No Loss to Penguin

Google Penguin Had Zero Impact on My Sites

April 24, 2012 and Google hits out against over-optimised sites with its Penguin algorithm. Penguin penalised websites with over optimised anchor text in incoming links – backlinks in other words.

The Penguin algorithm slipped past my attention until I read a tweet from Matt Cutts. I’m nearly obsessive about watching traffic stats for the sites in my portfolio; they get checked daily for activity of all types – traffic, attacks, broken links and so on, and I hadn’t seen any unusual traffic dips on April 24 or shortly after. If anything traffic  has increased to these websites since that time.

Latest Links to Your Site

Google Webmaster Tools Latest Links to Site

Latest Links to your site; something new from Google Webmaster Tools. It’s been a while since Google added anything new to their webmaster tools collection, but this new information tool is a “goody”. Latest Links to your site is a downloadable file, in CSV or Google Docs format, providing the site owner with a list of discovered backlinks, sorted by date and date-stamped.

Find Trackback Spam

The first practical use that comes to mind for Webmaster Tools Latest Links is to check for trackback spam. Trackback spam is a black-hat SEO technique to get you to publish trackbacks. The spammer sends a trackback to a post on your blog, hoping it will be published automatically, or approved if comments approval is required. But the black-hat doesn’t actually publish a link to the post – it’s a scam. And being friendly WordPress.com bloggers many of us see a trackback and think, “how nice, someone has given me a backlink, let me reciprocate”.

Google Ranks WPOnlineStore Websites Badly

Googlebot has Problems with WPOnlineStore

There’s a few problems Googlebot (Google’s search engine spider) has with sites using the WPOnlineStore osCommerce plugin for WordPress. These problems result in WPOnlineStore website catalogue listings ranking badly in Google SERP, or not being indexed at all.

One of these only affects a few sites, the another is common to all standard self hosted WordPress sites using the WPOnlineStore plugin for e-commerce websites. Both these problems are extremely serious, but neither is a fault or bug in the plugin. The third problem Google has with WPOnlineStore e-commerce sites is the store XML sitemap – there isn’t one!

Adwords Budget

What Results to Expect from $1000 Google Adwords

A client asked me the other day “which is better – a direct adword spend of $1000 per month with Google, or share in a collaborative campaign for a similar monthly fee, where total spend is 100 times that”. I had to ask for time to carefully consider this request and my response.

Both Options have Merit

My instinct tells me that for many businesses a direct campaign with a budget of that amount will normally be better. But a total budget of $100k /month sounds very inviting. My first response must be; investigate how the collaborative campaign funds are used relative to your business.

If the advertiser (the client) has a good idea of the key terms he wants to use for the Adword campaign, and only needs results from a small possible selection – let’s say 10 terms – 10 ads, then the money may be better used in a private campaign.

However, if he wants to cover as many options as possible, then the group scheme may be better.

Google Rich Snippets Not Working

Google SERP Not Showing Rich Snippets

After adding Rich Snippets Google does not show these in SERP. There are several reasons Google does not show rich snippet content in their search results. Rich snippets include Authorship Markup and Article Ratings e.g. GD Star Ratings for WordPress.

Google does not guarantee your rich snippets will be used in search results. The rich snippet program is intended to give searchers an indication they will find relevant, quality and original content on the page marked up with rich snippet content.

Rich Snippets Take Time to Include in Results Pages

Google takes some time before rich snippet content is displayed in SERP; up to around three months. Be patient. Make sure everything else is in order, and wait for results. While waiting concentrate on making sure the content of the site is suitable and fresh, and regular new articles are published.

Do You Update Old Posts

Updating Old Blog Posts and Web Pages

The updating of old published posts and pages is a somewhat controversial topic. Some bloggers feel it is wrong to update a published article, others do it regularly. I am one of the group who updates content in posts and pages whenever I find a reason (and the time) to do so.

Updating Old Posts is Good for SERP

Google now looks for “FRESHNESS” as one of the criteria for SERP (Search Engine Results Placement), the position a page or post will get. Fresher content gets favoured over old content. A new post may initially be placed high in their results, then overtime this will drop off, eventually fading into obscurity.

Give your older posts a new life by updating them. Sometimes when I go back to older articles I find the information is out of date, fresh knowledge or developments may need changes to the content to make the information more accurate…

Articles are often posted with unnoticed errors. I don’t mean incorrect information, just the small things like spelling mistakes and grammatical errors – both of which will lose ranking to Google’s algorithm. Even the way we have written an article can often be improved after some time has passed, and we go back and check the content we thought at the time had been so great. With a fresh look at these older posts, we can often see ways to re-write parts (or all) of the content to make it more readable for our visitors.

Should I use Google Webmaster Tools

YES, you should! Google Webmaster Tools is a suite of useful utilities to help get your website rocketing. First of all, you can submit a sitemap – or as many sitemaps as you want, confirm Google bot is able to read the file, and there are no errors in the file, e.g. to broken links or missing content. If you don’t use any of the other webmaster tools, sitemap submission is essential.

