Co-citation in SEO language

1) Co-citation If your Link fall in the right category (or right linking neighborhood) then you have a good co-citation and if not then it is said to be a bad co-citation.

Confused? Let me explain about co-citation in SEO language.

Let’s think you have Search Engine Optimisation Company and you are looking for quality back links from the relevant websites. Lets say you got a link on a page where your link looks like this:

1) Search engine Optimisation Company 2) Shoes company 3) Gifts company 4) Gift vouchers 5) Woodland shoes 6) Experience gifts

The most popular search engines continually making innovation in their algorithms to prevent the spamming or using any BLACK HAT SEO Techniques.

The search engines crawlers might relate your website theme with other websites links available on the same page. The back links / link partners should be linked with the relevant and themed website. Linking anywhere with any website invite to a trouble and it might cause a penalties from the major search engines.

Good Co-citation If you have a search engine optimisation (SEO) web site, then your possible niche could be websites related to search engine optimisation. So, if you link to search engine optimisation related websites, and then your co-citation would be falling in the search engine optimisation (seo) category. This is good co-citation (means linking to good neighborhood, which is search engine optimisation (seo) in this case).

Bad Co-citation Bad co-citation occurs when your website falls in search engine optimisation (seo) category and you link to gift category or any other irrelevant category – which affect your search engine rankings. 2) Canonical URL Google calls Canonicalization as the process for picking the best URL when there are many alternatives. Have a glance at domain URLs mentioned below www.example.com example.com/ www.example.com/index.html example.com/home.asp Most of the people would think that these are the same URLs but all URLs are completely unique and different. A web server could return completely different content for all the URLs above Let me Explain Canonical URL in More Details A Common SEO mistake made by many webmasters is that they are not consistent in cross linking across the entire website.

If some of your links go to the URL http://example.com, and the rest go to http://www.example.com/, your link popularity gets divided among these two URLs – thus affecting the page rank as well as the rankings for that URL. So, it is better to pick the URL that you want and use it consistently across your entire website, as well as for your incoming links. One cannot, however, control how other sites would link to their website. It is better to use one type of URL not to confuse the search engines crawlers and making the most of search engine optimization. Suppose you want your default URL to be http://www.example.com/. You can make your web server so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/. That helps Google know which URL you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect is recommended if your website changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).SEO experts are proactive and keep themselves up to date with the SEO techniques and Search Engine Algorithms. Our SEO experts work on latest and ethical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques to produce quality and great results to its clients.

Black-Hat SEO Grey-Hat SEO White-Hat SEO Tactics

Black-Hat SEO Tactics:

Keyword Stuffing
This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same color as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted.

Cloaking
In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like hidden text, when one of your competitors figures out what is being done (and don’t think they aren’t watching you if you’re holding one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report your site and it will get banned.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them out eventually and your site will be penalized. That or you’ll be reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.

Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.

Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done “correctly” (we cannot give the method for “correct” interlinking here as it’s still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don’t want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The following tactics fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended. Remember: even if the search engines cannot detect these tactics when they are used as spam, your competitors will undoubtedly be on the lookout and report your site to the engines in order to eliminate you from the competition.

It is definitely worth noting that, while it may be tempting to enlist grey-hat and black-hat SEO tactics in order to rank well, doing so stands a very good chance of getting your website penalized. There are legitimate methods for ranking a website well on the search engines. It is highly recommended that webmasters and SEO’s put in the extra time and effort to properly rank a website well, insuring that the site will not be penalized down the road or even banned from the search engines entirely.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

Cloaking
There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a “members only” area for example) you are relatively safe. Even so, this tactic is very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it’s use.

Arguably, another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking. As cloaking has often been abused, if other methods such as adding visible text to the page is possible it is recommended. If there are no other alternatives it is recommended that you contact the search engine prior to adding this tactic and explain your argument.

There is more information on cloaking on our black-hat SEO tactics page.

