Target Spider

Friday, August 16, 2013

6 Ways Google Robs SEO to Pay PPC

If marketing budgets were diverted from SEO to PPC campaigns then Google would make more money - so could that be a secret objective of theirs? Some disturbing signs hint that it may be - and that Google might be using shady tactics to harm SEO campaigns - and ultimately the whole SEO industry - in order to make more money from Adwords.

Google’s advertising business is showing signs of slowing as CPCs decline and market share is lost. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to forge ever-closer ties with Bing - and the combined power and reach of those two online giants poses a serious and growing threat to Google’s dominance of the search market.

That's the motive explained. Here's the means by which Google appears to be assaulting the SEO industry - and the opportunities it may be exploiting in order to do so.

1. Not Provided Keywords

The SEO industry has seen a dramatic rise in traffic from "Not Provided" keywords - a trend that shows no signs of slowing as Google encrypts ever more search queries. If you work in SEO then you'll find this chart all too familiar.

Google claims they encrypt keywords to protect user privacy - but that's just nonsense because they still provide full keyword data via Google Webmaster Tools! The only real difference is that you can't use that data to measure revenue from SEO. That's a very important difference to Google - because they don't make a penny from SEO, only from their paid ads.

Marketers aren't asking for user data - just clean search query data, the same data seen in Webmaster Tools, just linked to transactions and revenue. So what's the problem? Clearly there is no genuine problem - except that Google may not want people to measure the revenue generated by SEO - as opposed to Google Adwords campaigns.

To make matters worse, search share from tablets and smartphones is growing - and Google compells new users of its Android mobile operating system to log in or register. After which, of course, searches are encrypted and hidden from Google Analytics. The next version of Google's web browser, Chrome 25, will encrypt searches by default. Google may be using its growing strength in the mobile and tablet markets to encrypt even more searches.

2. Fewer organic search results

There have been signs that Google also intends to literally reduce the number of organic search results - so that the balance of visible results would shift in favour of Adwords results. This issue has been covered extensively - notably in this article on SEOmoz.

3. Withdrawing Google data from SEO tools

Google has been systematically investigating providers of SEO ranking software - and forcing them to either stop using Google Adwords data or stop tracking rankings. Some, like Raven Tools, were forced to abandon their rank-tracking facilities - and just offer Adwords data instead. So they have changed from SEO tools to Google Adwords tools. Marketers need both sets of information together in order to track SEO campaigns effectively, but Google doesn't seem to want us to track SEO campaigns effectively. only PPC campaigns. This seemingly sinister activity by Google could put some software companies out of business. Not nice.

4. Larger paid results

Adwords ad extensions and experiments are increasingly crowding out the organic results below them. From sitelinks to phone numbers, map links, images, product lists, star ratings and even lead generation forms, these extensions take up more and more space. For some competitive searches only two or three organic results can be seen below the enormous, screen-hogging Adwords ads.

5. Google Shopping has gone - to Adwords

Just to squeeze a little more activity through Adwords, after many years of offering Google Shopping listings for free the platform was shut down - at least for free/organic search results. Effectively Google Shopping has become an extension of Adwords. Anybody sensing desperation here, on the part of Google? It gets worse.

6. More eye-catching Ads

Google further emphasises its bias towards Adwords results by making paid results far more eye-catching than organic results - and not to improve the overall user experience. Just the Adwords user experience.

Google Shopping images are only shown in Adwords results
Star ratings are only shown in Adwords

Google is perfectly capable of displaying product images and star ratings in organic results - indeed, as we have seen, they used to provide free product image ads through Google Shopping, as a separate platform to Adwords. I used to love that about Google. But now those eye-catching, click-through-rate-boosting images are reserved for Google's paying customers. Star ratings have only ever been available in paid ads. That only helps Adwords advertisers - not customers and not Google's users (unless they want to click on a paid ad).

These changes may help Google protect its enormous revenues from paid search - and Google may appear to be in control here. But make no mistake: the brands are in control of the Adwords revenue and they can take it away.

More important, though, is the fact that we the people are in charge of the internet. We decide what succeeds and what fails by making our choice. In the long-term, in my view, these changes will alienate brands and customers alike, leaving Google isolated.

The original Google concept was to give people the best possible search results. That's what people want, not the highest bidder, not intrusive ads. There's the inevitable tension between commercial interests and people. But if history reveals one thing it is that, in the end, the people always win.

Search results dominated by expensive, eye-catching paid results from the biggest brands may crowd out small sellers and prevent new businesses from entering the market. That will only harm the market.

