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Google’s Algorithm in 2009

According to Google, 540 improvements was made to the search engine in the year 2009.

Canonical Cross-Domain

Taking into account the attribute rel=”canonical” which was implemented some months ago to avoid duplicate content between pages within a site, has been extended to similar pages on different domain names.
It is still preferable to use 301 redirects when you migrate a site on another domain.
Source Google.

To protect your site against other sites that might copy your content without permission, see how to build a generic canonical tag in PHP.
December 15, 2009

Real-time and personalized search

The results page will update while you view it, and without any intervention from you. The real- time search is extended to the whole world.
Also, personalized search has become the default mode, the engine saves your habits and tailors its results.

December 2009.

Indication of country of a site in SERPs

To tell users what is the country of a site for case where the location is usefull, results pages now display the country next to the URL in green. This is for the domains with generic TLDs like .com.
To assign the region, go into GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) in Site configuration -> Settings -> Geographic target.

Decembre 3, 2009 – Region Tags in Google Search Result. Examples on the Google’s blog.

Links on forum threads in SERPs

Following internal links in SERPs, results now include links to topics of forums that can answer a question. The main link points to a page of the site, and below, indented, threads of forum on the site in connection with the query with the number of the messages and the date.

Google Blog.
September 30, 2009

Links internal to pages in search results : Jump to feature

Snippets belows titles in results pages of Google are now enriched with internal links in pages of websites. When the result of search is on a specific part of the page, a link to it may appear for a direct access.

To enjoy these additional links in results, your pages should be structured with a menu of subtitles linked to subtitles inside the page.
Format of the link in the menu if the subtitle is “car”, for example:

<li><a href="#car">Car</a></li>

Format of the subtitle in the body of the page:

<div id="car">Car</div>

• Description by Google.
• Webmasters must add a summary anchors.

September 26, 2009.

New Interface

The search engine will now be more accessible: the size of the input field has been expanded to have larger characters and thus easier to read.
Announcement.
September 9, 2009.

New search engine, Caffeine.

Google is trying a new search engine that is intended to be faster and to provide more relevant results.
August 11, 2009.

More results from a same site

The results pages are normally limited to two results for the same site, the second being indented under the first.
With the addition of an expansion command represented by the sign +, you can now have a greater number of links to the same site.

Official news.
Image search is improved too with more options.
July 31, 2008.

Titles changed by Google

Some sites have seen the title of their page in the SERPS replaced by the name of their company.
Explanation from Google:

“We may choose to replace titles which are repeated on a number of pages or which otherwise appear to be suboptimal. To resolve that, it would be a good idea to make sure that the titles are unique, compelling and relevant to every page and that the important parts are visible in the first part of the title text.”

And remember that the webmaster tools can identify missing or duplicated titles.
July 18, 2009.

Search on images by license

Google has added the option to search images by license agreement. We can thus retain royalty-free images reusable on our own site.
Image Search.
July 9, 2009.

Search result pages simplified

Search results now resemble Adsense ads. Plus “cache” and “similar” near the link. The size of pages, the word “page” beside similar disappeared.
July 3, 2009.

Less weight for irrelevant backlinks

This is not confirmed officially by Google (who spoke little of its algorithm in any case), but webmasters believe that the results have changed and that positions in the SERPS are lost because they came from quantities of lower quality backlinks.
What are irrelevant links? There are:
- Blogroll.
- Backinks from social sites.
- From directories.
- Backlinks in footers in partner sites.
- Links included in CMS templates.
In fact Google recently announced that it would take no more account of blogrolls. It is without doubt the result. And it is not just a loss of importance to these links: they are no longer taken into account!

With regard to social sites (such as Delicious, Stumbleupon), in contrast, Google said in a roundtable with webmasters: “They are adressed as other sites”.
July 2, 2009.

SERPs: URL shortened

In results pages, the URLs are reduced by an ellipse in the form /…/ to remove sub-directories.
This highlights the name of the site and the name of the file that could contains keywords significant about the topic of the page.
June 23, 2009.

Flash resources indexed

The crawler is able to index Flash application, but now, it can index images and texts uses by these applications too.

Source Webmaster Central Blog.
June 19, 2009.

Explore the Web

A new link appears under the search field: Discovering the Web. A click displays a list of search contexts, such as that of Bing.com from Microsoft.
June 18, 2009.

Google maps out its search results

When a query includes the name of a location, the result page now displays a map of this location.
June 18, 2009.

New effect of the nofollow attribute – Onclick links.

The nofollow attribute let crawlers to ignore a link in a page. So the PR is distributed among the remaining links.
It now appears that the PR is first distributed among all the links (with or without nofollow) and then not distributed to the nofollowed links.
Example: You have 10 points and 5 PR links, 2 points are awarded for each. If two links are nofollow, no PR is passed through them, but others will not receive more points, they will receive only 6 points shared in 3.
The consequences are dramatic, links in comments on a blog would result in lost of PR for other links.

Quoting Matt Cutts:

“Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There’s this assumption that that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore.“

More on PageRank and nofollow.

Also, Google takes into account links assigned in the onclick event.
June 2, 2009.

Google Suggest improved

The suggestion list associated with the query box of the search engine is improved with the ability to include hyperlinks, which also allows to integrate advertising in the list.
Buttons are also added.
May 20, 2009.

Show options and Rich Snippets

Google.com present at top of results page a Show options link which provides a sidebar with a list of filters to refine the results by categories.

