Online Marketing Blog » Search Engine

3 Ways Google is Expected to Fight Spam Sites in 2011

George — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:40:23 +0000

Google have recently announced that they are going to fight search engine spam much stronger than before. They have been testing various changes which would help in the lowering the spam level. One of these changes is aimed at sites which have no original content or sites which copy content from other sites. They also plan to give options for users to give feedback about spammy and sites with low quality.

As per a recent article that I found on the net, Google is mainly concentrating on 3 major ways by which it could fight the spam sites in 2011 and are listed below.

1) Down Rank the Content Farms
There are a lot of websites with low quality content which have been created with the sole purpose of getting clicks for AdSense ads. Such low quality website would face a hard time in the coming months as they would probable be down ranked by Google.
Google has received a lot of feedback from users regarding the issues with web sites having low quality and spammy content. Such web site with content farms aimed at getting Adsense click may soon lose its ranking on Google.

2) Enabling Users to Tag Other Websites as Spam
Google also plans to provide the users the ability to tag other websites as spam if they find that they are irrelevant. By giving the users the chance to blacklists domains, users might get rid of these irrelevant sites from their own search results.

3) Devaluing Content Cloned Sites
Cloning the content of a website is one of the dirtiest ways that is being used by a majority of spammers in the hope of getting better rankings. As per Google some of the spammers even copied content for their website from Google groups and their sites got higher ranking than the original Google group content.

Blekko – The New Search Engine To Watch Out For

George — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 14:35:48 +0000

Blekko is a new search engine that launched recently and is aiming for the third position in the search market. It has certain unique features which even the search giant Google does not possess and these qualities make Blekko a hot favorite for becoming the top search engine. It is considered to be a search engine that has the potential to eliminate spams and irrelevant results due to its advanced features. You have the option to register with Blekko and this will help you to get more relevant results based on your preferences.

One of the best features they have introduced is the SlashTags which are tags used to refine the search results and return more relevant searches. There are inbuilt SlashTags which is created by Blekko itself and you can also create your own SlashTAgs. To create your own SlashTags you need to be logged in. You can get more idea regarding this once you start using Blekko.

Apart from the SlashTags some other interesting features of Blekko are the options to tag a search result, get SEO data, gets links to a particular page, cached version, IP information, get info about the site and spam reporting. These are some features that are missing in the other major search engines and this makes Blekko stand out.

The “tag” option is simply to create the slashtags the matches you search result and the “SEO” data provides you informative SEO data such as the number of inbound links, crawls stats, site pages, duplicate content etc. These datas are very much helpful for those who are really concerned about search engine ranking. The “Links” option provides details about the links that point to a particular URL in the search results and the “Cache” shows the cached version of the page. There is also a feature named “ip” which shows the ip address of a particular website. The “info” feature provides a brief description about the site and the “spam” link helps you to mark the result as spam. Once you mark it as spam, you will not see that result ever in your search results.

Since Blekko has many advanced features which the other major search engines do not possess, it is to be seen that how the major search engine respond to the threat posed by Blekko.

How The Ad Impressions are Counted in Google Instant Search

George — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:27:25 +0000

As I have mentioned in my earlier blog post, Google Instant is one of the biggest change in Google’s user interface and is expected to throw some interesting surprises in the coming days. Google Instant is aimed at making the search more faster and get precise results.

There were many questions and concerns regarding many aspects of Online marketing since the launch of Google Instant.

One of the major question was how the Ad impressions were counted in Google Instant Search. This question was thrown seriously by many of the online marketing professionals and Google was quite generous to provide a simple answer to this question. Google has explained clearly about the way and situations on how the Ad impressions are counted and is listed below.

When someone searches anything using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:
1) When a user starts to type a search query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page, an Ad impression is counted. The click can be on a search results, an Ad, a spell correction or a related search.

2) When a users chooses or selects a particular query by pressing the search button, Enter Key or selecting any of the predicted queries.

3) When the users stops typing a query and the results on the pages are displayed for atleast 3 seconds.

The Google Instant search results may cause an increase or decrease on the ad impression level, but Google has recommended to monitor the ad’s performance in the same way that we used to before. Google Instant search results also helps in improving the quality of the clicks as it helps the users by connecting them with the answers they need most.

Yet Another New Rich Snippet by Google!!

George — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:18:06 +0000

Google has introduced yet another Rich Snippet yesterday which is sure to enhance your pages on Google’s search results. This new Rich Snippet format is aimed at supporting events. The new snippet will include the links to the specific events along with its date and location, which can help the users in a big way. This new rich snippet is sure to get you more relevant clicks and also helps users to find information more quicker. This would also lift the user experience to new levels.

Google recommends to markup event information using hCalendar microformat standard in the body of a website. Doing this helps Google to identify event information and make it display in the search results. One thing that we need to take care is that just marking up the informations does not guarantee your event information on the search results. This is just in its initial stage and is not available with all the websites and we can expect Google to roll out this feature to more websites in the coming days.

As with Google Site Links and Breadcrumbs, the Event links helps you to get more links and clicks from search results page. To markup the event you can use the events documentation provided by Google.

Google’s Breadcrumbs in SERPs

George — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:34:16 +0000

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in the SERPs is another useful element for the webmasters as well as for those who are searching something on Google. Breadcrumbs are usually the hierarchical display that is used to show site navigation. eg. Main Page > Services > Service 1. The use of breadcrumbs in Google’s SERP which was started a few weeks back is still in its initial stage and is not used with all the URLS.

As far as researches are considered, site architecture will play a major role in the future for obtaining breadcrumbs and Site Links. Having breadcrumbs for your site in the SERPs would increase more visibility to your pages and thereby more traffic. It also helps the surfers to go to the most desired section of the website. In short if you manage to get breadcrumbs for your website in SERPs you will be getting more links and click from the SERPs.

As per Google’s Matt Cutts, a webmaster should try to have a set of delimited links on his site which accurately reflects the site’s hierarchy. By doing this the website will be having more chances of breadcrumbs appearing in its search results. A lot of webmasters have reported increase in their search engine traffic since breadcrumbs appeared in their search results.

Going forward, it is sure that webmasters would keep the breadcrumbs thing in their mind while designing and planning the architecture of their website. The breadcrumbs would also have a great influence on the SEO of websites and cannot be ignored. So create a website with good navigational structure, breadcrumbs, user interface and expect your site to have the breadcrumbs in the Google SERPs.

Google not Ranking Top for “Search Engine” in Google

George — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:08:40 +0000

Another interesting thing that I noticed in Google today was Google is not even being ranked on top for the keyword “search engine” and “search engines”. This is one of the interesting things, taking into the fact that Google is the king among search engines and it is not even having top ranking for that keyword in its own search engine. It is high time that Google take this into account and at least place it on the top results for the above search terms. I am not sure why this is happening and the sites which show on the top for those keywords are Dogpile, Altavista, Ask etc.