I find it very annoying as a web user to search the whole web, find what looks like a desired result, and then end up being on a log-in-page. These pages have just one aim in mind ‘Give me money, else go away!’ I always move away from such a page because I know that I can find that information on other websites as well.

Now, Google has something for those websites who are willing to go for a subscription model. It’s called “First Click Free”

In order to help users find and access content that may require registration or a subscription, Google offers an option to web and news publishers called “First Click Free.”

Important Goals of First Click Free are:

1. To include highly relevant content in Google’s search index. This provides a better experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.
2. To provide a promotion and discovery opportunity for publishers with restricted content.” - Google

Guidelines from Google.

“Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.
• If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.”

Some of the orthodox owners of websites may be reluctant to display their web content for free; however it will definitely boost up their popularity and SEO campaign performance. Also, sharing information will make the World Wide Web a better place to surf in.

Google hosted a live online webmaster chat on October 22, 2008. They had a presentation on “Frightening Myths and Misconceptions” where John Mueller demystified some webmasters myths related to Page Rank, duplicate content, links, 404 errors and geo targeting. There was also a return of their popular “Three for Three,” in which they had three different Googlers tackling three different issues … in less than three minutes each!

The best part was the Google Moderator tool where one could ask questions and also vote for the questions that were asked by others. Have listed few of these questions along with the responses posted by Googlers.

Q)”What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?”

A)In the majority of cases, it actually doesn’t matter–we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you’re a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn’t have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn’t obsess about it.

Q)Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?”

A)There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Q)”Until recentley (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?”

A)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.

Q)”Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?”

A)This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.

Q)“What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?”

A)I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.

Q)”Is the bounce rate and speed taken into account when ranking a page? i.e. if you see a searcher click on a result then return very quickly and choose another result, is the first page ranked lower?”

A)Assuming that users will be jumping out of a site like that, there’s a high probability that they won’t be willing to recommend it to others (or come back themselves). So yes, indirectly at least, if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like (and recommend to others).

Q)”How will social media or more specifically share of comments (buzz about a brand) influence the serps?”

A)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 eventualy 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).

Q)”Will it make any difference between a shared IP and a dedicated IP on SEO or search results, as opinions are divided on this aspect?”

A)Most of the web is on shared IP addresses, so it doesn’t make much sense for us to give those on dedicated IP addresses any advantages. That said, if your server is struggling with the load of your website, it might make sense to move to a dedicated server that helps to make sure that your users are happy when visiting your website.

Q)”Are natural results geotargeted?”

A)Yes. If you search for [bank] in the U.S., you’ll get different results than if you search in the U.K. or Germany.

Q)”does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by google?”

A)Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger

You can check all the questions at http://tinyhttp.com/tatask.The audio and video of the event will be available soon on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ . Online chat is a good way through which SEO experts and webmasters can get their queries answered in real time from someone at Google. Hope we have many more such events from Google.

There’s no such thing as a “Duplicate Content Penalty”. At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
According to Google there are penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site; for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined and discouraged by Google:

• Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “Cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first. (This one if especially for those affiliated with Amazon.com)

However, most site owners who worry about duplicate content aren’t worrying about scraping or domain farms; they’re talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. E.g.: www.somesite.com/boots.asp?colour=black&brand=riedell and www.somesite.com/boots.asp?brand=riedell&colour=black.
Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site’s performance, but it doesn’t cause penalties.
Google says duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, Google does a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in their search results.
Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy.
Google’s way of handling duplicate content is as follows:

• When Google detects duplicate content, through variations caused by URL parameters, Google groups the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
• Google selects what it thinks is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
• Google then consolidates properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Here’s how this could affect you as a webmaster:

In step 2, Google’s idea of what the “best” URL is might not be the same as your idea. If you want to have control over whether www.somesite.com/boots.asp?colour=black&brand=riedell or www.somesite.com/boots.asp?brand=riedell&colour=black gets shown in our search results, you may want to take action to mitigate your duplication. One way of letting Google know which URL you prefer is by including the preferred URL in your “Google sitemap”

In step 3, if they aren’t able to detect all the duplicates of a particular page, they won’t be able to consolidate all of their properties. This may dilute the strength of that content’s ranking signals by splitting them across multiple URLs.
In most cases Google does a good job of handling this type of duplication. However, you may also want to consider content that’s being duplicated across domains. In particular, deciding to build a site whose purpose inherently involves content duplication is something you should think twice about if your business model is going to rely on search traffic, unless you can add a lot of additional value for users. For example, Amazon.com affiliates have a hard time ranking on Google for content that originates solely from Amazon. This is because they cannot outrank Amazon if they’re providing the exact same content. Amazon has a lot of online business authority (most likely more than a typical Amazon affiliate site does), and the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.
Lastly, consider the effect that duplication can have on your site’s bandwidth. Duplicated content can lead to inefficient crawling: when Googlebot discovers ten URLs on your site, it has to crawl each of those URLs before it knows whether they contain the same content. The more time and resources that Googlebot spends crawling duplicate content across multiple URLs, the less time it has to get to the rest of your content.

In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

• You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
• If you’re a webmaster of “beginner-to-intermediate savviness”, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
• You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control.

The debate on whether to use underscores or dashes in URLs has been a pretty old one. Google finally cleared up the difference on their interpretation between the two. Their answer is simple: Dashes are considered are separators while underscores are not.

What this means is that for a URL like:

http://www.convonix.com/search-engine-optimization/

it is clear to Google, that, each word is a separate one, helping them determine keywords. If the URL was written as

http://www.convonix.com/search_engine_optimization/

instead, it would be possible that Google could make a mistake in parsing the URL. However, for those who currently use underscores to separate words in their URL, Google’s advice is to simply leave the existing URLs as they are, since they are constantly improving and say that, in time, there will be less distinction between the two punctuations.

