Google once again found themselves in the midst of unwanted attention after Jonathan Rockway, an employee was caught saying:

"Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large."

The highlighted part of the statement made by Mr Rockway, is something that goes directly against Google. Over the years, Google has repeatedly maintained that they do not consider SEOs to be spams. As a matter of fact, in October last year, Matt Cutts did an entire video giving a detailed description behind the reasoning why Google does not consider SEOs to be spams. Please be noted that Mr Cutts is the head of Google's web spam team.

Another worrying comment made by Mr Rockway has been quoted below:

"If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it's pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It's a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug."

Once again the highlighted part of the statement by Mr Rockway is particularly worrisome, as it goes on to suggest that if you want to rank well on Google, you will have to buy ads.

Though three days after making the initial comment Mr Rockwaymade a corrective statement, "I shouldn’t have mentioned ads here. Position on the results page should only depend on the quality of your content; if your site has the best content on the Internet for the user’s search terms, you should be the top result. You shouldn’t be able to change your position in the organic results any other way, like by exploiting bugs in Google’s ranking algorithm. The specifics of the ranking algorithm may change, but if your site is the best, you won’t have to worry about it." This statement sort of took care of the ads issue, but SEO comment is still open for speculation.

Google jumped onto the sinking ship trying to salvage some lost pride by confirming again and saying that "As always, Google search rankings are completely unrelated to Google’s paid advertising services and other partnerships, and there is absolutely no way for a webmaster to pay money to increase search rankings." and "When it comes to SEO, many owners of high-quality sites can and do get their site listed well in Google’s search results without any outside help. Some site owners prefer to have someone else check and optimize their sites, and for these folks we’ve published some guidelines relating to evaluating SEO companies."

Google has said that Mr Rockway is new employee at Google who just about completed one month of employment, perhaps hinting that he is not fully acquainted with how Google works. This seems no more than a case of misunderstanding.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Reaffirms: SEO Isn't Bad & Ads Don't Help Rankings!

Having changed the overall look and layout of sitelinks a number of times over last few years, Google is now rolling out a new change to the existing one-line sitelinks appearing under a search result.

As confirmed by a Google spokesperson, this change is currently being rolled out and will be reflected everywhere within a week. The change is only minor with a small arrow showing on the left side of the sitelinks.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Adds Small Arrow to Sitelinks!

What has Google been doing the past month? Well here are all the search updates it made in the month of January, listed in the official January update brought out by Google. The updates are many and include the likes of search preferences, speed, freshness, spelling systems, snippets, high-quality sites algorithm and much more.

High Quality Sites Algorithm Improvements aka the Panda

Yes, the Panda was updated in January, as we reported earlier. Google plans to integrate it more in to its ‘pipelines’. Google says, "We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines." Time for the sites previously affected to gear up.

Fresher Results

Remember the Freshness algorithm update that came out in November? Well Google made several "minor updates" to it in January.

Autocomplete spelling corrections

Google has revealed that it’s now faster at delivering predicted queries. The spelling corrections used in autocomplete have been improved as they are now more consistent with the spelling corrections used in search.

Improve detection of recurrent event pages

For fresher results, Google has improved the way it determines the date of a document. This means users will see "fresher, more timely results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events."

News queries

The process of blending news results in to search results has been made better by the search engine. Now people can look forward to "more responsive to realtime trends."

For the rest of the updates done for fresher, speedier search results, please refer to the full list as revealed by Google.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Search preferences, speed, freshness, Panda in the 'pipeline' & More in Google's January Search Update!

Google's John Mueller has stated that Google is limited to only processing up to 500KB of their robots.txt files.

John made a statement on his Google+ page that read, “#102 of the things to keep in mind when working on a big website: If you have a giant robots.txt file, remember that Googlebot will only read the first 500kb. If your robots.txt is longer, it can result in a line being truncated in an unwanted way. The simple solution is to limit your robots.txt files to a reasonable size .”

If your robot.txt file is super heavy and goes beyond 500 KB, then not only will it result in Googlebot ignoring anything that follows the limit but it will also auto truncate the file, which may effect your website's health in Google search.

John is currently answering all queries regarding robots.txt handling on his Google+ page. Click on the link to know more about robots.txt file controls.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Rules 500KB Crawl Limit For Robots.txt Files!