Paid Links
The practice of purchasing link on websites solely for the increase in link-popularity that it can mean has grown steadily over the last year-or-so with link auction sites such as LinkAdage making this practice easier. (You can read more about LinkAdage on our SEO resources page.

When links are purchased as pure advertising the practice is considered legitimate, while the practice of purchasing links only for the increase in link-popularity is considered an abuse and efforts will be made to either discount the links or penalize the site (usually the sellers though not always).

As a general rule, if you are purchasing links you should do so for the traffic that they will yield and consider any increase in link-popularity to be an “added bonus”.

Duplicate Content
Due primarily to the increase in popularity of affiliate programs, duplicate content on the web has become an increasingly significant problem for both search engines and search engine users alike with the same or similar sitesdominating the top positions in the search engine results pages.

To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site’s rankings penalized.

There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net, though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of unique content.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

Internal Linking
By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.

While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.

Reciprocal Linking
Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.

A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who’s content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you’re linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).

If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. You can read more about PRProwler on our search engine positioning tools page.

Content Creation
Don’t confuse “content creation” with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.

The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject.

Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.

Writing For Others
You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else’s website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don’t require a reciprocal link back.

Site Optimization
The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it’s search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

That said, it is of primary importance that the optimization of a website not detract from the message and quality of content contained within the site. There’s no point in driving traffic to a site that is so poorly worded that it cannot possibly convey the desired message and which thus, cannot sell. Site optimization must always take into account the maintenance of the salability and solid message of the site while maximizing it’s exposure on the search engines.

SEO Techniques

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Professional SEO consultants do not offer spamming and spamdexing techniques amongst the services that they provide to clients. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who utilize them, as either “white hat SEO”, or “black hat SEO”. Many SEO consultants reject the black and white hat dichotomy as a convenient but unfortunate and misleading over-simplification that makes the industry look bad as a whole.

“White hat”
An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered “White hat” if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and/or involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White Hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then make that content easily accessible to their spiders, rather than game the system. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility although the two are not identical.

Spamdexing / “Black hat”
“Black hat” SEO are methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from text that is “hidden”, either as text colored similar to the background or in an invisible or left of visible div, or by redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. A method that sends a user to a page that was different from the page the search engined ranked is Black hat as a rule. One well known example is Cloaking, the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms or by a manual review of a site.

Results from Black Hat and White Hat SEO Techniques
Black hat SEO techniques may quickly deliver results. However, due to the disposable nature of the domains, the results are often short term – although they can be long term.

White hat SEO techniques can take some time to implement (although not necessarily) but their results tend to last for a long time (although, again, not necessarily).

It’s true to say, then, that both black hat techniques and white hat techniques can generate both short term and long term results for clients, whether results are measured in terms of rankings, traffic, conversion or profit. However, do the ends always justify the means? I don’t think so. I believe that by continuing to condone black hat techniques the SEO industry is setting itself up for failure and sleepwalking into oblivion. The following two articles, Ethical Search Engine Optimization Explained and Search Engine Optimization and The Law, will expand upon this belief.

What Is Blue Hat SEO?
At the moment, BlueHatSEO.com is the only website on the Internet that is completely dedicated to the art of Advanced SEO. Blue Hat SEO is essentially the study of advanced Internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques. Blue Hat SEO covers the advanced knowledge of both Black Hat and White Hat SEO. Everything on BlueHatSEO.com will assume that the audience knows and understands the basics of SEO and Internet marketing. If it helps, think of BlueHatSEO as the creative aspect of SEO.

Blue Hatters use their knowledge of the search engines and other marketing practices to twist and manipulate them in a creative and original way to best benefit their sites.

The concept of Blue Hat SEO rose out frustration in the lack of advanced SEO knowledge made available to webmasters. The motive behind this site is to inspire other webmasters to copy and mimic it in hopes of creating more resources for the advanced search engine marketer. We want to create a venue where knowledgable webmasters can share and present their ideas and techniques. This, in hope, will lead to other sites dedicated to the art of advanced SEO tactics. Until this goal is reached enjoy the content!

Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search Engine Optimization Tips

• Title – Many search engines weigh the data in your title more heavily than other data in your page. Make sure that your title has keywords that represent your site effectively. For the most part the title should be short but always include your keyword(s).

• Meta tags – Use the meta-tag description and meta-tag keywords attribute on every page of your site that you want the search engines to index. If you don’t want a page indexed, then try the robots exclusion tag. The robots.txt exclusion protocol has more support with spiders.

• Content – Write great content using your most important keywords prominently throughout your web site. Visitors who read great content will link to your web site and recommend it to others.

• Keyword planning – Always do keyword planning on both the search engines and directories to determine the best set of keywords and keyword phrases your target audience is using. Look for “related searches” in search results for ideas.

• Alternative text – Put alternative text in your graphic images that clearly describe the graphic image and using your keywords whenever possible. Do not put text in a graphic image that has nothing to do with your web page.

• Frame Pages - Most search engines simply can not index a frames page. They get to your site and can’t go anywhere. Consider frames like a big ‘GO AWAY’ sign. If your site does use frames, doorway pages are ideal for better rankings.

• Don’t try to fool the search engines. This is probably the biggest trap people fall into. People come up with ways to ‘fool’ search engines, and they work for a little while…sometimes. But then the search engines catch on and write routines that penalize sites that use this practice. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: repeating keywords over and over; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area.

• keep the important content near the top of your pages. The actual text on your website is very important. Search engines (spiders) read this to determine rankings. Some engines will place a higher rating of importance based on where they find the text in your page. Closer to the top is usually better. But having keywords throughout your page develops a “theme” and that too is important.

• Don’t stuff the top of your pages with data the engines can’t read. As with the last example, something higher up in your page can be more important that something further down. Therefore, HTML formatting, images, scripts, etc. toward the top of your page can result in lower ratings.

• Website Content should be your #1 priority. Your quest for high placement must start with a good website. It is important to have a lot of text describing what you do. Use your keywords in the content, but don’t repeat them over and over. Many search engines rate sites based on ‘keyword density’. This is usually a formula that looks at META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the ‘ALT’ text on your images. They will even look at different forms of your keywords. For example, if an important keyword for you is ‘CLOTH’, the word ‘CLOTHING’ in the body of your document will raise the confidence in the word ‘CLOTH’ on some engines

• Keep your site updated. Make sure that your site is up to date. No one likes to go to a page that never changes or that is very out of date. Make sure that the data in your page portrays the message that you want to send. Check the links on your site every now and again. Make sure the links are still active. Dead links are not only an inconvenience for the visitor, but can also negatively influence your rankings.

• Don’t go image crazy. We have all seen pages that are almost all images. Usually they are the most beautiful sites. After all, your artist can make beautiful screens that display your content in the most eye-pleasing way. However, the search engines don’t have eyes. They don’t see the beautifully formatted text in your image. All they see is ‘yourimage.jpg’, and ‘yourimage.jpg’ doesn’t go far in terms of content and relevancy.

• Links to Other Pages. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of links. Both from your page to other pages, and from other pages to yours.

• First consider links on your pages. When many search engines see them, they consider your site more ‘real’. It also give the search engine spiders a place to go. Make your links meaningful. Make sure they relate to what you do (and keywords that are important to you). You can’t have too many links on your pages.

• Links from others websites. Some search engines place a very heavy rating of importance on how many other sites in their index have links to your website. Think of it for a second. If you knew that a company was only linked to by one website, versus a company that was linked to by a thousand websites, which one would you consider more important? If you were a search engine, you would surely try to link the more important ones first.

• This is where patience comes in again. It can take some time to get a ton of links to your website. We help quite a bit here, the fact that we submit to so many sites will help you get a great head start in this area!

• Consider Banner Ads. These are a very popular method of promoting your Web site. They are the little rectangular graphics that you see near the top or bottom of some popular Web pages. If you click on them, they transport you to another Web site. You can make your own banners using one of the many “banner creating” websites. Most offer free banner making.