Then there are other useful tools; You can monitor for Broken Links Google has indexed (broken links will really harm your site ranking if left unattended.) You can ask Google to delete entries from the index. Webmaster Tools can tell you how Google bot crawls your site; if there are access problems for the bot or page load speed issues. You also get Google Plus1 analysis.

Spammer Asks For Help

Markhproperty@aol.com Requests Spamming Help

This must be the most ridiculous help request I have ever received via this blog. Note the items I marked-up in bold.

I need your service for the following: I have a big problem. A whole bunch of sites have come across a massive problem. Over the past 4 days I have been uploading 10 sites per day. The sites that I loaded up 3 days ago have started to disappear from their positions. I am just cautious that I don’t want to keep uploading sites if they are not going to stick:

One example site is: Vodafone Contact Number.co.uk – this site was uploaded on the 20th November, and the URL was added to Google on the same day. On the 21st November in came straight in on Page 1 – Position 8. ( only 1 day later) Then today 24th November it has disappeared. I put it down to the Google dance (does that still happen?) It can’t be the lack of content on the site, because I have another site almost identical, which I did not add the URL to Google (could that be the problem), I just let it index naturally, and had a few backlinks added to it, and that one has stuck big time. The site is http://www.wellknownbanktelephonebanking.co.uk The same goes for this site: http://www.wellknowncouriercontactnumber.co.uk and even http://www.licencecontactnumber.co.uk has crept from page 2 slowly onto the bottom of page 1. They have seriously firmed up, with similar content to the ones that have disappeared.

I really need a plan to make these new sites stick. As it is pointless buying new urls, only to have them disappear 3 days later. I have a roll out target which is 2,000 sites all of which I would want your help on. We just need to find a way for these sites to not come on and then disappear.

We could both earn a lot of money out of this project, just need to get it 100% right from the beginning. I know your probably really busy, but if you could please spend a bit of time looking into this for me, it really will be worth your while. Its a shame you’re not in the UK, otherwise we could have met up.

Kind regards Mark

(edited, abridged, speling corrected and some changes made to mentioned names)

Even the help request shows typical characteristics of a spammer; numerous spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and of course the motivation to ‘make money’

Authorship Markup for WordPress.com

Using Authorship Markup and WordPress.com

(updated: 16-05-2012) Most bloggers by now will have heard about claiming authorship for their posts. Possibly many will be wondering how to do this with their WordPress.com blog. The instructions for using the attributes rel=”author” and rel=”me” posted on Google are possibly a bit confusing for bloggers without some HTML background – in fact without some minor changes the markup will not verify!. This article seeks to provide an easy to use solution for bloggers using the WordPress.com platform.

Firstly, we must look at the blog… Are you the only author, or does your blog have several contributing authors. The method of using the markup to claim authorship differs somewhat between single and multi-author blogs.

This article covers single author blogs. (An article describing implementation on multi-author blogs will be published after I have tested and confirmed the procedure).

Claiming Authorship for Single Author Blogs

For blogs with a single contributor, the easiest and most convenient way to claim your post articles as your own is to add the required HTML in a text widget, placed in a sidebar or the footer widget area. The HTML provided here includes a Google Profile icon (These may be linked to on Google, or uploaded to your blog media library).

Using the code in a widget places the link on every page of your blog, including the all important author profile page. There are other ways to meet Google’s requirements, but those are not as easy to get working for WordPress.com bloggers (or any other platform for that matter!)

Using a widget for Authorship Markup

Step 1: First thing to do is create a Google Profile, and add a clear head/head & shoulders photo of yourself to the profile.

Step 2: Next get a bit of code: If you want to use a link with a button, head over to Google Profile Button where there is a code generator tool.

translate.googleusercontent.com

What is translate.googleusercontent.com

Many site managers have asked what this traffic referrer is. The answer is simple. This is Google’s Translation Service.

Surprisingly the answer was not too easy to find considering this is GOOGLE! Many of us know the Google Translation Service: want to read a webpage in a language we do not know, Google Translate provides a very good translation to and from a range of international languages.Lately this other strange address has been seen in traffic statistics, as well as generating error messages for sites carrying Google AdSense advertising.

The website or URL we are more likely to be familiar with is translate.google.com; Fairly recently Google changed some of the service to this alternative domain.

From what I can find, translate.googleusercontent.com is the URL seen when cached translated pages are served, and the cached page pulls data from the live site, e.g. images.

A thread found on the Google’s AdSense support forum states:

Seeing translate.googleusercontent.com in traffic data “means that someone has viewed your page using the Google Translate service, you will probably also see Google Cache in your list which as noted above means someone has viewed a cached version of your page”

Identity confirmed on Google Support Forum

The confirmation of the domain was finally found hidden in a post on Google Groups by Josh (a Google Employee) who answers some questions about the errors seen by AdSense users.