Recently Google announced the an update to Webmaster Tools sitemaps.

Now onwards sitemaps page will also display statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News, thus retiring Video Sitemaps Labs. This new addition will let you know how many items of each type were added and for few content types, the number of indexed items.

You can now test a sitemap for errors taking only a few seconds to complete. But the initial testing may miss the errors which can only be detected only once the URLs are downloaded. Besides this, errors and warnings will now be displayed in groups and errors and warnings from child sitemaps have been aggregated for Sitemap index files, so that you do not have to click through each child Sitemap.

Towards the end the working of the "Delete" button has been changed. It will delete the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, from the accounts of the owners of the website.

For any queries, go to Webmaster Help Forum.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Updates to Google Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps!

In 2012, Google has continued its Panda Update with a Panda 3.2 update rolled out on January 18, 2012 (estimated date of the roll out). Google has revealed to search industry professionals that it has done a data refresh of the Google Panda algorithm with no algorithm changes. Webmasters experiencing ranking changes were discussing this on the WebmasterWorld forum for the past couple of days. Some sites had lost their rankings while the ones hit earlier were seeing higher SERPs- indicating a data refresh undertaken by Google.

However, now Google has sent out a statement confirming the update in the past week- minor update that was just a data refresh of the Panda update. Google has been quoted, "We're continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year."

This data refresh has been termed as the Google Panda 3.2, and since Google said this was rolled out about a week or so ago, search experts have estimated the date to be January 18, 2012.

The Panda 3.1 update came in during November 2011. After that Google gave a respite to webmasters over the holidays with an announcement of no Panda updates during holidays.

In the New Year this is the first data refresh/update and has been termed as the Panda 3.2. The Panda Updates Timeline goes back to February 24th 2011, when the ‘Farmer Update’ was rolled out. The algorithm designed against content and link farms wen international on the 11the of April 2011, when it was rolled for the English sites outside the USA. In the last week of September, the Panda 2.5 was rolled out and there were a number of tweaks made to the algorithm by Google.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Confirms Panda 3.2 Update!

The definitions of average position in the search query report in Google Webmaster Tools and search optimization report in Google Analytics is being changed by Google. The change was revealed in the Google Webmaster Blog and Google Analytics Blog.

What’s the new definition?

As per the new definition, your search ranking will be determined by the average of the top ranking of the site for all searches, as opposed to all URLs listed and average that. Please note that only the top rankings will be taken. Earlier, the average search ranking was gathered by taking all the positions of your rankings and averaging them together.

This is how Google explains it-

“Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.”

The impact of this on your Top Search Queries and Google Analytics Data

As per Google the historical data will not change, only the Top Search Queries Data going forward will be affected. Google said, “Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, as we will no longer be averaging in lower-ranking URLs.”

Google is of the view that webmasters anticipations of how a link’s position in Google Search results should be reported will be matched better with this new method of calculation. 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Average Search Rankings Redefined By Google!

Google has a newly redesigned Submit Your Content page. The URL submission tool page has also been updated. You can now submit content at google.com/submityourcontent. This page was launched in September 2008, and now has been given a facelift by Google. The purpose of the page was to act as an information resource for site owners to find out how to submit content to Google’s various portals.

This is the look of the new page:

You can choose from one of the four categories of users to submit your content. These are: Website Owners,  Business Owners, Publishing and Media and Public Agency. Explore the different submissions URLs on each of these landing pages. How do you like the new design? Do share your views.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Presenting Google’s Whole New Submit Content Page!

Google Inc. has announced through their official blog that they will be changing their current Privacy Policies and Google Terms of Service. These changes will assist Google to link their users across all Google products like Gmail, youtube, Google+ and so on. Google has indicated that the changes will be reflected in just over a month.

In the very words of Google “We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.”

Despite trimming policies in 2010, Google says they still have over 70 privacy documents spread across various Google products, making it complicated for users. Google too finds this completely out of sync compared to their vision of integrating various Google products. To get rid of the confusion surrounding the privacy documents, Google now will be consolidating almost 60 privacy policies into one main Privacy policy, leaving a handful policies untouched because of legal and other reasons. These changes will be reflected across all Google platforms by March 1st 2012.