• Videos.
• Forums. Search on threads of discussion for the solution to a problem.
• Reviews. Useful for selecting products.
• Over a past period.
• Date.
• Related searches. Groups of keywords leading in results the same site and for the request.
• Wonder wheel. Presents a semantic graph of associations. Very useful for webmasters.
• Timeline. Returns a list of results by pages created at different times.

The results are also now improved with Rich Snippets. This is additional information to be provided by the webmaster (more work again!). The webmaster adds annotation in a microformat recognized by the parser (including RDF). View the article from Google Making up structured data to enrich your snippets.

Reference: Introducing rich snippets.
May 12, 2009.

Information about forum threads

At the moment, Google is testing locally the display of information on discussion forums that are displayed under the title and above snippet on one line.
The line contains the number of posts, the number of authors, the date of the last post.
The display of the date of an article, retrieved from the page is not new. To disable it, simply put two dates in the page …
May 4, 2009.

Structured Data

Results in graphic and visual data are beginning to appear in search results.
This has been noted by TechCrunch.

This in fact is a reply to the announcement of Wolfram Alpha, the encyclopedic search engine.
April 28, 2009.

Similar Images

Research on improving images with the ability to refine a search using the “Similar Images” command . This is a link under each image displayed that allows you to repeat the search on the nearby images. Google Labs gives an example: if a search for Jaguar displays images of cats and cars, click on the command under cat image, and the search will be reduced to images of cats.
Similar Search.
Google News Timeline. Another new feature: results are organized by graphical timeline.
April 20, 2009.

SiteLinks

So far, only the first site in the list of results showed SiteLink. With the recent emergence of horizontal SiteLink, more discreet, Google now shows a line of links for each site, if elected to have SiteLink.
You have control over SiteLinks from Webmaster Tools.
Google Webmaster Central.
April 16, 2009.

Custom Search

It spreads to all users of the search engine. Research results reflect the behavior of the user, if he clicks more often on the pages of a site or a type of site, these pages will appear in further searches at the top of the results, for himself only.

Ref: Personalized search for everyone.
April 12, 2009.

Local Search

Google improves local search, based on the IP address, which allows it to find the country and the city of a visitor. From it, Google tries to show in results sites that are located as closely as possible.
To take advantage of this option requires that the research includes a place name, in which case a map is displayed.
Google’s Blog.
April 4, 2009.

Website Links

New horizontal SiteLinks below the snippets in results pages. Under the descriptions, there was sometimes a single site for a list of links on one or two columns. It can now be reduced to a horizontal bar.
April 2, 2009.

Snippets

Longer snippets in search result pages.
March 24, 2009.

Brand names

The algorithm gives now more weight to brand name and therefore promotes related sites. This is confirmed by Matt Cutts (head of staff and spokesman of Google) in a video.
The video.
February 26, 2009.

The canonical tag

A new tag tells to crawlers which URL it should index when a page is accessible with multiple addresses.
The duplicate content problem solved.
February 25, 2009.

Google’s Algorithm in 2010

Google perfoms 400 changes in the algorithm during the year, some are more visible and lead to big changes in traffic for some sites.

Check out Google’s Algorithm in 2010:-

Sentiment analysis added to the algorithm

Following an article on the New York Times, denouncing the fact that a merchant who causes the dissatisfaction of its customers and generates many complaints in blogs and forum gains an advantage with search engines, Google reacted.
Indeed, when we denounce the practices or content of a site, we put links on it to provide examples, and these backlinks are treated as a popularity indice by search engines, which translates into better ranking in the results!
Google therefore developed an algorithm for sentiment analysis, which aims to recognize if the text surrounding a link is positive or negative towards it, depending keywords it contains to penalize sites that we complained.
Google also advises the nofollow attribute to put a link on a site without wishing to contribute to its positioning.
Being bad to your customers is bad for business.
Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs. Analysis in English of the algorithm.
December 2, 2010.

More results from a domain

A same domain until new did not appear more than twice in SERPS. Now this limit is broken and that could let other websites to lose traffic.
November 17, 2010.

Instant preview

A magnifying glass icon on the right of snippets provides a quick thumbnail of the page corresponding to the result.
It already existed a firefox extension to display a thumbnail of each site beside the results.
November 9, 2010.

Black Friday

Since 21 and 22 October depending on the region, a modification of the algorithm on the ranking in results affected a lot of sites, some losing up to 80% of their traffic. The Alexa search engine, has published graphs showing huge losses or gains equivalent to some sites.
These changes seem permanent.
The purpose of these chan ges appears to be intended to improve the relevance of results.
“You are not alone”, Alexa blog.
November 5, 2010.

Custom Location

It is now possible to define a location. By default the search engine identifies the location of the user and selects the results based on it.
For various reasons, you may want to break free, when for instance you are been searching for the next day where you’ll be in another city!
You must have results already displayed to show the panel of options on the left.
Custom locations.
October 18, 2010.

Keyboard Navigation

Instant is enhanced with the possibility for the user to use the keyboard to select a row among the rows in the suggestion box.
This can have an effect on the traffic of sites.
Section and explanatory video.
September 30, 2010.

