Penguin 2.1 Recovery Plans – Reclaim your rank now!!

Proven Six Step Penguin 2.1 Recovery Strategy

Google’s Penguin 2.1 has impacted a lot of websites as it has gone deeper to look for spam, analyzing internal pages as opposed to just the homepage of websites in the earlier Penguin 1.0 update . The problem being addressed here was unnatural, manipulative inbound link profiles. What makes a bad link profile?

Google focused on links that were from

• Automated link exchanges

• Low quality article submissions

• Artificial blog networks

• Fake Profiles

• Blog Comment Spam

• Site wide Link Spam (Header/Footer Link)

• Artificial Blogrolls

• Network websites

• Link Exchange Site (reciprocal sites)

• Malware Attacked sites

• Paid links and Link farms

• Adult websites

• Irrelevant websites

• Foreign language websites

• Domain expired sites

Google+ Saved Searches Are Going Away On November 15th

Google is getting rid of the”saved searches” feature in Google+, but if you actually use it, you probably already knew that. It’s more likely that you don’t use it or haven’t used it lately. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t be going away.
Google is alerting users of the news when they go to actually look at one of the searches they have saved. If you have saved one in the past, it appears in your list of Circles. If you go to “more,” they should show up at the bottom. If you select one, you’ll get a message saying, “Saved searches are going away. Bookmark this page on your browser to save your Google+ search for later.”

 

If you click the link to “learn more,” Google suggests that you save your searches by simply bookmarking the results page in your web browser. It also says you’ll be able to access the existing saved searches from the “more” menu until November 15th.

Video: Google Matt Cutts Hints At Upcoming SEO Changes At PubCon

One of the highlights of the year for me is Matt Cutts talk at PubCon. So me not being there, being 6,000+ miles away, was unfortunate. It was the first PubCon I've missed in, well, I can't remember.
Anyway, there was some excellent note taking of his presentation, plus PubCon streamed it live, so I saw a glimpse of it. I wanted to pull out the highlights and most important things Matt shared, specific to topics SEOs should be concerned with for the end of this year and 2014.

Google Penalty On WWW Revoked But Remains On Non-WWW

A WebmasterWorld thread has an interesting discussion around how a webmaster said his manual penalty was revoked on his WWW but remains on his non WWW.

The non WWW is 301 redirected to the WWW and the WWW is set as the preferred domain in Webmaster Tools.

The webmaster with this problem said:

A site I watch has a manual penalty. After a lot of link cleaning and reconsideration request, Google has revoked penalty on www version, while penalty on non-www version stays. Both www and non-www versions verified in WMT and 301 redirected from non-www to www.

Its about a week now since penalty on www was revoked and the site doesn't even rank for domain.com.

Have you ever seen this case, where the WWW vs the non WWW don't have timed penalties properly?

Google Is Apparently Reducing Authorship In Results

Matt Cutts spoke at Pubcon in Las Vegas, discussing numerous SEO topics as usual. Bruce Clay has a pretty good basic recap here.

You can see 25 minutes of his speech here:

There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of big news to come out of the keynote. He discussed a lot of the things Google has been doing that everybody already knows about. He did say that Google is going to be working on combatting hacking and child porn in the coming months, and noted that the reason that Toolbar PageRank hasn’t been updated is because the export feature that sends the data to the toolbar broke, and they didn’t bother to fix it. It’s unclear if they will bother in the future. My guess is no. Trends for webmasters to think about going forward, according to Cutts, include making sure your site looks good on mobile devices, annotating your forms for autocomplete and rich snippets (on reputable sites). Google is also getting better at Javascript. Meanwhile, the page layout algorithm will start having a greater impact on Arabic and Russian sites. One interesting nugget to come out of Cutts’ speech is that Google is apparently going to be reducing the amount of authorship results it shows by 15%, saying that this will improve quality. Google reportedly still sees authorship as a key signal, they just want to “tighten” it to make sure it’s really relevant and useful, from what I gather.

Google Penguin 2.1 is Going Live Today

Google Penguin 2.1 is launching today, according to a tweet from Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts.

The first update to the second-generation Penguin algorithm designed to target web spam will affect "~1% of searches to a noticeable degree."

Google Penguin 2.0 went live on May 22 and affected 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries. When it launched, Cutts explained that while it was the fourth Penguin-related launch, Google referred to the change internally as Penguin 2.0 because it was an updated algorithm rather than just a data refresh.

"It's a brand new generation of algorithms," Cutts said in May. "The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

This is Google's fifth Penguin-related launch.

Google originally launched the algorithm that was eventually become known as Penguin 1.0 in April 2012. There were two refreshes last year: in May and October.

