Recovering From Google Farmer Panda Update

Not sure how I missed this, but the great Vanessa Fox has a fantastic post up on Search Engine Land about what to do if your traffic has gone down since the Google Farmer/Panda Update. It is quite a long post, but she covers it pretty thoroughly. I have had a handful of sites affected by the last update, but am pretty sure what changes I need to make. Not drastic mind you. Pay close attention to the authoritative Content and duplicate content. While not surprising, many sites might fall into the more ads than content category. She also covers how Google recently launched an algorithm update intended to address scraper sites, but I know for a fact that this still needs tweaking on their end. I see scraper sites outranking some original sites everyday. Web spam is always changing and sometimes Google seems to chase their own tail in this department quite often. Anyways, read it slow and absorb it as it is a great post. She really writes great stuff and is worth following.

Google To Look Closer At Cloaking In 2011?

Matt Cutts posted earlier today on Twitter that in the 1st quarter of 2011, Google will look closer at cloaking. He states in the tweet that not just page content matters, but different headers and redirects of the Googlebot as well instead of users. Now the Tweet is pretty vague as he does not address link cloaking, that up until now has not seem to hurt by doing it. That said, I have always shied away from link cloaking just by personal preference. I suspect Matt will elaborate on this more in a webmaster video or blog post, but it is something you might want to be aware of just the same. If I get a clearer confirmation, I will pass it on to my readers as usual. In the mean time, it is just one of those FYI type things, but it was important enough for him to tweet about it. Be advised.

Twitter & Facebook Influence SEO According To Google & Bing

I am way behind today, but wanted to point you quickly to this post by Rand Fishkin in which he covers that both Bing and Google have confirmed via Danny Sullivan) that indeed, links shared through Twitter and Facebook do in fact have a direct impact on rankings. As you know I have been a big fan of using Twitter, Facebook and other social networks for some time now and I suggest you make it a point to include them more going forward into 2011 once this holiday season is completed. Good stuff in that post.

Cutts Shooting Down Domain Age As Ranking Importance

I missed this video a few days ago and just got around to seeing it. In the video below, Matt Cutts all but shoots down domain age as a HUGE ranking factor in Google. This has been debated back and forth forever, but as Matt let slip, 6 months to 1 year is a great starting point to start targeting ranking good. Read between the lines. I have always targeted 6 months and my results go along with what he is saying. Interesting response nonetheless.

Exact Match Domains To Be Penalized Soon?

What a great post today by Rand Fishin ON SEO Moz as he addresses the question of if exact domain matches are too powerful and if they will be penalized in the future. Some experts believe that Google is rewarding sites too much right now for exact domain matches and believe you could indeed see a shift in the next 6 months. Right now it seems to be highly educated guesses on this, but owning quite a bit of exact domain name matches, I will be watching a little more closer than normal starting around the 1st of the year. My view is that Google should be able to take other on page things into consideration instead of just throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak. The best way to combat this is too build sites that do not suck and hopefully you and I have been doing it all along. Sure I have some more spammy than others and will get around to upgrading the quality as I get back around to them. Some great comments in that post as well and I highly suggest chiming in there as well to add to the conversation. Great post as usual by Rand.

Google Third Quarter 2010 Financial Results Released

I am WAY behind today thanks to a charity bake sale project my wife sprung on me late this afternoon. Crisis has been diverted and now everything has been baked and cooling down. Damn I am good! Who else is good? Google of course. I have owned Google stock since early 2006, so I love to hear when their financial results are released to skim through them. Admittedly, much of the stuff on the statement is not important to most webmasters, but on the flip side there is a ton you can take from these as well. I think Google is just scratching the surface of total world domination. Is that good as a whole? Probably not, but they put a ton of money in my pocket through Adsense and affiliate programs and the last thing I want to hear is instability. To hear Eric Schmidt talk, instability is no where close as Google had an excellent quarter. Long Live Google!!!

New Google QR Code Generator

Been a busy day as my grandfather passed away this morning. He was 90 plus, so he did not get cheated and went down hill in just a few days. No lingering and suffering. Regardless, it has me tied over over the next few days into next week. I am headed back out to family here shortly, but wanted to pass along a link to the new Google QR Code Generator. As Mark Sprague points out in the post, it has a long way to go, but you will be seeing more and more of that type code image in magazines, newspapers and the web. It is used already in Website Magazine and has been for quite a while. Do not ignore this going forward.

