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Showing posts with label Google News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google News. Show all posts

Saturday, August 24, 2013

What is Google Penguin 2.0 Update ?

Webmasters have been watching for Penguin 2.0 to hit the Google search results since Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March. Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out late Wednesday afternoon on "This Week in Google".
"It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam," Cutts said on the show. "It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally 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."
In a new blog post, Cutts added more details on Penguin 2.0, saying that the rollout is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well. Cutts wrote:
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.
Webmasters first got a hint that the next generation of Penguin was imminent when back on May 10 Cutts said on Twitter, “we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”
Matt Cutts Tweets About Google Penguin
Then in a Google Webmaster Help video, Cutts went into more detail on what Penguin 2.0 would bring, along with what new changes webmasters can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.
He detailed that the new Penguin was specifically going to target black hat spam, but would be a significantly larger impact on spam than the original Penguin and subsequent Penguin updates have had.
Google's initial Penguin update originally rolled out in April 2012, and was followed by two data refreshes of the algorithm last year – in May and October. 
Twitter is full of people commenting on the new Penguin 2.0, and there should be more information in the coming hours and days as webmasters compare SERPs that have been affected and what kinds of spam specifically got targeted by this new update.
Let us know if you've seen any significant changes, or if the update has helped or hurt your traffic/rankings in the comments.
Google has released a series of seven videos designed to help webmasters resolve specific types of spam issues that have been identified on their site. With Google Webmaster Tools offering more specific details about why a website might be penalized, these videos are designed to help you know exactly what kind of manual spam action your site has been impacted by, and the specific steps you can take to correct the issues in Google's eyes.

What is Pure Spam?

Google considers pure spam to be anything to spam that anyone with a bit of tech savviness can tell that it spam. Often called "black hat", Cutts said this includes such things as “auto generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping, throwaway sites, or throwaway domains, where someone is more or less doing churn and burn where they are creating as many sites as possible to make as much money as possible before the get caught.”
Cutts said this is that type of spam that Google takes the most action against. He added that it's rare for people to actually file reconsideration requests for sites that are classified as pure spam, because many webmasters approach them as churn and burn.
For example, here's an image of auto-generated spam site Cutts included in a blog post a number of years ago:
Matt Cutts
Image Credit: Matt Cutts Blog

Fixing Pure Spam on a New Website

Sometimes there are legitimate cases where site owners have purchased the domain only to discover that there is a huge amount of spam in the domain's history, making it difficult for a new owner to then create something legitimate on that domain. People can look up a domain's history on archive.org and see what kind of spam issues had been happening, so it will become a priority to ensure that the new owner is starting with a clean slate with none of the spam content anywhere to be seen.
If this sort of thing happened to you, you must take special care to ensure that the new site you're putting on the previously spamming domain is high quality and nothing that could be remotely confused with being spammy. You essentially need to create actions within the site that gives Google signals that the site is now trustworthy and should be included in the index.

Fixing Pure Spam on an Existing Website

If your site has been flagged as being pure spam, this is probably one of the more difficult spam flags to overcome, because it is reserved for the spammiest of websites. That means, when you file your reconsideration request, you need to ensure that there is nothing anywhere on the site that could be remotely considered spam.
When you're trying to clean up, ensure everything that violate the Google webmaster guidelines has been removed, and that the quality guidelines are being followed to the letter. You should look at it from the perspective of building an entirely new site with new quality content.
Cutts said it's important for webmasters who are trying to clean up from a pure spam warning that they document everything they do, whether it is having purchased the domain from a previous owner, discovering and then removing spam you didn't realize existed on your site, or just simply not knowing better when you created what you thought was a fabulous auto-generated site.
When you finally file a reconsideration request, be sure that you include the steps you took to clean it up and when, so that Google can investigate and decide if the site has really turned over a new leaf.

