No more visitors from Google. What has happened?

Last week, many webmasters observed that all of their websites with an .info domain name disappeared from Google’s search results.

Some websites removed traffic drops from several hundreds of visitors per day to zero visitors per day. It seemed that all websites that used the .info top level domain had been removed from Google’s index.

A few days later, the websites with the .info domains reappeared in Google’s search results.

Why did this happen?

It looks as if Google updated its filters for special domain names and went a little too far. Earlier this year, the head of Google’s anti-spam team made the following statement:

“A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.”

Domain names with a .info ending have been available for 99 Cent for some time. It’s likely that very many .info domain names have been purchased for spamming purposes.

Google might have intended to block .info domains that spam and a bug in the algorithm wiped all .info domains from Google’s results. Fortunately, Google’s engineers fixed the bug within days.

What does this mean for your website?

Filtering all .info domains just because many of them are used for spamming is a very drastic measure. Although Google doesn’t do this, it’s clear that there is some kind of filter for these domains.

If you want to succeed with your online business, it might be better to use a .com domain or the local top level domain of your country instead of a .info domain.

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First you would need a good and reliable web hosting company that offers steadfast service at reasonable price. But make sure you do not just go with very cheap company out there. First thing about the note you are going to send to your existing customer. On the initial page just give the introduction of your website and make sure the page is not too busy. It is ok to use some of the attractive text and eye-catching graphics to draw viewer’s attention. If you are actually serious about the website business then purchase a domain name from Netfirms for just $5.95 and get your web hosting from the world’s best web hosting provider HostGator.com for just $0.01.

Preamble

Additional reasonable priced technique of letting people come to know about the website is to make some of home flier or brochures. It does not require being great and neither it takes time to make it. Basically, your flier needs to carry a big bold, positive heading, which creates desire for people to it lift up. Incorporate your fresh website address in attractive text; comprising a couple of short sections explaining out the main features of it and how it would serve them.

Display Ads Marketing

Listing your website address via display ads marketing is another cost-effective way for promoting. These are nothing but your local news paper and class papers that people read it on daily basis. Most, if not each papers, have a system and/or Internet marketing services directory group besides a categorization associated to main business. If you use newspaper or handset book for display advertising, visibility of your website address or e-mail address would give great response.

Business/Visiting Cards

Even though this may look like a very obvious technique to promote a web site, many webmasters yet fail to study counting their web site address and e-mail address as part of their big business contact information. However, note that having website address on your business/visiting cards are important and may have huge impact when it comes to business.

You might try these tips and techniques to get started when promoting your website to the existing clients and actual world. In fact, there are loads of other technique as well to attract attention such as creative site marketing, article submission and many other tools you can try out. However, try as many different methods as possible, go with great experiment with different copy to see what works best with you. I always enjoy getting feedback on my articles, as feedback is important for me to improvise on my writing. I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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What is Blogging?
If you are still asking that question then you have come to the right place. Personally, I define blogging as a new-age journalism wherein bloggers and writers have their own control with their content. This is a place where you are free to express yourself as well as having a chance to earn some money in more ways than one.

How to Blog?
Blogging is very easy especially with the help of different blogging softwares such as WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger. These software are pretty easy to use and it also help bloggers to “customize” their blogs thus having your own personal flair in it.

Where to Blog?
I already mentioned the different blogging softwares which could be used in blogging and you could just choose one which you would find suitable for your own use. In terms of locations when blogging, you could blog in a place where you are comfortable with. Blogging in the office should be avoided though because it could hinder your work .

When to Blog?
Again, this is also dependent in your schedule. If you could have a regular posting schedule, that would be more advantageous as opposed to posting 10 entries a day. Of course, categorizing these blog posts is also a must because it would help you in organizing your blog entries and not appearing to be a “clustered” one.

Why are you blogging?
The last and the most important question of all. Why are you indeed, blogging? Is this just for fun or do you have a specific goal in mind? Realizing the answer to this question is important because it would help you in finding the right direction for your goal and would also put things in perspective. Personally, I blog because I have fun, I learn a lot from it and I also give back by sharing what I have learned.

I hope this simple and basic guide can help all aspiring bloggers somehow.