Google Instant

The real-time search goes on the main search engine: a results page is displayed as soon as you start typing a query and its continuous changes based on the words you add.
A suggestion in light gray is proposed also to complete the application.
This works on Chrome, Firefox and IE8.
Instant Will it end optimization for search engines, as some think? This tends to personalize the results page and then it changes the rules, but does not certainly removes the need for optimization. This will at least disrupt statistics in GWT and Analytics.
FAQ Google Instant.
Video: Google Instant by Marissa Mayer Google’s staff.
September 8, 2010.

SVG indexed

SVG content now indexed either it is in a file to include or embedded into HTML code.
List of files formats supported by Google.
August 31 2010.

Realtime search

It now has a special page. Conversation may be followed in realtime on a chat. Gives results mainly on Twitter.
The note from the Google Blog.
Realtime Experiment.
August 27, 2010.

Interactive result page

As you type a query, and the function Suggest proposes to complete the text, another thing may happen: if it is already displayed, the results page may change gradually depending on keywords that you add in the query.
To heve a best understanding of how it feels, a demonstration video.
It is a function under test and only a few netsurfers were able to observe it, but it has been confirmed by Google.
August 21, 2010.

More than two results for the same domain

So far the same domain could not appear more than twice in one page of results (except with the command site:).
Since August 20, 2010, that changed for some specific queries on which a site can be the one to many results, it may appear more than twice.
Showing more results for a domain.
August 20, 2010.

Harmful internationalization?

Some webmasters have seen their traffic increased from search engines other than Google Google.com or that of their country.
So Americans can see the arrival of visitors who visit other ccTLD engines, such as google.co.uk or google.fr for example, implying that the engine of other ccTLD includes U.S. sites in the results.
This could reduce the audience for the sites in these countries.
August 20, 2010.

History

A history link appeared on the page of search engine (on U.S. version only at first). It will displays previous searches and make to reappear results already found in the past.
This only works when you are registered to your Google Account, but it is accessible from any computer or mobile. You can edit the list and delete the results.
You have to activate this feature in the configuration of the account at the option “Save searches”.
Introducing search history link.
4 August 2010.

Definitions at top

Many surfers use the search engine for the definition of a term. Google has so created a special section that appears at the top of the result page and provides definitions from online dictionaries Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Answers.com, The Free Dictionary.
The snippets include pronunciation and grammatical information.
For now only on the English engine.
Example: Search for “persistent”.
Announcement.
July 25, 2010.

Google image modernized

The results pages of the image section enlarge images in a box when you move the mouse over the images and display them in a window with the page that contains them in a grayed background, on the principle of the lightbox.
July 21, 2010.

Caffeine builds a fresher index

Google announced June 8 that the new indexing engine, Caffeine is finalized. It offers a new index with 50% fresher results.
Its operation differs from the previous system which was updating as a whole, by waves. Caffeine updates the index incrementally. New pages can be added and made available for search as soon as they are discovered.
The new architecture allows also to associate a page to several countries.
Caffeine vs. previous system.
June 8, 2010.

MayDay: The long tail evolves

This was confirmed by Matt Cutts at the Google I/O in May, the radical evolution in the month of April comes from the change in the algorithm, to promote quality content on the long trail.

This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.

Remind that the long tail is the set of queries with multiple keywords, each being rare, but which together form the bulk of traffic to a site.

Webmasters gave the evolution the name of MayDay. I have previously called Black Tuesday. This has been disastrous for some sites well established but having not enough content in deep pages. This happened in late April and early May depending on the sites, even though other sites have experienced a loss of traffic for other reasons.
This has boosted traffic on scriptol.com.
Google confirms Mayday impact. By Vanessa Fox that says also Caffeine is not live yet.
Matt Cutts explains Mayday in a video. It is not related to Caffeine and is definitive. Webmasters must add content to their page to retrieve the traffic lost.
May 27, 2010.

Short answers

From the Squared engine as the previous technology, short answer is trying to directly answer a query that looks like a question.
For example if one asks the “date of birth x”, the engine will give a direct answer, date of birth of the person, then follows a list of pages containing information related to the birth date of x.
May 12, 2010.

Something different

In certain queries may appear in the sidebar to search by category, a new section: “Something different” and a list of query below.
In the case of a search on an actress, it will be a list of other actresses.
This has been developed for the Google’s alternative engine , Squared and integrated to the standard search engine.
May 12, 2010.

Black Tuesday: Ranking changes on the long tail

The long tail is the set of pages on a site that make few visit each but all together have a large traffic.
Queries on multiple keywords, make the long tail.
Many sites have seen a change in traffic of these pages since April 27. Some have lost up to 90% of their traffic. They attributed this change to Caffeine, the new infrastructure of Google indexes more pages and creates more competition, but it has been confirmed later by Google it is a change in the algorithm (see May 27).
April 27, 2010.

Similar Sites

For a while the search engine has a feature sites offering similar content. The “similar” link to a similar page near a result in addition to “cached” to the cached version.
This function becomes more important. We can now possibly find a block of sites similar to results at the bottom of results page.
April 28, 2010.

Rich snippets go international

Including rich snippets for recipes.
April 26, 2010.

Real time improved

MySpace, Facebook, Buzz, Twitter are integrated in search results. When, after viewing the results page you ask to show more options and you clicks on “Update”, you can see activities on social networks about the query, for a given period.
Replay accross Twitter.
April 14, 2010.

Snippets for recipes

The recipes are displayed differently in results, provided that their page has an internal format that is suitable.
Google supports 5 formats including RDF and microdata.
Introducing rich recipe snippets.
April 13, 2010.

