Tag Archives: seo

Google Has Updated Its Webmaster Guidelines

BWMagic’s Internet Marketing Newsletter

Google Has Updated Its Webmaster Guidelines

Google has made, in my opinion, a major update to its Webmaster Guidelines. Not
major in the sense that the overall goal of these guidelines have changed, but
major because Google has “fleshed out” or added more information and examples
to exactly explain what webmasters should do to create a quality site in
the eyes of Google.

For any webmaster, struggling with the Panda and Penguin Updates, this new
information or broader explanation can be helpful. For example, in regards
to Penguin and link building, in the new Guidelines Google has gone into much
more detail to what constitutes “link schemes” and how webmasters should avoid them.

Google now gives exact examples of forum comments, low quality text or articles,
links embedded in Widgets… and gives more tactics which webmasters should
avoid if they want to avoid being penalized by Penguin.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines covers three topics:

– Design and content
– Technical
– Quality

Again, each one of these areas is expanded upon or fleshed out. Webmasters
can now get a better feel for what Google wants and expects in a quality
website.

Google also points out the techniques and tactics webmasters should
avoid at all costs:

“Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Cloaking

Sneaky redirects

Hidden text or links

Doorway pages

Scraped content

Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value

Loading pages with irrelevant keywords

Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware

Abusing rich snippets markup

Sending automated queries to Google”

Each one of those topics has a follow-up article fully explaining
what these tactics are and how one should avoid them. These guidelines
should be the starting point for anyone affected by the Panda or Penguin
Updates.

Find them here:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

For more information on Google’s recent changes and
how they affect your web marketing, try this link:

Panda/Penguin Special Report

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus Hoskins

www.bizwaremagic.com

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Free Report – Post Google Panda & Penguin Web Marketing

– Strategies for Survival –

This detailed report examines both the Google Panda and
Penguin Updates – how these ongoing algorithm changes are
altering web marketing and SEO. The report also gives examples,
links, resources, tools, videos… all dealing with these
updates and how to recover from them.

Vital reading for anyone who has been hit by Panda or Penguin.

Thousands of sites and businesses will go under unless they
can fix any issues with their sites which puts them in the Panda
or Penguin penalty box. This helpful report gives recovery
suggestions from SEOs, webmasters and even from Google itself,
via Matt Cutts.

This report also gives suggestions or strategies for
surviving if your site or business doesn’t recover from
these harsh updates… how to market on the web without
Google.

Or finding rather, how to find other ways to use Google,
rather than traditional organic search.

All worth considering and this is a great resource to have
in your corner. You can find the Special Report here:

Web Marketing After Google Panda and Penguin

Google’s Webspam Update Causes Complete Havoc

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BWMagic’s Internet Marketing Newsletter

Google’s Webspam Update Causes Complete Havoc

Penguin

Has Google Search Become One Big Mess?

Just when the Hockey Playoffs are heating up, Google goes and
makes some drastic changes to its search rankings. Is there no
common decency left anymore!

And the fallout from these recent Google changes is just as
messy as some of the latest playoff games. If you don’t follow
ice hockey, you won’t get the reference, but believe me… it’s
pretty messy.

Like thousands, if not millions, of site owners I am scrambling
to adjust to the latest Google minefield. Since I have been
actively link building for over 10 years, these recent changes
within Google have really affected traffic on a few of my sites.

Thankfully, since last year I have been looking at other
ways to market online (other than SEO and high rankings
in Google) mainly through Press Releases, exact keyword
domains and changing my article marketing to just make sales
rather than to build links or for SEO purposes.

However…

This week Google rolled out one of its most disruptive
Algorithm changes yet, one that far outranks anything
the whole series of Panda Updates ever did to Google’s
listings. If your site wasn’t affected by these changes,
consider yourself very lucky for now, countless webmasters
have seen their sites disappear from Google’s SERPS altogether.

According to Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland, this
new update is called Penguin. It was released or rolled out on
April 24 of this week.

The online forums are full of horror stories from some
very legitimate high-quality sites which have seen the
negative effects of the recent changes. Google and Matt Cutts
are saying these recent changes have to do with “webspam”
and those sites which “overly” uses SEO to rank high
in Google.

More or less, if you have been actively building backlinks
to your site, this latest update could do serious damage
to your site. Google wants to reward sites that don’t
“aggressively” build links or practice SEO.

In a perfect world, maybe those changes would work, but
in an online environment where many businesses, big and small,
have been optimizing and aggressively building backlinks
for 10 years or more, these changes spell disaster.

Again, as with any changes Google make to determine what
sites get ranked, there is widespread uproar that Google is
simply now showing more junk results in their listings. The
outcry this time seems to be louder than in recent memory.

So has Google’s organic search results become one big mess?
Has consistency gone the way of the DoDo bird? Has Google
really thrown the baby out with the bathwater this time?

No matter how loud the outcry from affected webmasters
and site owners, the real question here has to be answered by
Google’s mainstream users. Will they accept these new
listings/rankings OR will they look for another search
engine to use?

Don’t hold your breath.

Actually, Google’s share of the lucrative search market is going
up and not down. It now controls over 65% in the U.S. and much
more in other countries. Unless those numbers go down, Google
can pretty much do what it wants, regardless of the outcry
from battle weary webmasters.

The only losers in all this are the search users and unless
they change their habits, SEO may indeed be on the way out,
along with relevant results. Especially if Google is now
penalizing webmasters who are practicing SEO and off-site link
building, the future looks very bleak for SEO.

Although some experts are saying you shouldn’t do
this – but you feel your site has been unfairly
affected by the Penguin/Webspam/Titanic Update you
can submit your argument/feedback to Google.