)
        Affiliate programs & links
        Outsourcers
        Money from various projects
        General business accounting (expenditures, taxes, etc.)


    I don't like having to use so many different systems to track so many things. Is there anything out there that tracks most of the items that an internet marketer needs in one system?

    Debating whether to focus on a narrower band of projects instead. Any suggestions and/or advice would be appreciated.

Panda 3.3 Update: Changes Pertaining to Link Evaluation and Its Implications

Google brings about frequent major changes in its algorithm almost every month; this is the thing that has made it possible for Google to remain on top of search engines since such a long time.

The latest update released by Google in the month of February pertaining to web marketing is Google Panda 3.3. The prime concern of this update is link evaluation.

Link Evaluation as Per Panda 3.3:

The official announcement made by Google pertaining to the changes in link evaluation process can be divided into two parts:

• Google is going to change the way it previously evaluated links.
• It is going to turn off a method with the help of which it evaluated links in the past years.

Explanation:

As per the announcement made by Google regarding link evaluation, to explain it to full extent, a person needs to know what characteristics Google can consider in link evaluation. The two characteristics considered by Google are:

• Link method
• Anchor text

A) Link Method:

When it comes to Google turning off a factor in its previous link evaluation process, a webmaster would jump to the conclusion that it’s the link method evaluation that has been changed. Meaning that, Google from now onwards, is going to consider Flash and JavaScript links, in addition to the standard Href links. However, the change statement addresses ‘topic of the linked page’, therefore, it can be said that the link method is not the factor that would change.

B) Anchor Text:

The second factor earlier considered in link evaluation was of Anchor Text, where along with the Title, Description, content, and headings of the page, Google also considered the anchor text that was used to link to the page. This presumable method would be changed.

Reason for Abandoning Anchor Text:

The overreliance of Google on anchor text has given birth to many problems in the past. The two renowned mishaps are:

• The unbelievable and irrelevant traffic that Adobe download link received because of its anchor text
• The hilarious scenario created because of search term President Bush and ‘miserable failure’.

Therefore, as per the February update, Google will neither fully not partially rely on anchor text as a major factor in link evaluation.

Replacement Evaluation Factor:

In a statement few months ago, Google announced that it would show better titles in the SERPs by reducing the effect of anchor text. Therefore, from now onwards, Google will focus its attentions towards the relevancy between the title tag, and the content of the page.

• The title that has its title tag relevant with the content of the page will show in the search results and vice versa.

Implication on SEO:

• Firstly, with the impact of anchor text decreasing, now the SEO professionals will have to focus more on the relevancy between the title tag and content of the page, by making the best use of keywords in them.
• Secondly, anchor text will not impact the link building process, therefore, an SEO professional can continue using it, but must not rely on it.

Conclusion:

In short, the SEO professionals who change with the changes in Google’s algorithm are the ones who become successful and long last. Adapting to Panda 3.3 is another thing, which every SEO must comply to immediately.

SPEED UP BOOST YOUR ALEXA RANKING

Your Alexa ranking is very important, because it also effects how you are listed on the major search engines like as yahoo, google, bing and aol. If you have a good alexa ranking, you will be more friendly and get good search engine listing.

THIS IS NO BOTS VISITORS, NO AUTOMATIC SOFTWARE USED, THE METHOD IS POSTING YOUR SITE TO THOUSANDS OF OUR BEST URL LISTS. SO YOUR SITE WILL GET PERMANENT RESULT.


IF YOU USE FAKE VISITOR BOT PROGRAM TO BOOST YOUR ALEXA RANK, YOU WILL GET TEMPORARY RESULT AND BANNED BY GOOGLE.

Benefit of Improve Alexa Rank :
- Our site or blog will be more friendly with major search engines like yahoo, goole, bing, and aol

- We can make it easier to join the online business programs that use Alexa rank as a benchmark, because most of paid review program using the Alexa rank as a main requirement. So the better the alexa ranking us, the more our chances to get money from the internet.

- Having high Alexa Rank attracts advertisers who help to increase your popularity so you can receive profitable prices for advertising on your website or blog

- If your site has a good alexa rank, It will make us proud and get prestige and reputation.

- No Alexa Robot Program used, No fake visitors, it's real link posting, so your site is safe.