Site speed

is officially a ranking factor

This was announced a few months ago, it became reality: a site that is too slow is now downgraded in SERPs or at least has a chance to be in conjunction with other factors.

Today we’re Including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.

It is possible to know if your site is too slow from Google Webmaster Tools (Labs -> Site performance).
Using site speed in web search ranking.
April 9, 2010.

Microdata

Microdata as specified in HTML 5 are now included in the description of the results if they are defined in the page.
They adds social data about the site.

Microdata in snippets.
March 12, 2010.

Public data in search results

The search engine now provides access to public statistics and displays graphs directly instead of links, like Wolfram Alpha.
To do this, you type in the search bar keywords like “unemployment rate ” with the name of a country or region and the image of a graph is displayed under a link to click.
You can check with “unemployement rate usa” that things are not going very well in USA.
This service works only for USA in March 2010.

More information and video.
March 9, 2010.

Assigning stars to results

Google abandons the SearchWiki service which imitated the principles of Wikia and allowed users to annotate, vote for or delete pages in results. (Wikia dropped this service for a while).
But it retains a feature that is extended to the general search engine: the user can assign a star to a link in results. When he returned on the search engine, links that received a star appear at top of the page ion a special list.
This rating is personal, it does not change the results for other users.

More details.
February 4, 2010.

Local Search option

A new option “Nearby” appears in the panel of specialized search. It restricts searches to regions.
The advantage is that the search will no longer depend precisely on keywords but on a region, without the need to found all the different terms used to designate towns and various places…
Refine your search by location.
February 26, 2010.

Sponsored links in results

As an experiment and for the cities of Houston and San Jose only, Google highlight sponsored links in search results listings. They are marked with a yellow rectangle.
The sponsored links on the side or top of the page still remains, this is a new different service named “Google Enhanced Listings”, costing $ 25 per month.
This subscription does not guarantee a better position in results.
More details and examples.
February 16, 2010.

Search engine and answers

To add the feature of the Wolfram Alpha engine, Google now wants to offer real answers to questions from webmasters. For this it offers a richer snippet (description under the link in results) and includes the response in bold.
Clearly, if we ask how many people are living in China, the snippet should contain the answer. What we can easily check …

The difference with Wolfram is that the user can click on the link for more details. In addition, the snippet has a limited size, while Wolfram can provide an answer on a full page … that the Web site linked by Google can also do. Webmasters may have to change their writing habits to adapt to that.
For example, to use Ajax to give to his visitors an unique information. If the information is not unique, they will find it in snippets of other sites and it is not recommended.

Explanation: Answer highlighting.
January 2010.

The speed of a site will be a ranking factor in 2010

This is what Matt Cutts has just said in an interview.

“Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast.
It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.
I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast, how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?”

This should favor static website with no SQL. See our article, How to build a CMS without database.
See also Let’s make the Web faster.
November 19, 2009. The interview.

RSS Search Engine Optimization

Tips for Helping Your RSS Feed Perform!
In some ways RSS is very similar to HTML, the language commonly used to create websites. Just as with HTML, webmasters using traditional search engine optimization tactics when creating an RSS feed will find that their RSS feed receives additional exposure and interest.

Simple steps to optimize an RSS feed for search engines:

1.) The title should contain important search terms.
To state the obvious, the title should be relevant and not misleading, while still emphasizing keywords. Ultimately, the title should entice the reader to read on, not mislead them.

2.) Display RSS feeds.
Most webmasters display their feeds as content on their website. When displaying a feed be sure to use PHP, ASP or HTML so that search engines will spider the contents of the feed displayed. If using a template to display feeds, use header tags to define the appearance of the Channel Title and Item Titles. Many search engines weight header tags with more importance.

3.) Internal & external Links.
Within a feed you should always use the full path of any links, keeping in mind that other sites may syndicate the contents of the RSS feed. Links that are not local to the site should launch a new browser. While this is not specific to search engines it will help keep visitors on your site.

4.) Link text should emphasize keywords.
It is no longer a deep, dark secret that the text used for incoming links will help a site contextually define the keywords that the site appears for in the search engines. Keeping that in mind, be sure to use keywords in any link text that points back to your website.

5.) My.Yahoo and My.MSN.
This is surprisingly simple to do but often overlooked by publishers and webmasters. The fastest way to have an RSS feed spidered by Yahoo or MSN is to include the feed on a personal my.yahoo or my.msn home page. Simply create an account on the respective search engines and customize the home page to include your RSS feed. This is done by adding content and listing the URL to the RSS feed. Typically, within 24-48 hours the feed’s contents will be spidered and indexed by Yahoo and MSN.

6.) Theme feeds.
Feeds should be themed. This will help with themed links back to a publisher’s website from anyone syndicating the feed’s content.

7. ) Link popularity.
Increase link popularity by submitting the RSS feed, blog or podcast to the appropriate directories. The following directories allow submissions of specific kinds of RSS feeds. Be sure to follow the guidelines of each site and choose categories wisely.

Submit Podcasts – http://www.podcasting-tools.com/submit-podcasts.htm
Submit RSS feeds – http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
Submit Blogs – http://www.blog-connection.com/submit-blogs.htm

8.) RSS feed descriptions.
RSS feed descriptions are generally summaries or introductions to other content. Often, feed creators will provide additional information on an HTML site, enticing the reader to click through for the full information if it is a topic that is of interest to them. Provide enough teaser copy that the reader can easily discern if the contents are something that is important to them.

