Tips to request reconsideration in Google

Most of the webmasters face the problem that their sites penalized by the Google. Before submitting, request for reconsideration, just have a look on the following video which is not more than 4 mints. 

In this video Rachel Searles and Brian White who are working in Google Search Quality Team explained clearly about the process.

Discussion as follows in the video :

Brian Says : 

Hi, I am Brian White and this is my colleague Rachel and we are in the Search Quality team in Google in the Web spam group. We are here today with some tips on the reconsideration process. 

Rachel Says: 

All right, let's start with the case where you know your site has violated the Google guidelines, it is important to admit any mistakes you've made and let us know what you've done to try to fix them. Some times we get requests from people who say: "My site adheres to the guidelines now," and that is not really enough information for us. So, please be as detailed as possible. 

Realize that there are people actually reading these requests, including the people in this room. If you do not know what your site might have done to get a penalty, go back to the Google guidelines and reread them carefully before requesting reconsideration. Look at the things to avoid and ask questions of people that work on your site, if you do not work on it yourself. If you'd like that advice of a third party, you can also seek help in our google webmaster forum. 

Brian Says: 

Sometimes we get reconsideration request or where the requester associates technical website issues with a penalty. An example could be that the server timed out for a while, or that bad content was delivered for a time, and google is pretty adaptive to these kinds of transient issues with websites. So people sometimes misread the situation as "I have a penalty" and then seek reconsideration. And it is probably good idea to wait a bit and see if things revert to their previous state. Some people attribute duplicate content with leading to a penalty and usually the problem lies elsewhere. And say you are in a partnership with someone else, say another website, and they put this combined effort together in a way that goes against our quality guidelines and involve both your website and theirs and then the end effort reflects badly on both. 

You have control over your site, but sometimes it's hard to get stuff cleaned up on sites you do not control. We are sympathetic to these situations. Just make your best effort to document that in a complete reconsideration request. In the case of say bad links that were gathered, point us to a URL that shows your exhaustive effort to clean that up. Also, we have pretty good tools internally, so do not try to fool us as there are actual people, as Rachel said, looking at your reports. If you intentionally pass along bad or misleading information, we will disregard that request for reconsideration. 

Rachel : And please do not spam the reconsideration form, it does not help to submit in multiple requests all at the same time, just one detailed concise report and just get it right the first time. Your request will be reviewed by a member of our team and we do review them promptly, that said if you have some new information to add about your site, go ahead and file a new reconsideration request. And finally, if reconsideration does happen, please be aware that it can take some time to notice when a penalty has been lifted. 

Brian Says : 

Yes, the bottom line is we care very deeply for our search engine users, and we want them to be happy and not have to complain. So make sure that 

A) The issues are fixed with your site before filing reconsideration

B) Make sure that we don't have to worry about your site violating the quality guidelines in the future.

So, from the people who are part of the reconsideration process, from our end, thank you.

Rachel Says: Thank you

Reasons Behind Bad Seo Services

Recently Seo Scams are getting increased day by day. Reading so many stories in the forums by stating that I have cheated by this seo service. Few clients are personally shared with me their experiences that how they have cheated by the services.

I have did a little research why all this was happening. At last i came to a conclusion now why this is repeating. People who don't have a long vision would do these kind of mistakes. They thought that their knowledge is enough to establish and run a company. They never look and thought of long term results. Feel that they could do it. 

Professionals with little experience who are working with a good seo companies will come out side and establish an organization. Now they will look for clients. Getting clients and satisfying them is not an ordinary matter, so they will promise everything what the client asks while taking the project. At the moment when they are taking the project they won't bother about results. They are in a dilemma that they will try for it, however they will promise to client that they will give it. At last they will often fail and receives a bad reputation in the market.

Few people will promise to the clients that they will get sales and leads through SEO. SEO helps you in getting the leads and conversions, however it won't give directly leads and conversions. That's a wrong statement. SEO guys can promise about search engine friendly optimization, page rank and SERP's.  Search Engine Marketing professionals should promise about leads and conversions. 

For a successful online business an organization should have :

• SEO Professional
• SEM Professional
• SMO Professional
• Web Designer
• Programmer 
• Quality Professional
• Leader
• Investor

To run a successful business at least we should have the above professionals.  All those guys should have well expertise in those respective fields then only organization will move towards success. I request to the guys who are establishing new companies, Never start a company with half knowledge. It's not good for you and also your clients.

Google Plans for faster search using Ajax

Google is planning to display search results using Ajax, Currently results are coming through normal Html. In Feb 2009 read few posts stating that Google is testing new interface with the help of Ajax. 

Use of Ajax in displaying results is good, it makes search smoother and faster, However experts says that it creates major problems for analytics tracking. Especially in referral string tracking. 