MY SERVICE WILL INCREASE YOUR ALEXA RANKING :

* Increase over than 1 million alexa ranking progress for sites that have recently ranking 3 millions or above (even for sites that have not been indexed by Alexa)


* For site that have 3 millions alexa ranking to 701k will improve about 10% to 30% of your recent alexa ranking.

* For sites that have 700k alexa ranking to 300k will improve about 5% to 10% progress of your recent alexa ranking.

My service is limited for any sites that have recent global alexa ranking no more than 300k alexa ranking only.

NOTE : MORE HIGHER YOUR ALEXA RANKING IT WILL NEED MORE TIME TO BEAT MANY GOOD SITES TO GET BETTER ALEXA RANKING.

How do you "really" determine KW competitiveness?

I have a potential client that is running a regional Insurance agency. I know from working with other very competitive industries that they are just that.. competitive. (such as mortgage brokers, banks, hosting companies, etc.)

But, how do you actually identify that the potential client needs more "heat" to get them ranked higher? In other words, the keyword "health insurance" is listed at Adwords as being "Medium" competition (although you would pay $73,000 per DAY for this). Whereas something like "health insurance texas" is identified as being "High" competition and about 4x PPC value (but with lower search volume of course)

In general, I have a standard configuration for standard clients that works well, but when I have client that is theoretically in a competitive market, I need to bump up the link-building .. but by how much and how do I determine this? I need to justify this to the client.

Will your site get penalized by Google

Our staff has been advising our customers and friends alike that quality content, simple forms of navigation, and creating content that applies or coordinates with the intended theme of a page or article is very important.  Google is striving to punish sites that are over SEO’d with over use of keywords and other “black hat” tactics.  Well it appears that the Google is getting ready to roll out a new tool to make that happen.

Matt Cutts announced a new Google Algorithm update last week that is meant to penalize those over SEO’d sites.  Google has been working on this update for a while now and plans to roll out the change within a few weeks.

While participating in a SXSW panel a questioner asked the following question:

“With so many SEO companies showing up claiming to do SEO, a lot of markets are getting saturated with optimized content…What are you doing to prevent, for example, if you’re looking for something, and the first page is just optimized content, and it’s not what you’re actually looking for? Are you pretty much out of luck if you’re not optimizing your site but it has relevant content? If I’m a mom or pop and I’m trying to optimize a site by myself, I’m going to get beat by people paying thousands of dollars.”

Matt Cutts explained that they are attempting to make the algorithm more adaptive.  In doing so, sites that have strives to provide quality driven content that is meant for the visitors pleasure will have no problems.  What he did say was ”throw too many keywords on the page, exchange way too many links, whatever they’re doing to go beyond what a normal person would expect.”

We think this is a very good thing!

Website content should first and foremost be theme or topic driven.  It’ OK to do research to find subject matter that readers or visitors want to find and read and then write about it on a page or article.  It’s also ok to use those keywords in the page title, URL, and heading tags.  It won’t be ok to write content that is over SEO’d with internal navigation techniques, overuse or over-duplicity of keywords within the content, and creating content that simply doesn’t make sense!

Matt Cutts added a few more comments. “Make a compelling site. Make a site that’s useful. Make a site that’s interesting. Make a site that’s relevant to people’s interests…We’re always trying to best approximate if a user lands on a page if they are going to be annoyed…All of the changes we make are designed to approximate, if a user lands on your page, just how happy they are going to be with what they’re going to get.”

Bing’s Duane Forrester added his own comments as well. ”Does the rest of the world think you have a great product? If they do, they will amplify this. If you’re not engaged socially, you’re missing the boat because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content. Those are really important signals for us. Whether you’re involved or not is your choice, but those signals still exist whether you’re in the conversation or not.”

So do they know?

Here are a few metrics that are used to decide if you have quality content.

1. Page and Site Bounce Rate.
2. Page and Site Exit Rate.
3. Average Visit Duration
4. Pages per Visit
5. Latent Semantic Analysis
6. Keyword Density
7. Duplicate Content
8. Social Sharing
9. Social Commenting
10. Overall Engagment

Google Releases March Updates to Database, Algorithm

It’s the beginning of the month, which means that if you’re an SEO, it’s time for your regularly scheduled paradigm shift.

That’s right – as per usual, Google has released the sum total of changes made to the algorithm in the previous month.

