Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results

Google would only show up to two results from the same domain on a single search result page. Now, Google has confirmed what many are seeing, where a single brand dominates a single page of Google’s search results.

This is not a bug, this is not an anomaly, it is an intentional change to Google’s ranking algorithm. Google said:

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.

What I find interesting is the last statement by Google:

We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

Remember, Google’s Peter Norvig who said, “for the second one [search result], you don’t want something that’s almost the same as the first. You prefer some diversity, so there’s where minority views start coming in.” You prefer diversity. Google is clearly saying that a result from the same site can still be diverse and different enough, even if there are ten results, all from the same site.

On the reputation management front, this is a clear winner for those with reputation management issues.


Source : searchengineland.com

Monitoring Backlinks

When you set up a web presence, one of the things you want to do is start getting backlinks. They help your search engine ranking, and the more places that link to you, the more people can find you. However, not all backlinks are good ones. There are plenty of places where people can trade backlinks or buy backlinks, and a lot of those places just offer spam. Link farms are examples of places you don’t want to find your site listed.

Link farms, and similar sites don’t really provide backlinks that are valuable, but inexperienced website owners may think that just having a lot of backlinks will be enough. When they dodo not start  seeing a lot of improvements on their site stats and traffic, they get upset – but they don’t understand that they’re hurting themselves by creating a lot of backlinks that aren’t beneficial to their websites or targeted to their niches. That’s why the ability to monitor your backlinks is so very important.

Anyone who decides to monitor backlinks should know that there are plenty of options for doing that. Some of them are free, and some of them cost money.  Yahoo Site Explorer is free and it works as well as or better than others I have seen This tool allows you to see how many sites are linking to you, who is linking to you and what they are linking to.  One thing that Yahoo Site Explorer does not do is take data points and track the link velocity. Remember that everything is relative as the Search Engines are comparing and ranking for relevance on a keyword-for-keyword basis.  Generally speaking the higher the quantity of naturally occurring targeted backlinks you have along with the higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher you will rank for targeted terms.  We suggest Yahoo Site Explorer because it seems to count many links that Google either doesn’t wish to count or divulge. We also recommend Link Velocity Tool as you can track competitors and take data points. This allows you to go back and see what your backlink count was at a specific point and time in the past.

Monitoring your backlinks is important. If you don’t monitor them, how will you know who’s linking to you and what content they like on your site? When you monitor backlinks, you don’t do it just because it’s the thing to do or you’ve been told by other people that you should. You do it because you want to use that information to make yourself more successful. There are plenty of ways to gain success on the Internet, but ignoring backlinks because you don’t see their value isn’t one of them. It’s much better to learn all you can and get all the data you can get about your website, so you can make good choices for its future.

It’s also important to understand the quality and quantity of your backlinks are a deciding factor when search engines determine where to place your page in search results. If many people who have ‘web cred’ are linking to you, it tells search engines that your site is valuable, and it will be ranked higher.

Not everyone monitors their backlinks with the competitors in mind, but you can certainly do that if you want to. Try our Link Velocity Tool.  You can monitor the relative speed of backlink growth between you and those competitive websites that you are interested in.  It’s a way of monitoring all of your important players while keeping a close eye on your long term online objectives.


Source : website-marketing-pros.com

Google Advertising Professionals Program Is Going To Be Replaced By Google AdWords Certification

Google’s longstanding Google Advertising Professionals program is going away, to be replaced with a new Google Adwords Certification program, Google has announced. The change means those certified through GAP will have six months to recertify under the new program. The change may also allow more companies to gain certification, as the overall required spend level has been lowered. More below.

Google Advertising Professionals launched in 2004 and is being phased out in place of the Google AdWords Certification program. Part of this change is to offer more training materials, more challenging certification exams, offer more advanced exams to test search, display, reporting and analysis and a shiny redesigned Certified Partner badge.