Google is doing things that are bad for most businesses who can't compete with brands. It is doing things that are bad for users, which can only lead to a decline in Google's popularity.

Google knows that competitors like Microsoft, Facebook and Apple are poised to exploit Google's weaknesses over the next few years. Google may look unbeatable right now - but if there's one thing that characterises technology, business and the web, it is constant change.

I smell change in the wind. Change for Google. Change for the search market. And change for the web.

Monday, May 20, 2013

URL Optimization: 5 Best Practices for SEO

The following screenshot is a sample URL with ideal anatomy for site SEO.

A Sample of an SEO-Friendly URL

When you talk about SEO in terms of content on a web page it is most often concerning the keywords. The URL of a page is an integral part of SEO and must also contain keywords that are consistent with the other content on the website.

The following are some things that you need to consider when structuring your URLs for SEO:

1. Words Used in URLs:

As shown in the diagram above, your URL consists of some important elements that require the presence of keywords to gain optimum SEO benefits for your site. Within the different elements of a URL, the domain, sub-domain, folder and page elements can contain keywords. It is not mandatory to use keywords but if you can name folders and pages with keywords that appear in the content of that particular page, search engine crawlers will easily index and return the pages for the appropriate keywords.

Along with keywords, there are other factors that need to be considered for the words in the URL structure:

Descriptive URLs: If you do not use keywords, use words that efficiently describe the contents of the page. An obvious URL scores high in usability and often in SEO.

Shorter URL Length: The fewer words the better. A short URL is quicker to type and read. Avoid using words such as a, our, for, the, etc. Also, the fewer the words the more value each word receives from a search engine spider.

Important Keywords at the Beginning: Put the most important words in the beginning of the URL as search engine spiders do not give much significance to words toward the end of a longer URL.

No Repetition: Do not repeat words, for example, a section and sub-section name in the URL.

Rather than this:

www.domain.com/services/services.php

Name the sub-section differently, like this:

www.domain.com/services/web-services.php

Not Necessarily Identical to Page Title: In the case of a blog page, the URL is not required to be exactly the same as the page title or the title of the blog.

Unnecessary URL Parameters: Parameters such as ?, & and % must be avoided in URLs. Read our post on A Guide to Clean URLs for SEO and Usability to learn more.

Long Keywords: For pages with long keywords, avoid using category and sub-category names in the URLs.

Keyword Stuffing: Do not stuff your URL with keywords.

Capital Letters: Do not use CAPITALS in words in URLs.

2. Dynamic Vs. Static URLs:

A dynamic URL is one that is created by a CMS or web server. The page element as a whole does not exist until the browser requests the URL. Once the URL is requested, the CMS dynamically generates the URL with lots of parameters and unwanted characters, making the URL non-SEO-friendly and causing it to look something like the example below:

http://www.domain.com/gp/detail.html/602-9912342-3046240?_encoding=UTF8&frombrowse=1&asin=B000FN0KWA

With advanced an CMS, such as WordPress, one can change the permalink structure and include the page name/title in the URL structure, as shown below:

Permalink Feature in WordPress

Using a static URL that is human-edited while keeping in mind all the factors discussed above will assist both people and search engine crawlers in deciphering your URLs easily.

3. Hyphens Vs. Underscores:

As discussed in our earlier post titled Underscores in URLs: Why are they Not Recommended? Google considers hyphens to be word separators but have not yet programmed their search bots to consider underscores as word separators. It does not make a difference if you use underscores or hyphens for search engines such as Bing, however, we recommend you use hyphens in your URL structure or no word separators at all. Underscores in URLs are not SEO-friendly nor are they user-friendly. If you already have URLs that contain underscores it is better to leave them untouched rather than changing them, as these pages may have already been indexed by search engines and have an established link structure. If you use 301 redirects to redirect a URL with underscores to hyphenated versions of the same URL you will lose some link juice, which is not ideal. Watch for our upcoming blog on link juice for more information on that.

4. Use of Sub-domains:

Use sub-domains for completely different parts of your website, such as a blog page that receives user-generated content on a regular basis. You must remember that sub-domains have the potential to be considered a separate entity and not a part of your website, hence, it is not advised to use multiple sub-domains. In the case of a blog, you can build an extensive interlinking structure with the main page and not lose link juice. Be careful of using other sub-domains, such as category pages on an e-commerce site, for example, woman.domain.com/blue-dresses.html. Although the URL is reader friendly, search engines will not consider it to be a part of the main domain, thus, your website’s link juice is segregated.

