SEO Tips For Google Instant - Revised

We've talk about SEO tips for Google Instant in the past but things change and Google's autocompletions algorithm within Google Instant has changed over the past six months.

A WebmasterWorld thread is discussing new techniques that you may be able to use to "optimize" for the autocompletions within Google Instant - also known as Google Suggest.

One SEO claimed the algorithms has changed so much that he doesn't feel it is even worthwhile to try to go after Google Instant autocompletions anymore.

He said:

I had a campaign last year that netted me $45,000 but recently Google changed its algo or manually edited the autocomplete for my sector. It's a neater subset. But I don't think I'll bother in the future. I assume the algo will have some special scrutiny for every major autocomplete phrase if it doesn't already.

If you can rank for the autocompletions, you can make a lot of money. So why is it hard to do so now?

Tedster said they have become much more localized and geotargetted.

Search suggestions are intensively geo-targeted, showing different choices in different geographies, sometimes even down to the zip code level! That's going to be difficult to take into account if it affects your chosen terms.

When a client of prospective client of his loses a nice chunk of traffic, one of the main things he looks at is not the SEO but if Google Instant changed the search suggestions for the query they lost traffic for. And they do often enough.

Have you noticed drastic changes to the suggestions/autocompletes in Google Instant?

SOURCE

CO.CC returns in Google Search After 6 Month Ban!

Six months ago, Google publicly wiped out any co.cc domain from showing in Google's search results. That subdomain wide penalty seems to have now been lifted.

A search for [site:co.cc] returns over a 100 million results now:

The results started appearing about ten days ago, when before, it returned nothing:

Boilerplate text - Google Update

Many websites have it, the boilerplate text on the site. Either it is a repetitive copyright or legal disclaimer on the footer of every page or it is a statement of some sorts find on all your pages.

Boilerplate text comes in many flavors and locations but Google says they handle it just fine.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has Googler John Mueller telling a webmaster not to worry about having boilerplate text on the page.

John said:

Google is generally quite good at recognizing "boilerplate text" (text which you repeat on many pages) and treating it appropriately. I wouldn't worry about having to place a disclaimer on your pages. If you want to make it clearer to search engines that it's not relevant to your content, you could also just place the text in an image (personally, I'd just place the text on the pages normally).

One of the Google update posts talks a little bit about boilerplate text. They wrote that they improved "Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors." Adding, "We [Google] look at a number of signals when generating a page's title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We [Google] found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page's content."

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when I said nnn I meant nnn, not mmm or nmn or nnnn

‎(And I'm ### if I can find a way to say "Look, when I said nnn I meant nnn, not mmm or nmn or nnnn") -

For the past year or so, searchers at Google have expressed their displeasure with Google changing their search query because they think the searcher really wants to search something else.

But now those complaints are reaching over to Microsoft's search engine, Bing.

We've all seen it. You search for something and Google and now Bing, show you search results for something that doesn't match your exact query. Sometimes Google will be bold enough to say, you searched for X but we are showing you results for Y. Sometimes Google won't show it at all. Same with Bing.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a complaint from a Bing searcher who said "Now they're doing it too," referring to Bing doing what Google has been doing.

It can be frustrating to not find what you are looking for. Bing's Duanne Forrester said in response to the specific query example:

Ummm. if it's the number one result on G, the Facebook page for the, and I'm assuming here, "artist" that I'm seeing...it could be because of the inappropriate language the FB page is showing in its description.

Couple that with low query volume, and most typos still leading people to something they wanted (maybe they typoed but actually wanted Jimmy?) and you could have an answer on this particular phrase.

Tips to attract targeted traffic

Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website. Here are some of the tips that you can follow to generate targeted visitors:

1. Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog posts.
2. Targeting 3-5 keywords for each page on your site.
3. Dofollow blog commenting on the same theme blogs.
4. Guest blog posting strictly related to the keywords you are targeting at.
5. Forum participation by establishing yourself on forum sites through genuine and active participation.
6. Article submission and converting them to PDF, PowerPoint presentation and videos and submitting them to respective channels can extremely amplify your site's traffic.