Here's how the changes will affect you personally, for example if you search for “Indian cricket team” on Google search. The next time whenever you log onto YouTube, there will be video suggestions of Rahul Dravid or other videos related to Indian cricket. Google will also have the power to customize search queries and ability to make better spelling suggestions.

Though it might seem like a welcoming and logical change for many, apprehension regrading the changes have already raised a few eyes brows around the corner. Individuals are getting worried as they believe their privacy will be attacked with Google now gaining the power to collect data from multiple products, linking them together. For example, user information from Android mobile phones can be retrieved linked with users YouTube/Google+ accounts. According to privacy advocates these changes will give Google enough power to share your personal information on Google+ profile on other Google products, even though you have previously ticked the box that says 'don't share'.

Updated Terms of Service and Private Policy is made available, to realise what is being changed here's the current Google Terms of Service.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Rolls Out New Privacy Policy : Information to be Shared Across All Google Products!

The head of Google’s Webspam Team, Matt Cutts in on a trip to India and did a ‘HangOut’ with Indian Webmasters from Hyderabad. This HangOut was a part of his webmaster outreach program with a group of Googlers involved in the same. In order to interact better with the Indian siteowners, this is how Matt welcomed them to ask questions on his Google+ profile, “I'm here in Hyderabad, India, and I might try to do a Google+ hangout in a few minutes to answer some questions from Indian webmasters. If you have SEO questions that you'd like for me to answer, just leave a question in the comments!”

The Hangout on  Matt’s Google+ profile began at 2p.m. IST today and webmasters posted very interesting questions before Matt. And Matt, as he is known for always helping webmasters to make their sites Google friendly, answered all the questions in a helpful manner. Webmasters also welcomed Matt to their country and asked him intelligent and highly topical questions on the way Google judges a site-its content and links.

The HangOut ended, however, Matt’s Google+ profile is filled with welcome notes from Indian Webmasters, wishing him a safe a fruitful trip. PageTraffic Buzz will bring you more on this HangOut soon.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Matt Cutts HangsOut With Indian Webmasters!

In a fresh upgrade involving punctuation marks, Google has updated its search results. So, now when you search for a “;” as in semicolon, you will now get search results. While some of the results are relevant, some may be not (the search for “/” slash reveals a music band with the same name on top). Here is what the search for “!” reveals:

This was reported by Google Operating System that Google was showing results for some punctuation symbols, as opposed to earlier, where it did not index them. Now you can see results for symbols/punctuation marks like:

1. [.]- Full Stop
2. [,]- Comma
3. [:]- Colon
4. [;]- Semicolon
5. [#]- Hash
6. [%]- Percent
7. [@]- At
8. [^]- Carat
9. [)]- Brackets
10. [~]- Tilde
11. [|]- Vertical Bar
12. ["]- Quotes
13. [<] Less than/Greater Than
14. [$]- Dollar symbol
15. [!]- Exclamation Mark
16. [‘]- Apostrophe
17. [&]- Ampersand
18. [ _ ]- Underscore
19. [-]-  Minus sign
20. [+]-  Plus sign
21. [=]-  Equals sign

Do these searches for yourself and see.
 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Punctuation Search Results Upgraded By Google!

If you are a surfer , then Google’s new move will do good for you. For webmasters, it means of lot of damage control. Google has brought in a new change titled the- ‘Page layout algorithm’ which is designed to penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads.

What is this new ‘Page layout algorithm’?
Google has revealed in a post that the algorithm will work against a site with pages where the ads far outweigh the content. This move by the search engine is again following a user generated demand that they want to see the content they were searching for and not be bombarded by ads.

Quoting Google, “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.”

As per a similar post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the sites that use pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads will not be impacted by the algorithm.

What number of ads above the fold will bring you in the red zone?
Post this announcement, the next obvious query was – “How many ads? Where does one draw the line?”
According to the blog post Google says, “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.”

Well, search experts have discussed this with Google and the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts has been sourced as saying that by using tools like Google Browser Size, webmasters can make an estimation as to the amount of page’s content is visible to users vis a vis the ads (under various screen resolutions). However, Matt Cutts has also said that this algorithm will impact less than 1% of Google’s searches globally, in perfect tandem with what has been written in the blog post by Google.