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Brand new domain names are often used by spammers to make a quick buck. These spammers buy hundreds of domains, fill them with automatically created scraper content and hope to make some money with the ads that appear on these sites.

In addition, some webmasters use new domains to test new search engine spamming techniques.

As it is difficult for Google to find out whether a new domain can be trusted or not, Google invented a set of filters that downranks new websites until Google thinks that they can be trusted.

What can you do to overcome Google’s filters for new websites?

It’s very difficult to get high rankings before Google trusts your website. For that reason, do things that make your website trustworthy:

1. Start with the right keywords

   It’s not possible to get a top 10 ranking for highly competitive general search term such as “cars” for a new website. However, it is possible to get high rankings for terms such as “used car dealer atlanta”.

   It’s not just easier to get high rankings for more specific search terms, these terms are also much more likely to convert to sales. Take some time to find the right keywords for your site.

2. Get links to your website

   It is not possible to get high rankings on Google without good incoming links. Try to get as many links from related websites as possible. If the right websites link to your site then Google will trust your website more quickly.

3. Optimize your web pages

   While more links to your website greatly increase your chance of getting high search engine rankings, you must also tell search engines for which search terms you want to have high rankings. Optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that Google lists your website for the right search terms.

   Search engines should be able to parse the content of your web pages easily. Consider this when creating a new website from scratch.

4. Wait

   A website that has been online for several years is much less likely to game Google’s ranking algorithms than newer sites. For that reason, your Google rankings will also increase just by waiting (given that you followed the steps 1 to 3).

If you do it correctly, getting high search engine rankings for brand new websites is possible. It’s important that you do the right things in the right order.

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1. Google doesn’t like cloaking.
2. It doesn’t matter if a small or a big company uses cloaking.
3. Websites that use cloaking will be removed from Google’s index.
4. Google will detect all cloaking attempts sooner or later.

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the web page content presented to search engine spiders is different from that presented to the normal web surfers.

This is done by delivering web page content based on the IP address or the User-Agent of the user requesting the page.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a script on the server delivers a different version of the web page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines.

All major search engines consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines. For that reason, websites that use cloaking will be banned from the search results.

Google’s opinion on “undetectable” cloaking

In his recent blog post, Google’s Matt Cutts commented on a Danish company that offered ‘undetectable’ cloaking to its customers.

Google tried to check if this claim was true and they quickly found a website that used the services of the company. It turned out that their cloaking wasn’t undetectable at all:

“If someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users.

Thatâ€^TMs a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not ‘undetectable.’”

Don’t risk your search engine rankings

You might get short term results with shady SEO techniques such as cloaking but it is very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use them. You’ll put your web business at severe risk if you use black-hat SEO methods.

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First thing’s first, on page optimization (then we’ll finish with link building). While many SEO’s delve into a bunch of meta information (keywords, index and follow, etc.) and keyword density, we’re not going to worry with that. Not  that I’m saying it’s unecessary or unimportant, only that there is little (if any) benefit to worrying about that. Let’s just make sure the pages on your website are crawlable and able to be fully indexed. There are a few factors here that are quite important:

Page Title – in my experience this is the most important part of your web page. The page title (found in your head tags and is visible in your browser bar) and should briefly describe exactly what your page is about. Less is more here, keep it short and sweet. My advice is to avoid using your site’s domain name in the title unless it contains your main keyword, or you’re concerned with branding. Regardless of what you decide, at least place you page’s actual title in front of anything else.

For example, this page’s title would display as “Basic Search Engine Optimization Anyone Can Do” or if I wanted to I could append “- Joe hayes {dot} Org” to the end of that or maybe even the category the post was placed in.

Another important thing is to ensure all pages titles are different. Duplicate page titles will likely land you’re pages deep into the supplemental index – and alot of sites do this. Every page on their site will be “DomainName.com” or whatever. Really bad, fix this quick.

Heading Tags – When at all possible, include your page title somewhere on the page in a heading tag, preferably H1 though H2 will do if you’re using that for you’re site name (common for blogs). Don’t repeat your site’s domain name here though, your visitors already know where they are. If you have sub-sections for longer posts, feel free to use H3 or H4 tags there as well. It’s good practice for copywriting.

Your Content – Yea that’s important too. When writing it’s important to use the keywords your wanting to rank for in your content, preferably starting early (in your first paragraph). Nothing spammy here, just make it a point to ensure the key phrases can be found on your page.