This change means that those who want to be individually certified now need to pass two exams. Companies wanting to be certified need to have one individually certified employee and have a spend of $10,000 per quarter.

Google is also relaunching the AdWords Professionals Search, which quietly went live in December 2009. The new name for the search is the Google Partner Search.

Google has also changed the pricing of their AdWords API usage structure. There is now a new preferred pricing section that takes you through to see if you qualify. This means some developers will get free API units based on managed client spend. You are eligible to apply for preferred pricing if your company is a Google AdWords Certified Partner and AdWords API-based tools remain in compliance with the AdWords API terms and conditions, including the required minimum functionality. More details on this at the AdWords API Blog and AdAge has some other details on this as well.

Postscript: I asked Google what happens to those GAP certified advertisers, do they lose their certification? Google sent me the following reply:

Yup, they’re still certified. That said, partners who are GAP certified will have to meet the new criteria, along with new terms and conditions, within a six-month period.
To be certified, each company must have one employee who has passed the Google Advertising Fundamentals exam, along with one Advanced exam (there are now four exams which cover a range of topics — Google Advertising Fundamentals, Advanced Search Advertising, Advanced Display Advertising, and Advanced Reporting and Analysis — instead of one broad exam). Additionally, the company must reach a 90-day minimum spend criteria of $10,000 USD or currency equivalent — which was previously $100k — and agree to new terms and conditions.

The GAP exam always had to be renewed every two years. The broad AdWords Certification exam (Google Advertising Fundamentals) is still valid for two years. However, the the advanced exams (Advanced Search Advertising, Advanced Display Advertising, Advanced Reporting and Analysis) that must be renewed annually, so it won’t be constant re-certification.

Google sent over more details about the terms for individual certification:

• The spend requirement has been removed (formerly $1,000 USD over 90 days).
• Individuals must achieve a passing score on two exams — Google Advertising Fundamentals, along with one advanced-level exam — as opposed to one exam.
• Formerly, these people were designated as a Google Qualified Individual. Now, they are Individually Qualified in Google AdWords.
• Individual badges will be phased out and replaced with certificates and an individual profile page hosted by Google – see example 
 

Source : Search Engine Land 

Twitter Hacked by DoS-Denial of Service Attack

According to the Associated Press, Twitter reported in its blog that the company is currently busy staving off a denial-of-service attack that was launched Thursday by an unknown group of hackers.

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a method where hackers commandeer computers and flood the targeted Web site with communication requests, forcing it shut down and reset. While a DoS attack is underway, the Web site either becomes unavailable to legitimate users or responds so slowly that the Web site times out and becomes unusable.

CNet reports that Twitter began suffering problems around 6 A.M PDT.

“We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly,” the company posted at 6:43 A.M PDT on their blog.

Around 7:49 A.M, Twitter updated users on the microblog’s status, saying that they were “defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly.”

AlertSite, a firm that monitors Web site performance, had only 40 percent availability at 8:00 A.M, but was still widely inaccessible to most users.

According to the Los Angeles Times, at 9:47 A.M PDT, Twitters updated their status with a notice that read, “As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.”

Currently, the top trending topics on Twitter include “DoS” and “Denial-of-Service”.

Twitter is a famous social networking services available on the Internet and have millions of registered users, including Hollywood celebrities, famous business mans, politicians etc.

Another popular social networking site, Facebook, was also the victim of a similar attack this morning.

Earlier this week, the popular blog network Gawker Media was targeted by a DoS attack that was able to knock it off the Internet for a brief period of time..

According to PC Pro, the motive behind the attacks on Twitter, Facebook and Gawker are unknown.

“The question on my mind is - why would someone want to attack Twitter?” asks Graham Cluley, the senior technology consultant at Sophos, a company that specializes in network security, to PC Pro.

“I can’t imagine it’s a commercial competitor of theirs, but it could be someone with a financial motivation (blackmail?) or a teenager in a back bedroom with access to an awfully large botnet.”



