Google's Advice On Web Site Content and Search results

Learn what Google has to say about Web sites that contain little or no original content

There are genuine benefits to updating your site frequently with fresh, original content that has genuine value for your readers.

This is from Google Webmaster

Little or no original content

One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.

However, some webmasters attempt to improve their page's ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don't add any value to users.

Examples include:

Thin affiliate sites: These sites collect pay-per-click (PPC) revenue by sending visitors to the sites of affiliate programs, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. These sites usually have no original content and may be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content.

Doorway pages: Pages created just for search engines
Auto-generated content: Content generated programatically. Often this will consist of random paragraphs of text that make no sense to the reader but that may contain search keywords.

Scraped content: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.

There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site. For example, you could create product reviews, ratings, and product comparisons.

Source: Google Webmaster

Mosaic Cloaking

Mosaic Cloaking

Webmasters involved in rather shady search engine optimization methods invented a new form of cloaking. That new method has been called mosaic cloaking and it is an attempt to make cloaking less detectable.

A great source for Mosaic Cloacking explanation is Fantomaster that actually coined the term and discussed it before it became ' an issue' Read their full story here

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to regular web surfers.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.

Search engines don't like cloaking because its purpose is to deceive search engines. If Google detects that a website uses cloaking, it will remove the website from the index.

What is new in mosaic cloaking?

While traditional cloaking served totally different content to search engines and human web surfers, the new cloaking method replaces only parts of the page.

For example, the blank space on a web page might be filled with keyword rich text when a search engine spider requests a page. The rest of the page remains unchanged.

Does this new cloaking method work?

It's likely that you can get short term results with this method because it's a relatively new method to which search engines might not have reacted yet.

However, we don't recommend cloaking to optimize your web pages. While you might get short-term results with cloaking, it is likely that your web site will be banned from search engines sooner or later.

Search engines know that these cloaking methods exist and they employ highly skilled engineers that try to detect spammy websites with algorithms. In addition, a competitor might manually report your website.

Google has made it very clear that these cloaking methods will get your website banned from Google's index if you use them. If you want lasting results, better use ethical search engine optimization methods to get your website to the top of Google's search results.

SEO For Your Blog

SEO For Your Blog

What Yaro states is true. We should know, we are SEO pro's and his advice holds-up, it works, and is easy to do. We recommend you follow his instructions, we sure have:-) Below is his article:

How Important Is SEO For Your Blog?
Source: Building Blog Traffic by Yaro Starak

I was recently putting together a lesson for the final class in the Blog Traffic School course. This lesson is part of what I call the “advanced” materials - topics focused on taking your blog beyond the 1000 daily readers we aim for in Blog Traffic School, which are discussed in the concluding sections of the course. Essentially everything in Blog Traffic School can be used to grow your blog beyond 1000 readers, but for this particular lesson I wanted to focus on the things I have found that really brought my blog above the 1000 daily visitors mark and into the 2000+ daily readers milestone.
As I sat back and thought about it I realized there was one very powerful traffic source, one that many bloggers don’t think about too much, which accounted for a lot of my traffic once my blog had matured - the search engines. I say it had to “mature” for a reason, you see my blog received barely any search traffic for at least the first 4-6 months of its life. I had purchased a new domain name (entrepreneurs-journey.com) for it and while it was very easy to get my blog at least listed in the search engines, quite a few things had to happen before I started ranking well.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an area that most bloggers will never get into in any real depth. At the highest level, very technical minded people are testing and tracking things to optimize search rankings for their websites and blogs. These people use controlled tests, playing with all the variables that make up a website - the words, code, links and so forth. Once they have results the rest of us can study their findings and apply the latest “theories” as tests for our own search engine rankings. Some things work well, some don’t.

In a lot of ways search engine optimization is an art form. It has fundamental principles which make you feel like it is a science - and a lot of people working in SEO will tell you it is and they will purport to having complete control over search engine results - but they would be lying. In reality everyone who works in SEO is guessing. Yes they have some very sound principles to work from but ultimately no direct control over the deciding factors - the search engine algorithms, which is as it should be or the system could be corrupted by those in power.

Why Does SEO Matter?
So what does all this have to do with your blog? As I stated once my blog had matured and grown past its first birthday I noticed that my articles started to show up in the first page of search engine results for some pretty relevant terms for my blog’s niche. While they don’t individually provide a lot of traffic, collectively it is a steady stream of new visitors - and this is the key - these are mostly new visitors.

Search engine traffic serves to bring in new visitors to your blog. Now I of course thoroughly recommend you work on building a loyal readership for your blog, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want new visitors coming in as well. Attracting new visitors is how your blog grows, and converting those new visitors into regular readers is the process you should be aiming to complete.

How To Get More Search Traffic To Your Blog
That’s the million dollar question isn’t it! Okay, first up if you know nothing about search engine optimization and you have time to really get your teeth into it, read this article series I wrote - The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques.

In that article I have collected the most relevant things you can do to help your blog’s SEO, however there is a lot to do and you may not be up for the task. If you don’t have the time or energy for in-depth SEO then here is my advice for you -

Focus your energies on one thing - get links from authority sites.

