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Google’s advice on how to deal with low quality backlinks

kuanhoong — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:58:00 +0000

One of the important factors for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is backlinks. However, often webmasters may be stressed out when they discovered low-quality incoming links in Google Webmaster Tools. Now Google has some tips on how to deal with low quality backlinks.

As per Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Webmasters who check their incoming links in Webmaster Tools often ask us what they can do when they see low-quality links. Understandably, many site owners are trying to build a good reputation for their sites, and some believe that having poor-quality incoming links can be perceived as "being part of a bad neighbourhood," which over time might harm their site’s ranking.

While it’s true that linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithms, it’s just one of many. I know we say it a lot, but having something that people want to look at or use—unique, engaging content, or useful tools and services—is also a huge factor. Other factors can include how a site is structured, whether the words of a user’s query appear in the title, how close the words are on the page, and so on. The point is, if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it’s important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site. If you have a well-structured and regularly maintained site with original, high-quality content, those are the sorts of things that users will see and appreciate.

That having said, in an ideal world you could have your cake and eat it too (or rather, you could have a high-quality site and high-quality backlinks). You may also be concerned about users’ perception of your site if they come across it via a batch of spammy links. If the number of poor-quality links is manageable, and/or if it looks easy to opt-out or get those links removed from the site that’s linking to you, it may be worth it to try to contact the site(s) and ask them to remove their links. Remember that this isn’t something that Google can do for you; we index content that we find online, but we don’t control that content or who’s linking to you.

If you run into some uncooperative site owners, however, don’t fret for too long. Instead, focus on things that are under your control. Generally, you as a webmaster don’t have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking. Organize your content; do a mini-usability study with family or friends. Ask for a site review in your favorite webmaster forums. Use a website testing tool to figure out what gets you the most readers, or the biggest sales. Take inspiration from your favorite sites, or your competitors—what do they do well? What makes you want to keep coming back to their sites, or share them with your friends? What can you learn from them? Time spent on any of these activities is likely to have a larger impact on your site’s overall performance than time spent trying to hunt down and remove every last questionable backlink.

In a nutshell, webmaster should focus on too much on the low-quality backlinks but instead focus on building high quality content.

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Google’s advice on how to deal with low quality backlinks

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Video : Find out how Google deals with Duplicate Content & Multiple Site issues

kuanhoong — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:13:24 +0000

No doubt, Google is the currently the “search engine” out there. Being penalized accidently or overtly by Google is like end of the world for a webmaster. One of the commonly asked questions is how Google deals with duplicate content and if you run mirror sites, will Google ban you.

Watch the following video by Google’s Greg Grothaus presented at the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference to find out how you can avoid being penalized by Google for duplicate content.

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Importance of Social Media optimization in Your SEO Strategy

kuanhoong — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:46:52 +0000

With the emergence of various social media websites and their increasing Popularity. Its very important for SEO experts to include social media strategies in their SEO campaigns. It is fact that social media really helps in improving the search engine rankings in an indirect way. For example, if a company/brand is more popular in Social media websites Then it means that more people are searching about that and will link to that which really can help in improving the visibility of search engines.

Another advantage of using Social media Optimization is that Social media has created new channels of relevant traffic for websites. In tough competition of online marketing one should not rely completely on traffic from search engines. It is wise to create as many channels/Bridges to your website so that people can find your website easily. Hence, one should be very careful while designing landing pages of their brands/products on social media sites.

Here are the few rules which can help you in your social media optimization campaigns :

1. Participate in the Community:- Don’t start telling people about you product directly . First participate in the community .Each Community has its own rules so it would be good that you learn their rules first.

2. Read, Learn and then Write:- Don’t go out there and start writing your views even if you are an expert in your niche . Try to Read first and learn about the tips which experts are using. After that start writing in the same style. It would increase the chances of your success

3. 80-20 rule:- Always Follow the 80-20 rule . It means that Spend 80% of your time in campaign in helping your targeted audience and remaining 20% in promoting your product. If your community know that you are always ready to help them and you are an expert in your niche then they will definitely try out your product .

4. Be Real:- Always try to show your real face in your community . No community like Fake People

5. Create Unique and Quality Content:- I am writing this at last because everybody know that you need to provide high quality content to attract your audience . Social Media Optimization is all about finding new mediums to interact with your audience and increasing your visibility in your niche Community. So do not ignore it and try to get as much as you can from Social media websites.

This is a guest blog post by Gagandeep Singh. He is working as SEO consultant for Miami Web Design Company . Please feel free to contact him on twitter.

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Importance of Social Media optimization in Your SEO Strategy

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How can you tell if a website is being penalized by Google

kuanhoong — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:47:41 +0000

Here is a good question to ask if your website is being penalized by Google. How do you find out?. What are the signs or indicators to look for?. If you like to know more, there is a Google Group that focuses on these questions.

