Google webmaster spring cleaning and alternatives of all three

On April 24 Google announced about closing three features of Google Webmaster tools; Subscriber States, robots.txt file generator and Site Performance. Google said that these three features are less used compare to others and hence we are closing. Google analyze the usage of different features make changes according to that. Google has named this process Google Webmaster spring cleaning. Here I am going to discuss all these features and its alternative tools which can work for you.

Subscriber States

Subscriber stats reports the number of subscribers to a site’s RSS or Atom feeds. If you want to gather subscriber states then you have many options. First one is Google’s own product Feedburner is available with more features. You can find everything regarding Feedburner and its features you can click here. Second option to track subscriber states is Google analytics’ event tracker. You can visit this post for complete guide, Tracking New RSS Subscribers With Google Analytics. If you are using WordPress blog then it is too easy for you. There are so many plugins available for WordPress to track the subscriber states. A great post about the plugins is available on Mashable.

Robots.txt Generator

Robots.txt file offers a way to instruct search engine crawler which part of website is to crawl and index and which is not. Rightly that robots.txt file generator is less useful feature. You can create robots.txt file using a simple text editor. Though, if you are new and need help to generate robots.txt file then I can suggest few which are free to use. First one is available for free from SEOBOOK. It is simple and has same user interface. The other two available for free are from SEOCHAT and Mcanerin International

Site Performance

Site Performance feature was basically for the information regarding the website’s speed and average load time. Site speed is one of the 200 factors that Google considers to generate Search Engine Ranking Pages. It is also closed because of low usage. Google provides alternative of this feature as PageSpeed Online. In fact this tool provide some great information to reduce the site’s average load speed. It points the areas where you can optimize the site to reduce the site speed. The other useful website is http://www.webpagetest.org. This website provides you more attributes like test location and browser to get more specific data. There is one more way you can get these data using an add-on provided by Yslow. You can download the add-on for Google chrome from yslow.org.

So that is it, these are the best alternative tools which I know. I really would love to know the other alternatives which you know in the comments.

Google wants to dominate web spammers-Penguin update after Panda

After getting almost 80% dominance over search industry, it becomes tough job for Google to maintain search quality as lot of people wants to get maximum benefit from Google search. It’s fair to say that Google has done a lot of work to maintain that quality and off-course doing that continuously. They have done major algorithmic changes in recent times. Google Panda update is doing fine job and discarded many malicious websites in last year. Now it’s time for web spam team at Google. The huge applauds for that team as they are fighting with web spammers since last 10 years. Bravo!! They have come up with fine algorithmic change this time. Matt Cutts, the head of Web spam team at Google, has released an official blog. They have overcome two major spamming techniques, keyword stuffing and unrelated outgoing links. The Google officials has given a name to this update- Penguin Update

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest methods of spamming and Google has already put up a lot of efforts to stop that but still there are few slipping and making their way into the search result. This time they have implemented solid methods which can identify the spammers and natural people. So now implement white hat SEO techniques. Write your content in natural way. Don’t think about your keyword density and keyword proximity or anything else related to keywords. If you have return your content for best user experience and subject oriented then nothing to worry. You will get best rewards from Google.

Unrelated inbound links

Getting many inbound links is the major ranking factor on search algorithm. So that spammers have implemented lot of techniques to get those links like link wheel, link bait, paid links and etc. Most of them build unnatural and irrelevant links. A website of flower getting links from footwear’s website and vice versa. A book’s website is linking to cloth’s website and vice versa. It seems ridiculous. This is only done to get or pass the link juice. What I think is, it is worsen the user experience. Don’t do this again. Generate excellent content that people would love. If they like your natural content they will definitely share it or link to you in their own content. Try this natural way of link building and you will get good deep sleep every night as you don’t need to worry of any Google algorithmic changes or any search engine’s changes. So many people ask question that, I have worked hard to build thousands of links but Google shows only few (i.e. 30 links). This is the answer that Google can categorize the backlinks and considers those which are related. Google doesn’t take the links stated in above example into consideration.

I will be back with next update to share my ideas. Till than all the best. Be a smart and hardworking webmaster!