Things NOT to Do !!

• Spamdexing – Generally, you should NOT submit every single page of your website to search engines. In most cases, you should submit only your home page and perhaps a couple of other very important pages at most. The rest of your website will be indexed by the search engine’s spider naturally after the first page is submitted. Over-submitting your website can get you blocked from being listed!

• Invisible/Tiny Text and Keyword Stuffing – Once a very popular form of inserting tons of key words and phrases into your pages, this is now considered a BIG no-no even though you’ll still see it from time to time! This is achieved by placing very small text at the bottom of a page and/or text the same color as the page’s background. This, too, can get your website blocked from search engine listings. Let your website’s content speak for itself!

• Use of non-compliant HTML to manipulate relevancy – Multiple titles and other techniques which aren’t HTML standards compliant, used specifically to raise relevancy. The first 2 in the grey area would be real candidates for this area as well. An example of non-compliant HTML would be using a title that does not reflect the content of the page. The links lead to information on proper implementation of elements.

• Use of CSS (cascading style sheets) to manipulate relevancy – Using hidden elements (layer or span elements etc) that can’t be seen by executing code to reveal them. This activity has not been addressed in SE content guidelines.

• Comments – Comments help maintain the code in an HTML document. Comments should not be used to raise relevancy or manipulate SE descriptions. Previously *on site* in Excite content Guidelines.

• Invisible form elements – Used to hold keyword values, not a well known technique, however they can be used this way. Not known to be mentioned specifically in any SE content guidelines or “unwritten policy”.

6 Easy Ways to Increase your Adsense Revenue

How much revenue do you generate from Google Adsense? Recently there has been a lot of discussion about people who earn over $10,000 a month just from Adsense. Furthermore, there are rumors of a few individuals who earn over $1 million a year just from using the power of Google advertisements.

So what is Google Adsense and how can you use this program to earn a six-figure income?

About 3-4 years ago, Google created this program to help websites to monetize their web-traffic.

Here’s how it works:

Webmasters obtain a special code from Google which then displays targeted ads on their website. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of these ads, the webmaster earns a commission. Unlike other online businesses, there is no selling involved. All you need to do is get people to click on the ads.

Although this is an excellent way to generate an income, many websites are not effectively maximizing their Adsense potential. As a result, they are leaving a lot of cash on the table.

The question is how can you increase your Adsense revenue without increasing the number of web visitors?

The key to earning an income with Google Adsense is to have your ads match the rest of the site, making them look like part of your content. Your focus is to avoid having the Adsense blocks look like blatant advertisements.

The following are six ways that you can do this and increase your revenue at the same time:

1) Find the right place - Most website visitors read content that is in the middle of a webpage. As a result, the best place to put your Adsense block is in the top part of the page, at the beginning of your web content. You want to weave the Google Ads into your web content to give the appearance that they are extra links which expand on the information of the page.

2) Use the Large Rectangle -With Google Adsense, you have the option of picking different ad formats. Most of the time people opt to use the Leaderboard (728×90) or Wide Skyscraper (160×600) style ads. Unfortunately, this is the wrong choice, because both look like blatant advertisements. Instead smart webmasters have found that using the Large Rectangle (336×280) yields the best amount of click-thrus.

3) Ditch the border - Many people experience a sharp increase in Adsense revenue when they changing their border. What they change is very simple…they get rid of the border on their Adsense blocks. This is another way to make the advertisements look like useful web content.

4) Adapt the font - Whenever you write content, it should be the same font size and style as your Google Adsense block. This will help make it appear that the advertisements are a natural part of your website.

5) Match the colors - In addition to changing the fonts, you also should match the colors of your website. For instance, if your content is written in black, and your hyperlinks are blue, then the Adsense blocks should also be the same color. Again, this helps the advertisements appear to be normal web content.