Present normal process is for example some one is searching for seo updates in Google, we will get the following url in current process :

http://www.google.com/search?q=seo updates

If Google have used Ajax in displaying search results then the url would be look like this :

http://www.google.com/#q=seo updates

Have you observed the difference between the first and second url. In the second url we have got # in the place of search? . It means browser won't send the code which is after #. So Analytics not able to get the referrer string to track which is after #. In result for all google visits what we get, analytics will show only the home page of google.com instead of the complete referrer string url. You never found that using which keyword the visitor came to your site. This is the major problem in Ajax. It was clearly stated in the clicky blog.

Google is stating that to come out with this problem, they will use gateway urls for better tracking and faster search results. It seems Google team is working on this from the past few months, hope they sorted out this problem. Of course they weren't revealed it yet. Yesterday (Apr 14, 2008) in Google analytics blog they have posted that there is a change in Google search referrals however it won't effect analytics tracking. Hope this is something related to Ajax feature, any ways we can't come to a conclusion until google announce it officially. 

According to that blog post old Google.com search referrals seems following :

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo updates&btnG=Google+Search 

According to the change we will see something like this now :

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Few months back Mattcutts declared  that they are testing new Ajax interface using javascript to enhance search results. Google team is testing it on less search results (Even less than 1%). They too don't know whether it's breaking analytics or not. It's still in testing stage. Few users are getting the test results, according to these test results they will experiment every thing and will come to a conclusion that in what areas they need to work out to fix everything.

Have a look on the following video that what Mattcutt says about 'Search using Ajax' :

Looking forward for Google faster and smoother search results using Ajax ..... :)

Does your website hacked?

Most of the webmasters are suffering with hacking and de-indexing problems. We need to take a lot of care while protecting a website even it is small or big. 

To findout the problems why your site is de-indexed or how hacked is little bit difficult and needs lot of attention to find out the reason. Participate in Google webmaster groups, so that Google engineers might guide you in the right direction. 

Actually when we will have a doubt that whether our site is hacked or de-indexed from google, just observe the following factors so that you will came to know the status.

• Website is ranked for spamy words
  
• Taking more loading time and getting error even host is good
  
• Suspicious messages from browsers
  
• Web pages disappeared from the Search engine results
  
• Homepage is De-indexed from Google
  

How to confirm that your site have suspicious content :

Google has released Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool in Mar 2008. Using this tool you can check

• Present status of your site
  
• While visiting does google have any problem?
  
• Does your site distributing malware or not?
  
• Is your site hosted malware?
  

In the following URL just replace cnet.com with your site URL to get the results 

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://cnet.com/

Just have a check on your site and let me if you have any problems and concerns. It looks as follows . If your site is safe then that's good or else what's next step you need to take (Described below the image)

If your site hacked then :

First step you need to take is contact your hosting service and inform him to remove the malware from the site. Then have a look on the following factors

• Hidden text and links
  
• Cloaking urls
  
• Automated requests to search engines
  
• Doorway pages
  
• Duplicate content
  
• Paid links
  
• Do follow links for ads
  

You must avoid all the above techniques to get good rankings in search engines. Once you fixed all these issues then go to the Google webmaster tools and request for re-inclusion. After few days your site will get back to the old position and some times even better positions too.

I hope everyone is using Google webmaster tools, if not please start using it. why because you will get all the information about your site that how Google is crawling your site, how many pages are included, indexed, crawling issues, problems .....etc. So as per the instructions in the account you will fix the issues and make your site clean and perfect. Sometimes you will get a mail or message from webmaster central team by stating about issues in your site. Would you like to know how the mail looks like, here it is ...

Here is a small video where Mattcutt explains What we need to do before submitting re-inclusion request to Google about our site.

Effective way of Doing Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking has it's own place in the internet even the social media is getting raised. It's a process where people can find links and bookmark or favorite those links and also can vote for the links. More votes for a link means the popular bookmark it is. 

Most of the guys even don't the right process that how to do social bookmarking. It's also an art, if you know that how to perform the art perfectly then your profile would be get more visits and your links would get more votes.

I would like to explain you the right way that how you need to perform social bookmarking. Step by step described follow :

• Update entire profile will complete info which looks professional
  
• Search authorized profiles then vote and comment on their links
  
• Add Authorized profiles in to your friends
  
• Build a professional relationship with them
  
• First to vote and comment on their links
  
• In result you will get good comments and votes for your links
  
• Provide different kinds of good links which catches public interest.

List of Social Boookmarking sites :

• Digg.com
  
• StumbleUpon.com
  
• Technorati.com
  
• Del.icio.us
  
• Propeller.com
  
• simpy.com
  
• Slashdot.org .......... etc...
  

Main problem here is most of the people will create profiles and submit their own website links again and again in the same profile, it causes to ban account by the site administrator and also you will get a bad impact in the internet world. Hope you guys are clear with instructions if not let me know. So that i can correct myself. Feel free to ask questions. Looking forward for your comments.