Interlink Where Possible – When referencing things that can be found other places on your website, link to them when possible. In content links are perhaps the most important links you can have. Not only that, it helps your readers with references to things you’re talking about. Also, don’t be afraid to link to other sources of information – even your competition.

Site Map – Good idea to have one of these as well, especially helpful in a portal or blog type platform where articles or posts can get lost deep in an archive. Notice I’m referring to a physical site-map here, not an xml machine readable format. Also good for visitors who may be looking for something in particular, in absense of a search tool. And on xml sitemaps while we’re on the subject, I’ve found they’re great for getting pages indexed fast but doesn’t seem to make a difference when it comes to rankings.

Friendly URLs – Not quite as important as it used to be but still a good idea if you can. While both www.example.com/topic.php?=123 and www.example.com/the-topic.html should both be indexed equally (used to be having multiple parameters in the url would prevent the page from being indexed, now it doesn’t seem to be a problem as long as it’s not excessive), having keywords in the url does seem to have some weight when comes to serps. It’s not a dramatic difference, which is why it’s near the bottom of the list.

Build Relevant Backlinks – While this is posted last, it’s certainly not last when it comes to ranking well and is is one of the more misunderstood concepts. All links, quite simply, are not the same. Now, let me be clear – you don’t have to buy links to be successful – in this day and age the social media sites out there are a great avenue for getting exposure and building natural backlinks to compelling content. With that said, however, getting powerful websites in your niche linking back to you is a great way to bolster search rankings and drive targetted traffic to your website. For many, this means purchasing advertising or trading reciprocal links.

Some basic backlink strategies include submitting to web directories (free and paid), Submitting articles to article sites, exchanging links with other sites in your niche (this is important, don’t link spam with unrelated websites), purchase links on related websites (please don’t be one of those page rank huggers that blindly go after after any website just because of PR and also know that Google doesn’t like link buying), leaving valuable comments on blogs related to your niche – especially if they dofollow (blogs that don’t use a rel=”nofollow” on outgoing links), participate in forums related to your niche (most allow a link back in your signature), along with many other ways to get people linking to your website – be creative!

In Summary, remember that any search engines goal is to return the most relevant results for the user’s query. Your site must be more relevant for that particular search than any of your competition. Once your site is crawlable or otherwise search engine friendly, it pretty much comes down to backlinks. All things being equal, the site with the most (relevant, powerful, and in quantity)  backlinks will win. Things like the age of the backlinks, sudden surges in recent backlinks, relevancy (have I mentioned relevancy?), and strength of the backlinks among the things that play a part in how your website ranks today. Once you get top 10 exposure, writing the best content should get you to the top eventually.

Hopefully these tips can help get you on a level playing field with your compeition. Remember to have patience and don’t expect results overnight. It can often take months to bring a site from zero to hero in the serps – depending on site age, competition, and many other factors. Build a website of value for your visitors, make sure it’s crawlable, and gain exposure from other websites – then rankings will come.

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1. Content is King

First and foremost, you can encourage millions of people to visit your blog, but the numbers won’t mean squat if you don’t keep them coming back for more. You’ll need to provide useful content. It’s not enough to provide the same news as every other blogger in your niche topic. You’ll have to come up with something new and unique and provide thought provoking analysis. Your blog has to say something and say it well.

2. Participate in Like-Minded Forums

Even if you’re not a joiner, it pays to visit forums so the rest of the people in your niche group know about your blog. If your blog is about knitting, visit some knitting and craft forums. If your blog is about earthworms, visit earthworm, soil and gardening forums. You don’t have to post a lot of “hey come visit my blog” type comments, but if you add a link to your blog in your signature, it will appear in every post. This is sure to bring in traffic.

3. Visit Other Blogs

Search for other blogs falling within your niche and pay them a visit. Be sure to comment so they’ll visit your blog too. If you have something interesting to say about your topic, others may link to and even discuss your blog.

4. Add Tags

Don’t forget your tags! Not only do tags help search engines pick up your blog, but they also help to direct those who are searching for your topic. Make sure you add as many tags as necessary. For instance, if your blog post is about roses, you’ll want to add tags for roses, flowers, gardening, soil, planting, thorns, aphids, and other related keywords.