5. Duplicate URLs:

Make sure to avoid duplicate URLs. When URLs are dynamically generated, sometimes duplicate URLs are created for the same content. Your website may have www and non-www versions of your URL pointing to the same content, thus also creating a duplicate content problem. Often times duplicate content is created unintentionally by session ids, affiliate codes and sorting options (for example, sort by price and sort by color options on e-commerce sites) in URLs. There are two ways to cope with the duplicate URLs. One is to choose the best URL and add a rel canonical tag to the other duplicate URLs. The other is to add 301 redirects, most often in the case of redirecting multiple home page URLs to one preferred version. This causes less confusion and also prevents your site from duplicate content penalties.

URL cleaning and optimization for easy indexing and navigation by search engines is an important part of your on-site SEO. It is worth spending time on your URLs for both SEO and usability purposes.

Source: woorank.com

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Underscores in URLs: Why are they Not Recommended?

Search engines treat dashes and underscores differently from one another. Google has clearly stated that when it comes to URL structure, using hyphens rather than underscores makes it much easier for them to identify what the page is about. Take a look at an excerpt below from the Google support blog on URL structure.

Google Claiming that Hyphens are Preferable to Underscores in URLs

Senior Google Engineer Matt Cutts clearly explains in this Google Webmaster Help Video about underscores in URLs that hyphens are used as word separators while underscores do not specify any function. Search engine bots have a different way of interpreting your punctuation when crawling and indexing sites. Search engines have not been programmed to interpret underscores the way that we do. This difference in interpretation is not only limited to URLs but also applies to image alt tags.

For example, if your URL includes tips_for_instant_weight_loss (with underscores) search engines read it astipsforinstantweightloss. Obviously someone typing in these words would include spaces. Conversely, when you use hyphens to link a keyword in your URL; tips-for-instant-weight-loss, search engines can return the words in various combinations, as follows:

Tips for instant weight loss
Tips for weight loss
Instant weight loss
Weight loss
Tips
Weight
Loss
Instant
Tips-for-instant-weight-loss
Tipsforinstantweightloss

So, the probability of your website being shown in the SERPs is lower when underscores are used as opposed to when hyphens are used. If you are not bothered about optimizing your website for search, here are some reasons why hyphens in URLs are also preferable for people.

If your URL contains underscores the link will look similar to this:

http://www.tips_for_instant_weight_loss.com (http://www.tips_for_instant_weight_loss.com)

Whereas if your URL contains hyphens, the link will look similar to this:

http://www.tips-for-instant-weight-loss.com (http://www.tips-for-instant-weight-loss.com)

A user may mistake the underscores for spaces, as the underlining in the link hides the underscores. On the other hand, hyphens are clearly visible, so users are more likely to remember to type them. So, the use of underscores in URLs impacts usability as well as SEO.

Google will still crawl and index URLs that already contain underscores and it is not necessarily advisable to change your URLs if they currently contain underscores. As long as you have other ranking factors working well, you should have no problem ranking high in the SERPs. For instance, look at the screenshot below of a Wikipedia URL for the term cloud computing. It uses underscores, and yet Wikipedia takes the top spot in search results for almost all keywords.

Wikipedia URLs Use Underscores

As seen in the Matt Cutts video mentioned above, Google says that they will begin working out a way for search engines to interpret underscores in URLs as separators once they have finished modifying the other high-impact search ranking signals they are currently working on. The general advice remains, however, that if you have yet to choose a domain name, do not use one with underscores, and if you are building inner pages on your website, make sure your URL structures contain hyphens rather than underscores.

If you already have a website URL that uses underscores and its SERP rankings are not improving, you can use 301 permanent redirects to a URL with hyphens. For example, if your old URL ishttp://www.yoursite.com/old_page.html 301 redirect it to http://www.yoursite.com/new-page.html. You do not need to do this, however, if your website fairs well in the SERPs, as 301 redirects can reduce a bit of the link juice that you obtain by building links to your site.

Souce: woorank.com

Friday, May 17, 2013

Robots.Txt: A Beginners Guide

Robots.txt is:

A simple file that contains components used to specify the pages on a website that must not be crawled (or in some cases must be crawled) by search engine bots. This file should be placed in the root directory of your site. The standard for this file was developed in 1994 and is known as the Robots Exclusion Standard or Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Some common misconceptions about robots.txt:

It stops content from being indexed and shown in search results.