Sitelinks are the links shown below some sites in search results and  are meant to help users navigate to your site. Google analyzes the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for and when it does find something suitable then it creates a sitelink. This is what a sitelinks look like

Sitelink

There need to be atleast three sitelinks created by Google for a particular site for the sitelinks to be displayed. The unfortunate part is that we cannot tell Google to create  sitelinks according to our choice, it does so on its own. However once Google does create a sitelink and if you dont want that particular link to be displayed then you can block it. Simply go into webmaster tools, there go to the sitelinks option and block a particular sitelink. Once blocked within a few days Google stops showing the sitelink and the sitelink remains blocked for a 90 day period. If you want that sitelink to be blocked for more time then all you need to do is just go to the sitelink page on webmaster tools. Each time you do so the sitelinks will be blocked for an additional 90 days. You can unblock a sitelink whenever you wish too

So how do sitelinks help an SEO campaign? Many a times it might happen that Google might create sitelinks of pages that you think people might not visit frequently  or more importantly you feel that there are many more important pages that deserve a sitelink. Then if you block a sitelink, Google automatically will create some more  relevant sitelinks.  Having irrelevant sitelinks might deter users from visiting your site and that is definitely not something that you want to happen.

It has been 10 long years since Google entered our lives and it has gotten better with age. It’s fascinating to know that a company started in a California garage by two Stanford PhD students today dominates almost 80% of its business market and has offices world wide.

Not many people know that the word Google is derived from the word googol which is a mathematical term for a number which has the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Also, Google was incorporated because one of their first investor s gave the founders a check which said Google Inc in the payee’s column.

You will be surprised to know that Google’s first motive is to improve user experience by delivering most appropriate results for any query which users enter. Earning millions of dollars is just a by product of this. To confirm this we don’t have to go beyond Google’s home page. Considered the hottest property on the internet you will never find an advertisement on it. Just imagine the amount of money Google is willing to let go.

Over the years Google has turned out to be a playful company. You can confirm this by just glancing at the various logos which Google has used over the years. They somehow come up with a new logo for every occasion and have more than 300 different variations of their logo. Phew!! That’s a lot.
Google’s office in Silicon Valley called the Googleplex is an awesome place. You have free food and white boards everywhere. The reason for having white boards on walls of corridors, rooms as well as rest rooms (yes they have one there too) is that you never know when an idea might strike you. Employees are allowed to bring their pets to work and can decorate their own cubicle. Wow that’s a work place I would like to work in.

Well enough for now, more Google info in my next post, till then here’s wishing Google a Very Happy 10th Birthday.

Have you ever seen local listing appearing on the first page followed by the natural listings?  That’s one more service that Google provides us. Google Local Listing is a free web mapping service. You can add your business through local listings and rank prior to the natural listings. The local business results attract the attention of a user with the detailed map of the region with various results to choose from alongside. This in effect leads to a significant drop in clicks for results, despite being #1 right below the map. Even though your website is thoroughly optimized and has all the SEO elements in place but if it appears below local listing it affects your website traffic tremendously.  To maintain the website traffic, add your business through local listings and improve or maintain you website traffic.

I was checking the traffic of one of my website’s and I came across one new feature that Google Analytics has included. You can now compare the no of visits and the sales made on a particular day. There are various other attributes such as Page Visits, Avg Time on Site, Bounce Rate, %New Visit that could be compared with other attributes such as Revenue, Transactions, Average Value so on.

Google Analytics

This metric comparison should help us compare one-to-one attributes that will help us monitor the search engine traffic more carefully. By tracking the no of visits and sales we get for a particular keyword, we can implement the SEO element as and when required.

Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier. Sitemaps have always been a part of good Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they have become even more important.
Using sitemaps has many benefits, like easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new pages, then using a sitemap can be vital to your sucess.
Google Sitmaps uses a special XML format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap which is very important from SEO point of view. One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders.

Directories are a well organized collection of websites/blogs/forums that make it easier for users to find websites related to different content. Each link on a directory includes a short description of the website.

Submitting your websites and blogs to directories is a good way to get some back links. Some also consider it a reasonable way to increase traffic. But is this really true and worth the trouble?

There are three types of directories:

1. Free Directories: Free directories accept all links for free. Some directories may not ask you for money but may require you to add a reciprocal link to their directory on your website.
2. Paid Directories: Paid directories require you to pay to get your link approved.
3. Both Free and Paid: These are directories that are a combination of Free and Paid directories. You can pay to have your link listed as a featured link and thus gain more exposure.

Directories provide you with useful back links and can act as a relevant source of traffic (However you rarely see any change in). Webmasters usually consider PageRank before submitting their site to a directory. Having a link on a directory with high PageRank can help improve your website’s PageRank and can help you get traffic to your site.

However, webmasters end up getting very less PageRank benefit and traffic from directories.

The reasons for this

1. PageRank - Eventhough some directories may have high PageRank for their homepage, their inner pages, where your link will be placed, rarely have any PageRank. Thus, your website’s PageRank does not get much boost.
2. Traffic - We have search engines to digg up websites for us without wasting any time. Thus, it is highly possible that your site won’t get much traffic from directories because not many people visit them to look for websites.

Now, is it worth the trouble? Yes! Submitting directories is still a good way to build some back links even if they may not boost your PageRank as much as you expected. Submit your websites/blogs to directories whenever you have a chance. Sooner or later, everything will all add up and you will notice the benefits. When it comes to SEO, every little thing counts.