6) Don’t have too many distractions - On a webpage, it is important to give web visitor a limited number of options. By having too many links and graphics, the web visitor might go to a section that doesn’t help increase your profits. While it is important to inform and entertain your web visitor, it is also vital that you monetize your site. So if the main focus of your site is to earn an income through Google Adsense, then get rid of all non-essential links and graphics.

By taking the time to implement these six simple steps, you’ll see a dramatic increase in the click-thru ratio of your ads. If added to all of the content of your site, your Adsense income will skyrocket!

20 Awesome Images Found In Google Maps

The introduction of satellite images into map search interfaces has excited both virtual sightseers and local app developers. Further innovations like Google’s Street View have caused consternation from privacy advocates while further pumping up the buzz about online mapping. In 2008, we can expect further innovations that stretch the envelope while dynamic map interfaces solidify as basic table-stakes for all local sites. In gearing up for this year in local search, I thought I’d give you a pure entertainment piece—here’s a guide to the top coolest things to see in Google Maps.Yum! Brands, Inc.’s subsidiary, KFC, built this brilliant ad back in 2006, geared to be viewable by space aliens. It was purposefully built just off Extraterrestrial Highway, near Area 51:

I pointed out the swastika-shaped building below back in 2006, along with a few other map enthusiasts. In September of 2007, the U.S. Navy bowed to pressure from radio commentators and the Anti-Defamation League and agreed to change the building’s profile at a cost of $600k. In the media feeding-frenzy, I got accused of “costing the taxpayers $600k” on a few blogs and forums, and one or two flamewars broke out in the comments on my Flickr page.

Giant thumbprint in a park in Great Britain. This thumbprint is actually a large maze designed by Chris Drury.

Evidence of drunken parking? This building in the Netherlands sports a Morris Mini parked on its side. The lights on the car turn on at night.

Yet more Minis parked on a building—this time the Minis are parked on top of a pub in Great Britain.

When all the satellite pics are stitched together to allow users to pan continuously in mapping programs, there are frequently some funky effects which can happen at transition edges. One common phenomenon is when two pics taken at different angles are spliced together, causing tall buildings and other structures to appear to be leaning sharply. This is called the “Escher Effect,” and this sample comes from downtown Dallas:

This is purportedly the largest Coca-Cola logo in the world, created near Arica, Chile, out of something like 70,000 coke bottles to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the company:

Back in January of 2007, Google publicly announced they were planning to send a plane over locations in Australia to update Google Maps images. Quite a few people attempted to communicate messages by displaying large text on the ground for the “Australia Day Flyover” as it was called, but very few actually accomplished it due to a miscommunication over the date of the flight. However, the Tourism Australia ministry managed it by paying a sand sculptor to form the letters of their domain name on Bondi Beach near Sydney:

“Giant pink bunny,” killed in a drive-by in Italy.

People are increasingly trying to get their messages seen in Google Maps satellite view, but most aerial messages already appearing in the pics were originally intended for people viewing from airplanes. For instance, this message written in a field adjacent to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska:

Some of the best-documented messages found in Google Maps have been marriage proposals like this one:

Another patriotic-themed image is this American flag found on a river bank in Pennsylvania:

Street View has raised all sorts of privacy concerns and people have taken great glee at pointing out people captured going into strip clubs, peeing in public, or doing various private activities. In this example, one of the traditionally photo-shy superheroes, the Green Lantern, is the one caught by the roving camera eye, looking out a shop window in Boston:

There are quite a few pictorial mazes that show up in Google Maps, particularly corn mazes and such in the US. This UK maze was built to celebrate the 200th birthday of Brunel, a famous British engineer:

There’s a whole subgenre of art called “Crop Art” that’s rendered in growing plants in patterns to form pictures when viewed from above. This example is a rendering of Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man, located in Italy:

Similar to Crop Art, “Earth Art” or “Land Art” is created by moving or scraping soil and rocks to create images. This huge image from a hillside in Mongolia celebrates Ghenghis Khan:

When the early Greek inventor Daedalus’s son, Icarus, plummeted from the sky after his wax-and-feathers wings experiment failed, his body’s impact left this deep indentation crater which subsequently filled with water, leaving this man-shaped lake in Brazil:

A man with the surname of “Luecke” in Texas decided to write his name big by leaving these trees when he was clear-cutting the land. According to reports, astronauts are able to see these letters from space:

Quite a few companies promote themselves by painting their logos onto their building rooftops. This example is particularly clever, since the Salvation Army apparently realized they could leverage their building’s close proximity to the Seattle Seahawks Stadium and they’ll forever after enjoy free promotion whenever news organizations fly over when covering sporting events.

One thing that some people spend a whole lot of time doing is looking for UFOs and Crop Circles. Here’s a really great crop circle of the Mozilla Firefox logo – a brilliant piece of promotion and linkbait if there ever was one:

Source : http://searchengineland.com/080114-124703.php

Chris “Silver” Smith is Lead Strategist at Netconcepts. The Locals Only column appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

Submit Your Articles: Guidelines for getting the most out of article syndication

The prevailing, generic internet marketing advice in vogue right now is that you need to syndicate your content. In other words, submit your articles to content directories and syndication hubs in order to win new traffic and links to your website.

The problem is that most new online business owners looking for solid step-by-step advice on how this is practically accomplished are turning up little more than the advice above.

People in the know have been there and done that. In fact, although article syndication is all the rage these days, expert internet marketers have been doing this for years. The system of getting the most out of syndication is a bit more advanced than simply paying someone to syndicate your content for you, to say the least.

Something to consider is that article dispersal hubs (article directories) come in all shapes and sizes. And some are far more advanced than most.

Consider the fact, which you might not have been aware of until now, that just getting your articles posted on a bunch of directories doesn’t necessarily mean you are getting your articles read in great numbers by your target market.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Think about the old link farms. It was awhile before anyone realized that no one in their target market was actually seeing their links! Certainly no one from their target market. Yet it was all the rage in its short-lived days as a top-notch marketing tactic!

The same can be said of most of the article directories on the web today. The two main visitors of such directories are website owners looking for content for their sites and authors looking for places to get published.

If neither of these groups are your target market, you are in big trouble if your articles only get syndicated to directories and no further.

The real point of syndication is consumption of your information by your target audience. Followed by a click on your link in the byline of your articles. A side benefit is any resulting search engine boost you might get for your site, but it is far less than most experts are telling you.

You see, when you submit your articles to the average directory they simply sit there and go no further. The average directories get little or no traffic and they do not in turn promote themselves properly through RSS feeds to bring your articles any real exposure.

The directories that give you the most bang for your buck are the directories that further syndicate your content through RSS and newsletters for each topic for which they accept articles.

What you want to look for are directories that are promoting your content actively and promoting themselves professionally. Look for directories with pagerank and high traffic stats and you can easily forget about any others.

In fact, just one submission to one high traffic, RSS feed-enabled directory can net you more traffic and backlinks than most of the rest of the content directories out there, since most of the others are small sites with article scripts put up by amateur marketers.

So when choosing places to spend time hand-submitting your content for the widest distribution possible, make sure you check to make sure submission is even worth that valuable effort. Check each directory’s pagerank and traffic stats before you waste time submitting your content to a black hole.

If you are going to use a service, carefully go through their stated list of submission sites before paying them a dime. Like the useless “search engine submission” companies that say they will submit your site to 7 zillion search engines (when there are really only a handful of real search engines on the web) many syndication companies pad their submission list with sites where no one will ever see your article or click your link.

Also, any syndication or PR specialist worth their fee should syndicate your article content through their own RSS feeds and have a popular site themselves. If not, don’t think they are going to do any better for you if their own site lacks significant traffic and pagerank.

You only have so much time each day to spend getting the most out of your efforts. Simply submitting articles to a huge list of directories expecting large amounts of links and traffic to come your way in the coming weeks is a loser’s bet.