What if you are hit and then set the ads right?
In case you are hit by the algorithm, you will have to wait for a couple of weeks to get your ranking back. Just reduce ads above-the-fold, give your content more prominence and wait. Google will make a note of the changes and will integrate into its overall ranking system, in a few weeks. As Google says, “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.”

Did you get the Google AdSense email?
On one hand heavy ads pages are being penalized, on the other hand, Google AdSense has emailed bloggers, encouraging them to put more ads on their site. Here is the mail:

As per the mail, you have to place you ads carefully keeping in mind the user experience.
What do you think of Google’s move? Will you have to change your page layout? Do leave your comments.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google’s ‘Page Layout’ Algorithm To Penalize Pages With Too Many Ads Above The Fold!

Google has provided programmatic access to the search queries data in Webmaster Tools with ‘Python’. The Python script for downloading search query data was brought by Google in December 2011 and now has new download options that make the data download highly more useful.

With this open source Python script from the webmaster-tools-downloads project, webmasters can now access their search queries data in CSV format. Google has clarified that the search queries data is not currently available via the Webmaster Tools API, and is being considered for the next API update. Here is the example Google gives as to how the search queries downloader Python script can be used to download search queries data and then upload it to a Google Spreadsheet in Google Docs.

“Example usage of the search queries downloader Python script:

1. If Python is not already installed on your machine, download and install Python.
   
2. Download and install the Google Data APIs Python Client Library.
   
3. Create a folder and add the downloader.py script to the newly created folder.
   
4. Copy the example-create-spreadsheet.py script to the same folder as downloader.py and edit it to replace the example values for “website,” “email” and “password” with valid values for your Webmaster Tools verified site.
   
5. Open a Terminal window and run the example-create-spreadsheet.py script by entering "python example-create-spreadsheet.py" at the Terminal window command line: python example-create-spreadsheet.py
   
6. Visit Google Docs to see a new spreadsheet containing your search queries data.”
   

Webmasters can set up these scripts to be run daily or monthly and can archive it for longer periods too. With search query chart data downloads, webmasters have access to information not easily available before. While viewing search query data, the chart in the user interface shows impression and click data per day. Prior to this, the detail has only been available if one hovered over a dot in the chart. But now, the detailed chart data available for download provides a greater understanding of the data.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Now Download Search Queries Data In Google Webmaster Tools!

Wordstream has put together an insightful infographic showing how Google earned a substantial $37.9 Billion in 2011 Advertising Revenues. The research was done by WordStream independently and is a follow up of the Google’s announcement of a “disappointing” 2011 Earnings.

What do you think of Google’s fortunes in 2011, so share your opinion?

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

How Google Made Money In 2011- Infographic!

Google has joined Wikipedia and other sites in the protest against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) being debated in Congress. Google has a link on its home page leading people to sign up in the protest against SOPA and PIPA. The link also notifies users of Google's opposition to controversial antipiracy bills before the Congress.

This is what Google has conveyed to various media houses, "Like many businesses, entrepreneurs, and Web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue Web sites without asking American companies to censor the Internet," a Google representative said. "So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page."

Google has also joined the tech firms opposing the two bills currently being discussed in Congress. Google is of the view that web censorship will have a huge negative impact on the US businesses. In protest, Google has covered its logo with a black strip and there is a one line message that goes- “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!”

The one liner is an appeal that takes you to an End Piracy, Not Liberty page. The page is a petition form where people can sign up and join the protest against the legislation. People can also share the following message- “Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA. The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.”

There is the latest number of people who have already signed the petition. Will this drive by the tech giants affect the Congress’ decision? We’ll have to wait and watch.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google’s Doodle Blackened In Protest Of SOPA & PIPA!

Google yesterday added a new dimension to its existing search engine by introducing, Search plus Your World. This feature will integrate personal results, mainly from Google+, into SERPs. This essentially means that information like People, Pages and Profiles will now be seen on the result pages. Lets have a closer look at the features :

Personal Results from Google+ Available in SERPs:

Users now have a choice about the kind of search they are interested in. Google has a personalization toggle icon at the top right hand side of the search page, the user now has a choice of including the relevant posts and pictures of his friends on Google+ or an option of drilling down unnecessary information by viewing normal result page.

