Google has reportedly name it’s latest algorithm update. Google “Penguin” is aimed at over-optimization. Here are the key points to consider:

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.

4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

6. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

8. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

These guidelines are nothing new, which makes you wonder if something else has actually changed, or if they have really just implemented a way of better enforcing these guidelines.

As with Google Panda, the actual results of the update appear to be that spam sites have been promoted and many quality sites have been smoked. The assumption is that a lot of blatant spam has been removed from the index, and additional tweaking is needed. We’ll see if that’s the case as things progress.

There’s been a lot of talk recently in the SEO world about over-optimization penalties that Google has apparently been rolling out over the last month or so. Many sites have already lost ranking or have been de-indexed altogether. Google hasn’t announced anything officially yet, but announcements from them generally come shortly after a major change has been completely implemented.

Rand at SEOMOZ put up a great summary of six really spammy things that webmasters and SEOs should stop doing in anticipation of the over-optimization penalties full implementation:

1. Use of unnatural Page Titles

Bad: A list of  keyword phrases, then “your brand” tacked on at the end.

Good: Your brand, and then a natural description of your services, which will include the most important keywords anyway.

2. Manipulative Internal Linking - Linking every instance of a keyword with identical anchor text in body of your content or in a side bar  to same the page. Only the first instance will count and the rest will tag you as a spammer.

3. Keyword stuffed footer links. Don’t use  keyword link lists in the footer of your website.

4. Keyword stuffed content blocks.  If it has no value other than the keywords in contains, get rid of it.

5. Backlinks from penalty-likely sources. (Check out this detailed article on how to monitor your backlink profile for penalties)

• Link Networks
• Comment Spam
• Automated Software
• Forum Signature Links
• Reciprocal Links
• Article Marketing

6.  Similar pages targeting different keywords with only slight differences in content. Instead, optimize a single page for the multiple keyword variations.

Making these changes may be a hard pill to swallow, especially if your success has been based on some of these shady tactics. It will be better in the long run to take a small hit right now than to get completely pulled from the SERPs by a Google penalty that is just around the corner.

In late February, Google gave webmasters a rare treat by supplying a detailed list of updates to their search engine algorithm. Continuing with item-by-item analysis:

10. “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

The “site:” operator is a handy advanced search tool you can use on Google Search to see the pages that Google has indexed for a Website.

Judging by the description it appears that Google is now more carefully selecting URLs to display for this advanced search query. This would help the display for larger websites that have many URLs, as well as many different types of pages. Rather than displaying page after page of results of a similar type up front, you should now be getting a more diverse mix of pages that will better help you understand the website more quickly.

When using the “site:” operator, Google will also display an ad encouraging you to set up Webmaster Tools. What you, as a webmaster, will gain from Google Webmaster Tools is not an improved version of the “site:” operator, but other data that will help supplement it.

Previous Articles covering Google Panda 3.3

No. 1 -More Coverage for Related Searches
No. 2: Tweak the Categorizer for Expanded Sitelinks
No. 3: Less Duplication in Expanded Sitelinks
No. 4: More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page
No. 5: More locally relevant predictions in YouTube
No. 6: More accurate detection of official pages
No. 7: Refreshed per-URL country information
No. 8: Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search
No. 9: Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms

Continuing with analysis of Google’s search quality updates back in February with:

9. Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.

Google’s search “autocomplete” is an import tool in driving searchers to more “popular” searches. Among other things, this makes the popular Adwords (pay per click) terms more competitive and more expensive for advertisers. This, of course, earns Google more money.

Google “Instant” is a heavy handed and widely hated feature with the same goal as Google Search “autocomplete.” The difference is that you can turn Google Instant off.

This particular change is aimed at removing offensive terms from autocomplete, which as been an embarrassing problem since its inception. You would think Google would take this problem as a clue that trying to drive searchers to popular searches is a BAD idea. But maybe Google is just a bad company.

With so many nice looking website templates available, why can’t you purchase a template, pay someone to install it, and paste in your text content, rather than designing a website from scratch?  A template design may be appropriate in a very narrow range of circumstances. Before  you decide to go with a template, ask yourself these questions:

• Does the template navigation have the same number of links as you have pages of content you want to provide your visitors? If not, are you willing to add filler content or leave out content to match those number of pages? If the answer is no to any of those questions, you’ll need to redesign the template.
• Do you really want to display a large piece of stock photography as the main focus of your homepage?
• Do you want to write or edit content down just to fit the boxes provided by the template?