Download Your Search Queries Via App

Google announced a new application, a Python script, that lets you download all your search queries available from Google Webmaster Tools.

Google is offering this for two reasons:

(1) They don't have the ability to download search query data via the Google Webmaster Tools API - yet.

(2) They removed about 10% or so of the search queries that show in your analytics when moving to SSL search and that will just get worse over time.

For more details on how this script works, see the Google Webmaster blog.

Google's John Mueller said on Google+:

If you haven't messed with Python, here's your chance to do something cool with it -- download the search queries data from your Webmaster Tools account, and automatically upload it as a Google Spreadsheet for your long-term logs.

Python isn't that complicated (if you're used to basic programming :-)), you just have to watch out for the indenting. Once you get used to it, it's really fun, powerful, & simple!

Fake Google Rich Snippets: Next Spam Target

A WebmasterWorld has SEOs and Webmasters complaining that they are noticing their competitors beginning to fake the rich snippets by planting their own microformats into the source code of the page.

Faking rich snippets is fairly easy. All you need to do is add any of the available markup to the page and if Google accepts it, it shows up in the Google search results.

You can fake things such as reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music and much more. In fact, recently, Google has been showing and allowing more and more sites to display these rich snippets in the search results.

Is this an issue for you? One webmaster said:

I have lost count the different ways I have seen reviews being faked. Google does have some safeguards in place but if you are creative enough you can get around them.

If you are not experienced I would beg you to think twice before playing around with this. Most inexperienced (and even some experienced) people end up causing themselves more harm then good when taking these shortcuts.

Source: - http://www.seroundtable.com/fake-google-rich-snippets-14492.html

Google paying Mozilla $300 million per year for search deal

Mozilla announced they have reached an agreement with Google to renew their Firefox search deal, to make Google the default search provider in Firefox.
The deal is extended for another three years.

This gives Mozilla some breathing room, as Google's browser, Chrome, continues to chip away marketshare from Firefox, Mozilla's leading browser.

Does Google need to do this deal? Probably not, but clearly there is some interest on Google's side for agreeing to renew the deal for three years.

"Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world," said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

"Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come," said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of spam, said on a Google+ post, "Yay, Mozilla and Google renewed their partnership on Firefox! Mozilla is an important, independent voice in the web space, so I'm glad that we're working together."

Bing May Discount Clicks On Popular Domain Names

A WebmasterWorld thread has a discussion around a new Microsoft research paper named Domain Bias in Web Search (PDF).

The paper describes how reputable and popular domain names have a strong bias in the search results. Searchers are more likely to click on the results from a popular domain.

What is the issue with that? Well, they say in the paper that the "existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains."

In short, if Bing uses click data for ranking purposes, which they do on some level, then they have to factor in discounting in clicks from reputable domains to reduce the bias searchers have towards them.

Why does it matter if reputable domains get clicked on more, they should? Well, according to their study, in a blind searcher test - if you remove the domain factor, searchers are much less likely to click on those results. So to remove bias in the search results, they want to dampen the click factor ranking algorithm to not artificially inflate those results.

Google Hosting SEO Advice

A new blog post by Pierre Far on the Google Webmaster Blog talks about SEO advice for hosting companies.

The blog post goes through common hosting related issues Google spots, including ways for hosting providers recognize, diagnose, and fix these issues.

It covers:

• Blocking of Googlebot crawling
• Availability issues
• Invalid SSL certificates
• Wildcard DNS
• Misconfigured virtual hosting
• Content duplication through hosting-specific URLs
• Soft error pages
• Content modification and frames
• Spam and malware

The invalid SSL certs is one that I found somewhat new:

For SSL certificates to be valid for your website, they need to match the name of the site. Common problems include expired SSL certificates and servers misconfigured such that all websites on that server use the same certificate. Most web browsers will try warn users in these situations, and Google tries to alert webmasters of this issue by sending a message via Webmaster Tools. The fix for these problems is to make sure to use SSL certificates that are valid for all your website’s domains and subdomains your users will interact with.

Forum discussion at Google +.