Google Link Shortener Now Live

The Google Link Shortener service is now live. I played with this in beta a bit, but it is now official that Google has opened it's own link shortener service. I have used bit.ly for some time and will be starting to use one on my own server as soon as a buddy wraps up it's development. You can bet Google really wants you to use theirs as they love the data coming in and out. The good thing about it would be you do not have to worry about the links going dead or 404. Or being redirected elsewhere for right now. The bad news is Google will have tons of free stats. it is what it is though and I thought I would alert everyone to this non earth shattering news. Link shorteners are here to stay for a while. i have some plans of my own I will be refining in the near future. I will pass it along when I work out the bugs and implement it wrong at first.

Google Updates SEO Starter Guide

The word is out that Google has updated their SEO Starter Guide and you can download the new 32 page PDF guide right here. The guide was originally released back in November of 2008 and was originally just 22 pages. The new guide has added content and features like a glossary of definitions and terms and more example images to illustrate the content in the guide. In addition they now give mobile device optimization techniques and easier understanding wording of the content so that it reads easier than the prior guide. The guide is also now available in over 40 languages. Make sure to refresh yourself and read through the new guide.

Google Instant Conspiracy Theories

OK, not really, but it is Friday after all and we have talked most of the week about Google Instant. I have been doing my share of reading on it and sifting through what I believe to be the good and bad on it. So far, none of my huge volume sites have suffered in earnings at all in fact it is obvious that some big ticket shopping is increasing. Could be an early start to the Christmas season, but i am not complaining. I am hurrying through a few well overdue rebuilds as well and have nearly $800.00 in original content being written right now to get put together on those sites by the end of this month.

Back to the Google Instant Conspiracy Theories. There is a fun post here on The Ultimate Tinfoil Hat Guide to Google Instant as Andrew Goodman has some fun at the expense of Google. Enjoy the chuckle and remember that Saturday is the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on America.

Google Alphabet Features Just Large Companies?

The new Google Instant that we posted about yesterday continues to create quite a buzz across several blogs and webmaster forums I have been reading on. One of the most interesting things I came across today is the The Google Alphabet post on the Wall Street Journal. It points out by typing in each letter of the alphabet typing each letter of the alphabet into Google that the top results included a lot of marketers. Not really too surprising in itself, but of course in the post on Adage, you can see that several readers posted what they were seeing in their area and of course the results are different across a large selection, which is nothing new. I would expect the large companies to show up being as they are probably searched for quite a bit, but also get heavier weight if they advertise or convert well Adsense or Adwords wise. Remember that Google is a for profit company.

Also to send you another direction, go to Twitter and search for Google Instant SEO. Tons of good and not so good reading. Lots of conspiracy theories as well.

Google Instant Has Arrived

In case you have been hiding under a rock, you should know by now that the new Google Instant is now live and running. Follow the link I just gave you for a run down of what it is and frequently asked questions concerning instant. In addition there have been several great post concerning the launch and I point you first to Matt Cutts and his take on Google Instant as he addresses it in relation to SEO. He does point out that over time people will learn to search differently and gives examples of it.

Search Engine Land has a complete users guide to Google Instant and how to disable it should you find the need to do so. Danny Sullivan pointed out the 2005 patent on what Google Instant does today. As you can see, it is trending today on Twitter as well and you can learn more by following some links here.

Google Giving Away Free Ice Cream And They Know My Favorite Flavor

No, Google is not giving away free ice cream, but you will see why I titled the post that way when you watch the video below. The "do not track me list" is a novel idea, but I think we are WAYS away from that. I could see a VERY, VERY strict privacy policy regulations thing coming down the road, but Google makes its money knowing the type softball bats you buy and if you are having problems with your attic fan. They want to know how to best market to you. Put your tin foil hats on and face north west, they are coming for you. Every direction, every day.

I found this on the guest post on SEO Book, by Jim Kukral.

Matt Cutts Discusses Keywords In Path Versus Filename In URLs

Head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, posted a new Webmaster video today in which he addressed a question regarding using relevant keywords in the path versus the filename in the page URL? He explains how one could look more spammy than another and says there is no real difference ranking wise of the two examples. In my experiences, both ways work fine and I am surprised this has never been addressed by him before today.

Introduction to Video Sitemaps From Google

I do not think enough people grasp the power of videos and more importantly the new use of video sitemaps. I came across the Google Webmaster video on the Introduction to Video Sitemaps below and it lays it better than I ever could. There is now a new section on video sitemaps dedicated to webmasters here on Google. If you are using mostly Youtube videos on your Wordpress blog, you might find this Google XML Sitemap for Videos plugin useful from Amit Agarwal. Works great for automated sites that use WP Robot to include Youtube videos.

