When search engine robots look at a website, the first file they will look at is your robots.txt file. Robots.txt file is small but very crucial for the Search engine to crawl any website. Creating wrong Robots.txt file can badly affect appearance of your web pages search result. Therefore, it’s important that we understand the purpose of robot.txt file and should learn how to check you are using it correctly.   A robox.txt file gives instructions to web robots about the pages which website owner doesn’t want to be crawled. For example, if you do not wish your images to be listed by Google or ...

Google, this week June 11 2014, released Google My Business, a program which has its motto in collecting more business holders under a common sunshade of Google with a one-stop shop for managing their business listings in search, using existing Google+ and more.   Google my business is an approach towards making one’s business management more effortless and profitable by the help of Google itself. Customers are the necessities of an acknowledged business.  The “Google my businesses” has brought tips to make your ventures closer to the customers.   It takes into account updating your business p...

  "Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased … Don't offer money or product to others to write reviews for your business or write negative reviews about a competitor. We also discourage specialized review stations or kiosks set up at your place of business for the sole purpose of soliciting reviews." These are the review sites you've probably heard of, but may have lolly-gagged to get on. If you want to give your business a quick online reputation audit, checking out how your business fares on these sites (and setting up profiles if you haven't already) is a great place to st...

If you are a keen and attentive visitor to the ever changing SEO world, you must have gone over the changes in past year and a half. So now that you know that link removal is all it takes to identify and get rid of those harmful backlinks, you can certainly refer a number of online tutorials explaining how to go about identifying and getting rid of harmful backlinks. If you have the tools, time, patience, and the most important - ability to follow step-by-step articles, then backlink cleanup has to be done; even if it's arduous. However, online tutorials usually do not guide you on when to cle...

Matt Cutts, the Google head of search spam, recently released a detailed video that involves the criteria by Google Web spam team - to determine whether a link is considered a paid link or not.   Five basic criteria are set by the SEO team - are supposed to be used by Google in link type determination. While the first one is quite obvious, others are relatively less obvious.   1. Explicit Link Sales The most obvious links are those that are explicitly sold for money. A webmaster sells certain link to another webmaster in exchange for a specific payment in dollars. This is the most clear and co...

New York Times published a report on Google+ on last Friday - that highlighted that Starbucks and The Economist use Google+ in order impact their search efforts rather than just for being socially active and visible. According to Alex Wheeler, the vice president of global digital marketing Starbucks, while posting something on Google+, they think more about how would the post relate to search efforts.   Starbucks has around three million Google+ followers; while its Facebook page has got 36 million 'likes'. Starbucks often updates its Google+ page in order to achieve good search placement and ...

Are you struggling hard to figure out how you should market your business with the help of social media channels? Why not try Google+? It's a great option today to market you business - around 50% of companies today have rated Google+ as an important means contributing to their business marketing. This social channel has significantly helped 15% of marketers acquire substantial customer base in 2013.   Google+ till date has attracted 500 million registered users. With its high impact on and integration with Google assets such as Google search, it is no wonder, becoming a valuable marketin...

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, recently announced that Google has crashed one more 'link network' in the line - 'Buzzea'; a French network.  He  confi rmed this on Twitter. Google has taken this action on Buzzea, for not following Google's quality guidelines                 .   The addition to this announcement was that the next target for call out by Google would be German link networks! Matt hinted this upcoming action on Twitter - “today France; Germany soon."   This is the latest call out in a long number of link networks that Google has been going one after one over the course ...

Are you aware of Google authorship? It is nothing but a way to link whatever content you create with Google+ profile. It allows your content to appear in Google search results with the headshot image (your photo) next to it.   When your article or blog content displays your photo besides it, it leads to an improved click through rate - which is ultimately helpful for your personal branding. In the form of author rich snippets, Google enables you to add extra information. The only requirement is your Google+ profile. As a part of search results, your snippet would display the number of people y...

It’s natural and common that people link between their sites. However, Google’s dial is way high for link networks; and thus, optimizing links between your sites anymore could make you appear to be a network.   Google has called out removal of another link network - which is popularly being known as Anglo Rank.   Matt Cutts - the head of search span of Google - announced Google's action against another link network via a couple of tweets. To put it simple - Google has taken action against “several thousand” link sellers that were part of a link network that bought and sold links that pass Page...