Google’s official Inside Search blog unveiled the 50 tweaks, nudges, and adjustments made in March. Some of the most important changes for SEO include:

Indexing symbols (codename “Deep Maroon”) – in the past, Google has ignored punctuation symbols, but has now decided to begin indexing those with the highest frequency of use: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, and “+”.

This change may be problematic for content managers and SEOs who break up long-tail keywords by using periods, commas, and other symbols. For instance, if you were trying to get a page to rank for “South Shore cleaning services discount” (for whatever reason) then you might have a sentence that runs “… our South Shore cleaning services. A discount may be available…”

Traditionally, Google has overlooked certain stop words and punctuation symbols to make this kind of flexibility possible, but if punctuation is now being indexed, then it’s not long until it starts affecting the algorithm.

Better scoring of news groups (codename “avenger_2”) – news results on Google are clustered into groups about the same story, and a slight change to the scoring system will lead to more effective news clusters.

Although this won’t change very much for SEOs or content managers, it’s an important reminder that tactics like newsjacking are not always effective – if you’re writing about the same topics as everyone else, it’s more likely than not that your content will be clustered in the News results, and therefore unseen.

High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements (codename “Panda”) – you’re probably already familiar with Panda, and no matter how long it’s been out of the news, it certainly hasn’t gone away. No, it’s been there all along, in the background, working away.

This month, algorithm data that had been processed offline was cycled into the database. Google gave this change away earlier this month on Twitter, but, as usual, failed to give any indication as to what kind of changes the data might have held. Watch your analytics for any bumps or dips.

Another change relevant to Panda (codename “Curlup”) is meant to improve the system that Google uses to rate the quality of sites, an important factor in a post-Panda world. Very little is released by Google about the qualities taken into consideration by the Panda change, but overall site quality is far and away one of the most dominant factors.

More relevant image results (codename “Lice”) – you might be wondering how an image search is relevant to an SEO, and if you are, you could also be missing out on the boon of image integration and alt-tagging. Since Google segregates image search from general search, you will now be able to find relevant, high quality images, even if they are on low quality pages. If you don’t use alt-tagging to differentiate your images, we recommend doing so immediately so that you can leverage this algorithm optimization.

Changes to how anchor text is handled (codename “PC”) – a classifier related to anchor text has been turned off; mum’s the word on this one from Google, but they claim their data suggests that anchoring text was more robust without this particular classifier.

It was also announced that the anchor text interpretation systems have been improved, which will augment how an anchor might be relevant for the query that led to the website. What this essentially means is that you should ensure that any anchoring you’re doing on-page should be reflective of the keywords and topics you’re trying to rank for.

Improvement of searches with navigational and local intent (codename “ShieldsUp”) – this change balances results for search queries that have local intent and an obvious navigational intent, such as “New York Times” “Florida accident.” Instead of weighing one more heavily than the other, search results will include highly relevant results from both categorizations.

Freshness rollout (codename “Freshness”) – when this improvement was released last year, the resources were significant enough that Google opted for a soft-rollout, affecting only news-related queries and traffic. This month, that freshness update has been applied to all queries. As has always been the case, this means your websites should be updated regularly, if not daily, to maximize freshness and leverage this and other changes that prioritize recency.

“Freshness” also includes some changes to how old pages are detected. Now, stale pages will be detected more quickly by the index, and as you can imagine, this means fewer stale results will be shown to users. Does your homepage look the same as it did last month? What about your contact page? Your product’s landing page? Change them.

This is only a sampling of the changes that were released and unveiled in March, but you can read the entire list of changes at Google’s Inside Search blog.

Although not all of these changes are released on the very morning of the last day or first day of the month, it’s not a bad idea to take a monthly baseline of your analytics so that you can keep a general sense of how the changes are affecting your traffic and performance.

Have you been Slapped by the Panda

Whats he talking about being slapped by the panda ? The big G or Google runs a very complex algorithm which uses artificial intelligence in such a sophisticated manner, no humans outside of Google really know how it works. This algorithm update is called a panda update, the most recent update being 3.3 which took place on the 27^th of February and included the discontinuation of a link evaluation signal.

In todays SEO world we all use calculated guesses and practice optimisation techniques based on the SERP  we achieve through many different link building methods, ie blog posts, forum posts, article marketing web 2.0 profiles etc. as mentioned no one actually knows exactly how google will rank a site. This most recent update had really taken some of our industries players for a rough ride as some results have been dropped by 5-7 rankings overnight. Which could indicate a case of “too many eggs in one basket” as SEO is about diversification. It’s important to diversify so that when certain ranking factors are updated by google it does not throw your site around the search results. Don’t get slapped by the panda !