Most people are doing this now, but you should have enough information here to avoid making that mistake yourself. Hit the big directories and don’t waste your time with the small fry. You can save yourself more time to write more content and syndicate it as well by skipping the ineffective article directories that are nothing more than content ghost towns.

5 SEO Tasks You Should Do Every Day

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

301 Redirects & Their SEO Advantage

301 Redirect is becoming popular, and used frequently by several webmasters around the globe.

So what exactly is 301 redirect ?

301 redirect means that your web page / web site has moved to a new location. 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

Take for example, you were having a page www.abc.com/alpha.asp, but webmaster of this website decides to replace this page ( with another page) due to their own technical/business preference.

What are some reasons you might want to move a Web page/ url permanently?

a) Website owner decides to change the technology and is moving website to an ASP.NET server, rather than an existing ASP/Windows server.

b) A new updated page ( in different location ) has to replace the old existing one.

c) If you have canonical issues and would like to resolve misplaced inbound links to different versions of your domain name then you will want to use a 301 redirect.

What would happen, if you remove/replace page directly ?

If you directly remove this page from your website you will face following difficulties :-

a) You will loose SEO rankings ( on Google/Yahoo) associated with that particular page.

b) You will also end up loosing online relationship with other website where you might have submitted your page in the page. Other website owners will delete your web page if your page is throwing a 404 error ( file not found error ).

301 redirect gives you an opportunity to inform both Visitors , and Search Engines about the new location of your page. Whenever somebody types in www.abc.com/alpha.asp, it will automatically move them to new page www.abc.com/beta.asp. Moreover Search Engines will transfer ranking power from old page to this new page.

How can you implement 301 redirect to replace old pages with new one ?

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect

• Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.

• Enter the redirection page

• Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”

• Click on ‘Apply’

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>

PHP Redirect
<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ASP Redirect
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status= “301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP .NET Redirect
<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(”Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

JSP (Java) Redirect
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect
$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(”http://www.new-url.com/”);

Is there any other functionality/usability of 301 redirect ?

Yes, it can even help you redirect your old domain to a new domain.

You need to create a .htaccess file ( This .htaccess method of redirection works only on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.) with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newwebsite.com in the above code with your new domain name.

Moreover, you should try to contact existing backlink websites to modify their backlink and point to your new website. Once 301 domain redirect is detected by search engines, they will transfer ranking power from your old domain towards redirected new domain ( * search ranking results can variate depending upon various factors)

Google’s Tag To Remove Content Spamming

Content spamming, in its simplest firm, is the taking of content from other sites that rank well on the search engines, and then either using it as-it-is or using a utility software like Articlebot to scramble the content to the point that it can’t be detected with plagiarism software. In either case, your good, search-engine- friendly content is stolen and used, often as part of a doorway page, to draw the attention of the search engines away from you.

Everyone has seen examples of this: the page that looks promising but contains lists of terms (like term  term paper  term papers  term limits) that link to other similar lists, each carrying Google advertising. Or the site that contains nothing but content licensed from Wikipedia. Or the site that plays well in a search but contains nothing more than SEO gibberish, often ripped off from the site of an expert and minced into word slaw.

These sites are created en masse to provide a fertile ground to draw eyeballs. It seems a waste of time when you receive a penny a view for even the best-paying ads  but when you put up five hundred sites at a time, and you’ve figured out how to get all of them to show up on the first page or two of a lucrative Google search term, it can be surprisingly profitable.

The losers are the people who click on these pages, thinking that there is content of worth on these sites  and you. Your places are stolen from the top ten by these spammers. Google is working hard to lock them out, but there is more that you can do to help Google.

Using The Antispam Tag

But there is another loser. One of the strengths of the Internet is that it allows for two-way public communication on a scale never seen before. You post a blog, or set up a wiki; your audience comments on your blog, or adds and changes your wiki.

The problem? While you have complete control over a website and its contents in the normal way of things, sites that allow for user communication remove this complete control from you and give it to your readers. There is no way to prevent readers of an open blog from posting unwanted links, except for manually removing them. Even then, links can be hidden in commas or periods, making it nearly impossible to catch everything.