Monday, June 17, 2013




Why Google Disavowing Links? Be Cautious While Using This Tool


Back on 16th October, Google introduced a new tool to disavow links. This was and continues to be good news for all those webmasters whose sites have unnatural links pointing to them, but which they cannot control; meaning all they can do is identify them, but not take them down. This tool gives them an option to do just that, all they need to do is put down all the URLs on a plain text file and upload it. Google does the rest. We have also talked about all you need to know about disavow links tool in our previous blog post.

Sounds simple right! Not Quite! Things are never as cut and dried as they seem. For starters, more than two months since this tool made its appearance on the scene, there is still some confusion going around whether it should or shouldn’t be used.

There are plenty of clients who come to us to help them disavow their links. Our recommendation is to not go this route, unless absolutely sure, and look for some alternative instead.  This might come as a surprise to some, but the fact is that Google doesn’t want everybody suffering from a ‘bad link’ problem to choose ‘links disavow’.
Here’s why we think that disavowing links is not a good idea all the time; we have also mentioned a few alternatives to using the disavow links tool.

A Case Made for Not Disavowing Links

Recall what Google said on its blog, while announcing the release of the Disavow Links Tool,
In Google’s words,

 “If you’ve been notified of a manual spam action based on “unnatural links” pointing to your site, this tool can help you address the issue. If you haven’t gotten this notification, this tool generally isn’t something you need to worry about.

One word begs a closer look and that is ‘Notification’. So, if you haven’t been notified, then you don’t really have to use this tool.
Here’s what a notification looks like:

Why Google Disavowing Links? Be Cautious While Using This Tool


Here’s something else that Google says in the same blog,

 “If you’ve done as much as you can to remove the problematic links, and there are still some links you just can’t seem to get down, that’s a good time to visit our new Disavow links page.

The question is, have you really done enough to remove all those unnatural links gunning for your site? You must contact webmasters manually and ask them to remove the problematic links that are pointing to your site from theirs. Using the disavow links tools should be your final throw of the dice and not your first.

Another line from Google, “We would reiterate that we built this tool for advanced webmasters only. We don’t recommend using this tool unless you are sure that you need to disavow some links to your site and you know exactly what you’re doing.”

There should be zero ambiguity as to which links you want to remove. If you have doubts about the links that you need to disavow, then this tool isn’t for you. It’s for webmasters that are very sure that they have done more than enough to get rid of unnatural links and in spite of their best efforts, they still can’t get rid of all the harmful links.

Google is very clear about when you should and shouldn’t use this tool.

Be Cautious While Using This Tool:

Webmasters need to be very cautious while using this tool as sources says that this tool could be Google’s Best Spam Reporting Tool yet.
Having said that, here are two possibilities that you can encounter while disavowing links:
  • In case of unnatural/unwanted links pointing to your website unknowingly (that is you being completely unaware of it), Google might reconsider your website
  • In case of manually created links being submitted for disavow, Google might not reconsider, as you are reporting SPAM that you created.
This is why it is such a good tool, it picks and chooses. It doesn’t tar all requests with the same brush.

The Alternates to Google Disavow Links Tool

So all things said and done, you will need to find alternates to using the Disavow Links Tool.
  • Analyze your link profile thoroughly and check whether your website has linked to unrelated websites unknowingly. If this is the case, then you need to get in touch with those webmasters immediately and get them to remove these links manually.
  • Use the tried and tested methods to get in touch with them, through mail, calling them up, or through Twitter and Facebook.
  • Use link removal tools and services such as RMOOV and REMOVEEM
  • Don’t be stingy when it comes to getting your links removed, at times you might even have to pay the webmaster for their removal, but it’s all in a good cause. So, if it’s feasible, do it. (However, Google isn’t in favor of this.)
What If You Have Built Large Chunk of Un-Natural Links Manually Those Are Unable to Control

While you are identifying the links for removal, there is a ‘straight out of hell’ scenario that you might encounter and that is you will be left with a huge chunk of unnatural links that you were unable to remove.