9.) Subscribe to feeds.
This might seem obvious, but a surprisingly large number of publishers do not subscribe to their own feed. This is a great way to visualize what your customers see, and experiment with formatting and integrating HTML into feeds.

10.) Image ads.
Add your corporate logo to your RSS feed. Create a brand and enforce that brand by including the image in the RSS feed. The image will enhance your corporate identity and dress up the look of your feed by adding your corporate logo.

11.) Alphabetical rank.
Many feed readers list feeds alphabetically in the reader. Feed channels that begin with A will naturally appear in the top of the feed list in most feed readers. If you wish to appear in the top of list of feeds that a reader has subscribed to, keep this tip in mind.

12.) Meaningful Links
Each item in your feed should contain a unique URL associated with it. This will direct users to associated information. Many find using target URLs with the “#” symbol in the link to identify specific content useful.

Most marketers have a love-hate relationship with search engines. Search engines have the abilitiy to make even the most confident webmaster feel powerless . Let’s face it – all of us have felt the wrath of the search engine powers-that-be at one time or another, and while it may be difficult to know what line was crossed or how we fell out of favor, following some basic guidelines will be helpful in optomizing feeds for search engines.

Display RSS Feeds on Websites

Displaying RSS

RSS offers webmasters a unique opportunity to display fresh content on websites. While publishing an RSS feed is a great way to generate site interest and increase communication, syndicating and displaying feeds from related relevant sources can also generate interest, increase traffic and improve search engine ranking.

RSS Radars

Webmasters with limited time or capacity can syndicate related content. In a nut shell, webmasters can create RSS radars by combining a mix of content from related sources by grouping similarly-themed feeds. RSS feeds are updated at different intervals, providing an ever-changing collection of related information.

RSS is a form of eXtensible Markup Language or XML. Viewing an RSS feed in a web browser generally produces code that is not easy for website visitors to decipher. As a result, webmasters use tools to display the content contained in an RSS feed.

Content contained in RSS feeds can be added to websites a number of different ways. Each method for displaying the RSS feed has pros and cons associated with it. Webmasters will need to determine which option will best meet their hosting and technology needs.

Using Javascript to Display RSS

Javascript is the easiest way to display RSS feeds on a website. There are a number of sites that will allow you to generate code that can be inserted into a website. The javascript will auto-update, showing the latest headlines as the feed is updated. Each time a visitor visits the website the javascript pulls the data from the feed. Often, the various scripts can be customized so that the look of the feed can be made to match a specific websiteeeds with hopes that the search engines will devour and spider the contents, you will be disappointed. When javascript is used to display RSS feeds, search engines do not actually “see” the contents of the feed, meaning that the search engines will not index the contents of the feed within the website.

Feedroll – Feedroll is a free service for syndicating RSS and ATOM news feeds on your website. Simply select a feed, customize the design, then copy and paste the code provided onto your page.
http://www.feedroll.com

Using PHP to Display RSS

PHP is a slightly more complex solution for displaying RSS. Like javascript, as the contents of the feed updates, the web page contents will update as the page is refreshed. The benefit of using PHP to display RSS is that the contents of the feed displayed with the webpage can be spidered and indexed by search engines. The result is a feed that always displays the most current information from the RSS feed and the web page content is considered search engine spider and robot-friendly.

rss2html.php – The rss2html.php script allows users to create web pages that will always display the most current information from the RSS feed, and because the resulting page is pure HTML, it will be in a format friendly to search engine robots. Using rss2html.php, webmasters can customize the format and look of the web page created from the feed. The RSS feed’s contents can easily be integrated into an existing website’s theme. The rss2html.php script parses the RSS file, extracts the pertinent information, formats it, and serves it up as regular HTML.
http://www.feedforall.com/free-php-script.htm

FeedRoll Pro – FeedRollPro was really designed to enable publishers to syndicate their own content on other sites. But it can be used to syndicate news feeds from other sites on your own pages. http://www.feedrollpro.com

Using ASP to Display RSS

ASP is similar to PHP. The free ASP/ASP.NET scripts can be used to convert RSS feeds into HTML and display on ASP/ASP.NET web-server.

rss2html.asp – ByteScout has implemented a guide for displaying of RSS/XML feed using free RSS2HTML.ASP script in ASP or ASP.NET environment. This script can be used free of charge on any ASP or ASP.NET web-server and generate HTML from RSS feed. This free ASP script uses MSXML to load RSS feed from URL and display it. You can use it as a standalone or call from script on HTML page to generate HTML content from RSS feed and then display on your HTML page.
http://bytescout.com/how_to_display_rss_using_asp.html

RssFeed – RssFeed is an open-source custom ASP.NET server control that displays the contents of a specified RSS feed in an ASP.NET web page.
http://www.scottonwriting.com/sowBlog/RssFeed.htm

If PHP or ASP is used to update feeds, the website will have free fresh, relevant content each time the feeds referenced are updated.

Export RSS to HTML
If you wish to dress up the feed’s appearance you can use a template exporting the feed as HTML or an HTML table. Publishers can incorporate exported tables into an HTML template using a server-side include. Each time the feed is updated, the feed will need to be exported to HTML and uploaded along with the feed. Though this only takes a few moments, exporting RSS to HTML does require webmaster intervention to update the content. The end result, though, is a complete web page with an RSS feed in it that will be search engine-friendly.

