Monthly Archives: September 2013

Google turns on secure search, except for Ad clicks

Google is now beginning to roll its encrypted secure search feature to more people. Earlier, secure search was only available to those who were signed into their Google accounts, now it’s working to make secure search the default for everybody even those who are not signed into a Google account.

In essence various sites are reporting that the “NOT PROVIDED” percentage of organic keyword referrals has jumped from 50-60% up to 95%, 99% or 100% , so sites are not able to pull full international statistics yet, but all signs point of SEOs and webmasters not being able to pull data on Google driven keyword traffic anymore.

Google’s latest move is interesting in the context of its own actions against the NSA as well as recent leaks regarding the agency’s activities. The leaked prism slides from early June revealed that the NSA can collect “notifications of target activity” and “special requests” both of which may involve searches, from the tech companies that are allegedly involved. If Google supplies encrypted searches to everyone, it may be able to slow down the pace at which the NSA can obtain search information from it.

The motivation here is not to drive the ads site-it’s for search users. It’s not still clear why Google seems to have ramped up things.

Matt Cutts : Reasonable nofollow links won’t damage your search rankings in Google

Can no-follow links hurt my site?

Matt Cutts released a new video in the Google webmaster help YouTube channel.

Cutts said that, No-follow links won’t harm your rankings in Google, but if a webmaster is spamming them on a massive scale, it could get the attention of the search Engine spam team and trigger a manual review.

Things like Blog comments tend to have a very particular footprint that would be easy to spot. Cutts mentioned a specific example of where blog comments where problematic, even though they were already no-followed, because it was done on such a massive scale.

SEO Experts have known for quite some time that putting no-follow link is a great way to tell Google that you don’t want to pass PageRank for this particular link or that you somehow don’t trust the sites link is on. In addition, giving no follow links any negative attention at all is only going to encourage people who participate in negative SEO attacks on their competitors.

Best SEO Practices to handle 404 pages

The error message displaying 404 not found is a common response status code generated by search engine results stating that the HTTP server did try to locate the requested URL but the targeted Web based content could not be found due to a broken link.

A 404 error means “not found”. This is usually the page you get when you make a mistake spelling page name in a site, or if the page is deleted or moved. The problem is that the standard 404 page is ugly and unhelpful. Such error pages provide negative user experience and can harm the reputation of the supporting sites providing reference links for such content. Also sometimes important links from other such domains can be missed and relevant reference material made inaccessible.

There are 4 possible scenarios with custom pages:

404- Responds with an error, but shows a custom page to help your visitors.
200- If a page is missing, it’s replaced with custom error page
302- If the page is missing, it’s replaced with a temporary redirect to a custom error page.
301- Redirects errors to either a custom error page, or some other page in the site(i.e. sitemap, homepage or best guess)

How to find 404 pages?

Screaming Frog, Link Sleuth or Google webmaster tools can be used to find the 404 error pages. Google Webmaster Tool is best for this and will help you not only find broken links, but the source of those broken links as well. You need to select “Crawl Errors” from the Google webmaster tool dashboard and then click on “Not found” to get the list of your links. Now you can select individual links and choose the “linked from” option to examine the link routes. Additionally, Redirection plugin in WordPress can be used to check and redirect 404pages from your console.

Will 404s kill my SEO? When 404s can be bad?

There are cases, however, where a site could be scored negatively as a result of an abnormally high occurrence of 404 pages. Does your site have 10,000 unique pages but 45,000 404s this month? That could be an indicator of a bigger problem with crawling and technical SEO. That’s also probably not a very good user experience, which could be reflected in poor user engagement and falling traffic, which could be reflected again by a search engine lowering visibility of your URLs in search results.

A high occurrence of 404s – when they are spiking and continuous – is not a good thing. But forget about SEO for a moment. Is that a good thing for users? Obviously not, and remember: search engines follow users.

What are the best practices for redirecting 404 pages?

404s should not always be redirected
404s should not be redirected globally to the home page.
404s should only be redirected to a category or parent page if that’s the most relevant user experience available.
It’s okay to serve a 404 when the page doesn’t exist anymore
Don’t panic. 404s are normal.

How does Google, for instance, couple with the 404 error suppression?

Google recommends “A good custom 404 pages will help people find the information they’re looking for as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further”.

Precisely how valuable is your big data?

For digital marketers and analysts, probably their biggest data source in terms of volumes of data they use on a regular basis is their web analytics system. But a lot of web analytics data at any one point in time is froth and generates very little value at all, and here’s why.

If you look at the visitors who visit your websites or use your apps then they’ll fall into one of three groups:

Anonymous visitors:

These are the visitors about whom you know very little. They have probably visited your website once or twice. There’s not a lot to know about them as there isn’t enough data to make any sense from. There will be limited information on which channel they came in on, for example, and what they looked at, but not much necessarily to give you a full picture.

Observed visitors:

These visitors have visited more frequently, so there’s more data and more history, and potentially more to learn. Even though you don’t know who these people are, you can begin to build up some kind of profile in terms of patterns of behavior and content consumption.

Known visitors:

These are the visitors who you really care about because you have some kind of relationship with them. That relationship might be quite tenuous because all you have is an email address, or it could be quite deep because they’re gold card carrying loyalty members.

Just as it is important to think very carefully about your geographical location and how you should move forward, the same is true for thinking about what makes you special and unique. What are your strengths? What makes you special in your region or area? What incentives can you offer that help you stand out? By pausing to answer these questions, much of your keyword strategy will come into sharper focus.

Website visitors are most likely interested in buying your products or services. By visiting your website, they already know who you are and what you offer. The problem is, only 2-3% of website visitors bother to identify themselves, which means you’ll never know who the other 97% of your visitors are. The SEO Company in Bangalore solves this problem, enabling B2B small/medium businesses and enterprises to identify anonymous website visitors, increasing new sales opportunities from the companies that are most likely to buy your products and services.

Social SEO-Why the right type of interaction matters?

Even with great SEO, you need to push your messaging out to the public. That’s one place where social media comes in. Your fans are your fans on social sites because they want content from you that matters, that they can relate to, and that they can share with others. They want to be a part of the brand experience. They want updates about sales and new products, but they also want to feel valued.

People love to talk, and conversing with your fans about neutral topics, such as sports, weather, current events (politics excluded, unless that’s your brand equity), work, and entertainment can help you get to know them on a different level. So, be sure to branch out from your standard product or company promotions on your social networks and start to have real conversations about everyday types of topics. Getting your fans engaged will make them look forward to visiting your social profiles as well as sharing posts with their friends, enabling you to extend your social reach.