This leaves you open to the accusation of link sp@m  for links you never put out there to begin with. And while you may police the most recent several blogs you’ve posted, no one polices the ones from several years ago. Yet Google still looks at them and indexes them. By 2002, bloggers everywhere were begging Google for an ignore tag of some sort to prevent its spiders from indexing comment areas.

Not only, they said, would bloggers be grateful; everyone with two-way uncontrolled communication  wikis, forums, guest books  needed this service from Google. Each of these types of sites has been inundated with sp@m at some point, forcing some to shut down completely. And Google itself needed it to help prevent the rampant sp@m in the industry.

In 2005, Google finally responded to these concerns. Though their solution is not everything the online community wanted (for instance, it leads to potentially good content being ignored as well as sp@m), it does at least allow you to section out the parts of your blog that are public. It is the “nofollow” attribute.

“Nofollow” allows you to mark a portion of your web page, whether you’re running a blog or you want to section out paid advertising, as an area that Google spiders should ignore. The great thing about it is that not only does it keep your rankings from suffering from sp@m, it also discourages spammers from wasting your valuable comments section with their junk text.

The most basic part of this attribute involves embedding it into a hyperlink. This allows you to manually flag links, such as those embedded in paid advertising, as links Google spiders should ignore. But what if the content is user-generated? It’s still a problem because you certainly don’t have time to go through and mark all those links up.

Fortunately, blogging systems have been sensitive to this new development. Whether you use WordPress or another blogging system, most have implemented either automated “nofollow” links in their comment sections, or have issued plugins you can implement yourself to prevent this sort of spamming.

This does not solve every problem. But it’s a great start. Be certain you know how your user-generated content system provides this service to you. In most cases, a software update will implement this change for you.

Is This Spamming And Will Google Block Me?

There’s another problem with the spamming crowd. When you’re fighting search engine sp@m and start seeing the different forms it can take  and, disturbingly, realizing that some of your techniques for your legitimate site are similar  you have to wonder: Will Google block me for my search engine optimization techniques?

This happened recently to BMW’s corporate site. Their webmaster, dissatisfied with the dealership’s position when web users searched for several terms (such as “new car”), created and posted a gateway page  a page optimized with text that then redirects searchers to an often graphics-heavy page.

Google found it and, rightly or wrongly, promptly dropped their page rank manually to zero. For weeks, searches for their site turned up plenty of sp@m and dozens of news storiesbut to find their actual site, it was necessary to drop to the bottom of the search, not easy to do in Googleworld.

This is why you really need to understand what Google counts as search engine sp@m, and adhere to their restrictions even if everyone else doesn’t. Never create a gateway page, particularly one with spammish data. Instead, use legittmate techniques like image alternate text and actual text in your page. Look for ways to get other pages to point to your site t article submission, for instance, or directory submission. And keep your content fresh, always.

While duplicated text is often a sign of serious spammage, the Google engineers realize two things: first, the original text is probably still out there somewhere, and it’s unfair to drop that person’s rankings along with those who stole it from them; and second, certain types of duplicated text, like articles or blog entries, are to be expected.

Their answer to the first issue is to credtt the site first catalogued with a particular text as the creator, and to drop sites obviously spammed from that one down a rank. The other issue is addressed by looking at other data around the questionable data; if the entire site appears to be spammed, it, too, is dropped. Provided you are not duplicating text on many websites to fraudulently increase your ranking, you’re safe. Ask yourself: are you using the same content on several sites registered to you in order to maximize your chances of being read? If the answer is yes, this is a bad idea and will be classified as spamdexing. If your content would not be useful to the average Internet surfer, it is also likely to be classed as spamdexing.

There is a very thin line between search engine optimization and spamdexing. You should become very familiar with it. Start with understanding hidden/invisible text, keyword stuffing, metatag stuffing, gateway pages, and scraper sites.