How to add google friend connect in blogger

1. Login into Blogger
2. Select your blog if you have many
3. Then migrate to LAYOUT –> Click on “Add A Gadget“
4. You get a window opened then find for More Gadget
   
    
   5. Then scroll down to find Followers, and click on add ( + symbol )
   
   
   
    

Google Confirms Panda Update 26 Is Rolling Out

This morning, I noticed a possible Panda update was rolling out, one that seemed to be “softer” in nature than the previous updates, where many webmasters who were originally hit by the algorithm are now claiming recovery.

Google has confirmed a Panda update is rolling out and this specific update is “more finely targeted.”

As you may remember, Google told us new Panda algorithms are being pushed out monthly over a ten day period. Google’s Matt Cutts did imply there was a bit of a delay in pushing out their monthly Panda refresh because they wanted to release signals that would soften the algorithm a bit.

Google confirmed with us that a Panda update is being released and said:

In the last few days we’ve been pushing out a new Panda update that incorporates new signals so it can be more finely targeted.
This is despite Google telling us they are unlikely to confirm future Panda updates.

There does seem to be a wide number of SEOs and webmasters claiming recoveries here. I certainly hope you have recovered.

We are not exactly sure what number of Panda updates were up to, if I had name this one, I’d label it version 26.

Here are all the releases so far for Panda:

Panda Update 1, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
Panda Update 2, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 8, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
Panda Update 20 , Sept. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 22, Nov. 21, 2012 (0.8% of English queries were affected; confirmed, not announced)
Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
Panda Update 25, March 15, 2013 (confirmed as coming; not confirmed as having happened)
Panda Update 26, July 18, 2013 (confirmed)

Google's Matt Cutts - The importance of backlinks

1.  Links are still the best way to rank a website
Matt Cutts made it clear that the links that point to your website are important: "Links are still the best way that we've found to discover [how relevant or important somebody is], and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that."

2. Link building is not bad
As long as your website is link worthy, link building is fine:
"The philosophy that we've always had is if you make something that's compelling then it would be much easier to get people to write about it and to link to it. [...] Make a fantastic website that people love and tell their friends about and link to and want to experience. As a result, your website starts to become stronger and stronger in the rankings."

3. Don't use press releases for link building
Most links from press releases do not count in Google's ranking algorithm. If an editor decides to publish an article on a newspaper site based on that press release, that link will count.

4. Guest posts can be problematic
According to Matt Cutts, Guest posts can be problematic:
"If people just move away from doing article banks or article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they don't raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can cause problems."

5. Content syndication should be planned
You must make sure that your website is the original site if your content is syndicated to other sites. Publish the content before others and use the rel=canonical attribute.

Two things to take from Mr. Cutt's words. Google loves content! Fresh new quality interesting content that they can index, rank and drive vast amounts of traffic towards. And still the most important indicator of how Google ranks one website over another is backlinks.  

Best Seo Tips 2013

Page optimization is an important matter of SEO. Both On-Page & Off-Page optimization is essential for this. So, you have to get a core idea about the features of page optimization. Here I mainly point out the features of page optimization which may be helpful for you to optimize page professionally.

Key Features of On-Page Optimization:

1. Meta Tag: Meta Tag is important for SEO. This is not used for Google page ranking but it increases the weight of your keywords and it also determines what your site is about.

2. H1-H6 Tag: This Header Tag optimization is another important part of SEO. For this you need to have knowledge about HTML tag optimization.

3. Image Alt tag: The alt text that comes with your images is vital when people are looking for images about your niche. It also boosts your site’s traffic. So don’t underestimate the images of your site.

4. Permalink for URL Structure: Structure of permalink is an important matter for page optimization. Short links are not helpful for you to increase your traffic. But if you’re serious about your SEO, it’s better to have a domain name that is related to your keywords, content and Meta tag.

5. Name of Page: Good Keywords make your site specific to the search engines. Select your page name using good keyword.

6. 

   SEO friendly contents: “Content is King” remember this in case of on-page and off-page optimization. Content should be SEO friendly. Content has to be reliable with your site’s keywords.

7. Xml Sitemap: Sitemap generation and submission in different search engine is most important for SEO. From this site (http://www.XML-sitemaps.com/) one can easily generate sitemap for his site. But after this you have to submit this sitemap in different search engine. You can use Google Webmaster Tools for submitting your site in Google search engine.  

Key Features of Off-Page Optimization:

1. Blog Commenting: In almost every Blog there is an option to make a comment. For submitting a comment makes sure that that your comment is a quality comment. Because quality comment will help you to make a strong backlink. Try to make comment in relevant Blog.

2. Social Bookmarking: This is purely artificial. Create account in different social bookmarking site and bookmark your site easily. For example, you can use www.socialmarker.com which will link you to some important bookmarking site for social bookmarking. 

Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors

Seo optimization tips 2013

While building the links, Google’s preference list has changed than before. The important things to keep in mind are:

Total Number: Google at first keeps track of the total number of links one has. It isn’t an effective factor considering the rank, establishment and trustworthiness of a good site will always be much more valuable than spammy and low quality links.

