Google Improves SEO Service for Webmasters

Google has changed the way its Webmaster Tools SEO service reports site backlinks to include backlinks from a wider spectrum of domains. In the past, webmasters have been able to download a report on 100,000 inbound links arranged in alphabetical order. The issue was that this report gave an incomplete picture of a site’s link profile, as sites with large numbers of backlinks were rarely able to access data for links from the end of the alphabet. The reporting change addresses this issue.

Webmaster Tools team member Yinnon Haviv said on the Google Webmaster Central blog: “Most of the links are now sampled uniformly from the full spectrum of backlinks rather than alphabetically. You’re also more likely to get example links from different top-level domains (TLDs) as well as from different domain names.” This change is likely to result in the availability of a more diverse link profile for sites, though the link report will still be alphabetical. The expanded link range will show links from high-quality domains and also allow webmasters to find and deal with poor-quality inbound links.

This is a major advantage for content marketers and firms looking to provide a good SEO service. Head of Search at theEword Natalie Booth said the change was “likely to prove valuable for those looking to clean up links to their site.”

With recent search algorithm changes, many brands are finding themselves penalized by poor link building practices from the past. Using the updated backlink report means they will have a more realistic assessment of the types of inbound links to their site and whether questionable links represent a high proportion of those links. It will also help SEOs to see how effective their marketing campaigns have been in building quality links and relationships with other authority sites.

The change enhances the utility of Google Webmaster Tools, which helps webmasters optimize the status of their site in Google search. It includes tools to submit a sitemap, check a site’s crawl rate, see broken links and redirects, view keywords searches, work with structured data and check for malware. The Webmaster Tools dashboard also allows Google to communicate suspicious activity that might hurt search rankings to webmasters.

The update complements another recent announcement by the Webmaster Tools team, which allows webmasters to use the new Manual Actions report to see whether any part of their site violates Google’s quality guidelines. Together, both tools should result in clearer information for content marketers and SEOs and cleaner results for web users.

News Source:- contentstandard

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How to Use Google Trends for SEO

Google Trends is one of the best and most versatile tools available for SEO. It is the marketing equivalent of the Leatherman or Swiss Army knife. If you could only use one SEO tool to develop an Internet marketing campaign, this product would be a serious contender.

Working with Google Trends

When performing a search on Google Trends, you have the option to set four variables or parameters (default shown in bold):

• Web Search – Image search – News Search – Product Search – YouTube Search
• Worldwide – Option to choose a specific Country
• 2004-Present – Past 7 Days – 30 Days – 90 Days – 12 Months- Choose a Year
• All Categories – Arts & Entertainment – Autos & Vehicles – Beauty & fitness – Books & literature – Business & industrial – Computers & electronics – Finance – Food & drink – Games

You can compare up to five search terms or groupings at one time, with up to 25 search terms in each grouping.
For example:

• pen + pencil + paper (grouping 1)
• stapler + tape + notebook + ruler (grouping 2)
• eraser + paper clip (grouping 3)

By using the + sign between your search terms you are telling Google that you want to include searches for pen or pencil or paper.


Google also displays Hot Searches and Top Charts in Google Trends, listing the top searches of the day as well as popular searches by category.
Having all of this data available is great, but knowing what to do with it is even better. Following is a guide on how to use this information for SEO.

Keyword Research

Since Google Trends doesn't give actual search numbers, it works best when used in combination with the Keyword Planner. Google Trends will show a "normalized" or relative level of interest over time for a prospective keyword phrase. It also allows you to compare the level of interest among potential target phrases.
Let's say you're selling car parts. When does interest in car parts peak? What potentially drives more traffic; the search phrase "car parts" or "auto parts"?

In this example, I set the parameters for the U.S. from 2004 - present. We can see that Americans are most interested in "car parts" at the onset of summer. It is also clear they search for "auto parts" 4X as often as "car parts". There is a general upward trend in searches for auto parts, albeit a mixed bag over the last 12 months. Good to know when optimizing a campaign.
How about ecommerce potential? Use product search as a parameter to find out:

Product Searches have more than doubled since fall 2010. Clearly, the interest is there, but you should do a competitive analysis, before jumping into any space.

Geo-Targeting

Google Trends breaks down the search data by region. As you can see below, there is some level of interest in auto parts across the entire U.S., with the greatest level coming from Georgia and Florida.