What do you do then? No, the correct answer is not using the Disavow Links Tool. Why? That’s because you will be indirectly reporting a large chunk of SPAM to Google, and there is nobody else responsible for this SPAM but YOU. Google will identify you as somebody who manipulated rankings to improve your SERPs rankings. In such cases, Google will never reconsider your website, not in a million years.

Well, there is just one alternate that will work. Get yourself a new website and start afresh. Don’t make the mistakes you made in the past and focus on creating quality backlinks.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest answers that work best. Google has been telling this to us, all along.

To Conclude:

Google disavow links tool is not for everyone, so before using it think multiple times whether you’re eligible (yes, eligible) to use this tool. It has more negative sides than positive as Google holds the full control. Using this tool you can either win the battle or lose everything, therefore, if you are unsure about your link profile and use of this tool then it is better to take help from experts as well as focus on the ways mentioned in the above explanation.
Let us know if you face any difficulty or if you encounter any questions
.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Google’s Recently Launched ‘Keep’ Service vs Evernote




The modern-day technology realm is a veritable jungle – numerous entities compete amongst themselves but only a lion can dethrone another. That’s precisely the challenge Google have thrown with the release of their “Keep” application that seeks to topple current market favorite “Evernote” from its throne.
So how do the two note-taking programs stack up against each other? And which should finally you opt for? The answers are below.

Compatibility:

Google’s Keep, at the moment, is only compatible with the Android operating system and that too only iteration 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and higher. Users habituated to other platforms will definitely consider this as a limitation.
Evernote, meanwhile, is a fully functional annotation software that conveniently works with all popular mobile operating systems be it Android, iOS, or Windows.

Look and Interface:

Keep has a refreshing interface that looks nice and is easy to operate. The interface neatly arranges your various annotations in both list and grid modes making navigation and execution simple. What’s more, one can change the background color of one’s annotations just like conventional sticky notes.
Evernote’s interface does not appear as prepossessing as Keep’s but this can be attributed to the slew of on-screen and other features that the program offers (described later).

Features:

At the outset, both Keep and Evernote embed some common facets such as the abilities to compose notes, record sound, facilitate dictation, use Android widgets, and take photographs.
Apart from the facets stated above and the design features mentioned earlier, Keep offers:
  • An Android lock-screen widget to help formulate notes and render dictation.
  • Compatibility with Google’s “Drive” online service. You can use Drive’s desktop facilities as also its competency to format text via Google documents.
  • The capacity to transfer notes on to emails and social media posts such as Facebook or Twitter.
Conversely, with Evernote, you get a slew of additional attributes:
  • Evernote incorporates plug-ins that can be used with all reputable browsers; these plug-ins handily allow you to grab web page content and transfer the same on to your annotations.
  • Evernote facilitates social sharing in the real sense – it enables you to post a distinct link easily for the online community to share.
  • Through the Evernote web browser extension, you can effortlessly (via the “copy” command) engender a note containing your favorite link – text and all.
  • You can make folders thus making note-taking orderly and uncomplicated.
  • You can format your text and even font in a number of ways.
  • Unlike Keep, images can be directly downloaded from the internet via their unique URLs.
  • You have the prerogative to configure tags.
  • Sorting and listing your annotations by name and date is easily accomplished.
  • You can view data pertaining to geographical location.
  • Evernote also importantly entrenches a desktop application that promotes offline use. With it, working with and transferring content from your personal computer is a breeze – even without the internet.

External Support:

As Keep is a new service, third-party support is not built in.
On the other hand, Evernote is armed with potent external assistance in the form of:
  • Applications such as Skitch (lets you capture screen content across multiple operating systems), Kustom Note, and Penultimate (an iPad annotation application).
  • Plug-ins.
  • Other online tools and services.
The aforementioned third-party add-ons decidedly increase Evernote’s overall resourcefulness and worth.
Conclusion: Google’s Keep is admittedly a welcome inclusion with a cheery interface and fuss-free executing being its universal selling points. But it is ultimately Evernote that still rules over the note-taking world with its gamut of features and all-embracing versatility.
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