Domains: If a site has several links from the same site, then it’s a spoil spot. Google is going to disregard the influences of most of the links and so link diversity are very important.

Google can detect the domains of links through varied IP addresses. So, it’s advised that the links should be coming from IP addresses around the globe suggesting connection with different people.

Anchor Text: Anchor texts should be varied while creating links which keeps your link profile diverse and natural looking. As a benefit, people won’t use the keyword that the developer has made on that page pointing to that site.

Age: It’s a popular belief that older links that has been used for years are much more important and powerful than the new links. Older and known links will be definitely more influential and impactful than the new links. Google trusts the old links more because they are much more authoritative.

Variation: Diversity or variation is very important in terms of anchor text and source of the links. Variation is also important with respect to image versus text, placement of links on various sites and ‘dofollow’ links versus ‘nofollow’ links.

Some years ago, only the ‘DoFollow’ links were allowed by Google. As a result, every site developer started focussing entirely on ‘DoFollow’ links and started eliminating the other. But the SEO’s belief is contrary to this and they say that Google wants to curb the success of sites that are not playing according to the instructions of Google and blocking their way to the top.

Quality: Quality is the most important factor to keep in mind. Receiving the links from valued sites is better than receiving thousands of spammy blogs. The focus should be made on getting links from the well-known sites, which is difficult because they’re very conservative. Creating and sharing the links should of top priority to increase the quality of the site.

Penguin 4.0 Updated today may 2013

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

Your Rankings Drop Around May 15th? May Be Due To Link Networks Google Busted

On May 15th, Google's head of search spam, announced on Twitter that Google has taken "action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link that passes PageRank network."

Google has done this time and time again, and we covered at least two previous cases of this. We do not know which link network - some are asking if SAPE links was hit again, but others are asking about a network named ghost. I am not sure. It seems like it may be several smaller networks.

One thing for sure is that around May 15th, many webmasters started to complain about ranking drops in WebmasterWorld. Here are some quotes:

Also, seeing a significant drop in ranks for a different domain I mentioned in another thread that I was using to test junk links. It's possible we could be seeing a penguin update.

I am also seeing a decent drop on the 14th which seems to be continuing today.

The complaints go on and on.

I am trying to figure out which network(s) were hit but I can't seem to nail it down to any specific one.

The Black Hat World forums are talking about it but no one is mentioning anything specific and concrete outside of some guesses.

Do you know which link network(s) were hit?

Forum discussion at Black Hat World & WebmasterWorld.

Update: We have a statement from ghost network about this:

I can confirm that the Ghost Network was not targeted in Google's most recent link crackdown. Our ranks are still holding strong for the time being. Thanks Barry.

Google’s @MattCutts Confirms Penguin 2.0 Coming up Over The Next Few Weeks

The latest from Yesterday’s News Google webspam head Matt Cutts on Twitter about Google Penguin. When asked about Penguin update this week Matt. “Nope, no new Penguin update this week,” Cutts wrote on Twitter….In this comment, Matt Cutts responded Penguin update will be coming next few weeks at the latest.

The first Panda algorithm was introduced on April 2012. By this update targeted at spam back-links; also coined the ‘Web-spam Update it targeted keyword stuffing…!!

#Penguin 2.0 @ A Conversation Google’s Webspam Head Matt Cutts via Twitter;

Ignore That Last Google Webmaster Tools Notification: Googlebot CAN Access Your Site

In the past twenty-four hours, it seems as if Google sent out a message to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of site owners, that there is a problem with their site.
Typically, you never ever want to ignore a webmaster tools notification but in this case, the messages were sent in error.
Google told these webmasters that "Googlebot can't access your site", that the site had connection failures and Google was unable to access your site.
Here is a sample message one of my clients received (although I received several):

Google's Matt Cutts wrote in the thread that this seems like an error on Google's side. He said:

Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages

The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. Today we’ll introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.

To see this in action, let’s look at an example. The website example.com has content that targets users around the world as follows:

• http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
• http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
• http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
• http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide

In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang usingSitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

Do You Fear Google Disavow Link Threats?

It is no surprise to many that more and more SEOs are using the Google link disavow tool. The issue that comes up as time goes on is that there are some using it as a threat to remove or change the links or anchor text pointing to their site.

I am sure some of you have received it. SEOs or other webmasters may email you saying, hey - you are linking to me on this or that page using this link and this anchor text. You have a couple options, either remove the link or change the anchor text to X. If you do not do it within Y days, we will use the Google disavow link tool.

They may add onto that email that using the tool can make your site look bad in Google's eyes. Yada yada.

My question to you, do you fear those types of emails? Do you fear someone may use the Google disavow tool and cite one of your URLs?