Tag Archives: SEO Services Bangalore

Matt Cutts Latest Webmaster Help Video: How Small Sites Can Outrank Big Sites

The latest webmaster help video from Google takes on a following question: How small sites being able to outrank big sites.

Matt tackles the following question:

How can smaller sites with superior content ever rank over sites with superior traffic? It’s a vicious circle: A regional or national brick-and-mortar brand has higher traffic, leads to a higher rank, which leads to higher traffic, ad infinitum.

Google rephrased the question of the YouTube as “How can small sites become popular?”

Matt says, we see the sites that are smart enough to be agile, and be dynamic, and respond quickly, and roll out new ideas much faster than these sort of lumbering, larger sites, can often rank higher in Google search results. And it’s not the case that the smaller site with superior content can’t outdo the larger sites.

Matt gives an example of Myspace and Facebook and then Facebook and Instagram, all these small sites have often become very big. Even Alta Vista and Google because they do a better job of focusing on the user experience. They return something that adds more value.

Finally Matt suggests that whatever area you’re in, if you are doing it better than the other incumbents, then over time, you can expect to perform better and better. Think about concentrating on a smaller topic area and make sure you cover it really well and then you can sort of build out from the smaller area until you become larger and larger.

Here is the Matt Cutts Video:

The “Thin-Content” Warning

According to Google Webmaster Blog by Chris Nelson, “Affiliates that produce thin content and have little-to-no-value-add on their site may be penalized for going against Google’s guidelines.”

Websites that copy the same content over to different pages, replacing just a few words or geographically anchoring the same information to a different location, will be susceptible to a “thin content” warning. Another more subtle aspect of websites that Google Webmaster Tools scans is the relevance of syndicated and RSS feed content.

Chris Nelson stated that “As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of our users’ search results.”

Article Original Source: http://bangalorewebdesigncompany.in/google-alert-subtle-warning-to-affiliates-thin-content/

Matt Cutts: More Pages on a specific site does not have a direct ranking benefit

Google head of search spam Matt Cutts, released a new video explained the concept of more pages on a specific site doesn’t mean to have a better rankings.

Matt Cutts said “I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you automatically get a high-ranking. That’s not the case.”

He explained that if there are more pages, chances are more to rank for different keywords and more likely to have more overall links and PageRank , which do directly impact your rankings. But the number of pages on specific site, does not have direct impact on ranking factor.

Bing Upgrades to Pintereset Boards in Image Search Results

Microsoft Bing team announced a new feature in image search results UI by integrating Pinterest boards. Microsoft already integrated Pinterest in Bing image search results with the pin to Pinterest feature, allowing you to pin and save results directly from Bing image search.

Now, whenever you do an image search on Bing, you’ll see Pinterest boards appear in the top-right corner. But this search feature is only available to U.S members at the moment, if you’d like to see it in action, you can click the gear icon in the top right corner of Bing and manually change your location to the U.S.

Image collections are great for a search like Halloween decorating ideas, where we bring together cute pictures from around the web with creative collections by people who are passionate about decorating their house in the best way possible.

Earlier this year, Bing added Pinterest pinning functionality to image search, enabling users to pin the images they find on Blog back to their boards back on Pinterest. Pinterest itself recently added more info to article pins, potentially helping drive more web traffic to articles and blog posts.

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”.