Google Guru Matt Cutts: Insider Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers

This is a must-see video by the guru of Google for anyone doing web or blog development. Get tips and tricks from a Google insider that could well double your knowledge of blogging SEO!

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How to avoid alienating the Major Search Engines - Article from Entire Web

Today Morning I recieved an article titled "SE Tactics: How to Avoid Alienating the Major Search Engines" from EntireWeb written by RoseMary. The article has listed down the SE tactics not to be engaged to avoid alienating major search engines. Read the article below:

Each of the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN have quality webmaster guidelines in place to prevent the unfair manipulation of search engine rankings by unscrupulous website owners. These webmaster guidelines change frequently to 'weed' out any new deceptive practices and those websites found engaging in these illicit practices are consequently dropped from the search engine rankings of the major search engine they have offended.

Being banned or dropped from the search engine rankings can have dire effects on your website traffic, online sales generation and site popularity. Especially if your website is classified as a 'bad neighborhood' site, you can then kiss your reciprocal linking campaign goodbye, as existing and prospective link partners will not want to be associated with your site for fear of their own rankings dropping.

If you wish to avoid alienating the major search engines then do not engage in the following SE tactics:

1. 'Cloaking' or sneaky redirects - displaying different content to the search engines than shown to your normal website visitors including hidden text and hidden links. Often this is achieved by delivering content based on the IP address of the user requesting the page, when a user is identified as a search engine spider a side-server script delivers a different version of the web page to deceive the search engine into giving the website a higher ranking.

2. 'Doorway' pages created specifically for the search engines that are aimed at spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for specific keyword phrases to send the search engine spider to a different page. With doorway pages a user doesn't arrive at the page they were looking for. Similarly avoid 'cookie cutter' approaches that direct users to affiliate advertising with little or no original content.

3. Don't create pages that install viruses, Trojans or badware. 'Badware' is spyware, malware or deceptive adware that tracks a user's movements on the internet and reports this information back to unscrupulous marketing groups who then bombard the user with targeted advertising. This type of spyware is often unknowingly downloaded when playing online games or is attached to software or information downloads from a site. They are often difficult to identify and remove from a user's PC and can affect the PC's functionality.

4. Avoid using software that sends automatic programming queries to the search engines to submit pages or check rankings. This type of software consumes valuable computing resources of the search engines and you will be penalized for using it.

5. Don't load web pages with irrelevant words.

6. Don't link to 'bad neighborhood' sites who have:

* Free for all links pages
* Link farms - automated linking schemes with lots of unrelated links
* Known web spammers or the site has been dropped or banned by the search engines.

7. Avoid 'broken links' or '404 errors', your site will be penalized for them.

8. Don't display pages with minimal content that is of little value to your site visitors.

9. Do not duplicate content unnecessarily.

10. Do not use pop-ups, pop-unders or exit consoles.

11. Do not use pages that rely significantly on links to content created for another website.

12. Do not use 'cross linking' to artificially inflate a site's popularity. For example, the owner of multiple sites cross linking all of his sites together, if all sites are hosted on the same servers the search engines will pick this up and the sites will be penalized.

13. Do not misuse a competitors name or brand names in site content.

14. Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual host names will be penalized.

15. Do not use techniques that artificially increase the number of links to your web pages ie. Link farms.

16. Display web pages with deceptive, fraudulent content or pages that provide users with irrelevant page content.

17. Using content, domain titles, meta tags and descriptions that violate any laws, regulations, infringe on copyrights & trademarks, trade secrets or intellectual property rights of an individual or entity. Specifically in terms of publicity, privacy, product design, torts, breach of contract, injury, damage, consumer fraud, false, misleading, slanderous or threatening content.

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About the Author: Rosemary Donald is an SEO Consultant with Rank1 Website Marketing (www.rank1websitemarketing.com) & author of the SEO ebook 'Insider Secrets of Rank1 Websites' available for $29.95 AU. Rosemary is a regular contributor to online article sites on the topics of SEO, website marketing, ecommerce, search engine marketing & small business development. Rosemary is also a successful online trader & owner of top ranking website

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Yahoo Mail Innovates, Gmail Stagnates

Yahoo's mail service just came out of beta. Lifehacker takes a look at some of the unique features in each one to see which one is better.

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10 Google Services That Get No Love

If you were to interview a broad cross-section of internet users and ask them about Google services, probably most of them would enthusiastically talk about Gmail or Google Reader. At the very least, they would mention Google’s superior search engine. But how many people do you think would discuss... (continues)

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Google's GDrive on its way as GoogleDrive.com's name servers are updated...

Google already owns GDrive.com, but it's unlikely that will be the final name of the service. Like Gmail is technically "Google Mail" the real name for GDrive will likely be "Google Drive". And sure enough, today, the name servers associated with googledrive.com changed to to NSx.GOOGLE.COM.

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Google Finally Updates Webmaster Tools, Interface and Features

Some insight into the new features and interface of the latest update to the Google Webmaster Tools....It's about time!

