Google: Adding Too Many Pages Too Quickly May Flag A Site To Be Reviewed Manually

Google’s Matt Cutts answered a question submitted by another Googler, John Mueller, on YouTube asking, “Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?”
The question is, if you build out a new section of your website with tons of content – is it safe to just launch them all at once or should you do smaller chunks at a time?

Matt said that Google can handle it either way, but he did say that if a site released hundreds of thousands of pages overnight, it may raise a red flag and warrant a manual review by the Google spam team. And if you do not want Google to manually review your site and you don’t want to draw attention to your site – you may not want to release too many pages too quickly.
Here is the video:

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What Is Your Company’s Digital Marketing IQ?

There is a continuing disconnect with people’s personal use of the internet and how they then apply digital marketing to promote their business.

The company CEO will use Google for researching and buying a new car but when it comes to optimizing his web site for ranking high in Google he struggles to see the value and perceives that building a website is all he needs to do to be “found online” and generate mountains of cash.

The Company With A Feeble Digital IQ

Only the other day I heard about the owner of a company who had recently won a business award  and when they came to present it they mentioned that everything was great about his business except they were surprised that he didn’t even have a website!

This disconnect between time spent on media and use of media for marketing becomes quite apparent when you look at the hard data and becomes apparent that organisations are lagging the consumer.

Companies Media Marketing Dollars Are Being Wasted

JP Morgan research shows that only 7% of media is consumed through our newspapers, yet corporate America is allocating 20% of its media dollars to traditional  newspaper marketing (this is a bad forward leading indicator for shareholders of newspapers).

Looking at the Internet figures it reveals that only 12% of media marketing spend is allocated to online media but 26% of media time is spent online. If we dig a little deeper on the numbers it is even more damning. If you are under 40 and earning over $50,000, media consumption increases to over 50% for the internet. In essence corporations are spending  much more on media where the consumer is no longer hanging out and is somewhere else.

Read more at www.jeffbullas.com

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5 SEO Tools You Might Not Have… Yet

When it comes to lists of SEO tools, you typically see the same names bounced back and forth. Today, I’d like to share some tools I use on a regular basis that you may not have in your toolkit just yet. The best part – they’re all perfect for SEO’s and businesses with smaller budgets.

iSpionage

You can’t begin any search marketing campaign without a list of great keywords to target.iSpionage is known for their PPC research tools, but they also have powerful keyword research features as well. When you enter a keyword into their search, you will first see the top 10 PPC competitors along with a graph showing the advertising trend for the keyword.

After a block of related keywords is one of my favorite parts: a glimpse of the top-performing, longest-running ads in Google related to your keyword.

What’s nice about this is you can see how other websites are using the keyword. When you click on the Ads tab, you can review even more ad copy and landing page combinations sorted conveniently by the number of days seen. It can be a great way to spark some ideas on content and calls to action.

Last but not least, you can see the top SEO competitors in Google based on organic search traffic. Some results will list the number of backlinks, pages, and total number of keywords each competitor has in the search index. This can help you gauge what it will take to beat them for a desired keyword phrase.

Other handy features offered to paid members are the Keyword Monitor Dashboard and Competitor Alert. With the Keyword Monitor, you can keep track of your current rankings for the keywords you are tracking. It also includes a historical analysis so you can see the progress of your search marketing campaign.

With the Competitor Alert, you can enter your top competitor’s domains and be notified when they add new ad copy, PPC keywords, and SEO keywords. This way, you don’t have to keep checking up on your competitors to find out if they are targeting something new.

cognitiveSEO

Once you have your targeted keyword phrases organized, your next job will be researching the backlinks of your competitors. cognitiveSEO offers a visual approach to learning about your competitor’s backlink profile that includes charts for deep link ratios, dofollow to nofollow, website types, website categories, link trustworthiness, and much more.

You can also use the new Visual Link Explorer tool to see the link profile as a whole and drill down into the specifics.

You can also drill down into the traditional list of backlinks to filter out results.

cognitiveSEO also offers additional features to help you with your link building campaign including a link management tool that you can use to upload backlinks you have acquired / requested to monitor their status as well as a rank tracking tool to make sure your SEO efforts are yielding results. There is even a handy to do list feature to help you manage tasks assigned to various members of your team.

Broken Link Finder

The broken link building strategy is a great one to employ for link building, but it can be time consuming. Fortunately, there is a faster way to do it. The Broken Link Finder tool allows paid members to search for a keyword or keyword phrase and get potential broken link opportunities.

You can then export the backlinks for these broken links into a CSV to start contacting webmasters in hopes that your helpful tip about a broken link will result in your link getting placed on their page. You can use your membership credits to reserve a particular search result so that no one else can discover it again or use them to find similar broken link opportunities.