Multiple Sub Gmail Accounts

I forget who it was that asked, but I was recently asked about getting multiple email accounts with Gmail. Gmail at one time gave these away very freely and I have tons of these I set up over the years. It is not so easy to do these days as they want you to verify the account via a text message to a phone number. It is understandable why they do this as to eliminate SPAM boxes. You can't really blame them though.

What most do not know is you can set up sub accounts per say within a single gmail account. Let us say your main gmail account address is: testgmailaccount@gmail.com and you want a sub account to use under it. You can add a + sign and then another name or word after it and create your self a sub account. Using the example above, it would be: testgmailaccount+dave@gmail.com and you can then click on Settings in your Gmail dashboard and click on Filters and then Create a Filter. If you enter in your new sub-account in the To: box and click Next Step you can apply a label or action of where you want email addressed to that account to go if you so desire. Play around with it. If you do not want to use any filters, that is fine too. Just open any email client and send yourself a test email using the + sign.

I do not remember what the limit is for these, I think 20, but have never needed that many. Either Thursday or Friday I will show you a neat trick I have been using for a while that you might want to see using a sub gmail account and filters. It's amazing and I could of sworn I posted about it before, but haven't. It must have been on one of the numerous forums I post on.

Google Adsense & Google Gmail News

There have been a few new news items surface in relation to both Google Adsense and Google Gmail you might be interested to hear about. First with Adsense, Google has now announced a revamped design of three of their AdSense for content ad units. The 3 sizes being revamped are (728x90)(300x250) & (336x280). I can't wait to try the new 728x90 layout in the Socrates Wordpress Theme Monetization Bar as I have recently built a few new sites using that easy to customize Wordpress theme.

As far as the Gmail news, if you use multiple Gmail accounts like I do, you can take advantage of the new Multiple sign-in feature in your Google Accounts dashboard. After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts. This might not sound like a huge deal, but every second counts in my work day.

Google Query Operator Refresher

I think we get caught up with other aspects in this business that we often times overlook the simple or obvious things we should know. Such is the case with Google Query Operators. A ton of newer webmasters do not know what a powerful tool Google is outside of just regular search.

Stephan Spencer has an excellent refresher post up on Search Engine Land that covers her top Google Query Operators along with the format and a brief description of use of them. This is a great post to bookmark and use as a handy reference for future use as well. The daterange operator for instance is one I never knew existed until now. Great post.

Entertaining Graphic On How Google Works

Happy Saturday to all. I am working on getting another VPS server up ang going and to my liking today along with cleaning up some stuff on my other servers as well. While on Twitter this morning, I came across a post from by the end of June by Aaron Wall on his interpretation of how Google Works. You will see he has made it easy for us bloggers to add the graphic to our post as well, with a great backlink to his new PPC blog. This post of his is not only informative, but it makes for great link bait with a title of How Google works and it will assuredly do it's job in attaining backlinks as well. So there is more than one thing to learn from his entire post, not only how Google works. Wall is a master of this. Of course click the graphic for a larger version.

1) I found it via Twitter.
2) The bait was irresistible for me not to click.
3) It is a graphic that screams post me somewhere.
4) The content is informative.
5) He makes it VERY easy to share.

Infographic by PPC Blog

$5.99 Domains & Another Google Web Based Rank Finder Tool Surfaces

Time and time again I get emails from readers who think they rank in position x for their keyword in Google and wonder why they are not getting any traffic. Often times I come to find the person does not actually rank where they think they rank. This is because the rankings they see in Google on their end are influenced by the searchers IP address, the language of your computer, past search history and other factors linked to the new "Google Personalized Search" feature. Now true rank finder tools are nothing new, but a another free one called Scroogle has surfaced that gives you a clean, unbiased search to truly see where you rank in Google for certain keywords. The site is not new, just one that has resurfaced over time. It is fun to play with, especially if you do not use the Rank checker plugin offered up for Firefox. Play with it yourself and see how it fits your need.

Also one final note. Name.com has $5.99 .COM & .NET domains for sale today only. July 1st, all registrars are going up as I previously reminded you. This is for new registrations only and you need to use the coupon code in the blog post before checking out. This is sort of like a last call at a bar. Take advantage of it.