If you list a certain page or file under a robots.txt file but the URL to the page is found in external resources, search engine bots may still crawl and index this external URL and show the page in search results. Also, not all robots follow the instructions given in robots.txt files, so some bots may crawl and index pages mentioned under a robots.txt file anyway. If you want an extra indexing block, a robots Meta tag with a ‘noindex’ value in the content attribute will serve as such when used on these specific web pages, as shown below:

 <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>

Uses for Robots.txt:

In some cases the use of robots.txt may seem ineffective, as pointed out in the above section. This file is there for a reason, however, and that is its importance for on-page SEO.

The following are some of the practical ways to use robots.txt:

To discourage crawlers from visiting private folders.
To keep the robots from crawling less noteworthy content on a website. This gives them more time to crawl the important content that is intended to be shown in search results.
To allow only specific bots access to crawl your site. This saves bandwidth.
Search bots request robots.txt files by default. If they do not find one they will report a 404 error, which you will find in the log files. To avoid this you must at least use a default robots.txt, i.e. a blank robots.txt file.
To provide bots with the location of your Sitemap. To do this, enter a directive in your robots.txt that includes the location of your Sitemap:

      Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/sitemap-location.xml

You can add this anywhere in the robots.txt file because the directive is independent of the user-agent line. All you have to do is specify the location of your Sitemap in the sitemap-location.xml part of the URL. If you have multiple Sitemaps you can also specify the location of your Sitemap index file. Learn more about sitemaps in our blog on XML Sitemaps.

Examples of Robots.txt Files:

There are two major elements in a robots.txt file: User-agent and Disallow.

User-agent: The user-agent is most often represented with a wildcard (*) which is an asterisk sign that signifies that the blocking instructions are for all bots. If you want certain bots to be blocked or allowed on certain pages, you can specify the bot name under the user-agent directive.

Disallow: When disallow has nothing specified it means that the bots can crawl all the pages on a site. To block a certain page you must use only one URL prefix per disallow. You cannot include multiple folders or URL prefixes under the disallow element in robots.txt.

The following are some common uses of robots.txt files.

To allow all bots to access the whole site (the default robots.txt) the following is used:

User-agent:*
 Disallow:

To block the entire server from the bots, this robots.txt is used:

User-agent:*
 Disallow: /

To allow a single robot and disallow other robots:

User-agent: Googlebot
 Disallow:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /

To block the site from a single robot:

User-agent: XYZbot
 Disallow: /

To block some parts of the site:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /tmp/
 Disallow: /junk/

Use this robots.txt to block all content of a specific file type. In this example we are excluding all files that are Powerpoint files. (NOTE: The dollar ($) sign indicates the end of the line):

User-agent: *
 Disallow: *.ppt$

To block bots from a specific file:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /directory/file.html

To crawl certain HTML documents in a directory that is blocked from bots you can use an Allow directive. Some major crawlers support the Allow directive in robots.txt. An example is shown below:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /folder/
 Allow: /folder1/myfile.html

To block URLs containing specific query strings that may result in duplicate content, the robots.txt below is used. In this case, any URL containing a question mark (?) is blocked:

User-agent: *
 Disallow: /*?

Sometimes a page will get indexed even if you include in the robots.txt file due to reasons such as being linked externally. In order to completely block that page from being shown in search results, you can include robots noindex Meta tags on those pages individually. You can also include a nofollow tag and instruct the bots not to follow the outbound links by inserting the following codes:

For the page not to be indexed:

     <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>

For the page not to be indexed and links not to be followed:

            <meta name>=“robots” content=“noindex,nofollow”>

NOTE: If you add these pages to the robots.txt and also add the above Meta tag to the page, it will not be crawled but the pages may appear in the URL-only listings of search results, as the bots were blocked specifically from reading the Meta tags within the page.

Another important thing to note is that you must not include any URL that is blocked in your robots.txt file in your XML sitemap. This can happen, especially when you use separate tools to generate the robots.txt file and XML sitemap. In such cases, you might have to manually check to see if these blocked URLs are included in the sitemap. You can test this in your Google Webmaster Tools account if you have your site submitted and verified on the tool and have submitted your sitemap.

Go to Webmaster Tools > Optimization > Sitemaps and if the tool shows any crawl error on the sitemap(s) submitted, you can double check to see whether it is a page included in robots.txt.

Google Webmaster Tools Showing Sitemaps with Crawl Errors

If a page is blocked by robots.txt, GWT will describe the error as sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt.

Alternatively, there is a robots.txt testing tool within GWT. It is found under Webmaster Tools > Health > Blocked URLs as shown in the screenshot below:

Blocked URLs Testing Tool on Google Webmaster Tools

This tool is a great way to learn how to use your robots.txt file. You can see how Googlebots will treat URLs after you enter the URL you want to test.

