Tuesday, August 11, 2009

When does Google ban, penalize or sandbox a website?

Someone said, “You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!” Of course, I do not intend to say that every SEO guy should get banned. I know it sucks. But sometimes it helps to understand the finer lines when your site is banned.

Search engine penalties and banning are not the topics that are discussed frequently by webmasters, except those who are proud to call themselves blackhat. But many times, I have seen people getting confused with low SERP rankings and banning. Just because your site is not ranking in Google for a certain keyword(s), which was a traffic puller earlier, does not necessarily mean that your site has been banned.

Remember, Google is CRAZY! It is extremely choosy about the quality (and quantity) of your links. You can try an exercise to believe this. Try searching for your backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and the link:http://sitename.com command in Google. What do you see? I am sure you got my point now.

Sometimes, it is very difficult to determine, whether a site has been banned, penalized or sandboxed (in case of Google). Let’s see them in detail.

When does Google ban a site?
  1. You don’t follow their guidelines.
  2. You get involved in link farms.
  3. Your site is screwed up. This happens when you neglect the code to content ratio and keep adding a number of scripts to your site.
  4. You have a huge number of affiliate links / paid links on your site.
When does Google penalize a site?
  1. You really mess with some of their serious guidelines.
  2. You keep using the same anchor text for linking to a particular page.
  3. The keyword density for certain keyword(s) remains on a higher end for all the pages of your website.
When does Google sandbox a site?

Though webmasters have different opinions about the existence of Google Sandbox Effect, but assuming that it exists, here are a few things why Google will sandbox a site.

  1. You caught their attention due to your black/grey hat SEO techniques.
  2. Your site is new but yet attracting huge number of inbound links.
  3. The links to your site are from a bad neighborhood.

It is very important to know whether you have been banned, penalized or sandboxed by Google. If you are banned, you can opt for a reinclusion request or just move on and forget the site. If your site is being penalized, then you are being monitored by Google and every action of your’s either helps in rectifying the penalty or pushes you deeper into the banned zone. But if your site is sandboxed, then the best option for you is to keep your site in good shape. Be careful with the content of your site and avoid any black/grey SEO techniques. Within a short span of time, your site will be out of the sandbox if you keep it clean.

Conclusion: Don’t jump to conclusions by merely touching waters from the surface. Go deeper and find the root cause and work towards it. This will not only focus your efforts in the right direction but will also help in giving your site a good credibility and ranking.


Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/

When does Google ban, penalize or sandbox a website?

Someone said, “You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!” Of course, I do not intend to say that every SEO guy should get banned. I know it sucks. But sometimes it helps to understand the finer lines when your site is banned.

Search engine penalties and banning are not the topics that are discussed frequently by webmasters, except those who are proud to call themselves blackhat. But many times, I have seen people getting confused with low SERP rankings and banning. Just because your site is not ranking in Google for a certain keyword(s), which was a traffic puller earlier, does not necessarily mean that your site has been banned.

Remember, Google is CRAZY! It is extremely choosy about the quality (and quantity) of your links. You can try an exercise to believe this. Try searching for your backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and the link:http://sitename.com command in Google. What do you see? I am sure you got my point now.

Sometimes, it is very difficult to determine, whether a site has been banned, penalized or sandboxed (in case of Google). Let’s see them in detail.

When does Google ban a site?
  1. You don’t follow their guidelines.
  2. You get involved in link farms.
  3. Your site is screwed up. This happens when you neglect the code to content ratio and keep adding a number of scripts to your site.
  4. You have a huge number of affiliate links / paid links on your site.
When does Google penalize a site?
  1. You really mess with some of their serious guidelines.
  2. You keep using the same anchor text for linking to a particular page.
  3. The keyword density for certain keyword(s) remains on a higher end for all the pages of your website.
When does Google sandbox a site?

Though webmasters have different opinions about the existence of Google Sandbox Effect, but assuming that it exists, here are a few things why Google will sandbox a site.