Whitespark

If you are working with a local website, then Whitespark is a must have resource. This citation finder will go out and find local search opportunities based on your website’s keywords and location.

You will get to see the domain, direct submit link, type of website, Majestic SEO AC Rank, Domain Authority, and date discovered. The results are based off of backlinks / citations that other local competitors have gained. It’s a great way to get new link building opportunities for local and non-local websites alike.

Link Detox

Unfortunately, if your website has acquired any form of bad links in the past, it is susceptible to a link penalty from Google. If you think your website has been hit with a Google penalty based on you links, then the Link Detox report from Link Research Tools is a must have. You simply enter your domain or upload your links from Google Webmaster Tools. It will then mark your links as healthy, suspicious, and toxic. This will give you a better idea of which links to remove first.

When you export your report, you will see details about why a link was marked as suspicious or toxic. Along with the reasoning, you’ll see the URL linking to your website, what page it’s linking to, anchor text, dofollow / nofollow, and other metrics.

Best of all, you don’t have to have a recurring membership plan with LRT to get access to this tool. You can sign up for a Daypass at $39 for 72 hours access and 3 Link Detox reports (plus access to some of their other tools). Just be sure to export your reports before your daypass expires.

These are some of the tools I use for keyword research, competitor research, local search, and link building. What are your favorite lesser-known tools for SEO?

Source: -.search engine journal.com

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Google: 5 common mistakes with rel=canonical

Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines your preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It’s supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you’d like displayed in search results. However, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky because it’s not very obvious when there’s a misconfiguration.

While the webmaster sees the “red velvet” page on the left in their browser, search engines notice on the webmaster’s unintended “blue velvet” rel=canonical on the right.

We recommend the following best practices for using rel=canonical:

• A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.

One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines.

• Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)
• Verify the rel=canonical target doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag
• Make sure you’d prefer the rel=canonical URL to be displayed in search results (rather than the duplicate URL)
• Include the rel=canonical link in either the <head> of the page or the HTTP header
• Specify no more than one rel=canonical for a page. When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored.

Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series 

Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages:

• example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1
• example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2
• and so on

Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all. 

Good content (e.g., “cookies are superior nutrition” and “to vegetables”) is lost when specifying rel=canonical from component pages to the first page of a series.

In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup.

rel=canonical from component pages to the view-all page

If rel=canonical to a view-all page isn’t designated, paginated content can use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” markup.

Mistake 2: Absolute URLs mistakenly written as relative URLs 

The <link> tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs. Relative URLs include a path “relative” to the current page. For example, “images/cupcake.png” means “from the current directory go to the “images” subdirectory, then to cupcake.png.” Absolute URLs specify the full path—including the scheme like http://.

Specifying <link rel=canonical href=“example.com/cupcake.html” /> (a relative URL since there’s no “http://”) implies that the desired canonical URL is http://example.com/example.com/cupcake.html even though that is almost certainly not what was intended. In these cases, our algorithms may ignore the specified rel=canonical. Ultimately this means that whatever you had hoped to accomplish with this rel=canonical will not come to fruition. 

Mistake 3: Unintended or multiple declarations of rel=canonical 

Occasionally, we see rel=canonical designations that we believe are unintentional. In very rare circumstances we see simple typos, but more commonly a busy webmaster copies a page template without thinking to change the target of the rel=canonical. Now the site owner’s pages specify a rel=canonical to the template author’s site. 

If you use a template, check that you didn’t also copy the rel=canonical specification.

Another issue is when pages include multiple rel=canonical links to different URLs. This happens frequently in conjunction with SEO plugins that often insert a default rel=canonical link, possibly unbeknownst to the webmaster who installed the plugin. In cases of multiple declarations of rel=canonical, Google will likely ignore all the rel=canonical hints. Any benefit that a legitimate rel=canonical might have offered will be lost. 

In both these types of cases, double-checking the page’s source code will help correct the issue. Be sure to check the entire <head> section as the rel=canonical links may be spread apart. 

Check the behavior of plugins by looking at the page’s source code.

Mistake 4: Category or landing page specifies rel=canonical to a featured article

Let’s say you run a site about desserts. Your dessert site has useful category pages like “pastry” and “gelato.” Each day the category pages feature a unique article. For instance, your pastry landing page might feature “red velvet cupcakes.” Because the “pastry” category page has nearly all the same content as the “red velvet cupcake” page, you add a rel=canonical from the category page to the featured individual article. 

If we were to accept this rel=canonical, then your pastry category page would not appear in search results. That’s because the rel=canonical signals that you would prefer search engines display the canonical URL in place of the duplicate. However, if you want users to be able to find both the category page and featured article, it’s best to only have a self-referential rel=canonical on the category page, or none at all. 

