Seo Melbourne, Search Engine Optimisation Services

Many webmasters think that low quality links or links from spammy websites can have a negative effect on the ranking of their websites on Google. The problem with links from spammy websites is that it is very difficult to do something against them. For example, a competitor could add your website to a link farm network or the competitor could spam with your URL.

Google has released an official statement about spammy links

This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:

1. Linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.
2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.
3. It the webmasters of the spammy website are not cooperative, don’t worry and focus on the links that are under your control.
4. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking. The top 10 optimizer in our website optimization tool has been designed for exactly that task.It analyzes dozens of factors that influence the position of your website in the search results and it shows you what exactly you have to change so that Google will list your website on the first result page.
5. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google’s ranking algorithm.
6. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

What does this mean for the rankings of your website?

Low quality links are usually links from low quality websites. These website usually have low Google rankings and they cannot pass much ranking power to other websites. For that reason, you shouldn’t worry too much about links to your website that you cannot control. Better focus on the following:

• Create high quality web pages with a good website navigation and optimized web page content. Make sure that all web page elements contain the right information so that Google will list your website for the right keywords.
• Try to get high quality links to your website. The more high quality links your website has, the less impact have links from spammy websites.

To get an overview of the websites that link to your website, select IBP > Links > Add sites > Find existing backlinks to your site in our SEO tool IBP. IBP will show you the URL of the web page that links to you, the anchor text, the PageRank, TrafficRank and IP address of the linking pages and more.

IBP will also show you the websites that link to your competitors, blogs that could link to your website and much more.

With the growth in popularity of high-end mobile phones with full (HTML) Internet browsers, like the iPhone and phones running Android, advertisers are increasingly extending their campaigns to mobile devices. Because these devices offer a rich content experience similar to desktop, advertising on them is a natural extension for many advertisers.

Today we’re launching a new feature for AdSense mobile publishers that will allow you to take advantage of the high-end mobile phone browsing experience. This feature offers publishers the ability to run larger AdSense ads visible on high-end phones. Before this launch, AdSense mobile publishers were only eligible to serve smaller text and image ads on their website content.

We’ve done this by introducing a new JavaScript snippet that is easy to implement and specifically optimized for mobile to reduce latency on high-end mobile phones. Furthermore, this new snippet will allow publishers to select additional ad unit sizes from common AdSense formats.

However, if you’re targeting all mobile devices, or if you’re unable to make changes to your website, you don’t have to update your AdSense code in order to enable larger AdSense ads to show on high-end devices. We’ll automatically detect if the user is browsing with a high-end phone, and instead of serving a smaller mobile WAP ad, we’ll return a larger ad optimized for high-end mobile devices.

For more information on earning money from your mobile content or to get started with mobile AdSense, visit the Help Center or check out past posts on the Google Mobile Blog.

There are a few things that you can do to show search engines that your website is trustworthy:

1. Get links from seed sites or from websites that are linked from seed sites

Seed sites are websites that are manually marked as trustworthy by the search engine owners. For example, if Apple.com has been chosen as a seed website by the search engine a link from Apple.com will have a positive effect on the TrustRank of your website. If Apple.com links to website X, website X links to website Y and website Y links to your website then your website will still get a good TrustRank.

2. Get an old domain name with a good domain history

The older your domain is, the better. If your domain has been online for several years, this is a signal that the website owner is serious about the site and it’s less likely that the domain is used for spamming purposes. Your domain name should not have changed the owner too often and it should not have been used for many different topics. Of course, it also should not have been used by spammers in the past.

3. Get links from related websites

Does your website get links from related websites and does it link to other related websites? Is your website a lonely island with no links from and to other websites or is it integrated in a network that deals with a special topic?

4. Don’t link to spam websites

You should not link to websites that are known spammers or to websites with dubious quality. If you link to such a website, you show search engines that you support them and that your own website should not be trusted too much.

5. Get many links from social networks

The more often your website is mentioned on social media websites, the more likely it is that your website is a trustworthy high quality website. The more votes your bookmarks on social media sites get, the better.

6. Offer good content and stay away from certain topics

It is not likely that a website that consists of only one page is an authority website. If your website has many pages that contain great content about a special topic then it is much easier to get a good TrustRank. If your website deals with a special topic, then it’s likely that it never will get a high TrustRank. These topics are the topics for which you receive the most spam emails.

If search engines trust your website, it is much easier to get high rankings

Does Google care about the position of a web page on your server? Does it make a difference if a web page is in the root directory of your website or in a sub directory? How does your URL structure influence the position of your web pages in Google’s search results?

Trailing slashes and sub directories

A popular assumption is that Google prefers pages that are in the root directory of a website. If an URL contains many trailing slashes (meaning the page is placed in a sub-sub-directory) then Google might not think that the page is important in relation to the other pages. Although this statement is often repeated in SEO forums, it is probably not true.

The visibility of a web page counts, not its position

If a web page is linked throughout your website and if the page has inbound links then the web page will be indexed and ranked by Google without any problems. Most web pages on today’s websites are created dynamically and the URL that is displayed in a web browser presents only a virtual site structure that is not really available on the server. As there are no real folders on the server, search engines won’t find a valuable ranking signal if they look at things like presence or absence of directories.

What does this mean for your website?

If you want to show search engines that a page on your website is important, link to it from many other pages of your website so that it can easily be found. A page that gets many links (both from your own website and from other websites) will get the attention that it deserves from Google’s indexing robot. When you should care about the structure of your URLs

1. URL stripping can cause problems

Rumor has it that Google uses URL stripping to index web pages. That means that Google shortens the path to an URL to find new pages on a site. For example, “www.example.com/folder/keyword.htm” would be shortened to “www.example.com/folder/”. If you use dynamically created URLs then you should make sure that all virtual folders return real web pages a “404 not found” pages. Otherwise, Google might think that you have many faulty pages and/or that your website has a low quality.