Making the most of their promoting edge over Facebook and other social networking sites, search result page interestingly shows only results from Google+, leaving out Facebook and others in the cold. Google officials have cited that, term of service set by Facebook and other sites prevents them from crawling through deeper and retrieve information.

Google+ Profiles In Search:

Google tries to reason out the main idea, behind the concept of incorporating Google+ profiles in search, through a published post on their official blog. The statement reads :

“Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the person you’re looking for. Once you do find him or her, there’s no quick way for you to actually interact. Starting today, you’ll have meaningful ways to connect with people instantly, right from the search results.”

As the user types in the first few alphabets of a person's name, Google now autocompletes and bring up its own results in SERPs, where Google+ profile and other web results are highlighted. Once the desired person is found, users can view all the relevant web information that Google attributes to that person, bypassing all others sharing the same name. This will also allow the signed in Google+ users to add prominent Google+ profiles to their Circle directly from SERPs.

People and Pages:

When searched for a particular topic like cricket or laptops, Google will now show prominent people who frequently discuss it on Google+. This page will appear at the right hand side of the result page, encouraging users to strike meaningful conversations through Google+ and discover communities in an easy and never done before way.

New Security Level for SERPs:

Search plus Your World result pages will share the same protection level as that of Gmail via SSL encryption. This could come in as a relief for many who are worried about their Google+ profile and posts, appearing in search results, will leave them vulnerable. However this feature will not work if the user is not signed in, once you've logged onto Google and a search is made then all your search results including your own personal contents are safe.

Search plus Your World will be rolled out in next few days for logged in users searching English keywords at https://www.google.com.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Introduces Search Plus Your World!

According to a sensational investigative report, British Broadcasting Company(BBC) claims that Google is in hot water again. BBC has blamed Google.co.uk for running ads for illegal Olympic ticket resellers, ads for cannabis and ads for fake UK passports and identification cards. According to published BBC report, these ads were stopped by Google as soon as they were brought to company's attention, but that has not stopped Google from keeping the revenue they generated through these illegal ads.

Google US had faced similar problem back in August 2011. Google was then caught red handed for helping Canadian pharmacy to advertise and sell drugs to the US consumers, a grave violation of US Federal Laws. This incident cooled down with Google being slapped a massive $500 million fine to U.S Department Of Justice, and now with only five months on, Google UK has yet another similar problem at hand.

It is apparent that search giant has learned nothing from their previous mistake, this time around though, Google cashed on upcoming London Olympics 2012 fever. Ads like illegal Olympic ticket resellers, ads for cannabis and ads for fake UK passports were said to be doing rounds online, until they were taken down. This matter was brought to BBC's notice by a consumer, who grew suspicious of its legality, when she was asked to fax her signature for completion of ticket purchase. She was purchasing her tickets through LiveOlympicsTickets, an illegal Olympic ticket reseller, appearing on Google's AdWords. Please be noted, that it is a crime in the UK to sell/resell Olympics tickets without the permission of organizing committee.

The latest incident highlights an everlasting problem at Google, and proves it is going through conflict of interests, made evident by raising profit from the very ads they say they are committed to monitor. Though Google has accepted they have done the illegal but they still haven't paid the price for breaking the law. This matter is sure to evolve in coming days with a trial against Google, most probably on cards.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

BBC Catches Google Running Illegal Ads In UK, Google UK Accepts!

Google has made quite a few improvements to search in the month of December 2011, and they brought out a latest monthly recap about these search tweaks. The most interesting takeaway of the entire line up of 30 odd improvements is the project codenamed “Megasitelinks,” by Google.

This is an algorithmic improvement for choosing sitelinks, and that too localized sitelinks being chosen by the search engine. This is what Google says about it, “We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting. ”

It seems that sitelinks is one thing Google has been working on for some time. Sitelinks now include Google+ data along with showing up on home pages and inner pages.

Google has also improved image search too. As Google is quoted,”This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.”

Now the Google algorithm searches for relevant as well as linked to quality source pages. Also Google has put in action its spam detection algorithm from its main search results page too. Now users will get to see the most relevant images.

