Google making changes in its local search algorithms

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Google 的貼牌冰箱（Google refrigerator） (Photo credit: Aray Chen)

With Google making changes in its local search algorithms, checking rankings for local business listings for geo-targeted terms is getting a bit difficult. Google also takes into account the searcher’s location and alter its search results to prefer local listings. So, searching for keyword “chicago pizza”, a person sitting in Chicago may get somewhat different results from a person sitting somewhere else. Sometimes, a person searching from outskirts, or suburbs, of major city do not get same results as a person searching from within city limits or center of city. However, there’s a way to determine local rankings with considerable accuracy. Google provide a Custom Location option in left hand s! ide menu options on search result pages (sometimes hidden under search Tools option). This lets you customize your search location. Make sure you are not logged into your Google account and disable personalization results based upon search activity.

Many Sites experience downtime while under maintenance or up-gradation. Most of these websites put up a temporary placeholder page informing visitors as to what has happened and when the site will be back. But this is not the best way to deal with search engine crawlers during the downtime. Most of the websites either return 200 Ok as server response code for their temporary page or show an 404 Error Page with 200 response code. Google has suggested webmasters to use 503 HTTP (service unavailable) server response code. an optional Retry-After header can be used to specify the estimated date and time when the downtime will be complete. For e.g., this code will somewhat look like

header(‘HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable’);

header(‘Retry-After: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 18:27:00 GMT’);

But be cautious not to use 503 response code for a very long time as it can eventually be seen as a sign that the server is now permanently unavailable and can result in us removing URLs from Google’s index.

There are times when its make sense to bid for your own brand keywords or company name in AdWords (or adCenter). Chances are that the CPC you will pay is not very high unless you have a world renowned brand name. Also, you will enjoy high Quality Score and therefore, may have to pay lesser CPC. Some of the situations when you should bid for top position, or above organic results, are mentioned below.

{1} You website does not have top position for brand keyword or company name due to SE penalty 

{2} Negative reviews come in top ranking results for the brand name queries

{3} Other companies are bidding for your brand keywords or optimizing their websites to appear in top organic rankings for your terms

{4}You want to create brand awareness. Sitelinks and Product extensions are best ways to do it.

{5}Capture additional traffic by dominating both organic and paid listings

Google Panda Update - Earning

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Recently Google announced a major algorithm update on how it ranks websites and this affected almost 12 % of the search engine results. "Panda Update" named after one of the Google's engineer was designed to get rid of low quality websites-websites with copied and low-value content that is of no use for the readers. At the same time, it aimed at providing better search engine rankings to the websites with original and informative content. With this update, it is now required to tweak your SEO strategies a bit in order to rank high is SERP. Focus on creating high-quality content for your website and you can use the Panda as an advantage.


Google has an Advanced location options which apply only to ads shown on the Google Search Network. Options include targeting users by their physical location, by search intent, or both. You can also exclude certain locations, either by physical location only, or by physical location and search intent. Search intent refers to location-specific terms in users search queries, such as san francisco bakery. Generally, the default settings are appropriate for the majority of advertisers. But in case you ship your product only to a limited geographical region, Or you are sure that customer outside a particular area is less likely to convert, you can disable the targeting using search intent. This will allow you to bring down the PPC cost although it may reduce the impressions as well.


PPC campaign for local businesses can be a bit different from the other larger businesses. For most local businesses, especially to start, I recommend using a geo-modified keyword campaign and then moving into setting up another campaign which is more of a keyword driven campaign rather than a geographically driven campaign (from a keyword standpoint). This is because starting out with a huge AdWords campaign can be overwhelming to a new user, which can lead to poor management and a poor account quality score right off the bat.

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search engine visibility Link Building

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Link Building counts for the credibility of your website and more credible it is higher search engine rankings you get which makes it visible to potential customers and hence increases sales. Here are some tips and trends that are likely to impact your Link Building efforts:


Start using mix-match technique for link popularity building and that makes your site reliable.


Focus more on how to secure the links that help you in long run.


Leverage the benefit of social media networks for link building.


Make sure to use keyword in tweets including a link back to your website and this when indexed in Google helps in your link building efforts.


Participate in forums and leave your link in signature.


Emphasize more on quality rather than quantity when it comes to Link Building.


Breadcrumbs are navigation tools implemented while designing the website that helps user easily navigate through your website. They help create easy links within your site that boosts your website search engine rankings. Breadcrumbs help in making your site more functional for both search engines and your potential users which means better conversion rates and more sales for your website. They help a lot with your internal linking and therefore your search engine visibility.


Social Bookmarking websites attract a considerable amount of user attention and are still a significant part of any organic SEO campaign. Most of these websites use No Follow attribute so as not to pass link juice to websites that they don't trust. But here search engines are not the entire limit of the world, there are users also who are looking for information on the web and you can fetch direct traffic to your website through these no follow links even if you don't get Google traffic.


To exclude content on the website, many webmasters either use robots.txt file or Robots Meta tag. But there is some difference in way both of this work.


* Block with Robots.txt – This means that you are telling search engines not to attempt to visit the URL, but feel free to keep it in the index & display in the SERPs. Such URL will often show up in search results without page title and snippe 


* Block with Meta No Index – It's like telling search engines to feel free to visit, but don’t put the URL in the index or display in the results.


* Block by No following Links – not a smart move, as other followed links can still put them in the index.

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Link Building Ethics from experts

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Relevant search result is what Google is aiming for and it has been very adamant about providing a superior user experience and is rejecting websites with low quality link building. Importance of content has increased and it need to be well written by keeping reader in mind and providing real information that could fetch a lot of quality backlinks.


Building backlinks is still important, only do it right? Don't just build backlinks but build quality backlinks that count for your website search engine rankings. This can be done through content driven backlinks via Guest blogging, forum participation, social media participation, quality blog commenting, link baiting, internal linking press release, blog creation and lot more.


In a nutshell, the best link building approach is to use diverse backlink sources that make your link profile look natural and helps in improving the search engine rankings of the website.


Search engines analyze how many links you have coming into your site while ranking your website and also see the quality and relevancy of the page that is giving a backlink in context to your website. So to rank high on search engines, follow link building ethics that work and fetch natural backlinks from range of quality sources.


Important Link Building Ethics:


Don't try to grow your link count by double or triple each month and stick to like 5% or 10% increase in backlinks per month.


Don't aim to build a ton of links, but instead build theme based relevant links, as they will move your rankings a lot faster.


Stay away from all page links (site-wide links). Although they can easily be bought, it's unnatural that someone would link to your website from every page.


By working with these ethics and following the latest trends in Link Building like Squidoo, Hubpages, Guest blogging etc., you would definitely develop a link profile that would surely improve your website rankings in search engines.

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