I noticed a certain website was completely shut down overnight as a result of google deindexing 98% of its blog network. This was a subscription network with literally thousands of members paying $50 + pm ! It just goes to show you how powerful these guys are and that there is no point trying to “trick” Google as there intelligence will catch up with you soon enough.

This most recent update seems to be aimed at providing consumers a more accurate local results and tends to be showing more local businesses, a good thing for small business however can knock around some of the bigger guys.

How to Diagnose a Google Penalty

How to Diagnose a Google Ranking Ban, Penalty, or Filter

If you undertake black or gray hat techniques, you run a fair chance of having your site penalized in the search results. But even if you are not engaged in these techniques yourself, your site may be punished for associating with black hat purveyors. Hosting on a shared server or sharing domain registration information with bad neighborhoods can lead to to ranking problems, if not punishment. Certainly linking to a bad neighborhood can lead to discipline. If you purchase a domain, you’ll inherit any penalties or bans imposed on the prior version of the website.

There are a wide range of penalties and ranking filters that search engines impose and a still-wider range of effects that those penalties produce. In diagnosing and correcting ranking problems, more than half the battle is figuring which penalty, if any, is imposed and for what violations. Ranking problems are easy to fix but arduous to diagnose with precision. Sudden drops in rankings might lead you to suspect that you’ve received a penalty, but it might not be a penalty at all.

In the following section we’ll look at some specific penalties, filters, conditions, and false conditions, and how to diagnose ranking problems.

Google Ban

The worst punishment that Google serves upon webmasters in a total ban. This means the removal of all pages on a given domain from Google’s index. A ban is not always a punishment: Google “may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law.” Google warns that punishment bans can be meted out for “certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index.”

One of the most newsworthy instances of a total ban was when Google, in 2006, issued a total ban to the German website of carmaker BMW (http://www.bmw.de). The offense? Cloaked doorway pages stuffed with keywords that were shown only to search engines, and not to human visitors. The incident became international news, ignited at least partially by the SEO blogging community. BMW immediately removed the offending pages and within a few weeks, Google rescinded the ban.

How to Diagnose a Total or Partial Ban

To diagnose a full or partial ban penalty, run the following tests and exercises:

• Check Google’s index. In the Google search field, enter the following specialized search query: “site:yourdomain.com.” Google then returns a list of all of your site’s pages that appear in Google’s index. If your site was formerly indexed and now the pages are removed, there is at least a possibility that your site has been banned from Google.
• Check if Google has blacklisted your site as unsafe for browsing (type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com with your domain at the end).
• Check for Nofollow/Noindex settings. It might seem obvious, but check to make sure you haven’t accidentally set your WordPress site to Noindex. To check, go to your WordPress Dashboard and click the “Privacy” option under “Settings.” If the second setting, “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” is set, then your site will promptly fall out of the index. A stray entry in a robots.txt file or in your WordPress template file can instruct search engines not to index your entire site.
• Check Google Webmaster Tools. Sometimes, but not always, Google will notify you through your Webmaster Tools account that your site has been penalized. But you won’t always receive this message, so you can still be penalized even if you don’t receive it. See the image below for an example message.

Guide to Google penalties recognition and removal 2012

1) Penalty recognition and removal:


A) Did you got some private blog network backlinks?

If you see a penalty some time after you got some private blog network post backlinks - even some long months later - it could meant that blog network got de-indexed (check your reports and forums for any comments about de-indexing networks).

Penalty recognition:

- sudden drop in rankings without any reason (sometimes it could be 3-5 spots, sometimes 100-200 spots)
- un-explained dancing (no backlinking/onsite optimization done in last 2 weeks)

Solution:

If you see only dancing/small drop in rankings then it means your backlink diversity is low. Go and grab some different types of backlinks - mix of Manual Bookmarks (a lot of them from different providers) and unique article submission to article directories will help to regain your position - even stronger than before.




B) Did you pinged your website/got some Whois posted to it?

You can notice huge dancing (even tens of positions back and forward) or sudden drop way below top100.