2. Shorter URLs can be better for your website visitors

Although most web surfers don’t pay attention to the URL in the browser address bar, shorter URLs can enhance the user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to remember and they can improve the direct type-in traffic.

3. Short URLs get more clicks

A search marketing study found out that web surfers clicked short URLs twice as often as long URLs in Google’s search results. Long URLs are cut off in Google search engine result pages. Web surfers cannot see where they are going to go and this can decrease the click-through rate.

4. The URLs of your web pages can contain your keywords

The words that appear in the URL of a web page can influence the position of the web page for these words. For that reason, it can make sense to rewrite your URLs so that they include the keywords for which you want to have high rankings.

Most people think that Google purely ranks websites by using mathematical formulas. Google even has an official statement about the way that search results are calculated:

“A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted.”

Not everything is done by software robots at Google
If you read the above quotation carefully, you’ll see that Google relies “heavily” but not fully on computer algorithms. In a recent interview, Google’s Engineering director Scott Huffman explained that a lot of human reviewers (probably 10,000) manually review Google’s results:

“Every day, we are looking at a random sample of grades that we think represent the queries we get from users. Evaluators look at the quality of each result relative to those queries.”

Real people take a look at Google’s search results and they tell Google which websites they don’t like. If your website looks spammy, it might be reported to Google by these people.

Google’s algorithm is constantly changing

Google constantly updates its algorithm based on the feedback of the human reviewers:

“The evaluation site ratings that we gather never directly affect the search results that we return. We never go back and say, ‘Oh, we learned from a rater that this result isn?t as good as that one, so let’s put them in a different order.’ Doing something like that would skew the whole evaluation by-and-large. So we never touch it.”

That means that a website won’t be automatically removed from the search results if a human reviewer finds it inappropriate (unless it is an obvious spam page).

It does mean that Google’s algorithm is constantly changing and that you have to keep your website up-to-date with Google’s latest algorithm.

You have to keep an eye on your website rankings

A website that has high rankings on Google today might lose these rankings tomorrow based on Google’s ever-changing ranking algorithm.

As a rule of thumb, websites with many inbound links and good content that is related to the searched keyword will remain much longer in Google’s search results than websites that obtained their high rankings through tricks.

If you use spammy SEO methods, you can quickly get high rankings on search engines. Unfortunately, Google will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods:

Spammy websites can be detected by Google’s human reviewers and your competitors can report your spam website to Google. If you use ethical SEO methods, it will take longer until you get high search engine rankings. However, your rankings will grow steadily and you’ll get a much better performance in the long run:

Do not use spammy SEO methods to increase your rankings on Google. It will backfire on you. If you want to get lasting rankings on Google, you have to keep an eye on Google’s changing algorithm. You should check your website regularly to find out if it is compliant to Google’s current algorithm. If you create a website that is compliant to Google’s algorithm and only use ethical SEO methods then your website will get page one rankings on Google and it will keep these rankings as long as possible.

GOOGLE has struck a deal to include its Chrome web browser with Sony computers, the first of its kind for the search giant. The deal could expand the reach of Google’s fledgling browser which lags behind Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox in market share.

Google spokesperson Eitan Bencuya said the deal with Sony would go into effect this summer, but declined to discuss specifics. Google said the company was exploring ways to make Chrome accessible to more people. “We are in the process of testing one such channel with Sony,” it said. The deal with Sony was first reported by the Financial Times.

Sony trails computer giants like Hewlett-Packard Company and Dell in terms of sales, failing to rank in the top five vendors by worldwide shipments in the second quarter, according to research firm IDC. But Mr Bencuya said Google was looking at striking similar deals with other computer makers as well.

Google introduced Chrome in September 2008 and remains a distant number four player in the browser market, with a 2.59 per cent worldwide share in July according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominates the browser market with 67.7 per cent, followed by Mozilla Firefox with 22.5 per cent and Apple Safari with 4 per cent.

“The sitelinks for Wikipedia results are special because Google doesn’t send you to a different page, but to a section of the article. This is especially useful for long articles that include a lot of information. It’s the first time when Google indexes URLs that include anchors and sends you directly to a section from a page. The feature has already been available at Yahoo Search and Live Search.”  more>>

Who Owns Who

• Yahoo! owns AllTheWeb, Lycos and AltaVista. Yahoo! also owns and uses Inktomi’s technology and database for all the partnering engines under its wing.
• Google partners with AOL, it is also a major result provider for many large engines because of its own cutting-edge technology (Netscape, Ask.com, Iwon).
• Live Search does not own anybody and uses its own database (since February, 2005).

LONG-running rumours about a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo may finally come true tomorrow. The two companies have apparently agreed to team up against Google with an online search and advertising partnership. The deal is expected to be formally announced within today.

If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword, you must optimize one of your web pages for that keyword. If one of your web pages has been optimized for a keyword, then Google will return it in the search results.  Unfortunately, there are many websites that target the same keywords as your website. If more than one website has been optimized for a keyword then Google will list the web pages with the best inbound links in the top 10 results.

For example, if 20 websites have been optimized for the keyword “green widgets” then the website that has the most inbound links that use the text “green widgets” as the link text will get the best position on Google.  If your website meets all on-page requirements and has the right kind of links (which does not mean that it must have the most links) then Google will list your website on the first result page.