From the perspective of a user-centered design process aimed at producing a user-friendly website, the idea of using a template puts the last part of the process first. The purpose of a visual design is to present the content in an intuitive and pleasing way. The content should be the focus of the website, not the look and feel. If you start with the visual design, the rest of the process becomes like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.  You will likely break both your content and the visual design of the template in an attempt to force them to fit together.

I work with many small businesses with varying levels of technical capability at their disposal. Businesses with few employees often have no IT support. The problem is that today’s business environment virtually requires the use of email.

On the surface email is simple. You sign-up for a Gmail, Yahoo or AOL account. You send and receive. No big whoop. Every once in a while, however, you may not receive someone’s email, or they may not receive your’s. Maybe there is a certain person you cannot correspond with, because the emails never make it to the other’s inbox.

The problem is, this kind of inconsistency in a business situation can make you look unreliable, or even incompetent. You may even be missing golden business opportunities because you are not receiving all the inquiries that area being sent to you. In order to avoid these problems, you need to understand a little more about how email works.

The primary reason that email messages don’t make it to their intended recipients is spam filtering. Spam is a huge problem and expense for internet companies to deal with. There are two ways that companies that manage email servers attempt to reduce the number of spam messages that make it to your inbox:

1. By rejecting the message at the server level
2. By use of spam filtering software

Both of these methods can also filter out messages that you really want to receive. There isn’t much you can do about spam filtering at the server level. You should, however,  have control of the spam filtering software, and be using the following practices to manage it:

• Set the spam filter to save all suspected spam to the spam folder. NEVER set it to automatically delete suspected spam.
• Review the messages in your spam folder on a regular basis, and then delete.
• Add all known contacts to  your “white list” or “safe senders” list. This will keep the spam filter from blocking or diverting any messages from these senders. Some email clients will automatically white list all addresses in an associated contacts address book. You may need to specifically add addresses to your white list. To properly implement this practice, you will need to find out how your email client handles white listing.

In addition to receiving mail, here are some best practices for sending:

• Avoid using free email addresses for business correspondence. To more tech savvy business people, this looks unprofessional.

If you have your own website and domain name:

• Make sure that you have a dedicated IP address for your website. Otherwise your messages may be flagged as being from an unreliable source, and either be rejected by the recipient’s mail server, or end up in their spam folder (which they probably never check)
• Consider using a third party email service to manage your email. This can be a little more expensive, but is much more reliable than using free or cheap solutions.

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

8. Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.

You may have noticed, that images are showing up on a wider variety of SERPs. I have some blogs that get most of their traffic from image search, so selecting quality images and properly tagging them is of the uttmost importance. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Include keywords in the filename
2. Include keywords in the img “Alt” tag (important for the visually impaired visitors as well)
3. Include keywords in the img “Titile” tag
4. Use microdata and create a Rich Snippet 

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

A translation from this French SEO Expert points out that Top Level Domains (TLD) are the best identifiers of the country that the content of a website is intended for. It would follow that Google would want to keep up with the most recent TLD data.

Having worked on sites that have targeted Japan and mainland China, I can attest to the fact that getting country-specific domain names isn’t always easy if your business is not based in those places. To those of use who got by targeting those countries without the advantage of the appropriate TLD, our work might have gotten harder. Probably, though, this is just a clean-up, rather than a tweak that puts more weight on those country-specific TLDs.

I am, in fact, set to relaunch one such site in the coming weeks. I’ll update the blog with any new information I gain. In the meantime, anyone in a similar situation who is having problems as a result of this update, please comment!

Troy Philis

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

Google (or at least their CEO, Eric Schmidt) sees Brands as the way to sort out the cesspool that is the internet. So making sure that the official pages, especially of big brands, are properly identified, should be a priority of Google’s search algorithm.

As this seo blogger points out, the change is probably aimed at sites that attempt to identify themselves as official pages, but aren’t, thus taking advantage of that boost in ranking that Google gives to official pages. If your site attempts this, your ranking may have been hurt, and rightfully so. Most SMBs (small or medium sized businesses) were probably unaffected by this particular tweak.

Just a quickie! I’m using the ITPShare toolbar, which is a cool Joomla extension that displays social networking icons on one of my Joomla Websites. The extension is a module. It worked great, but with IE set to display JavaScript errors, I was getting and error from the code in that module. A quick search on Google brought me to this forum. Although the forum was for another extension that I wasn’t running, the solution worked.

Basically, all I had to do was disable the following parameters in the module, under Advanced Parameters:

Facebook Root Div: NO
Load Facebook JS library: NO

Everything else works, and no error! Thanks