Source :- collegenews.com, seoportal.blogspot.com

Google Wants To Save Your Life (Or Help End It)

Pushes Google Health and advance directives

Health issues are highly personal. Some folks, for example, are scared of living for years on end without control of their bodies. Others are terrified that a plug will get pulled moments before they make a total recovery. And a certain search giant thinks both of these attitudes represent great reasons to start using Google Health.

A post on the Official Google Blog tells readers, "An advance directive allows you to determine your end-of-life wishes so that your family and doctor can honor them if you get sick and are unable to communicate." It has the ability to save all sorts of people all sorts of pain, and whatever your age or condition, is something you should consider completing.

Google just wants to make sure its software is part of the equation, and as it turns out, Google Health can now process scanned paper documents.

So the post continues, "Google Health is now working with a leading advance directive provider, Caring Connections, that provides a free, downloadable form customized for all 50 states. To complete your form, download it, print it out, complete it, scan it, and upload it to Google Health. Once you've uploaded the signed form, Google Health makes it easy to share it with your caregiver."

Admittedly, this seems morbid and a bit opportunistic. But the issue's an important one, and this may prove an effective tack for Google to take.

Source :webpronews.com

Google’s Tetris Logo

Google Australia, China and some other places where it’s Saturday already are displaying a special logo doodle celebrating Tetris. The alt text reads “Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect - courtesy of Tetris Holding, LLC”, and the logo is linked to a search for tetris. Wikipedia knows: “Tetris ... is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984”.

And did you know? One of the original makers of Tetris is now working at Google – Google Australia, specifically, on the Google Wave project. Sydney Morning Herald reports: “Vadim Gerasimov was just 15 when he was taken under the wing of two Russian computer engineers – Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky – at the Moscow Academy of Sciences and helped them create Tetris ... Since around 2003 Gerasimov has lived in Australia, where he worked in complex systems research with the CSIRO [Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization] before joining Google about a year and a half ago.”

[Thanks Hebbet, Tom & Tony!]

Google’s Tetris Logo by Philipp Lenssen


Source : blogoscoped.com

Manage Unfollowers with 5 Twitter Tools

Tools to help you take control of your Twitter account.

Twitter has an insurmountable number of various applications from the very useful to the rather comical . It’s hard to weed through and find the true great applications/services.

To better help you in your Twittering efforts, I’ve put together a list of 5 really great tools to help you monitor your followers and unfollowers… since we all know is about that ratio. Hopefully you find the list useful. If there are some I’ve neglected to add or if you know of other ones please leave a comment with a description and a link.

Twellow, The Twitter Yellow Pages, has many features that range from extended profiles to Twellowhood (one of my personal favorite Twitter tools on the Internet).

Mixed in with the plethora of features that Twellow offers is an unsung hero which is just simply called "Followers". With this you can easily see who is reciprocally following you. But, the best part of Followers is... you can follow or unfollow directly from Twellow. No clicking to got back to Twitter, you can get the job done without leaving the page.

Qwitter is a nice little service that emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message, below is an example.

That's pretty much it... no extra frills.

Friend or Follow is pretty self-explanatory, you enter in your Twitter username and it gives you three tabs of information.

Following (who your following, but not following you back), fans (who’s following you, but your not following them back) and friends (people who you follow and they follow you back.

TweetLater is an online service that has an abundance of features ranging from scheduling tweets to Ping.fm integration. They offer a free account as well as a payed professional account.

Buried deep within the features of TweetLater is the option to "Follow those who follow you" and "Unfollow those who unfollow you". This is completely automated and set by the user.

Twitterless is an online service that notifies you when any Twitterer stops following you, and gives you their username. But, they don't stop there. They take it one step further and give you a graphed out "follower history" over a period of time to help you understand where your gaining or losing followers.

They also offer follower filters that give you a more descriptive view of your followers. You can filter in real time and search using keywords to see if your followers are talking about anything that interest you.


Source : webpronews.com