5. Add Links

Not only is it important to add relevant blog links to your blogroll, but you’ll also want to link to other blogs in the text. The blogger on the other end of the link might just reciprocate, leading more traffic to your blog. At the very least, he’ll add a reciprocating link to the side of his blog.

6. Technorati is Your FriendBy claiming a blog with the blog search engine Technorati, you’re making it available to others who might not have otherwise heard of you. The more you post and the higher you are ranked, the more likely others are to turn up your blog during a search. Your Technorati rank depends on how many others link to your blog. If you want other bloggers to offer up links to you, you have to provide good content, an eye pleasing template and build up an active community.

7. Submit Your SiteIn addition to submitting your site to all of the blog search engines, you will need to ping all the engines every time you update. To do so, utilize a free service such as Pingoat or Ping-O-Matic to ping all in one fell swoop.

8. Install an RSS ButtonMake it easy for others to subscribe to your blog by installing an RSS button.

  9. Read Up on the Latest Traffic Building Techniques 

If you’re really serious about blogging, visit blogs about blogs. The top blog bloggers offer great traffic building tips in addition to other helpful information.

  10. Analyze Your Stats In addition to the above steps, you’ll want to implement a stat tracking service such as Site Meter to keep track of hits and traffic. Your stat tracker will not only let you know how many people are stopping by each day, but they’ll also let you know where everyone is coming from. This will enable you to determine which traffic boosting methods work best for you.  

It takes time to build up traffic. Above all else, don’t give up. It may take up to a year or more for yours to become one of the top blogs in your niche.

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What is a robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a simple text file that must be placed in your root directory (http://www.example.com/robots.txt). It tells the search engine spider which web pages on your website should be indexed and which web pages should be ignored.

You can use a simple text editor to create a robots.txt file. The content of a robots.txt file consists of so-called “records”.

A record contains the information for a special search engine. Each record consists of two fields: the user agent line and one or more Disallow lines. Here’s an example:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This robots.txt file would allow the “googlebot”, which is the search engine spider of Google, to retrieve every page from your site except for files from the “cgi-bin” directory. All files in the “cgi-bin” directory will be ignored by googlebot.

Which new commands is Google testing?

Webmasters have found out that Google seems to be experimenting with a Noindex commands for the robots.txt file. It basically seems to do the same as the Disallow command so it’s not clear why Google is using this command.

Other commands that might be tested by Google are Noarchive and Nofollow. However, none of these commands is official yet.

How does this affect your rankings on Google?

If you accidentally use the wrong commands then you might tell Google to go away although you want them to index your pages.

For that reason, it is important that you check the content of your robotx.txt file.

How to check your robots.txt file

Open your web browser and enter www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt to view the contents of your robots txt file. Here are the most important tips for a correct robots.txt file:

1. There are only two official commands for the robots.txt file: User-agent and Disallow. Do not use more commands than these.
2. Don’t change the order of the commands. Start with the user-agent line and then add the disallow commands:
   
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /cgi-bin/
   
3. Don’t use more than one directory in a Disallow line. “Disallow: /support /cgi-bin/ /images/” does not work. Use an extra Disallow line for every directory:User-agent: *
   Disallow: /support
   Disallow: /cgi-bin/
   Disallow: /images/
   
   
4. Be sure to use the right case. The file names on your server are case sensitve. If the name of your directory is “Support“, don’t write “support” in the robots.txt file.

You can find user agent names in your log files by checking for requests to robots.txt. Usually, all search engine spiders should be given the same rights. To do that, use User-agent: * in your robots.txt file.

What happens if you don’t have a robots.txt file?

If your website doesn’t have a robots.txt file (you can check this by entering your www.yourdomain.com/robotx.txt in your web browser) then search engines will automatically index everything they can find on your site.

Checking your robots.txt file is important if you want search engines to index your web pages. However, indexing alone is not enough. You must also make sure that search engines find what they’re looking for when they index your pages.

[Source : Axandra.com]

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When submitting comments to these blogs please write some relevant and useful content. Don’t Spam! If you submit just one comment to all of them then it gives you more than 250 back links to your Website/Blog. And these 250 back links alone can get you a PR of 1 assuming you have quality search engine friendly articles.

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