FeedForAll - FeedForAll allows users to export RSS feeds from RSS to HTML. The look of the HTML can be modified to match an existing website’s design.

http://www.feedforall.com

Using Services
There are a number of services available that host and display RSS feeds, in many cases free of charge. Because these services operate on a different domain server there is little benefit to end-users displaying their feeds in this fashion. That said, the services are generally free of charge, so you get what you pay for.

RSS2HTML.com – Select a layout, color scheme and enter the URL of the feed. A web page URL will be generated that will display the feed in the selected scheme.
http://www.rss2html.com

FeedBurner – FeedBurner provides a number of online services. Among them is a service that displays RSS feeds on a website.
http://www.feedburner.com

Using XSL to Display RSS
Although using XSL and CSS stylesheets to display XML directly is easy to understand in theory, it is rather tricky to implement in the real world and is very tough for novices to use successfully. Webmasters must be fairly familiar with CSS and XSL to have the formatting work well, and webmasters then have to address browser incompatibilities and exceptions. As a result, not a lot of resources or services yet exist to display RSS using XSL.

Using highly targeted feeds, webmasters can enhance their websites with themed content. Ultimately, providing relevant, educational or newsworthy information from reputable related sources will establish expertise in a specific area.

 

YouTube Video Optimization Tips

1. Include a call to action at the end of each video.

What do you want your audience to do after watching the video? Take advantage of your product or service promotion? Visit your website? Call your toll-free number? Whatever it is, don’t forget to suggest a next step to your audience.

2. Shoot brief, high-definition, widescreen videos.

Post high-definition videos in widescreen format. YouTube has a page explaining the best formatting options for video uploads. In a nutshell, here are some formatting recommendations to follow:

• HD quality video with 16:9 aspect ratio
• MP4 video file format with .H264 compression
• MP3 or AAC audio compression
• 30 frames per second

Also, keep videos to 2 minutes or less in length. Viewership tends to drop off in videos longer than that, unless they’re extremely compelling.

3. Find potential keywords for videos by typing them into YouTube’s search box.

As with Google’s keyword suggest tool, as soon as you begin typing a query in YouTube’s search box, YouTube (which Google owns) offers suggestions. Type “silly pet,” for instance, and YouTube will complete your query with suggestions such as “silly pets,” “silly pet tricks,” and “silly pet videos.”

YouTube’s suggestions give you an idea of which terms people use more frequently in video searches at the site. Though identifying popular keywords is important, keep in mind that there may be a lot more competition for these terms, too.

4. Perform a search using your intended keyword phrases on YouTube.

Once you have some keyword ideas, use them in searches on YouTube. This will give you an idea of what the competition is like for those terms. You can customize your search results to sort by relevance, upload date, view count and rating. Limit your searches to specific categories (such as People & Blogs).

5. Place your most important keyword phrase in your title, description and tags.

As with any SEO effort, make sure your target keyword phrase is included at the beginning of your video’s title, in the description, and in the tags. Use the entire allowed space for your description, too, and make it as compelling as possible. The goal is to get people to decide to view your video from among all the other choices in the search results.

Keep your video titles within 65 characters, if possible (including spaces and punctuation). Titles longer than that get clipped in search results.

While your YouTube video description can be up to about 5,000 characters, only the first 140 characters will be displayed in YouTube search results. Make sure to put your keyword phrase within the first 140 characters, to reinforce the phrase and encourage click-throughs. And try to fill the entire 5,000 character description with good, keyword-rich details (without resorting to keyword stuffing).

6. Check the analytics of videos similar to yours.

In many cases, you can see the keywords, URLs, and related videos viewers used to find a video, as well as view a graph showing viewership over time. You can also see which audience demographics the video is most popular with, though this being YouTube, it’s usually males aged 13 to 17. Bottom line: Other people’s video analytics may give you ideas for keywords to use for your own videos.

To view the analytics, click the button to the right of the thumbs down button under the video. Keep in mind some people who post videos to YouTube don’t allow their analytics to be viewed by others.

Of course, you should also monitor your own video’s analytics. If the metrics YouTube offers aren’t enough, consider third-party tools like VOOT (Video Online Optimization Tracker), a new service currently in private beta.

7. Add captions to your videos.

YouTube offers the option to add captions to videos. YouTube, Google and other search engines index captions and use them to help decide if a video is relevant to a query. As the video’s owner, you have the option of uploading your own caption or letting YouTube automatically generate one — though the results may not be completely accurate. Check out YouTube’s page on how to add and edit captions for more information.

8. Relate your videos to each other.

Research shows that YouTube users tend to watch batches of videos per visit. So make sure your videos are clearly linked, to encourage multiple viewings. Aside from using similar tags, you could also use a series title for multiple videos in the same vein, such as “Silly Pet Tricks: Dog vs. Cat Smackdown,” “Silly Pet Tricks: Dog Does Yoga, Drives Car,” and so on. You could also post a new video as a response to an older one.

9. Share your video socially as soon as it’s posted.

As soon as you post a new video, use YouTube’s Share option to add it to your Facebook profile or business page, tweet about it, and so on. Also embed the video on your blog with a post that describes it — and be sure to use your target keywords.

10. Develop a branded YouTube channel.

Branded channels give your YouTube presence a more professional look by incorporating your company’s logo, a custom background design, and so on. You can easily syndicate your channel to other websites, add gadgets and ads to your channel, and tie your channel to Google Analytics for more metrics.