  1. You caught their attention due to your black/grey hat SEO techniques.
  2. Your site is new but yet attracting huge number of inbound links.
  3. The links to your site are from a bad neighborhood.

It is very important to know whether you have been banned, penalized or sandboxed by Google. If you are banned, you can opt for a reinclusion request or just move on and forget the site. If your site is being penalized, then you are being monitored by Google and every action of your’s either helps in rectifying the penalty or pushes you deeper into the banned zone. But if your site is sandboxed, then the best option for you is to keep your site in good shape. Be careful with the content of your site and avoid any black/grey SEO techniques. Within a short span of time, your site will be out of the sandbox if you keep it clean.

Conclusion: Don’t jump to conclusions by merely touching waters from the surface. Go deeper and find the root cause and work towards it. This will not only focus your efforts in the right direction but will also help in giving your site a good credibility and ranking.


Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/

How to achieve sitelinks for your website.

SEO is not easy. It takes lot of efforts for achieving high search engine rankings and maintaining them. We at CopperBridge Media, get many inquiries from our clients as to why search engines do not display their site’s one line links (read sitelinks). Well, it sounds a bit funny at times. Because after helping their sites dominate the first page of major search engines, they still aspire for more search engine visibility.

Now the SEOs / webmasters will know that with consistent efforts a site can achieve top rankings. But unfortunately, that’s not the case with sitelinks. Webmasters have absolutely no control when it comes to displaying the sitelinks.


google-sitelinks


Regular Google Sitelinks

Though Yahoo and Bing too offer sitelinks, but of course the inventor of the concept of sitelinks is Google. It introduced sitelinks to help users navigate a site so that it saves users time and allows them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

How to get sitelinks on Google?

I wish I could give you a simple solution for this. But that’s because you can’t force Google to show the desired links of your site as sitelinks. Google explains, “We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

Okay so as always, Google speaks from its own perspective with no help to the webmasters. But based on my observations for achieving sitelinks, here are a few tips that I can pass on:


  1. Submit your site to all major search engines. Don’t wait for their crawlers to find you.
  2. Monitor which pages of your site are attracting huge traffic. Normally, these pages would be the best candidates for being featured as sitelinks.
  3. Keep working on your most viewed pages, i.e. optimize them. Put more focus on keyword density, content relevance and optimization.
  4. Follow proper page naming conventions and keep a simple navigation structure for your site. I have seen that the sitelinks are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
  5. Cleverly follow cross linking strategy from your most viewed pages. This will ensure that other relevant pages also appear in the sitelinks for a single query.

Now a days, Google displays one-line sitelinks. These are not different from the regular sitelinks, except that they are displayed in only one column and allow a maximum of four links to be displayed.

google-one-line-sitelinks

Google One-line sitelinks

Even though, Google says its process for generating sitelinks is completely automated, you can surely help Google locate the most relevant pages of your site so that they appear as sitelinks. Use your SEO skills along with the tips mentioned above and see what happens.

Just in case, you think that Google is displaying inappropriate or incorrect sitelinks, you can block them so that they no longer appear. But for this, you will have to have your site registered with the Google Webmaster Central Tools.


Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/

How to optimize images for search engines?

You might have heard about optimizing a website or a blog for search engines so that they give you quality traffic for relevant keywords. Often referred as Search Engine Optimization or SEO, this is a very demanding process for any web-entity today. The importance of search engines and their role in promoting your brand cannot be denied.

But just like you optimize your website or blog which consists of some code, it is also very necessary to optimize the images on your site. Whether you use specific images, say like logo(s) of your products or use generic images to denote your operational industry, all of them need optimization.

Why do Images need SEO?