Some of the answers provided are like :

Basically search under your domain name – if you aren’t listed and previously were than that is a good clue of a penalty.
A sudden drop in traffic, while useful often leads to other reasons being discovered, but is surely a good sign that something may be penalized.
If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, you’ve got problems and it probably has something to do with links, how you manipulated them, got them, or distributed them.

If you would like to know more whether your website is being penalized by Google, it is always advisable to check closely error reports reported by Google Webmaster Tools.

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How can you tell if a website is being penalized by Google

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SEO : Check your website position in various search engines

kuanhoong — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:10:15 +0000

The ExactFactor Ranking Tool is a reliable FREE SEO tool for checking your website position in various search engines, and for a specific search query. It helps to analyze website promotion factors in your preferred search engine and track your website rank.

With ExactFactor, you can track your website position in your favorite search engine quickly and displays the results simply and clearly. ExactFactor Ranking Tool is based on real time updates from the search engines. ExactFactor also help to track your website position constantly, provides you scheduled search engine optimization reports and send you a notice email when change occurs. You can also track competing sites position relatively to your website.

Check your website position in various search engines with ExactFactor.

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SEO : Check your website position in various search engines

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SEO Starter Guide from Google

kuanhoong — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:47:04 +0000

If you have tons of questions related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then the best way to get the right answers is from the King of Search Engine itself – Google. The Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing.

From this guide, you can find answers to questions like ways on improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more. Throughout the guide, there are many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. [via]

Download Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (pdf)

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SEO Starter Guide from Google

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SEO : Best Practices for URL Structure

kuanhoong — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:19:57 +0000

Here is a brief all-in-one guide to summarize what we know about SEO for URLs. Here we go:

Describe your content – Basically URL structure should roughly describe the content of your page.
Keep it short – According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the best practices for URL Length should not be more than 3-5 words. If there are more than 5 words, Google algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
Don’t be Case Sensitive – Unlike URL for your domain, URL is case sensitive – meaning that if by any reason, you started with upper-case URL structure, it is recommended that you stick to a an upper-case version, remember that this can cause a few issues: people are most likely to link to the standard lower case one and you might both lose link juice and suffer from duplicate content issues.
Hyphens Separate Best – Although Google has no individual preferences between hyphen and underscore (meaning you won’t be penalizes for either of the versions), hyphens are more preferable as Google “sees” each hyphened word as an individual word.
Don’t be spammy – Try to avoid your URLs perceived as spam with the usage of unnecessary spam keywords.
Use Static URL instead of dynamic URL – Googlebot crawls dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

I hope I have covered almost all aspects, and if you have something to add, please kindly leave me your comments.

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SEO : Find rankings of your pages in all major search engines

kuanhoong — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:43:05 +0000

Part of the tasks for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to closely monitor the rankings of your pages in all major search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo and Windows Live Search. SERPs Finder is a free SEO utility that allows you to do just that. SERPs Finder can easily check search engine position of your site for a given query in Google, Live Search, and Yahoo! Search.

As the saying goes, “Never judge a book by its cover”, despite it’s simplicity it is one of the most powerful tools of its kind, unlike many others it searches for position deeply, analyzing first 1000 of search engine results. It is also incredibly fast, the only practical limit is the speed of your network connection.

Download SERPs Finder

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SEO : Find rankings of your pages in all major search engines

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SEO : Simple review about the "nofollow" tag

kuanhoong — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:39:24 +0000

The nofollow tag was introduced by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com as a means of combating spam. The basic concept of the nofollow is to notify Google search bots do not credit any links with a rel=”nofollow” tag attached to them. Google advised webmasters to nofollow all the unwanted, unrelated links so that Google could improve their searches, by eliminating any false links.

Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. For example:

Before nofollow was used on individual links, preventing robots from following individual links on a page required a great deal of effort (for example, redirecting the link to a URL blocked in robots.txt). That’s why the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute was created. This gives webmasters more granular control: instead of telling search engines and bots not to follow any links on the page, it lets you easily instruct robots not to crawl a specific link. For example:

 sign in

This also means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

According to Google, here are some cases in which you might want to consider using nofollow:

Untrusted content: If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links
Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links
Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.

* Check out Official Google blog regarding the usage of “nofollow” tag

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SEO : Check for Broken Links for your web site

kuanhoong — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:29:33 +0000

One of the most important steps for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to make sure there are no broken links for your web site. With Dead Links dot com, it is simple to check for broken links. All you got to do is to put your website or weblog home page URL in the input box and a little spider will read the html code and check for the broken links.

The spider splits links in two categories, internal, from the same host, and external, outgoing link to different domains. Once you have put your start URL the bot will visit your website and follow all links checking for their status. When finish you will see a report showing all the bad links found, not only 404 status.

Check for Broken Links now

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