Are shorten urls SEO friendly? …. Yes

Shorten URLs will be used especially at Social Media sites to share web pages and interesting links. People are spending hours and hours in front of Facebook, Twitter etc, so URL Shortener services are increasing day by day. Most of people have this question that whether these short URLs are SEO friendly or not. 

Usually shorten URLs will redirect to destination URLs. We need to find out whether these redirections are permanent (301) or temporary (302). We have few free tools on the web to check it. Yes, URL Shorten Services are using permanent 301 redirection which is search engine friendly. Please have a look at the following screenshot and video for better understanding.

 

Mattcutts explaining the same in the following video:

Google Webmaster Tools - SEO Updates 2012

I would like to highlight & include the summaries of SEO Updates in 2012 which are published on Google webmaster central official blog.

1. Google https search is faster now on modern browser             - Mar 19th 2012
2. SEO Friendly Pagination algorithm update from Google           - Mar 13th 2012
3. Better Crawl Errors reporting in Google Webmaster tools         - Mar 12th 2012
4. Filtering Free hosting spam websites from search results          - Mar 06th 2012
5. User & Administrator access are now available in GWT           - Mar 05th 2012  
6. Video markup language for better indexation of Videos             -  Feb 21^st 2012
7. Optimize your site to handle unexpected traffic growth              -  Feb 09^th 2012
8. Webmaster tools sitemaps interface with fresh look                  -  Jan 26^th 2012
9. Few changes on Top search queries data in Webmaster tools    -  Jan 25^th 2012      
10. Google Algorithm update to Page layout structure                     -  Jan 19^th 2012
11. Page Titles Update in Search Results                                       -  Jan 12^th 2012

1. Faster HTTPs Search:
Google made some changes to its https search. If you are logged in to your gmail account and searching for some thing on Google, When you click on a specific result for a keyword then you will reach that web page little faster compared to earlier https search. Google Team has reduced the latency of https search in modern browser like chrome.

2. SEO Friendly Pagination:
Most of the eCommerce and content portals will usually have pagination issue. Due to pagination most of the duplicate pages will be created with product titles in eCommerce portals and with article titles in content portals. Now Google came up with updated algorithm i.e. following are the two ways to fix pagination issue.

• Insert View all page and use rel="canonical" in sub pagination pages
• Use rel="prev" and rel="next"

3. Upgraded Crawl Errors Reporting:
Crawl Errors is a feature in Webmaster tools which will report all errors in your website. Google webmaster team started detecting new errors and reporting all errors in a better way. Categorized crawl errors in to two types i.e. "Site Errors" and "URL Errors".
 
4. Filtering Free hosting spam websites:
We know that "few of the hosting providers will offer free hosting services". Due to free hosting most of the spammers will create low quality content websites dynamically. Google started filtering this kind of websites from search results and also requesting free hosting providers to show patterns of spam to Google team, so that Google team can effectively update their algorithm and filter these spam sites from search results effectively.


5. Now Webmaster tools have both admin & user access:
Earlier we do not have an option to give user access to our webmaster tools account to any other user. Only admin access should be shared to other users, which isn't safe. With the latest update we can give webmaster tools user access to other users now onwards.

6. Schema.org Video Markup:

We all know that Google, Yahoo & Bing are supporting schema.org common markup language to make a better web. Now schema.org released mark up for Videos i.e. http://schema.org/VideoObject. Follow this markup while adding videos to your site. It will help search engines to crawl these videos effectively.

7. Handle sudden traffic spike:

Usually popular sites face downtime issues due to sudden increase in traffic, websites will crash often in such cases. So, it’s better to plan “lightweight version of the website or mobile version” to handle traffic in difficult times. Also we can use third party services to land that particular page which is receiving higher traffic. 

8. New interface for sitemap section:

Earlier sitemap section used have normal interface with some basic content stats. Now added videos, images sitemap statistics with colorful interface. Compared to old interface, new interface looks pretty clean and easier to understand with better usability. Now users can delete sitemaps, which were submitted by another webmaster owner. 

9. Search queries data update:

Normally in webmaster tools search queries data rankings will show average position of the keyword. Now onwards it will display top position of that keyword.

10. Page Layout Structure algorithm Change:

We often see websites with too many ads and it’s difficult to find out the difference between real content and ads. Few sites will have completely ads about the fold, users will have bad experience with these sites. As per new page layout algorithm, these sites will lose rankings and bring down from top search engine results.

11. Page Titles update in search:

Page titles will have higher impact in CTR. Usually Google pick the title tag from

Better page titles in search results

Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.


We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the

Page layout algorithm improvement

Webmaster Level: All

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

Overall, our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus on specific algorithm tweaks. This change is just one of the over 500 improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. As always, please post your feedback and questions in our Webmaster Help forum.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer