wordsfinder weblog

Spam links DO NOT hurt your ranking

2008-08-28 04:01:35

From Google :

I wouldn\'t really worry about spam sites hurting your ranking by linking to you, as we understand that you can\'t (for the most part) control who links to your sites. However, there is some action you can take if you come across spam in Google\'s index. The preferred method of reporting spam to us is by clicking on "Report spam in our index" while logged into Webmaster Tools. If you don\'t have a Webmaster Tools account, you can use our non-authenticated spam report form: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Microsoft adCenter Excel Plugin

2008-08-28 04:00:53

There is a new keyword tool out there better than the usual overture and our traffic estimator tool.

It is an excel 2007 plugin that does:

Keyword Expansion – we have included 3 different expansion algorithms: campaign association, fast contained, and category simulation
Keyword Search Volume Historical and Forecast – we have included daily and monthly keyword traffic data, including forecasting
Keyword Buzz – you can find buzz keywords in our 300+ verticals
Keyword Demographic analysis
Keyword Geographic analysis
Keyword Categorization
Keyword Monetization – you can find all monetization information (CPC, CTR, etc.) for your keyword list

You can download it from this here. MSN hasn\'t made the tool easy to find. :(

I definitely recommend giving it a try. You’ll need Excel 2007 to run it. The best part - it’s free.

Intelligence Alert

2008-08-24 12:04:38

Share your thoughts.

FREE Press releases distribution sites.

2008-08-19 05:31:01

This post has been written by Stephen a dear SEO friend. He loves free press release dot com. I had good results with pressbox and promotionworld. Don't be put off by the quite horrible look of these sites. After all web 2.0 look and feel could be expensive !

www.free-press-release.com
www.e-xl.com
www.inthepress.ru
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.press-world.com/add
www.pr-inside.com
boingboing.net/suggest.html
www.sanepr.com/submitpressrelease.cfm
EzineArticles.com
searchenginewatch.com
www.seo-blog.com
www.promotionworld.com/submit/submitcontent.html

Frank's top 20 Free Press Release Distribution Sites

2008-08-19 05:27:47

We’ve gathered 20+ sites that will help you with getting your press release out in the world for free.

24-7PressRelease.com - Free release distribution with ad-support

1888PressRelease.com - Free distribution, paid services gives you better placement and permanent archiving.

ClickPress.com - Distributs to sites like Google News and Topix.net, Gold level will also get you to sites like LexisNexis.

EcommWire.com - Focuses on ecommerece and requires you include an image, 3 keywords and links.

Express-Press-Release.com - Free distribution company with offices in 12 states.

Free-Press-Release.com - Easy press release distribution for free, more features for paid accounts.

Free-Press-Release-Center.info - Distributes your release, offers a web page with one keyword link to your site. Pro upgrade will give you three links, permanent archiving and more.

I-Newswire.com - Allows for free distribution to sites and search engines, premium membership differs only slightly in adding in graphics.

NewswireToday.com - All the usual free distribution tools, premium service includes logo, product picture and more.

PR.com - Not only will they distribute your press releases, but you can also set up a full company profile.

PR9.net - Ad supported press distribution site.

PR-Inside.com - European-based free press release distribution site.

PRBuzz.com - Completely free distribution to search engines, news sites, and blogs.

PRCompass.com - Distribute your press release with a free or paid version, others can vote it up ala Digg style.

PRUrgent.com - Not only distributes your release, but attempts to teach you how to write one, and even offers downloadbale samples for you to work with.

Press-Base.com - Submit your release for free and get on their front page and the category of your choice.

PressAbout.com - A free press release service formatted as a blog.

PressMethod.com - Free press release distribution no matter what, but extra services based on the size of your contribution.

PRLeap.com - Free distribution to search engines, newswires, and RSS feeds. Fee based bumps get you better placement.

PRLog.org - Free distribution to Google News and other other search engines.

TheOpenPress.com - Gives free distribution for plain formatted releases, fees for HTML-coded releases.

We are working on a tool to submitt your PR to all the sites ! It would be another free tool. Get in touch to find out more.

google webmaster tool new API

2008-07-23 09:54:06

What is the Webmaster Tools API?

Google Webmaster Tools is Google\'s free service for webmasters. See your site as Google sees it, find out any problems we had crawling your site, and share info with us that will help improve your site\'s visibility in Google\'s search results.

Your client application can use the Webmaster Tools Data API to view sites in your Webmaster Tools account, add and remove sites, verify site ownership, and submit and delete Sitemaps.

Link on how to integrate the webmaster with your CMS / application :

http://code.google.com/apis/webmastertools/docs/reference.html

How Google PR works from a Google employee

2008-07-23 09:09:24

Technologies behind Google rankingIn my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See "Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview" for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations.

Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. We work hard to fulfill the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade we have pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions.

When we talk about queries at Google, we use square brackets [ ] to mark the beginning and end of queries (see "How to write queries" by Matt Cutts), a notation I will use throughout this post. (Pages and search results change frequently, so in time, some examples used here may not behave as explained.)

Understanding pages: Over years we have invested heavily in our crawl and indexing system. As a result we have a very large and very fresh index. In addition to size and freshness, we have improved our index in other ways. One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. We find the official homepage for Sprovieri Gallery in London for the Italian query [galleria sprovieri londra], even though the official page does not have either London or Londra on it. In the U.S., a user searching for [cool tech pc vancouver, wa] finds the homepage www.cooltechpc.com even though the page does not mention anywhere that they are in Vancouver, WA. Other technologies we have developed include distinctions between important and less important words in the page and the freshness of the information on the page.

Understanding queries: It is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system.

Most users have used our spelling suggestion system at one time or another. It knows that someone searching for [kofee annan] is really searching for Mr. Kofi Annan, and is prompted: Did you mean: kofi annan; whereas someone searching for [kofee beans] is actually looking for coffee beans. Doing this internationally with very high accuracy is hard, and we do it well.

Synonyms are the foundation of our query understanding work. This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don\'t want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don\'t even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word \'Dr\' in the query [Dr Zhivago] stands for Doctor whereas in [Rodeo Dr] it means Drive. A user looking for [back bumper repair] gets results about rear bumper repair. For [Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query query [b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada. We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of.

Another technology we use in our ranking system is concept identification. Identifying critical concepts in the query allows us to return much more relevant results. For example, our algorithms understand that in the query [new york times square church] the user is looking for the well-known church in Times Square and not for articles from the New York Times. We don\'t just stop at identifying concepts; we further enhance the query with the right concepts when, for instance, someone looking for [PC and its impact on people] is in fact looking for impact of computers on society, or someone who searches for [rainforest instructional activities for vocabulary] is really looking for rain forest lesson plans. Our query analysis algorithms have many such state-of-the-art techniques built into them, and once again, we do this internationally in almost every language we serve.

Understanding users: Our work on interpreting user intent is aimed at returning results people really want, not just what they said in their query. This work starts with a world class localization system, and adds to it our advanced personalization technology, and several other great strides we have made in interpreting user intent, e.g. Universal Search.

Our clear focus on "best locally relevant results served globally" is reflected in our work on localization. The same query typed in multiple countries may deserve completely different results. A user looking for [bank] in the US should get American banks, whereas a user in the UK is either looking for the Bank Fashion line or for British financial institutions. The results for this query should return local financial institutions in other English speaking countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. The fun really starts when this query is typed in non-English-speaking countries like Egypt, Israel, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland. Likewise the query [football] refers to entirely different sports in Australia, the UK, and the US. These examples mostly show how we get the localized version of the same concept correctly (financial institution, sport, etc.). However, the same query can mean entirely different things in different countries. For example, [Côte d\'Or] is a geographic region in France - but it is a large chocolate manufacturer in neighboring French-speaking Belgium; and yes, we get that right too :-).

Personalization is another strong feature in our search system which tailors search results to individual users. Users who are logged-in while searching and have signed up for Web History get results that are more relevant for them than the general Google results. For example, someone who does a lot football-related searches might get more football related results for [giants], while other users might get results related to the baseball team. Similarly, if you tend to prefer results from a particular shopping site, you will be more likely to get results from that site when you search for products. Our evaluation shows that users who get personalized results find them to be more relevant than non-personalized results.