Importance and merits of different factors in SEO ranking based on latest algorithms of different search engines

Search engine reward pages with the right combination of ranking factors. This information is based on the latest information and as of my knowledge. I think, I should share it with others, so I have.

Some factors influence more than others, which I have weighted 1 to 3 stars, where 1 is weakest and 3 is strongest. Again I would like confess that no single factor guarantees top ranking. Several favorable and in the context factors in combine achieve success. Few factors can be villain as well. Please give some time to fight with them.

Let’s jump into detail. We will discuss both on-page and off-page factors. Let’s discuss on-page factors first, give them importance factor, and define their merits.

Content based factors

1.       Content quality  (+3)

The latest panda algorithm of Google clearly obligating me to give Three stars.

2.       Keyword Research (+3)

Keyword Research is the heart of SEO campaign and maximum contributor for the success. Simply Three stars.

3.       Keyword frequency (+2)

Keyword frequency, prominence and proximity, all of them are important factors and will get two stars.

4.       User Engagement (+2)

Do visitors spend time on your website or straight away bounce over other tab? Bounce rate in analytic is now really important as per the Google Panda.

5.       Freshness of the Content (+2)

Is the content on your website is there since six months? There are so many researches coming in every field. Please update it. Again panda suggesting me to give two stars.

HTML based factors

1.       Title (+3)

All of us have learnt title as the first lesson in SEO. There is no any hesitation to give three stars.

2.       Description (+2)

Here is some confusion. In early day, description is as important as title. But now it’s not due to keyword stuffing in description. Still description is the only factor which attracts a person in search result and proves you superior among 10.

3.       Headers (+1)

After panda release, content is king and header is part of content. So there is some part to play by headers and will get one star.

I think you might be surprised, because Meta keywords not in the list. Almost all search engines ignoring keywords. Matt Cuts has given the final words on it.

Site architecture based factors

1.       Crawl (+3)

Crawl includes so many factors in it. Your site must be easy to explore for users and hence for the search engine spider. For more information on crawl factors you can visit other blogs. You should do this because it has got three stars

2.       Speed (+1)

Latest hints of Matt Cuts suggest that site speed has some role to play. So one star.

3.       URLs  (+1)

This is important for dynamic site owner. Now you should work out on the structure of URLs.

Don’t go away and navigate to second blog for merits of off-page factors.

http://indi-pride.blogspot.com/2011/11/off-page-seo-ranking-factors-and-its.html

Google’s latest algorithm changes based on keywords

Recently, I have seen so many complains on Internet forums where so many people have suffered too much ranking updates (bad). I have done some research and follow some experts in the industry. I have found some changes those Google has made in its algorithm. It is really interesting and that why I am sharing with you guys.

The first one is, some people uses brand name as people searches it more. For example, Nike shoes, Adidas cricket kit with some pre or post fixed text. The intent is to generate more traffic. Google has sorted out the issue with some changes to make search result perfect. Now Google doesn’t display the websites for the keywords as I have explained. Now Google has developed an algorithm which analyze our web page and content. After that it finds title and description for that. After that the comparison will be made and if algorithm generated tile and description found more relevant then Google bypasses our keywords and display those title and description in SERP.

The second one is long tail keywords and mid tail keywords with more than 3 words. Now those keywords are passing through more stringent semantic and ranking filters (meaning the array of broad match keywords a page could potentially rank for) have been tightened up or reduced to increase relevance. Many have reported seeing up to 2/3 or their long-tail and mid tail traffic disappear during this transition.

The other one is keyword variations. If you have mapped the keywords like kitty food, cat food and kitten food on a single page then it is your case. Now, those three of them will return different set of results.

When normalization occurs and the new algorithms settle, we may see many of the pages that were churned take their place back in their previous positions. However, in the meantime, the best thing to do is stick to SEO basics and keep producing relevant content, using intelligent internal linking to preferred landing pages using preferred anchor text and acquiring quality inbound links to offset any depreciation your website could be experiencing from the virtual rug being pulled out from the web as we knew it – as indexed by Google.