Associated Press is all frenzy at search engines and blogs who quote their content without proper licensing. The madness does not stop with blogs, websites or forums; it is even against search engines like Google. Continue Reading

I have been getting many comments to write about the recent Google Search Masters Conference that happened in Bangalore. Most of them who attended were not even aware what search engine optimization is nor they had any idea of Google Analytics or Google Adwords.

As we all know, the invitation was given on a first come basis. However, many search engine optimizers and webmasters are not that happy with the concept. It is quite funny to know that the participants were chosen in random or first come basis when Google is able to spend 100’s of man hours to decide whether a search box or search result should be up 1 pixel or down 1 pixel.

Google SearchMasters 2009 conference is happening on 28th February 2009. It will also be an opportunity to share your experiences and meet other members of the Indian webmaster community.

The program also features presentations on Google Custom Search EngineTM, building websites for mobile phones and Google AnalyticsTM. Continue Reading

Did you know that 65% of web users speak a language other than English? Haven’t you wished that your blog or website is also available in many other languages? What if most of your visitors are French or Japanese? Not all users understand English. Even if you do not understand French or any other foreign language, there are options where you can easily add a translation plug-in to your website. Just add a few codes and relax while these applications take the pain in translating the website for you. Continue Reading

Recently, when I tried to buy hosting space from Godaddy, I landed up in a page stating, “There was a problem authorizing your credit. Please verify your payment information or use an alternate form of payment.” after I provided my credit card information.

There was no further information on the reason this could have happened. I have been using the same card on GoDaddy and have made at least 10 purchases and my credit limit was still more than $800.

I googled this issue and found that similar issues have happened with people using paypal but not credit card. Anyone who has had similar issues please let me know.

Extracts from the Chat

The third online webmaster chat was attended by Google’s Matt Cutts, Wysz, JohnMu, Maile Ohye and many others. Search engine optimizers and webmasters had some difficult questions for the Google team. Many myths, fears and confusions were cleared out in this chat conference. Some of the extracts are below:

Sitemap Questions:

Question: If my website has an extremely large number of pages, like Amazon.com, should I include every single URL that I want indexed in my XML sitemap? If not, how should I go about populating my XML sitemap?

Google’s Answer: Feel free to use your Sitemap to list all of your pages… that’s what it’s for! However, if you have many duplicate URLs for the same content, then you may want to only list your preferred versions of the URLs in your Sitemap.

Question: In addition to a XML sitemap, does it make any sense to have also an HTML sitemap on the same website? Does HTML sitemap helps improve the rating?

Google’s Answer: A HTML sitemap file can help search engines, especially those that don’t use XML Sitemap files. Also, the 404 widget in Webmaster Tools (which you can place on your 404 pages) will use “/sitemap.htm” and similar files to help users to find the content they’re looking for. So yes, I would recommend making HTML sitemap files, however I’d focus on the user and not the search engines.

Directory Submissions

Question: Until recently (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?

Google’s Answer: In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience.

If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.

External Links

Question: Will too much of “rel=nofollow” or totally “nofollow” to all outgoing links by the author of a blog be stamped as over optimization and penalized? Is there any penalty for over optimization sort of stuff?

Google’s Answer: I wouldn’t worry about this, Raj. I would try to work on making the site as natural as possible.

Question: Many believe that to rank well, you simply need “quality” backlinks. But how important is having your keywords in the homepage, and throughout your site? Is keyword density of any importance to show what the page is about? What % is suggested?

Google’s Answer: Links are just one factor involved in Google’s ranking of pages. We look at both on-page and off-page content, so what you have on your page can be an essential part of ranking. However, there is no recommended “keyword density.” Your content should be high quality and written for users. If you try writing for search engines, the language can become very unnatural, which may end up hurting you more than it helps.

Question: Until recently external links from article directories could improve page ranking. Is this still valid? Do links from article directories have a better weight than links from web sites or blogs?

Google’s Answer: Article directory links certainly aren’t inherently worth more and don’t get more weight than other web sites or blogs. I answered another question about article directories as well.

Social Media Networking

Question: How will social media or more specifically share of comments (buzz about a brand) influence the SERPs?

Google’s Answer: Social media is great! But, there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.

A few things to note:

1. If you allow user-generated content on your site, remember to monitor for spam.
2. Also, if you’re looking to get buzz to directly help your site in SERPs, know that we normally don’t crawl JavaScript, so if it’s hosted in JavaScript you’ll still get the user traffic from the buzz (which can eventually lead better rankings), but the user comments themselves won’t be indexed.
3. If you want to get the user-generated content associated with your site (as part of your URLs), then make sure you host the user-generated content on your domain (so it’s not link to a separate site).