Penalty recognition:

- sudden drop in rankings or heavy dancing
- drop in just few keywords or group of related keywords


The main causes could be two:

B1) your onsite optimization is really poor
B2) you have nasty backlinking (some really poor backlinks/spam/porn links)


To determine which one is right - simply check what backlinks Google sees by checking Alexa backlink checker and Google search engine. If Alexa is not showing anything of ppor quality (spammed websites where you link is located) then search for your website as - domain.com (without quotes and without www or http://). If you can see any spammy links (use your common sense to determine) within first 5 pages - then go ahead with B2 solution. If not - use B1 solution.

Solution:

B1) Check your inner linking (for any dead ones), correct 301's, proper site map, proper coding of website (no serious errors). I would suggest getting some webmaster to check your coding (he do not need access to your hosting - he should be able to work by reading your sites code with his browser) or using IBP (expensive but extensive) or SEOmoz (less expensive but really user friendly) - I didn't tested other options so just check reviews on SEO non-affiliate forums/blogs/review sites.
After you are done hit your site with ping services (pingomatic, feed burner) and whois sites (hit it with like 1000-10.000 sites to get your site noticed by crawlers to re-check it).

B2) Build some high authority backlinks - perfectly 2-3 types of links.
I would suggest high PR backlinks at first (any high PR backlinks will do really). Once you have some good number of them get them indexed at once (build SB links to them or run them by one of the indexing/crawling programs like Linklicious/Backlinks Indexer/Lindexed etc.)
[For example - build some High PR (PR4+) forum profiles, High PR blog posts and High PR Web 2.0 properties]




C) Did you created a lot of backlinks lately?

You have created a lot of backlinks recently and your site is jumping around or lost a lot of rankings.

Penalty recognition:

- heavy dancing, moving up and down (from top position to out of top100 and backwards)
- most of the keywords changed position right after backlinking (possibly for worst)
- your website lost all rankings (but you can still see it in Google as top3 when you search for your own domain name without spaces etc.)

Solution:

C1) You are not in top3 results when you search for domain.com (where domain = your domain name, .com = your extension - do not use www/http when searching for it in Google)

It means your website got serious penalty from Google - possibly soft one.
DO NOT ask for reconsideration within Webmaster Tool in Google.

Follow those steps:
- remove Google Analitycs from your site
- close your Google Webmaster Tools account (cancel it)
- log out from Gmail/Youtube (from now on always log out from them before accessing Google search results or your site)
- opt out/log out from any Google owned business that could lead to YOU or to your website

Perform full onsite optimization - (Check step B1) but do not do Whois linking.
Build quality backlinks to your site - Facebook, Twitter and whole group of Reputation Management business sites (Linkedin/Merchant Circle/YouTube/MySpace...). Do it manually or get a guy that can do this for you.
Get some social backlinks (High PR Manual Bookmarks or Re-Tweets with your link in it).
Get all links crawled (use Pingomatic or more advanced crawling service)
After all this - wait for ~5 days and then submit your site to good list of Whois websites (minimum 1.000).

C2) You are on position 2-3 when you search for your domain name.

Build more diverse backlinks - create "Raw backlinks" (no anchor links) to your main page. You can use for this AMR - get some quality article from Ezine, do not spin it and submit it to article directories. As a link use your homepage url (not inner pages, just homepage).

C3) You are on position 1 when you search for your domain name.

This is just a dance. You can get few of crawling services (Pingomatic etc) and submit your site to them to speed up process of ranking selection.
DO NOT submit your site to Whois sites at the beginning of dance as this can mislead you with further investigation on whats the problem.




D) Did you maintained status Quo for last 2 months?

You have done nothing in last 2 months but all suddenly all your keywords started to falling in rankings.

Penalty recognition:

- sudden drop in rankings without doing anything to the site by you
- complete lost of rankings by all the keywords

Solution:

D1) Your keyword is easy/medium competition

You lack link building - keep building backlinks on weekly or even daily basis. Try to diversify backlinks and fetch some high quality manual ones (Linkedin/Merchant Circle/YouTube/MySpace/Tumblr/Tweeter/Ezine...)
You need to re-build your whole SEO campaign so create a plan of backlinking and start getting them in proper quantities - use your common sense on how many of them. Regular site will use 3 different backlinks provider/sources a month (for example - Manual Bookmarking, Manual Web 2.0 and Scrapebox blast with 10K links - change strategy/providers each month).