It's a totally unexpected PageRank update for Webmasters - before the year end! No one had expected a new Google Toolbar PageRank update after the recent one in February, 2013.   Toolbar PageRank is the ‘simplification of real PageRank' – which is a complex algorithm. Google usually throws a new PR update on quarterly basis.   Here is the list of earlier PR updates from Google: 4 February 2013 7 November 2012 2 August 2012 2 May 2012 7 February 2012 7 November 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 January 2011 April 2010 Dec 31, 2009 30 October 2009 27/28 May 2009 June 2009 1 / 2 April 2009 30-...

Google has rolled out the old manual action viewer in Google Webmaster Tools. There are reports of the new manual action alert - 'image mismatch'!   This manual action is for those images on your site that appear differently - on your site and in Google search engine pages. When the images on your Website do not match what Google is displaying and indexing on the search result pages, the 'image mismatch' manual action comes into picture.   Manual actions are nothing but the penalties from a human reviewer at Google - who has determined certain Websites violating Google's guidelines and/or has ...

Google+ had started supporting hashtags in the month of May; however the company recently announced that Google Search will now allow its users to search for Google+ posts by using these hashtags. Now when you can see a little bit of Google+ in every product of Google, no wonder the Google+ hashtags too are making their way into other Google products.     Hashtags are basically useful in Google+; they enable you to find and manage the posts that use them. So if you now enter your search query on Google for a hashtag, you may see the latest feature to the right side of the regular sea...

A number of advertisers have been advertising by adding certain visual informative elements to the search ads along with the features such as product listing ads, media ads, and image extensions; that appear only in response to some branded product queries. Google has now announced its experiment with enormous banner advertisements associated with brands. Introduction of banner advertisements is a significant change for the company and such ads may lead to generate more traffic to the respective advertisers compared to that through traditional advertising. However, this would take the desired ...

Google uses PageRank, an algorithm to rank various websites in Google web search engine results. It’s a great way that measures the importance of Web pages and used to occur at the interval of three months since 2009. However, it has been eight months after the last update occurred; Google Toolbar PageRank Update is not seen. According to Google, there won't be any more Google Toolbar PageRank update this year.   Matt Cutts, the head of Google search spam, declared on Twitter about not pushing out the new Google Toolbar Update this time.   In late 2011, Google users observed an update to the q...

A new search algorithm was revealed on the 15th birthday of Google - Hummingbird! This algorithm is specially designed to receive more precise and faster query results; and this why is named 'Hummingbird'. Unlike most of previous search algorithms, this one is totally based on semantic search. It emphasises on user intent versus individual search terms. The announcement of this new algorithm quite stirred both worlds; technology and SEO. It is currently influencing around 90% of the worldwide searches via Google.   Hummingbird brings to you a lot of improvement in Google search with some ...

Google keeps changing its search algorithm every year and this change could be approximately 500-600 times. However, most of these changes are minor. Google also calls out the major update that seems to significantly affect the search engine results. One of these major updates is Google Penguin which was very first announced on April 24, 2012 (Penguin 1). All those Websites that seem to violate the rules and regulations of Google Webmaster have to face significant drops in their search engine rankings after this Penguin update.   Here is when the immediate next Penguin updates were released:  ...

Are you a small business yearning for a robust online presence? Are you eager to reach your potential customers by securing top positions on popular search engines? That's where the magic of SEO comes into play. However, we understand that for many small in-house businesses, SEO packages can be quite costly.  Affordable SEO Company in Melbourne Webplanners, a leading SEO firm located in Melbourne, dedicated to crafting customised marketing and SEO strategies tailored to suit businesses of all kinds. We take pride in offering affordable SEO services specifically designed for small businesses al...

This is the digital Web world and almost everyone looks on Internet for whatever to check out or purchase. Internet has become the largest and easiest platform for both, buyers and sellers. So when customers are taking advantage of being online, why not take the same advantage as a business? No matter how small scale your business is, you can always create your strong presence and reach larger mass and largest markets. Being online and performing search engine optimisation can take your business site to the top rankings of search engines. This ultimately ends up in grabbing maximum number of c...

Many small business owners can't afford professional SEO services and look out for cheaper alternatives to market their products and services for gaining more publicity and traffic online. However, SEO is much more powerful than any other online marketing alternative and thus, hiring professional SEO services has become quite essential for small businesses too. There are many companies in market that offer SEO at low costs.   Unlike only search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and advertising involve great costs. Thus, investment is must while opting for professional SEO services. ...