How to Increase Your Site Crawl Rate

1. Update your content often and regularly (and ping Google once you do) – well, an obvious one, so not much to describe here; in a word, try to add new unique content as often as you can afford and do it regularly (3 times a week can be the best solution if you can’t update your site daily and are looking for the optimal update rate).
2. Make sure your server works correctly: mind the uptime and Google Webmaster tools reports of the unreached pages. Two tools I can recommend here are Pingdom and Mon.itor.us.
3. Mind your page load time: note that the crawl works on a budget – if it spends too much time crawling your huge images or PDFs, there will be no time left to visit your other pages.
4. Check the site internal link structure: make sure there is no duplicate content returned via different URLs: again, the more time the crawler spends figuring your duplicate content, the fewer useful and unique pages it will manage to visit.
5. Get more back links from regularly crawled sites.
6. Adjust the crawl speed via Google Webmaster tools.
7. Add a sitemap (though it’s up for a debate whether the sitemap can help with crawling and indexing issues, many webmasters report they have seen increased crawl rate after adding it).
8. Make sure your server returns the correct header response. Does it handle your error pages properly? Don’t make the bot figure out what has happened: explain it clearly.
9. Make sure you have unique title and meta tags for each of your pages.
10. Monitor Google crawl rate for your site and see what works and what not:

How do you know if you’ve been banned?

First let me show you how to see if you’re clearly banned by Google. Often times people think they’ve been banned, when in reality they’ve just dropped in ranking and can’t find their website.

There are a couple of things you can do.

1. Check Google’s search results.

2. View the Google toolbar.

Check Google’s search results

Go to Google and enter your entire URL into Google’s search box. In this example we’ll use a made up domain name. (www.jkhljkhkjh.com).

Notice that Google says there is no information available for this URL? This means that the URL is no longer in Google’s database.

If you enter a brand new website into Google, you’ll always get this message until the website has been indexed. But, in this case, the website we entered has been banned by Google for some reason is either banned or is brand new. If we know our website was once in Google and do the search I just showed you above, and Google says “Sorry, no information is available for URL [whatever your URL is]“, then chances are… you’re banned.

Another way you can quickly see if your website has been banned is by:

View the Google toolbar

Download the Google Toolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com

Once it’s installed, simply visit your website. If the Google toolbar is completely gray, this may meen that you have been banned by Google.

Banned:

* Note: Most SEOs call this “gray barred”. (So if you hear that term in an SEO forum, that’s what they’re referring to)

Not Banned:

Ok, so now we know how to tell if our website has been banned.

Google Penalty Checklist

When a penalty is suspected, start by checking with Google the number of URL’s it has indexed. This can be accomplished by using the site:yourdomainname.com -asdfasdf command within a Google search window. If no URL’s are indexed and no backlinks show up when the link:yourdomain.com is entered then there is a high probability of a Google penalty, especially if your site used to be indexed and used to show backlinks. The exception to this rule is a new website with few backlinks, which may not be Google indexed since it is still waiting to be crawled. Such websites frequently show no backlinks, but this doesn’t imply they have received a Google penalty!

Check out the Google Penalty Checklist:

•           Banned websites links

Check all outbound links from your site to see if you are linking to any sites which have themselves been Google banned. You can get the details of all your outbound links from Google Webmaster Tool. These will be sites which are Google de-listed and show 0 PageRank with a grey out Toolbar Page Rank indicator.

•           Bad neighbourhoods Linking

Run a test you on the backlinks and check if you are not linking to any bad neighborhoods, link farms or doorway pages. Bad neighborhoods include spam sites and doorway pages, whilst link farms are just pages of links to other sites having no original or quality content.

If in doubt, we recommend quality checking all of your outbound links to external sites using the Bad Neighborhood detection tool. Even as this SEO tool isn’t perfect, it may spot those “problem sites”. Another good stuff is to do a Google search for the homepage title (Title that appears on the Browser Top) of sites that you link to. If the sites don’t rank in the top 30 of the Google search result, then they are almost certainly low trust domains and linking to them should be avoided.

•           Automated query penalty

Google sometimes penalizes due to excessive use of automated query tools which uses Google’s API, particularly when such queries are made from the same IP address that hosts your website. These tools avoids Google’s terms of service. Google allows certain automated queries into its database using its analytic tools and when accessing through a registered Google API account. Unauthorized types of automated query can cause problems, particularly when it is used excessively from a single IP address.

•           Bad SEO techniques or Over optimization penalties

Google penalizes a website due to utilizing bad SEO techniques such as aggressive link building using the same keywords again and again in link anchor text. That’s why make sure that whenever you are managing link building campaigns always vary the link anchor text used and incorporate a variety of different keyword terms. Optimizing for high paying keywords like “Viagra” can further elevate risk, so mix in some long tail keywords along with it. For new domains, it is strictly advisable that create no more than 5 new one way backlinks a week and use deep linking to website internal pages, rather than just homepage link building.

•           Website site wide cross linking & link schemes

If you are running more than one website and the Google penalty hits all sites at the same time, check the inter-linking between those sites. Extensive inter-linking of websites, particularly if they are on the same C Class IP address (same ISP) can be viewed as “link schemes” by Google which breaks their set of guidelines. The risks are even higher where site A site wide links to site B and site B site wide links back to site A. If you must use site wide links, make sure they are not reciprocal links. Link schemes built around links in the footer of each webpage are particularly risky. The reality is that site wide links do little to increase site visibility in the Google SERPS, nor do they improve Page Rank more than a single link, as Google only counts one link from a site to another. I also believe that Yahoo! and Bing now follows a similar policy. There is some evidence that the extensive use of site-wide links can lower website Google trust value, which can subsequently reduce website ranking.