Drill down further and you will see that Atlanta is a particularly strong market:

If you're doing local SEO or geo-targeted PPC, this data is invaluable.

News Jacking

Newsjacking suddenly, is all the rage in SEO. According to David Meerman Scott, it's "the process by which you inject ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business."
If Hot Searches didn't exist, someone would create it for newsjacking. The newsjacking formula is a simple one:

• Choose a trending topic.
• Blog about it.
• Tweet it (using the established hashtag).
• Don't be a moron (e.g., don't try to capitalize on tragedy).

Here's a great example of newsjacking in Bongo Bongo land.

Content Creation

Top Charts is the perfect resource for developing content ideas that people are actually interested in. Sticking with the car parts theme, navigate to Car Companies, click on "BMW", then click on "explore" in the right column.

Looks like a blog post about the BMW i3 and / or the BMW electric car would garnish some interest. If the term "Breakout" appears under Rating, the searches for that phrase have jumped by +5,000 percent.

Link Building

Links are still a primary driver of rankings. By creating content that people are looking for and want to read, you will attract links. Links are a measure of success when reviewing the outcome of your content marketing efforts.

Video Content

Poop. That's right; poop is the top result when I do a Google Trends search for "YouTube" with the search parameter set to YouTube:

I sure wasn't expecting to find an explosion of YouTube Poop (+250 percent since '08) and that's precisely the point of using this tool for video content research. Congratulations to California, with a search volume index of 100 on this one.
To play this game at home:

• Navigate to Google Trends.
• Enter your keywords.
• Change "Web Search" to "YouTube" search.
• Brainstorm
  • Is there an idea that you can use for your niche?
  • Is there a trend that you can capitalize on?

This data may also be used for video optimization:

• Creating great titles.
• Using the right tags.
• Optimizing descriptions.

Brand Monitoring

This one only works for "big Brands" with sufficient search volume. In the case cited below, three of four competitors are static, but one company is clearly in the zone. AutoZone.

Takeaway

Google has a voracious appetite for fresh topical content. Google Trends is the single best tool available to develop content ideas that will garner traffic and links. If you haven't been using this tool for SEO purposes, you should check it out now.

Source:- http://searchenginewatch.com

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Matt Cutts: Too Many nofollow Links Won't Hurt Your Google Search Rankings

One of the latest webmaster help videos brings up a really interesting SEO question: what happens if you get a lot of nofollow links, such as links gained for the explicit purpose of generating direct traffic. Could that negatively impact your search rankings?

SEO professionals have known for quite some time that putting nofollow on the link is a great way to tell Google that you don't want to pass PageRank for this particular link or that you somehow don't trust the sites the link is on. So if a large number of nofollowed links are pointing at a single site, could this potentially raise a flag to Google that the site is untrustworthy for some reason?

"No, typically nofollow links cannot hurt your site – so upfront, very quick answer on that point," said Matt Cutts, Google's Distinguished Engineer. "That said, let me just mention one weird corner case, which is if you are leaving comments on every blog in the world, even if those links might be nofollow, if you are doing it so much that people know you and they're really annoyed by you and people spam report about you, we might take some manual spam action, for example."

Fortunately, things like blog comments tend to have a very particular footprint that would be easy to spot. Cutts mentioned a specific example of where blog comments where problematic, even though they were already nofollowed, because it was done on such a massive scale.

"So I remember for a long time on TechCrunch, any time that people showed up, there was this guy, Anon.TC, would show up and make some nonsensical comment. And it was clear that he was just trying to piggyback on the traffic and drive the traffic from people reading the article directly to whatever he was promoting. And so even if those links were nofollow, if we see enough mass-scale action that we consider deceptive or manipulative, we do reserve the right to take action," Cutts said.

"So we carve out a little bit of an exception if we see truly huge-scale abuse. But for the most part, nofollow links are dropped out of our link graph as we're crawling the web, and so those links that are nofollow should not affect you from an algorithmic point of view," Cutts said. That said, Cutts indicated that in the future this potentially might not be the case, if some spam loophole is found.

"I always give myself just the smallest out in case we find somebody who's doing a really creative attack or mass abuse or something like that. But in general, no. As long as you're doing regular, direct-traffic building and you're not annoying the entire web or something like that, you should be in good shape."

News Source: - searchenginewatch.com

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