Lastly there are some important points to remember when it comes to robots.txt:

When you use a forward slash after a directory or a folder, it means that robots.txt will block the directory or folder and everything in it, as shown below:

Disallow: /junk-directory/

Make sure CSS files and JavaScript codes that render rich content are not blocked in robots.txt, as this will hinder snippet previews.
Verify your syntax with the Google Webmaster Tool or get it done by someone who is well versed in robots.txt, otherwise you risk blocking important content on your site.
If you have two user-agent sections, one for all the bots and one for a specific bot, let’s say Googlebots, then you must keep in mind that the Googlebot crawler will only follow the instructions within the user-agent for Googlebot and not for the general one with the wildcard (*). In this case, you may have to repeat the disallow statements included in the general user-agent section in the section specific to Googlebots as well. Take a look at the text below:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /folder1/

Disallow: /folder2/

Disallow: /folder3/

User-agent: googlebot
 Crawl-delay: 2

Disallow: /folder1/

Disallow: /folder2/

Disallow: /folder3/

Disallow: /folder4/

Disallow: /folder5/

Domain	Linking domains	Overall Links	Description
Twitter.com	1,350,000	116,890,000	Microblogging platform and the world's second most popular social network. Many sites link to their Twitter feed
Google.com	872,000	47,620,000	Google's main homepage
Yahoo.com	452,000	23,280,000	Was the biggest search engine before Google's dominance. Now merging with Bing
Baidu.com	308,000	16,750,000	China's top search engine - China has the world's largest population (more than 4 times more people than USA)
Wordpress.com	211,000	14,340,000	The most popular blogging platform
Blogger.com	210,000	7,280,000	Google's blogging platform
Amazon.com	207,000	5,430,000	Online retailer that began life selling books
Youtube.com	204,000	5,960,000	The most popular video-sharing social network - owned by Google
Bing.com	150,000	3,190,000	Microsoft's search engine and rival to Google
Adobe.com	132,000	4,420,000	Provides Flash for online video and reader software for PDF documents - both are popular and frequently linked to.
Taobao.com	108,000	3,140,000	A leading consumer-to-consumer marketplace
Microsoft.com	102,000	1,679,000	Microsoft global homepage
sina.com.cn	97,081	3,580,000	China's leading web analytics provider
Linkedin.com	88,349	2,720,000	The leading professional networking website
Sohu.com	87,309	3,270,000	Chinese search engine
CNN.com	85,057	2,580,000	The leading global news provider (US-based)
Ebay.com	83,948	2,130,000	The world's most popular auction site (peer-to-peer)
PayPal.com	83,886	2,760,000	The world's most popular peer-to-peer payment system. Websites using PayPal often link to the site
163.com	81,974	3,340,000	Leading Chinese web portal
Apple.com	76,271	1,220,000	Apple homepage
Facebook.com	75,988	2,040,000	Homepage of one of the world's most popular social networking sites
Wikipedia.org	74,819	1,700,000	User-edited (wiki) encyclopedia
Yahoo.co.jp	74,434	2,750,000	Yahoo's Japan homepage
Tumblr.com	63,302	4,390,000	A leading blogging platform
Qq.com	62,995	2,280,000	China's biggest web portal
Google.co.jp	62,483	3,300,000	Google's Japan homepage
Msn.com	58,029	1,520,000	Microsoft Network homepage - used to be the default homepage for Windows computers
Google.de	53,443	1,120,000	Google Germany
BBC.co.uk	46,182	1,100,000	Leading provider of news, entertainment and information - ad free - to the UK and the world. Funded by UK TV owners
Imdb.com	45,887	1,320,000	Movie database

Target Spider

Friday, August 16, 2013

Top 30 SEO Link Authority Websites Worldwide

6 Ways Google Robs SEO to Pay PPC

Monday, May 20, 2013

URL Optimization: 5 Best Practices for SEO

URL Optimization: 5 Best Practices for SEO

1. Words Used in URLs:

2. Dynamic Vs. Static URLs:

3. Hyphens Vs. Underscores:

4. Use of Sub-domains:

5. Duplicate URLs:

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Underscores in URLs: Why are they Not Recommended?

Friday, May 17, 2013

Robots.Txt: A Beginners Guide

Robots.Txt: A Beginners Guide

Robots.txt is:

Uses for Robots.txt:

Examples of Robots.txt Files:

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