•           Hidden or tiny text or links

Completely remove any hidden text in your content and remove any hidden keywords. Such content may be hidden from view using CSS or alternatively, text may have been coded to be the same colour as the page background, rendering it invisible or the font size of the content is too low that it seems invisible. These risky SEO techniques often lead to a Google penalty or website ban and should be removed immediately. The same rule applies to hidden links, which Matt Cutts has openly stated break their webmaster guidelines.

•           Keyword stuffing (spamming)

Remove excessive keyword stuffing and abnormal repetitions of keywords in your website content. Always use natural and well written web copywriting techniques.

•           Automated page redirects

Use of automated browser redirects to any of your pages. Meta Refresh tags and JavaScript automated redirects often result in Google penalties as the pages using them are perceived to be doorway pages. This technique is especially dangerous if the refresh time is less than 5 seconds. To avoid Google penalties, always use a 301 redirect or Mod Rewrite technique (for apache server) instead of these methods. This involves setting up a .htaccess file on your web server.

•           Link buying or selling

Check for any paid text or banner links. There is some evidence that buying links can hurt rankings and this was implied by comments from Matt Cutts (a Google engineer) on his Google SEO blog. Cutts states that Google will also devaluate links from website selling text or banner links, such that they offer zero value to the recipient in terms for improving website rankings or Page Rank. They should use “nofollow” attribute in case they are selling text or banner advertisement. More recently, Google applied a Page Rank penalty to known link sellers and many low quality directories.

•           Reciprocal link building campaigns

Excessive reciprocal linking may trigger a Google penalty or cause the Google search result filter to be applied when the same or very similar link anchor text is used again and again and huge numbers of reciprocal links are added in a relatively short time hitting the same keyword.

The risks are made worse by adding reciprocal links to low quality sites or websites which doesn’t matches to the website theme. This can lead to a backlink over optimization penalty (BLOOP). A Google Backlink Over Optimization Penalty causes a sudden drops in SERPS ranking. To stay away from this problem, reciprocal link exchange should only be used as part of a more sustainable SEO strategy which also builds quality one way links to original website content.

Adding reciprocal links to un-theme sites is a risky SEO strategy, as is reciprocal link exchange with low quality websites. To help identify quality link exchange partners we use a simple but effective test – regardless of indicated Google PageRank, if you can’t find a website’s homepage in the top 30 of the Google search results (SERPS) when you search for the site’s Title Tag (shown at the top of the Browser window) then undertaking reciprocal link exchange with that site may offer few advantages. Don’t forget to check that prospective reciprocal link partners website matches to your website theme or not.

•           Paid listings on Commercial Directories

Some leading online directories like Yell.com offer paid placement for multiple regions where your website link then appears on many pages of the directory with keyword optimised anchor text. These links are search engine accessible (i.e. they have no “nofollow” tag).

Now the bad news – assuming you’ve also been optimising the same keyword elsewhere in your SEO campaign adding hundreds of links from a commercial directory with the same or similar anchor text in a short space of time can cause serious problems. In extreme cases we’ve seen these kinds of directory links trigger a Google filter.

•           Low quality Affiliates and “Made for Adsense” websites

It is a well known fact that Google don’t like affiliate websites with almost no content and the same applies to website made to Adsense sites. Always make sure affiliate sites have quality original content if you don’t want to get them filtered out of the search results when someone completes a Google spam report.

•           Duplicate Content RSS Feeds and use of IFrames

Check using Copyspace on any copied contents from web used. Sometimes, high authority sites that copied our contents can lead us to content thief. Try using Google parameter handling tools to deal with duplicate contents.

Content feeds (including RSS) are widely used on the web, there is some evidence that extracting large amounts of duplicate content through such feeds may have an adverse effect on ranking and in extreme cases may trigger a Google penalty. In particular, the use of Iframes to pull in affiliate content should be avoided where possible. Consider the use of banners and text links as an alternative.

• SEO Penalty Check

This site helps me to check any URL on SEO penalty points. However, there are no detailed information given here. It is just guidance for us to dig further on penalties on any website or blog.

•           Check Google Webmaster Guidelines

Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines and check website compliance in all respects.

•           Google Webmaster Tools

According to Google’s Matt Cutts Blog, Google is improving webmaster communication with respect to banned sites and penalties. Google is now informing some (but not all) webmasters the cause of a website ban or penalty, via their excellent new Webmaster Console. If you’ve been hit by a website ban or penalty, it is worthwhile signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and uploading an XML Sitemap onto your site and then to check site status in the Google Webmaster Tool.

•           File a Google Reinclusion request

You can file a Google re-inclusion request to Google if you suspect that your website os penalized by Google. Matt Cuts has posted an excellent post on how to file a google a reinclusion request.

• Google Banned Check

There are several tools provided online for free to check our site gets banned or not from google. For example: iWebTool, Selfseo, etc.

If your blog is under Google penalty, try to identify the cause of your penalty. If you couldn’t find, then try to post it on Google Webmaster Help Forum with your link and problem. There are many experts in this field will help you out and if you are lucky, some famous Google staff will reply too. Then, request for reconsideration from google webmaster tool.