For various reasons, like:

  • Search engine crawlers cannot understand anything other than text, so it is important to tell them what an image denotes by using an ALT tag.
  • When the crawlers see the ALT tag, they are better able to derive intelligence from the content of your site, giving you a better chance to achieve higher rankings.
  • Many times people use the image search to find images, and with proper optimization of your images, you stand a good chance to appear in the image search results.
  • Decreases the Code to Content ratio and guarantees a good standing for relevant keywords.
How do I optimize images for Search Engines?

Actually, its very simple. With a little knowledge of HTML, you can easily optimize the images of your site. Place this inside the image tag:

<img src=”image.gif” alt=”The text that you wish to use” />

You can add relevant image location and text in the alt field so that the text is assigned to that image. This will tell the search engines what that image refers to.

If you are using Wordpress for your site/blog, SEO Friendly Images Plugin may prove to be very helpful.

Once you have optimized all the images of your site, bookmark them using the relevant social bookmarking site(s). Its not necessary to bookmark your images in each and every bookmarking site. Its better to use only such bookmarking sites which are relevant to your images or which comprises of many people in your network/group. This will surely help as your site will keep getting consistent traffic and other people will tag your images, providing more visibility and that extra push towards higher rankings.


Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/

Chris Brogan kills the Rockstars Page.

rockstarlogoChris Brogan recently announced that he had taken down the Rockstars page from his blog. The Rockstars page had a collection of websites/blogs that were submitted by Chris’s readers. Chris explains,

The intent was to have a big huge page of links featuring all of you, because I truly believe the blog is about you and our interactions together. The thing is, it’s just a lot of work to manage, and I don’t see hardly ANY clicks to it any month. No one really looks in there for anything.

His intention to highlight the people belonging to his community did catch fire when he had announced the Rockstars campaign. It was a nice inbound marketing campaign wherein people were asked (not forced) to add the Rockstar badges to their blogs after their inclusion. The badges were attractive and easy to use. It was a kind of link exchange strategy to gather inbound links. But it somehow failed.

I am thinking of writing a post about failed inbound marketing campaigns. Please share examples of such campaigns, if you know them.


Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/

Is Lifestreaming killing Blogging?

I have been a fan of Copyblogger since quite some time now and love the way Brian creates great content. One of Brian’s recent post discusses whether blogs are a part of the social media or not. While reading his post, a new thought triggered my brain. The thought was, “whether lifestreaming has killed blogging?”

I remember, around 12 months ago, people were crazy about getting a free blog from Blogger or Wordpress. Blogging allowed them to express themselves and gave them great satisfaction, since they were sharing their feelings with the world. But with time things change. While some bloggers remained active, others dropped out, simply because they did not generate enough readership to keep the comments and conversation rolling. The resulting frustration was enough for them to never look back at their blog, again.

And today, with tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, etc. lifestreaming has appealed to masses. People prefer to use these services because it takes less time to express yourself. It also allows them to track real time updates and helps in establishing a connection easily. Sometimes, there are things which one cannot express on a blog regularly, say like what I had for lunch or at what time do I exercise, etc. But with lifestreaming, all these things are possible as you can pass on the crappiest of your act to the bunch of people who have nothing better to do than admire your updates.

Don’t get me wrong but I have lived both blogging and lifestreaming. And somehow blogging makes me more happy as I can target my posts in such a way that they benefit my readers.

I was very surprised when Steve Rubel quit blogging to embrace lifestreaming. I somehow just fail to understand how someone can get his message through just 140 characters. Maybe that’s one of the tricks that I need to master to increase my twitter following!

Chris Brogan’s explains this scenario by drawing an analogy between the two by saying - “There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby.

Lifestreaming does provide more speed and action to a conversation than blogging but sometimes this can go offtrack. Its like somebody starts discussing about a football match, praises the team coach, digs his personal history and the discussion moves on. As you can see in this case, the conversation about the match lost its importance, maybe because the history of the coach was more attractive. With blogging this condition will never arise as it contains a targeted message.

To conclude, I would re-iterate that I prefer to blog than lifestream. What about you?


Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/