What are authority sites? They are websites that have a lot of links from other authority sites! Aha - catch 22 you say, and yes in a way it doesn’t sound fair does it. Authority sites are websites, and blogs are included, which the search engines consider to be authority sources of information. Generally if the site has lots of traffic, links from other authority sites and people doing searches keep finding the answers they want from these sites, you have the formula for authority status. It’s a hard thing to pinpoint but virtually every niche online has a handful of authority sites. Right now I bet every website you visit on a daily basis (perhaps besides your own) is an authority site for it’s niche.

When authority sites link to your site then your site gets some of that “authority” juice. It’s that juice that will help your blog climb higher in the rankings.

For the sake of clarification I want to state that your blog’s search engine ranking is dependent on a lot of variables and just focusing on authority links is only part of the picture, but in my opinion it is the most crucial and the most difficult to accomplish. To get a link from an authority site, or preferably lots of them, and from many different authority sites, you really need to be doing spectacular things or saying spectacular things or helping people in spectacular ways or have a spectacular PR person working for you. It’s by no means easy and it doesn’t (nor should it) happen over night. This is something that you build up to over time.

So essentially, once again my advice to you regarding your blog’s search engine rankings is to become spectacular. As simple as that

Yaro StarakSpectacular Blogger and The Blog Traffic King

Absolute Link Advantages With SEO

Absolute Link Advantages With SEO

An absolute link contains the whole URL for example:
http://www.your domain-name.com/your-page.html

It is said to be absolute because it can link to the pages absolutely from anywhere on any Web site.

A regular link may only include the page name ie. your-page.html without the Http://www. This type of link will work within the Web site but not anywhere else.

The absolute link also has the benefit of passing a measure of PR or Google PageRank on to the page it is pointing to.

So, when doing links within your web site, try and use absolute links and not the easy, lazy way of just the page name link. The 2 extra seconds it takes to make a 'full' link will pay off in the end.

OnTheAvenues SEO Consultant

Google Reads Flash Text, So Optimize It

Google reads Flash text, so optimize it

by Jeff Muendel

With the recent admission by Matt Cutts to Stephan Spencer that Google is using Adobe Systems' Search Engine SDK technology, a new set of optimization opportunities opened up.

That fairly definite confirmation of how Google reads text within Flash files makes it possible to create Flash .swf files with some level of search engine optimization.

"It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the Search Engine SDK tool that Adobe Macromedia offers," Cutts said. "So my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that Search Engine SDK tool to pull out the text."

This has long been the suspicion of Flash developers and SEO professionals concerned with .swf files, but to my knowledge, this is the most direct and clear confirmation to date. The implication is simple but important: if Web developers--and specifically Flash developers--have the ability to test .swf files during development for textual SEO parameters, then Flash files can be designed to offer specific text to search engines.

While the concept is simple, the practice may not be. Flash is a complicated multimedia program with tremendous flexibility and many layers of content. Also, parent Flash .swf files can load secondary, child .swf files ad nuaseum, and this is a very popular, load time-friendly technique. The path between viable textual content and the "front" of a given Flash presentation can be very intricate.

There ... Read more

For more great advice courtesy of Matt Cutts, I invite you to either read the transcript of my interview with Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon or you can listen to the Matt Cutts at Pubcon interview podcast (31 minutes, 3.8 MB).

OnTheAvenues

Optimizing for Secondary Supporting Keywords

Optimizing for Secondary Supporting Keywords

Optimizing for secondary supporting keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be far less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are focused on the minor words or synonyms.

For example, "real estate in Mississippi" might have much less action than "real estate" by itself, but if you are operating in Mississippi, you could get less volume in traffic but considerably more refined traffic. Also do not under estimate the value of working with acronyms. For example "real estate MS" or for example "Victorian homes in NJ" short for New Jersey

We see real estate sites that achieve top rankings in a few shport weeks by using secondary supporting keywords. For example, a site we did for a realtor in Phoenix AZ that receives over 400 page view a day for such terms as:

modern camelback corridor lofts
westgate az living
biltmore court phoenix
price per square foot for a condo in phoenix
44 monroe
encanto district homes phoenix
chateux on central
urban mansion arizona
chateaux on central
44 monroe phoenix
biltmore phoenix homes
biltmore arizona new upscale high rise for lease
modern camelback corridor lofts
zips codes of historic districts in pheonix
condos on central in phoenix
paradise valley mls search
downtown phoenix, az zip code fq story
encanto historic district arizona zip code
summit condos phoenix
real estate for sale f.q. story
historic phoenix
biltmore townhouses phoenix
palmcroft in phoenix arizona
az mls free
phoenix mls
arizona new homes/cave creek
free arizona mls
central phoenix home search

In short, generic terms are not always the best. Look outside the box when selecting keywords

If you need your real estate site optimized to achieve better rankings, be sure to contact OnTheAvenues

Using ALT Attributes Correctly

Using ALT Attributes Correctly

Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, provides some useful tips on how to optimize the images you include on your site, and how simply providing useful, accurate information in your ALT attributes can make your photos and pictures more discoverable on the web.




Some of you have asked about the difference between the "alt" and "title" attributes. According to the W3C recommendations, the "alt" attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or applets. The "title" attribute is a bit different: it "offers advisory information about the element for which it is set." As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the "alt" attribute. Feel free to supplement the "alt" attribute with "title" and other attributes if they provide value to your users!