Remember that the canonical designation also implies the preferred display URL. Avoid adding a rel=canonical from a category or landing page to a featured article.

Mistake 5: rel=canonical in the <body> 

The rel=canonical link tag should only appear in the <head> of an HTML document. Additionally, to avoid HTML parsing issues, it’s good to include the rel=canonical as early as possible in the <head>. When we encounter a rel=canonical designation in the <body>, it’s disregarded. 

This is an easy mistake to correct. Simply double-check that your rel=canonical links are always in the <head> of your page, and as early as possible if you can.

rel=canonical designations in the <head> are processed, not the <body>.

Conclusion 

To create valuable rel=canonical designations:

• Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also appears in the canonical page.
• Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in the <head> of the page.
• Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content (i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).
• Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to featured articles as that will make the featured article the preferred URL in search results.

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Study Finds Google’s Penguin Update Getting Stricter Over Time

A study by Portent, an Internet marketing company, shows that Google’s tolerance of spammy links to trigger a Penguin algorithm ranking drop has declined by 30% since the Penguin algorithm launched.

The study shows that of the 500,000 links found, Google has been steadily reducing its tolerance for webspam. Now, Google is likely to penalize sites with as little as 50 percent suspicious links in their link profiles, whereas 80 percent was required when Penguin first launched.

Portent analyzed about 10,000 links pointing at each of the top 50 sites on the 2012 Inc. 5000 list. They then captured the SEOMOZ and Majestic SEO data for each incoming link. They designed a crawler to score the link as spam based on the page the link is linking to being related to the page the link is coming from. They did this and collected data on more than 250,000 links pointing at penalized sites, and 250,000 links pointing at non-penalized sites.

Here are the results over time:

Source: - Search Engine Land

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Phone Numbers No Longer Allowed in Google AdWords Ad Text

If you want to include a phone number in your AdWords ad, you'll need to use the call extensions feature. Starting in April, Google will begin disapproving any ads that include telephone numbers in the ad text, according to a recent policy update.

The official word from Google:

In the next few weeks, we will no longer allow phone numbers to be used in the ad text of new ads. Advertisers who would still like to promote phone numbers in their AdWords advertising can use the call extensions feature. We're posting this alert now to provide adequate lead time to make ad changes.

In April 2013, we will begin to disapprove ads that were using phone numbers in their ad text before the March 2013 policy change.

While an ad like this is currently showing, once April rolls around that ad will no longer be allowed in AdWords: Sources: - Search Engine Watch

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Google: Sorry We Accidentally Penalized Your Site

Yesterday, Digg was completely delisted from Google's search index. Some thought it was an issue with their robots.txt file, some thought it was a Google bug and some had no idea what to think.

What was it? Google accidentally penalized the whole site. Yes, it was an accident.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said on Hacker News, "we were tackling a spammer and inadvertently took action on the root page of digg.com."

Google released an official statement as well:

"We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy submitted link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly."

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Yahoo Clues, App Search & Other Products To Shut Down April 1

Since taking over as Yahoo’s CEO, she’s spoken repeatedly on the need to zero in on being part of its users’ “daily habits.”

Today, the company announced the shut down of seven products that don’t fit that “daily habit” mantra. Included in the group are a couple search-related products, including one under-the-radar keyword research tool that we (and others) have written about fondly in the past.

Yahoo Clues will be shut down on April 1st. It was poorly named and was primarily positioned as a search trends product, but for SEOs it was an interesting keyword research tool. Clues launched in late 2010 and was expanded about nine months later.

It provided a snapshot of keyword searches over time, plus great demographic information about keyword preferences between male and female, different age groups and by location.

I don’t know how widely used it was by search marketers, but in my experience, every time it was mentioned in conversation or blog posts, people had good things to say about Yahoo Clues.

Yahoo App Search is also shutting down on April 1st. This was a fairly standard search product with apps sorted by category and various filters available to searchers. Search results sent users to the appropriate app store if they wanted to buy/download something they found. Itlaunched in 2011.

Also on Yahoo’s chopping block:

• Yahoo app for Blackberry. This will no longer be available for download as of April 1st, but the existing will continue to work — unsupported — after that date.
• Yahoo Avatars. This won’t be supported after April 1st.
• Yahoo Sports IQ. This is shutting down on April 1st.
• Yahoo Message Boards. Also shutting down on April 1st, but the message boards that within individual Yahoo sites (like Finance and Fantasy Sports) will remain active.
• Yahoo Updates API. This won’t be supported after April 16th.

Source: Search Engine Land

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