As per the improvements list, Google has bettered the byline dates and made them more accurate. This improvement is codenamed “foby” and the algorithm has been improved to better determine the date to associate with a document. Now more accurate dates will accompany search results.

Other improvements include making country-restricted search results more accurate, better ‘soft 404’ detection. Now Google will know better when sites have been set up to send inaccurate code to Google’s spiders. The query wording has also been improved.

Have you experienced these changes? Please share your view.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

‘Megasitelinks’ Announced By Google As A Part Of Search Quality Improvements!

In news that has the entire search industry gripped, Google has penalized its own Chrome browser in the search results. Google has levied a penalty against the browser as result of which Chrome has lost its position in SERP. The 60 day penalty has taken effect and Chrome is not ranking for keywords like- ‘Chrome, Chrome browser or even internet browser’.

As additional penalty, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome has been lowered too. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam team has confirmed the penalty via a post on Google+: “In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.”

This is Google’s reaction after the search engine was accused of buying links for promoting their browser- Google Chrome. It was revealed that Google seemed to be a part of a sponsored posts SEO campaign dedicated to buying links for Chrome. However, in their reaction, Google has denied any knowledge of the quality guidelines being violated, as they were aware of only buying video ads.

When the news broke-  “Gasp! Google buying paid links?”
In a stunning disclosure by Aaron Wall, it was revealed that the Search Engine giant, Google was caught buying paid linksto promote Chrome for the keyword "browser". Aaron said that a search for the term “this post is sponsored by Google" returned over 400 results. What was in the results- All of them contained thin or worse garbage content, and a Google video ad and link to the Chrome website. This paid links campaign was in clear violation of Google’s own webmaster guidelines. These state that all advertising links must have a rel="nofollow" attribute in the link code. Whereas the paid links promoting Chrome were not ‘nofollow’.

Most of the blogs were written in the month of December, as we had to sort out the search preferences to reach the results page. Google has now had all these blogs removed. As we clicked on them and all the first page results led to ‘404 Errors.

When Google’s reaction statement came-  “Oh! Google didn’t know of the paid links campaign!”
Google has since stated that they only intended to buy online ads. This was the official statement from Google- “Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

Google, it seems, had hired a marketing company, Unruly to run a promotion campaign for Google Chrome. One of the bloggers has revealed that they got $ 40 gift voucher, in return for every sponsored blog written on Google Chrome.

Meanwhile, marketing agency Essence Digital has come forward, saying they were contracted to post video ads, and Google was unaware that they would appear in the form of sponsored posts containing links.

Mark Baker, online marketing manager at the Eword, said: "This is really embarrassing for Google, as it breaks their own rules in terms of paid links and the Panda algorithm update. But it looks like Google wasn't entirely to blame, and is now holding its hands up and facing the consequences. However, there are still some questions left unanswered: why did they sign up for video ads in the first place, and was anybody at the company checking the progress of the campaign?"

When Google penalized Chrome-  “OMG! What transparency!”
The search fraternity was waiting for some move by Google, and Google obliged by taking the route it took with the likes of JC Penny. The Chrome website and download page have been pushed way down below in search results. This is the official Google statement on the same,

“We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.”

Now, this paid links fiasco may be the result of two different agencies being involved. Even if Google was unaware, but quality guidelines were violated, and now Google applied a solid penalty against itself. A 60 day penalty, where the SERP of Google Chrome for the term ‘internet browser’ dropped from 5th to 58th. And for the term ’web browser’ dropped from 4th to 54th.

Matt Cutts shared some more information on Google+ and revealed that video player links didn’t pass any link juice. However, as they found at least one non-video player link that linked, they decided to implement the penalty. Matt said:

“If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either. However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bi … er=35769#3”

The bottomline- Google follows its own rules. And punishes itself too in the case of violations. Your take on this?

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Penalizes Google Chrome Post Paid Links Fiasco- Loses SERPs For Top Keywords!

Google’s Matt Cutts often posts insightful videos for webmasters. He has recently posted one about the options in Google Webmaster Tools to geo-locate or geo-target for multiple locations. The video is a must watch for webmasters with a site that targets different locations:

You can also check my recent presentation on Global SEO Strategies I did at SEMPO, Chennai

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Matt Cutts Gives Insights On How To Target Parts Of One Website To Different Locations!