Another case of user intent can be observed for the query [chevrolet magnum]. Magnum is actually made by Dodge and not Chevrolet. So we present the results for Dodge Magnum with the prompt See results for: dodge magnum in our result set.

Our work on Universal Search is another example of how we interpret user intent to give them what they (sometimes) really want. Someone searching for [bangalore] not only gets the important web pages, they also get a map, a video showing street life, traffic, etc. in Bangalore -- watching this video I almost feel I am there :-) -- and at the time of writing there is relevant news and relevant blogs about Bangalore. Finally let me briefly mention the latest advance we have made in search: Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). CLIR allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google\'s translation technology, we make this information accessible. I call this advance: give me what I want in any language. A user looking for Tony Blair\'s biography in Russia who types the query in Russian [Тони Бл�?р биографи�?] is prompted at the bottom of our results to search the English web with:Similarly a user searching for Disney movie songs in Egypt with the query [أغاني أ�?لام ديزني] is prompted to search the English web. We are very excited about CLIR as it truly brings us closer to our mission to organize the world\'s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I could go on and on showing examples of state-of-the-art technology that we have developed to make our ranking system as good as it is, but the fact is that search is nowhere close to being a solved problem. Many queries still don\'t get satisfactory results from Google, and each such query is an opportunity to improve our ranking system. I am confident that with numerous techniques under development in our group, we will make large improvements to our ranking algorithms in the near future.I hope my two posts about Google ranking have made it clear that we live and breathe search, and we are more passionate than ever about it. Our fervor for serving all our users worldwide is unprecedented. We pride ourselves in running a very good ranking system, and are working incredibly hard every day to make it even better.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Facebook can be used for SEO

2008-07-23 03:50:47

Since Facebook announced that the contents of your Facebook profile would become searchable in popular search engines like Google, Live and Yahoo, it’s given us all opportunities to market our profiles and make ourselves stand out in search results.

This site shows some simple ways of helping you optimise the information you have in Facebook for search engines. It brings together some common information about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and adds in a bit of flavour for making the information in your Facebook compete well in the major search engines.

Starting last week, you can serve XML sitemaps off apps.facebook.com domain, and notify search engines about changes on your pages. Naturally, this works better for pages that display content without requiring logins. (this goes back to an earlier post i did discussing how facebook wants apps to be visible without having to actually add the app).

The best way to SEO your Facebook applications for the major search engines is to register your site with appropriate services:

* Google Webmaster Central
* Yahoo! Search Site Explorer
* Live Search Webmaster Center
* Ask.com Help for Webmasters

News Feed Optimization, on the other hand, is a bit trickier:

Like Google’s PageRank algorithms, Facebook’s proprietary “FeedRank” (my term) algorithms determine which Feed items are shown to whom and which items are not.
Like Google’s undisclosed PageRank algorithm, the variables that contribute to your Feed item’s FeedRank are unknown to you (and everyone except Facebook).
Like companies dependent on their SEO’d Google PageRank, companies dependent on their NFO’d Facebook FeedRank will experience similar trauma when the algorithm unpredictably or inexplicably changes.

Welcome to the new world of NFO–the new SEO for Facebook marketers. Optimizing your product’s News Feed items is the single most important thing you can do as a marketer on Facebook. Not only should Feed items be designed for optimal conversion, but they should also be invoked by your application in ways that will maximize their distribution.

What is the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)

2008-07-23 02:56:00

The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 486 per month and Google displays 214,234 results for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 486 divided by 214,234. In this case, the KEI 0.002.

The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. That means that you might have a better chance of getting to the top.

KEI Guide Score Value
0 - 10 KEI Bad
10 - 50 KEI Good
50 + KEI a devine gift

duplicate content issue - google view

2008-07-21 07:41:22

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

Consider blocking pages from indexing: Rather than letting Google\'s algorithms determine the "best" version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don\'t want us to index the printer versions of your site\'s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
Use 301s: If you\'ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)
Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don\'t link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.
Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We\'re more likely to know that www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than www.example.com/de or de.example.com.
Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you\'d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt.
Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, www.example.com or http://example.com).
Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
Avoid publishing stubs: Users don\'t like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don\'t publish pages for which you don\'t yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use robots.txt to block these from being crawled.
Understand your content management system: Make sure you\'re familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.
Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don\'t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.