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Google updates the time onebox

Google slightly improved their onebox that shows the current time in different locations around the world, across the different time zones. For instance, you can enter time in moscow or time in berlin, germany or usa time.

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Yahoo's New Social Network - "Mash"

Yahoo has given a preview of its social network "Mash".Mash has features common to Facebook, MySpace and My Yahoo.

To know more take a look at this article from TechCrunch.

Google, at age 10, is the official heart of the Internet - Yahoo! News

Born 10 years ago, the Google Internet search engine has grown into the electronic center of human knowledge by indexing billions of web pages as well as images, books and videos.

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Latest Google Adsense News And How It Affects Your Earnings

I don't know if you've been keeping up with what's going on with Google Adsense these days. If not, you might want to read this article. The recent changes to this program will greatly affect your earning potential with Google Adsense. In case you're wondering, the good old days are over. Keep reading to find out...

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Good News for Microsoft Office rival, Google Apps

Capgemini will today become the first global consultancy to offer major corporate clients Google's web-based office software as an alternative to Microsoft's Office technology. The endorsement for Google is a milestone for the concept of "software as a service" that is owned, run and delivered remotely, using the internet

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Top 21 SEO Tips for 2007

Top 21 SEO Tips for 2007

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Google starts hosting its own news

Search and advertising juggernaut Google introduced self-served news articles from four press associations over the last few days. The company has signed deals with the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association (UK) and The Canadian Press to allow its news sub-site to host images and articles rather than link through to...

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Outfoxed: Full documentary on Google Video, examines Fox News

This is a penetrating documentary about how Fox pushes their agenda. A must watch if you don't understand where the nation gets its news. Fox News watchers: you should watch this. What do you think about it?

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Google is going to be more aggressive about paid links that violates quality guidelines

Back again with a post on Link policies.

I recieved a newsletter this morning from WebProNews titled "Is Google Hitting Directory Links?". Here is the opening paragraph.

Algorithmic flux or selective penalization? Nobody's sure and nobody that can answer is talking so far, but paid link directories have been plummeting in Google search results. Many are not ranking for their own business name, according to reports, even though webmasters have not received penalty notices.

>> To know more read the transcript

The newsletter also had a list of some affected directories which includes Aviva, Alive, Big Web links,ewebpages, Directory Dump, Elegant Directory, and Biz-dir.

Google's Matt Cutts had presented a slide presentation on "Are Paid Links Evil?" during a session at SES. He was approved to relase this presentation which distinguishes types of paid links Google doesn't like. Cutts said that sponsored or advertising links must be clearly labeled.

Cutts also suggested some tips on labeling paid links in the following ways:

· Redirect through URL blocked by robots.txt
· Redirect through URL using a 302
· Use Javascript to direct the link
· Apply the rel= "nofollow” attribute to the link
· Add to the page header

This clearly shows that Google is going more aggressive about paid links but Google has approved paid links from certain places. The approved list is as follows:

· AdBrite
· Quigo
· IndustryBrains
· Microsoft AdCenter
· Yahoo! Publisher Network
· Any site that doesn't pass PageRank

I would be publishing more tips on paid links in the future posts.

Get listed in Google in 48 hrs!

My inbox is always cluttered by emails with the subject line "Get Google and Yahoo Traffic in 48 hours." Some forums scare webmasters with discussions like it can only be accomplished by doing some "top secret" marketing tactic or advanced optimization strategy..

However it is quite easy to get listed in Google within 2 days.

Before discussing on how to get indexed quickly, let us know how search engines find a website.

Search Engines send their spiders to visit website that is already in their index and the spiders will follow all the links from that site. This technique is called "crawling." This is how search engines add the new website in the index of their search results.

So the first step is to include your new website link in popular directories or indexed websites. All you will need to do write an article based on the theme of your website and submit the article to the popular article directories and don't forget to give a link back to your website.

Submission is the big thing which would bring more links to your website and the search engine spiders visit our site following those links. Your site will also get indexed quickly.

Outbound Links Policy

Back again with the post on outbound link policy..........

Outbound links are those links that start from your website and attest another website. Outbound links are very important to boost your link popularity.

Always give links to other related website which will help you enhance your link popularity. The anchor text used for link should be able to indicate the content on the link.

Tips on Google Adwords

BUSINESSES of every stripe are learning to live with - and love - the world's largest online search engine. But make no mistake about Google: it's cutthroat.

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Last Week In Google - (Aug 26 - Sept 1)

George Reyes To Retire As Google CFO

Google CFO will be stepping down this year. However Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Lary Page praised his contribution "George was successful in keeping Google financially disciplined while protecting the company's entrepreneurial culture."

CNN.com Inks Multi-Year Advertising Agreement with Google

I did post on the deal few days back.. Here goes the summary. CNN has partnered with Google on a multi-year deal for displaying Google Adsense contextual ads on CNN.com