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Search engine news and articles of the week

October 2012 U.S. search engine rankings "Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in October with 66.9 percent market share (up 0.2 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 16 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 12.2 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.2 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.8 percent. [...] 17.6 billion explicit core searches were conducted in October (up 8 percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8 billion (up 8 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.8 billion searches (up 9 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.1 billion (up 8 percent), Ask Network with 560 million and AOL, Inc. with 309 million (up 8 percent)." Editor's note: to get your website in front of these search engine users , optimize your pages so that they get high rankings. Google: file reconsideration requests in the language of your site Google's Matt Cutts explained in...

Inside Google: a former Google web-spam team member gives tips

1. How does Google detect web spam? Google uses on-page signals such as keyword stuffing or hidden content. They also judge the quality of the web page content. Any type of scraped, synonymized or poorly written text is seen as a spam signal. In addition to the on-page signals, Google uses the backlink profile of a web page to detect spam. Google analyzes many different backlink elements: how many links are there in total? What is the quality of the pages they come in from? Do the pages look “real” or are they just there to host the links? What anchors texts are used? The commercial vs. non commercial ratio of the anchor texts. 2. What are commercial keywords and how do they influence your backlink profile? A commercial keyword is a keyword with a high search volume or a keyword that has a high financial value, for example "cheap flights" or "car insurance". If 90% of the anchor texts in a backlink profile are commercial keywords, it is likely that th...

Original content for SEO: Latest Google search update targets sites with frequent DMCA removal requests

On Friday, Google’s Amit Singhal reported that the company will roll out a new ranking signal that factors any Digital Millenium Copyright Act requests that a site has received into its search standing. According to Singhal, the move will “help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.” The fight against piracy on the web has been a continuing battle for different industries over the years. Google’s update could make it more difficult to find unlicensed and pirated content on the web, while creating one more reason that original content is needed for SEO . For marketers, the move will impact their SEO in a limited manner – unless they’re routinely hit with copyright infringement notices. In theory, the update could improve site’s search standing since those with frequent DMCA violations will drop or be removed from results altogether. According to Singhal, a rapidly growing number of copyright infringement notices and removal requests provided the...

Google Panda Update vs. Google Penguin Updates

The SEO community has been a buzz this past week with the latest update from Google, named Penguin. Penguin came down the pipeline last week, right on the tail of the latest Panda update. Since most of the big updates in the past year have been focused on Panda, many site owners are left wondering what the real differences between Panda and Penguin are. Here is a breakdown: Google Panda Update Overview: According to Google’s official blog post when Panda launched , This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on. Basically, Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren’t necessarily spam but aren’t great quality. This was the first ever penalty that went ...

Google’s New Algorithm Means for SEO

With its  recent major algorithm change (nicknamed "Farmer"), Google has made a significant effort to improve the rankings of high-quality Web sites in its search results, and to reduce the visibility of low-quality sites. What does this mean for SEO now and how does it change the content landscape?  Kelly Andersson , experienced writer and website developer, talks about this new algorithm's impact on search, ranking, and elancers. Google regularly adjusts its search function – the algorithm programming that determines what you find when you search for something. These algorithm changes are almost never noticed; the February 2011 change, though, devastated some websites' rankings – and thus their traffic. The change was made to reduce the high rankings of content farms on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and to move sites with quality content up in the rankings. And it worked. Why Did Google Do This? In short: user feedback. Customers complained ...

Instant results in search

Well, as you can see the search engines are displaying more and more results that are related to the most recent items in their News search. How many times have you been researching something and you think you’ve found what you are looking for only to find out that the article you are reading is from 2 years ago.. Grrrrr and you thought that vacation spot was nice.  The review you were reading was from 2 months prior to the ‘flood’ they experienced and that review after that is lost somewhere in cyberspace. Herein is the issue. How do you index this kind of data in a way that cant be manipulated. If you tell people certain elements to inclue peopel will lie. If you dont, what will be the standard? when goog gets it? the most trusted sites keep pumping out the data that gets read first? How does this work if some nobody site actually reveals something very important but their site has very few links. These are the challenges. I think when it all boils down it wil...

Good Content is very Important for SEO

Good SEO content has three primary characteristics: Offers useful information presented in an engaging format to human readers Boosts search engine rankings Attracts plenty of links from other sites Note that human readers come first on the list. Your site must deliver value to its visitors and do it in an engaging way. Few sites specialize in a subject so narrow that they have an information niche all to themselves. You'll have competition. Set yourself apart from it with expert interviews, meaningful lists and well-researched resources. Write well or invest in someone who does; your investment will pay off in increased traffic. Although search engines aren't your primary audience, they still influence your page rankings. In the days of early SEO, using keyword-stuffed META tags brought in plenty of traffic. People didn't hang around on a site that promised low air fares and delivered advertisements, but that didn't affect the search engines. Each iter...