Site Factors:

Question: Does inconsistent capitalization of URLs cause duplicate content issues and dilution of page rank? For example, www.site.com/abc vs www.site.com/Abc. On Windows hosts, these are the same page, but are different pages on Unix hosts.

Google’s Answer: Hi John, based on the existing standards, URLs are case-sensitive, so yes, these would be seen as separate URLs. Since the content on the URLs is the same, we’ll generally recognize that and only keep one of them. However, we’d recommend that you try to keep all links going to one version of the URL. Keep in mind that this also applies to robots.txt files.

Question: Any chance of Google favoring sites with valid markup anytime soon? On the principle that if the webmaster has taken the trouble to write valid markup, it’s less likely to be a spammy site?

Google’s Answer: Since less than 5% of the pages out there actually validate according to study done by Opera, it wouldn’t make much sense for us to give the other 95% of the pages any trouble.

Link Selling

Question: What is ok/not ok to sell links? We get requests on a daily base, we not offering to sell links, but sometimes we get a related request and wonder if we are “allowed” to sell one or two links without hurting our rankings?

Google’s Answer: Paid links that pass page rank are not a good idea

Visit Webmaster Chat for more questions and answers.

New and interesting features are being added to Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis. Though Yahoo and MSN do update their tools and features, they lag far behind when it comes to Google’s update frequency. Google now helps webmasters understand the crawl error sources.

Webmasters using Google’s Webmaster Tools would have faced the issue of not knowing the exact cause of “Not Found” and “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps” errors. Google reports a “Not Found” error if the URL is present in another website, however, not available on the owners website.

Google has now added a new column “Linked From” which lists the number of pages that link to a “Not Found” URL. Once when you click on the “Linked From” link, a new dialog box appears which lists each individual page that has linked to the specific URL. The link page can be either within the website or in an external website.

Further more, you can also download either a specific table or all errors for the site or all sources of error in the site. This new feature will help webmasters reduce 404 errors by identifying the source of the issue which can help search engine rankings in a positive way.

The new SmartSpace from GoDaddy can help even an internet dummy to create a site at ease which has photo galleries, email addresses, chat rooms and a blog. That’s what SmartSpace claims in its caption, “Be live on the web immediately with an instantly connected domain!”

SmartSpace offers a free blog tool, a free photo site and free social space once you order a domain name with SmartSpace at Godaddy. Social space is an application by Smart Space which can be used to collect and display dynamic information from Flicker, YouTube, Google News and Facebook profiles.

The tool has a clean and simple interface as it caters to users who are not technically sound. The tool guides the user step by step based on the features requested. The only requirement needed from the user would be to choose the layouts, color preferences and customize it. That’s not a big requirement and hey it’s your website and you need to decide them.

The SmartSpace feature can be accessed by logging in using your regular username and password. With many new domain sellers and hosting providers arraying into the market, hosting providers have to provide additional features with little or no cost to hold on to their existing customers.

Googlebot is becoming clever and smarter day by day. It would no longer be patient enough to crawl all your search result pages which carry those complex URLs. Instead it would send you a warning that it found out high number of URLs.

Webmasters have been allowing search engines to index their internal search result pages which in turn portray a false image that the site is huge. This can also help in getting a large number of pages indexed in search engines.

Recently, Google has been sending warning messages to websites which have similar practices or if their URL structure is too complex to understand.

Subject: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site: www.example.cm

Message: Googlebot encountered problems while crawling your site http://www.example.com/.

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site. The above notification mail also includes a list of URLs which face the issue. Though there is no mention of a ban or spamming, Google might consider this to be a serious issue in the near future. Google would definitely think about avoiding crawling into these pages as this process would involve consuming a large number of resources and time.

Microsoft Webmaster Tool has had a recent update with some new features added to help webmasters.

Webmaster Live which is now moved out of beta, now has some additional features similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Google has been constantly updating its webmaster tool which provides much greater insight into a website once the owner authenticates their site.

The new section “Crawl Issues” provides information related to 404 errors, Blocked by REP, Long Dynamic URL and Unsupported content type. REP issues are related to the Robot Exclusion Protocol through the robots.txt file. These issues can further filtered by subdomain or subfolder level. The derived report can then be downloaded as aCSV file.

Similarly, the “Backlink” tool and other tools like “Outbound Links” now has filtering and downloading options. The listing also includes a Page Score similar to how Google ranks pages with its Page Rank.

This is a good update by Microsoft but still have a long way to go and frequent updates to compete with Google Webmaster Tools.