D2) Your keyword is in high competitive niche

You need to check your backlinks.
Go to Alexa.com and Google.com and search for your backlinks.
When in Google.com search for domain.com (without quotes, where domain.com is your domain name).
Go through first 10 pages (if there is as much as that) and look for backlinks you do not recognize.

D2-A) You found backlinks that you do not recognize (made by your competitor) - you need to make them weaker or stronger:

D2-A1) Make them stronger - build backlinks to those bad links (do not do it if the anchors are nasty ones like - "Porn", "Fuck", "Cocaine" etc or there is more than 1.000 outgoing links from the page). Get some proper Scrapebox blasts to those links in order to create authority in them. Around 100-500 backlinks per bad link is enough. Get all the backlinks created to badlinks crawled (use Linklicious/Lindexed/BacklinksIndexer).

D2-A2) Make them weaker - to do so you need to make your website authority one. Create high authority backlinks to your website comming from popular social sites + Wikipedia (if you can - possibly as a source link or in-article anchor) + Wiki sites (there is many service providers offering such a Wiki submission). Build few hundreds of high PR backlinks to your site without anchor ("Raw Link"). Get all the backlinks crawled using popular pinging/indexing services.
If none happened - submit your site to Whois database after 2 weeks of creating major backlinks.
Keep building backlinks constantly and take care of diversity so this wont happen again.





2) Avoiding Penalty and Google reviews:


A) Onsite Optimization
B) Offsite SEO
C) Overall Quality Score



A) Onsite Optimization

You are required to keep a very good onsite optimization.
You need to prevent having serious coding loops or errors as Google will detect it easily. Any dead links (within a site or going to other sites) can affect your rankings and cause problems.
List of things to look at:

- Check your websites code for any serious errors. Your code should be W3C validated: http://validator.w3.org/
- Check for dead links - Google hates them: http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com
- Interlink your inner pages to main page (Inner Page linking to main page with one of your main Anchor) or other way around (main page linking through footer with Anchors to most valued inner pages - not too many though)
- No excessive advertising - 2 ad blocks are enough, 3 is a lot, 4+ can affect your rankings
- No linking out to Scam/Spam/Illegal sites - one link to Scam e-commerce shop can drain out your authority
- Proper content quantity/quality for crawlers to index - 300 words article is not enough to fill whole website. Every site, even MNS should have more than 1 page and more than 300 words article
- DO NOT post spinned content on your website - Google will index copied content as long as it is quality and related. Spinned content can get you de-indexed or penalized
- You do not need to link to authority sites - by doing so you will pass some juice on them but also you will get more Google trust. Evaluate which option is best for you.



B) Offsite SEO

To impress Google you need proper diversification and constant backlinking.

- Create different types of backlinks. There is no "Miracle Backlink". You cant dominate results with just one backlink type and hope for Status Quo. You need to diversify your campaign so Google wont see any spam attempts. Even if you are #1 keep building diverse backlinks (if #1 was achieved by blog posts from
private network - build some quality Web 2.0 and .Edu links for diversity and security).
- Keep constant backlink flow. You cannot create 100K Scrapebox backlinks at once and expect best. Keep building backlinks daily, weekly or even monthly to maintain your good authority and trust within Google.
a) Monthly backlinking example - buy automatic bookmarking, 10K Scrapebox blog comments and wiki links in one month - then in next one create new "campaign"
b) Weekly backlinking example - create 1-2 different backlink types like Private Blog Network submission and Forum Profiles first week, .Edu backlinks and Linkpushing other week.
c) Daily backlinking example - build daily amount of backlinks like blog comments, forum profiles bookmarks and manual high PR backlinks
- Mix quality with quantity - Scrapebox or Xrumer links are good as long as you will mix them with high authority (or high PR) backlinks. Do not worry about getting 10K Scrapebox links - but add some extra high PR Bookmarks or Articles same week you done them for fast and secure results.
- Get high authority backlinks indexed using indexing/crawling systems - any high authority (or high PR) backlink can be artificially forced to cue for crawling by Google without any negative penalty.


C) Overall Quality Score

Look at your website as manual reviewer will do it.
He have less than a minute to evaluate your website and he will look for following:
- code/keyword report
- relevance of content to keyword
- ad spam/affiliate spam attempts
- content lockers (do not use content locker if 100% of your traffic is from Google unless you are experienced in what you do)
- misleading information/links