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Google vs Bing – Who Wins The Little Miss Search Award?



BWMagic’s Internet Marketing Newsletter

Google Zipper





The Photogenic Award Goes To…

While Bing may be losing the search war, at least when
it comes to “user numbers”, but can the case be made
that Bing will win the Little Miss Photogenic Award.
However, don’t rule Google out when it comes to putting
on a good show for its visitors, this little Backrub
has made some great interactive moves in the past few
years.

Today’s Zipper image almost takes the crown, but the
Pac-Man game from a little while back was much more
entertaining.

Is it just me, or has Google increased the number of
these “special logos” they feature on their home search
page? Could this be in response to all the images Bing
is displaying? Isn’t all this foolishness, sounding more
and more, like a little Miss Search contest? My dimples
are prettier than your dimples…


Google UnZipped





But this is serious business, serious as in Billions,
since gaining the patronage of loyal users who log in
each day does mean money in the bank for these search
engine companies. Hands down, Google seems to be winning
that war with over 65% share of the lucrative US search
market, but according to Alexa, Google has been knocked
down from its #1 spot numerous times last year by Facebook.

The premier social network repeated this feat several
times again this year and this must be worrisome for
Google, which has long been the top site on the web.
But even more troublesome is the fact that Facebook
users spend much more time on-site or logged in, than
do Google users. And did someone say Facebook was
developing its own search engine?

All serious stuff indeed, but back to our Little Miss
contest, who wins the photogenic award for having the
best visual presentations? Bing? Google?




Google UnZipped


Months back, I became so annoyed at Google’s whole
Privacy Changes and its cruel Panda Updates, I switched
my computer’s homepage from Google to Bing. I have been
enjoying immensely the eye-popping images which are
presented each day. It does make me want to keep using
Bing and seeing all those pictures.

However, I do find Google’s presentations much more
creative or should we say inventive. Besides, in a former
life, I have been an artist and art teacher, so liking
things that show the creative and whimsical side of life
is probably in my DNA. While the search engine marketer
in me is totally ticked at Google’s recent move to favor
corporate brands in organic search, I must admit some of
Google’s doodles are true masterpieces. They keep me
grinning all day long.

So who wins?

Who cares… just keep those images coming so I can get
my daily fix.




Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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Does Google Believe Your Links Are Natural?

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BWMagic’s Internet Marketing Newsletter


Does Google Believe Your Links Are Natural?


If you’re like me and monitor hundreds of major keywords
in Google on a daily basis, the last few weeks have been
really interesting. There seems to be a major shake-up
in the works, mainly regarding your site’s backlinks
and if they appear natural or not.

Google, now more than ever, seems to be judging the
quality of your links. Do your links follow set norms
or standards? Do they appear natural? Or do they
appear manipulated?

Thousands of webmasters have received Google’s answer
in the form of a message in Google’s Webmasters Tools
– your site’s links appear unnatural.

These webmasters have been told by Google to:

“Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural
links pointing to your site that could be intended to
manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could
include buying links to pass PageRank or participating
in link schemes.”

In fact, Google has de-indexed some popular blog networks,
where webmasters could purchase links to manipulate their
rankings in Google. This is a warning sign for other
webmasters to make sure your links are natural and not
manipulated in any way.

Of course, if you have been practicing SEO, you probably
have been actively building backlinks to your site and
web pages for ages. Now is a good time to re-examine your
link building practices and see if they do meet Google’s
standards.

This is a very serious business, if your links appear unnatural,
you will lose your rankings in Google. It can even make your
site unprofitable.

Anyway, as usual, I have written another article on this
topic and I list 5 or 6 things you can do to make your
links appear more natural in the eyes of Google.

You can find the article here:


Google & Your Links

But I would like to leave you with another helpful tip.
One easy way to monitor your current links and keywords
in Google is simply to create Google Alerts for your
site’s major keywords and your site’s URL. Then whenever
Google indexes a link containing these keywords or your URL
– Google sends you an email. Great way to track your links
and also a great way to track your competition.


Google Alerts



Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

Did you find the above information helpful? If so, why not
help spread the word – recommend this content by using
the social bookmark sites below. The SEO Gods will Thank You!

How To Redirect Your Affiliate Links

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How To Redirect Your Affiliate Links


As I told you last week, Google judges the quality of your content
and if your site or content triggers a penalty – your site drops
from page 1 to page 3 or beyond. In other words, your site and content
becomes worthless in regards to getting very valuable targeted search
traffic from Google.

Now, while Google hasn’t come out and actually said they don’t like
affiliate sites… they definitely don’t like sites with too many
affiliate links and very little “value-added” content. I do believe
having too many affiliate links, especially above the fold or at the
top of your pages will hurt your rankings post-panda.

As I also told you last week, by simply hiding or masking my affiliate
links on one site, I brought my Google rankings back from page 6 to
the top of page 2… not quite back to the first page where they were
pre-panda, but search traffic and sales have increased which is the
goal.

For years, most webmasters and affiliate marketers have been masking
or hiding their affiliate links. In the case above, I was using a
meta-refresh script which is a very bad move in the eyes of Google
because many browsers can’t read it and your pages turn up blank.
A site which shows a lot of blank pages is obviously not of the
best quality!

There are many ways to hide your affiliate links, as in my site above,
I used 302 redirects which don’t pass link juice. Since these are
affiliate links there’s no need to pass the PR PageRank juice to them.
Now if you want to pass link juice, you have to do a 301 (permanent)
redirect.

One very simple way to mask your affiliate links is to create
a php page or redirect.

For example, here is URL or link

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/affiliatelink.php

Now you would have a php page on your site which
would contain the following:

< ?php
header( ‘Location: http://affiliatelink1.com’ ) ;
?>

For example, if you had an affiliate link for hp laptops
then you would have a page entitled hplaptops.php and your
affiliate link would be placed in the ‘Location:’ in that
short script. Where ever you want to place that link on
your page you would have to use:

http://yourdomain.com/recommends/hplaptops.php

Now, if you’re like me and have hundreds or even thousands of
affiliate links on a site. Creating a php file or page
for each link can be time-consuming and a real hassle.

I did some searching on the web and I found a free script
which saves a lot of time because you have all your affiliate
links on the one page. This script is from www.stevedawson.com
and you can find it below:

http://www.stevedawson.com/articles.php

There are many other versions of this “array” typescript for masking
your affiliate links but this one works for me and it’s free. One major
benefit, if one of your affiliate links becomes outdated or is changed…
you just have to make one change on this page to fix the problem, instead
of manually changing hundreds of links on countless pages on your site,
been there, done that.

Now one final note, many SEO experts say you should stop Google from
indexing these affiliate links. While it doesn’t completely block Google
from indexing them if they find the same links elsewhere on the web.

It will help to insert this into your Robots.txt file.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /jump.php/

This will stop the Google and the search engines not to index the
page containing all your affiliate links. Keep in mind, this page where
you keep all your affiliate links can be named anything, like ‘recommends’,
‘go’ or even ‘links’.


Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

Did you find the above information helpful? If so, why not
help spread the word – recommend this content by using
the social bookmark sites below. The SEO Gods will Thank You!