Sunday, July 29, 2012

"People Related To" In Google Search Result


Today Morning when I typed “Twitter” in Google search I found people related to Twitter on right hand side of the usual results.


When I clicked on first link named “Evan Williams”, it took me to search results for search term “Evan Williams”. Also there was info about him on right hand side.
All info about Evan was taken from his Wikipedia page and picture from his G+ page.
When I searched for couple of other search terms I got to know that these “People related to” shows up for people with very strong “G+“Profile & wiki page.
Now this is not about only people. When I searched for book “iwoz”, I got all details with picture about this book on right hand side. 

Again the details were from Wikipedia.
I guess, this is the time for building strong wiki pages & “G+” profiles for getting there on right side of the search results ;)

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Local Directories/Citation list

Local search marketing is getting prime importance these days and its been proven traffic booster technique with pretty good conversion rates.
I have gathered more than 100 local citation websites , specially for USA. Some of them are:

http://needium.com/
http://www.thumbtack.com/
http://www.yellowone.com/
http://www.zipcodez.com/
http://www.merchantcircle.com/
http://neworleanswebsites.com/
http://www.yellowusa.com/
http://www.2findlocal.com/
http://www.angieslist.com/
http://www.mojopages.com/
http://www.geodelic.com/
http://www.topix.com/
http://www.macraesbluebook.com/
http://www.bizjournals.com/
http://www.bridgat.com/
http://www.servicemagic.com/

Subscribe this blog, to get the complete list of more than 100 local citation websites.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Identify Low Quality Links


Poor back linking issues is major concern these days. If any website is not doing well then first thing come up in mind is “Does Google penalize my website?”, “Is that a poor baclinks issue which prohibit my website from ranking higher in SERP?”

For one of my client, beside great SEO & fresh content, website was not doing well. So I thought of checking backlinks.
Here is my step by step search procedure:
1. I gathered all backilnks for client’s website using tool “open site explorer”.
2. Then gathered all data in excel.
3. Sorted out websites with low DA (domain authority), any special signs like (????, Â ) in title tag or anchor text, any irrelevant anchor texts.
4. Grouped them in separate excel.
5. Checked in Google search with search term “Domain name”, if website does not come up in first few results then that website is either penalized or on the way to get penalize as per my reading. Gathered all penalized websites.
6. Forward that to my link building team to remove those penalized websites.

Try to remove these websites if easily possible & try not to use them for further submissions.
It’s always good to build quality link instead of trying to remove bad links, but we can give this small try to easily removable links.

I also checked baclinks with Netpeak. I was able to find websites having same IP address with “subnet” option from Netpeak tool. I heard that if option “Google index” from Netpeak is n/f, that means the website is deindexed from Google but somehow it was showing me n/f for twitter also L(I do not know if anything was wrong on my side).

 Anyways, considering quality is important than quantity in current scenario, here are some conclusions:
-When pick up websites from complete list first check IP address & remove the website with same IP addresses.
-Submit link to particular website one time only.
-Websites with low DA should be checked in Google with domain name only e.g. “abc” for “abc.com” and if abc.com does not come up in first few results, then avoid that website.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Quality Link Building Techniques


Since the day, Penguin update rolled out quality link building has become more crucial for SEO’s.  I would like to share few techniques which I am using recently.

1. Set up Google alerts that notify you every time someone mentions your branded keywords and check out each site that come up in alerts. Then you can send linking request to webmasters of some of those websites which are perfect for back linking purpose.

2. You can try for .edu links by asking your client’s staff to sign up for their college alumni network where they can put company’s website. One of the natural way to get edu links.

3. Update blog at least once in week and share blog post on Google+, Tweeter, and Face book

4. Creating public profile on
 Flickr·    Current   Kirtsy     PostOnFir CoRank   Digg Propeller   Technorati    BloggingZoom   MyBlogLog
These websites do not have No-followed links in their public profiles


5. Link building with competitor analysis. Consider competitors with position 10, 11, 12 as these websites work hard to get on page one, so we can get good source for links. Use of commands like intext:domain-to-check(.)com for competitor back link analysis.

6. Try using different anchor texts for linking purpose. For example if the key term is “ABC”, then use “ABC”,”ABC blog”, “Contact ABC “,”ABC services” etc.    

7. You can look for theme based guest post opportunities. For example, searched for author “XYZ” who writes on particular issue, then run query ["XYZ” Guest] in Google search. You will get many sites which allow guest post & even you look for your niche.






Thursday, February 23, 2012

Blogspot.com redirecting to Country specific URL



I was surprised when I saw my blogspot.com blog is redirecting me to blogspot.in First I thought that I made some mistake or changed some settings. After doing some R&D I got to know that it’s not my mistake but the Blogger change. You must have observed this change recently.
From now your Blogger blogs will redirect to country-code top level domain, or "ccTLD." Like .ca, .au, .in etc.
Now my concern is will that affect blogs from SEO point of view? Will it create a duplicate content issue?
Well, this problem will be tackled by use of rel=canonical tag as explained by Google people. The .com version of BlogSpot will be canonical version to let crawler know that content is same but the URLs are different. Wow it’s a great relief now J
Also, let’s say you want U.S version of the BlogSpot content & you are in some other country, then you can request the same using formatted NCR i.e. “No country redirect” URL .
e.g. http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr will take you to U.S version of blog irrespective of your current location.
Ohh, it’s pretty good. Isn’t it?