Archive for July, 2012

Confusion: Google Sends Warnings with the Message of Ignoring Them

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

From the last few months, Google has been vehemently sending warning and notices to publishers either they act as per their guidelines about bad links or get ready to be penalised. On 20th July, Google sent latest warning to the publishers that they could relax this week; is that what’s called transparency. It has created lots of confusion among the experts. To decipher what Google wants to say requires scrutinisation of its earlier posts, quite similar to the latest one.

From the last weeks of the March to the early weeks in April, Google started sending serious warning related to fake and unnatural links. The Google search quality team has sent warnings to the websites’ owners mentioning they have detected that some of their site’s WebPages are built on the techniques that do not comply with the Google’s webmaster Guidelines. They were warned to detect some artificial and unnatural links pointing to their sites that are used for manipulating the page rank. The messages sent by Google team have created confusion among the readers, as it was not clear whether Google team is penalising them for having these links on the sites or it was just informing them and not taking any negative action.

In the last weeks of April, the Google penguin has created havoc among publishers, as it was specially designed to detect spam and penalising publishers who are into the practise of using bad linking activities. Other advices of Google such as ‘get rid of bad links’, ‘do not ignore link warning’, etc has been read and followed by many publishers. Google constantly sends warning and advices to the publishers; however, it completely depends on them whether to follow or not. If anyone ignores such warnings, the only thing one has to face at the end is low ranking. It’s a friendly advice better follow the warning than ignoring them.

Points That Can Potentially Damage the SEO Ratings of a Website

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

Online companies lay great emphasis on the concept of SEO. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a powerful and efficient marketing tool that helps the websites get more online traffic from the search engines. A wide range of SEO strategies are employed to enhance the website and thus, promote the company and the brand. With so many methods recommended by various sources, one might get confused as to which technique is more effective and which is detrimental. Therefore, here is a list of points, which can damage the SEO ranking of a website.

  • Backlinks that point to the main page only

When using backlinks, it is important to build them properly. If the links point only to the main page, then it will be the only page to be ranked from the entire website.

  • Importance to extremely specific keywords

Keywords should be analyzed and used carefully. It is a good idea to think like the online audience to get a better understanding of key phrases and word they use, rather than targeting keywords that are excessively specific.

  • Overlooking Google webmaster

Optimally using the features provides by the webmaster can allow the site to get more attention from Google, thus enhancing the priority.

  • Utilizing Google Translate on all the online content

Although, it is an effective tool to translate between English and other languages, sometimes the translation can fail to form a sensible and complete sentence structure. It is recommended not to completely translate the content with this feature.

  • Using a single keyword list for targeting all geographic locations

This is a wrong technique as it can restrict the website from targeting audience of other locales. Implementing variety can help the website reach the audience all over the globe.

  • Staying clear of sites that are country specific because of content duplicacy

Duplicacy of content is frowned upon, especially due to the Google Penguin algorithm. However, it offers an HTML tag, ‘rel=”canonical” ‘which can be employed to spread the content over all the domains related to different countries or locations.

  • Placing all supported languages in a single page

Placing multiple language notes can make the website look chaotic and disorderly. Proper design and a creative approach ensure the visitors can conveniently browse through the website.

  • Using a single landing page when supporting multiple languages on the website

A website represents the business to a global audience. Users may move on to other sites if they cannot understand the website. This can affect the website adversely. Designing a website with flags that denote the different languages supported can make the website friendlier to the users and thus, they can be redirected to a page on the website where the language of their choice is supported.

Knowledge about the methods that can adversely affect the SEO rankings of a websites can be beneficial as it can help one avoid making mistakes when optimizing the website.