What is this "over optimization" that everyone is talking about?

Google’s “over optimization” Penalty 

1.  The most common infraction is keyword stuffing/spamming/abusing etc.  When desperate for rankings people will often resort to just repeating keywords as often as they can.  You need to focus on proper keyword usage and the best test for this is to read your content out loud.  You'll know if it sounds keyword stuffed and you can go back and edit it.  One way to avoid keyword stuffing is to use different variations of your words and phrases and look for synonyms that you can get in there.  That eliminates the over usage of one phrase and it creates more phrases you can possibly be found for.

2.    Lots of low quality links all with the same or very similar anchor text. This dates back to the days of the good old fashioned link exchange - "you link to me and I'll link to you and by the way, let's both have everyone linking to us use the same anchor text and all link to only the homepage".  Not cool these days.  As with most things in SEO, it's about balance and well rounded diversity.  You want quality links to many different pages, all with different anchor text (that is relevant to the page you are linking to).  These kind of links are hard to obtain but Google doesn't care.  It's what they want.  Most people want a quick easy link fix and it was never a good idea but it's even more important that you avoid it these days.

3.    Too little content on the page but lots of "optimization"

4.    Lots of duplicate content taken from sites that rank well.

5.    There is some theory that too many sites being pointed/redirected to your main site could hurt you.  I've heard a lot of talk about this one but not seen a lot of proof

6.    Link farms/networks. There are two ways this can hurt you.  If you are running a link farm - which means too many links on a page, none with any real text or purpose other than giving out links.  The second way is having a link farm/network linking to your site (especially if the same ones have multiple links back to your site).

It actually surprises me that everyone is making such a big deal about this - over optimization has always been a bad thing.  It's been called spamming and black hat (which also involves cloaking and various other nefarious things) but the bottom line is Google has been continually ramping up their efforts to weed out bad sites.  Each time it happens and a group of bad sites take a hit, everyone is surprised and rushes to analyze it.  The truth is you do need to optimize but it needs to be in a more "natural" way.  Avoid some pretty basic things and be strong in the areas you should be.
As I said, this really isn't new.  We went through this months ago.  I mean, wasn't Panda aimed at the quality of sites?  You bet it was!

All this really means is Google is getting more aggressive about cleaning up the search results.  I am actually good with that.  Sites that aren't participating in any of the problem areas have nothing to worry about. If you have a quality site that focuses on "evergreen" optimization, you won't have to worry each time there is an algorithm shake up.

Article Resources Write by Jennifer Horowitz

 marketingseo 

Is Cloud Computing Good For SEO?

 Is Cloud Computing Good For SEO?

Cloud computing is often thought about in terms of data storage, not web development. But as it becomes more popular you’ll start to see many more uses for it. For data storage purposes, cloud computing was thought to be a much needed relief for many companies. But it turns out that even Google has security issues with keeping data secure. So if Google can’t do it, who can?

Someday someone is going to get the bright idea to build a website in the cloud. What will happen?

First, I predict the site will be hacked. If data storage is unsecure in the cloud then how much more will web development be? Hackers can already sneak into WordPress and other CMS systems. If those systems were cloud-based they’d be even that much more insecure. And an unsecure server is bad for search engine optimization and your website.

If a hacker gets into your server, he could really do some damage. Link dropping, malicious malware downloads, just to name a couple. Some webmasters on traditional servers have already experienced these issues with WordPress and other CMSs. Just by not updating their software. Now put that non-updated software on the cloud. See the issue?

You could lose your search engine rankings for some of these issues. All because of a lack of security in the cloud.

article sources:http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/07/16/cloud-computing-seo/ 

The Impact of Cloud Computing on SEO

The Impact of Cloud Computing on SEO

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing has been developing in the last few years and it promises to be the new business model for many companies. With cloud computing there is no need to own the physical infrastructure. Hardware and software capacities are rented through a provider. Users can rent virtual computers on which they can run their own applications, allowing access/share data through the cloud (Internet) at any given moment. Most importantly cloud computing allows sites hosted in the cloud to be accessed rapidly and in the user’s local language, as WebPages are served through a cluster of servers closer to the user’s IP location.

Is Hosting location important for SEO?

Hosting location and country Top Level Domain (TLD) have always been important factors for SEO to target search results specific to a country. While TLD indicated the site’s origin (e.g. .com.au for Australia) to search engines (SEs), hosting has been significantly important to identify the geo-location of a website as SEs have been looking at the IP address of the site to detect the server location. If a site was hosted on a server that was physically located in a country, then that site would have been included in the country-specific searches even if this had a generic TLD domain name. SEO recommendation for a site targeting Australia would have been to choose a hosting provider coming from Australia rather than the US. Hosting location would have especially affected sites using generic TLDs such as .org, .info, .biz, etc. Google also allows webmasters to set the geo-location within Webmaster Tools to help them target a specific market.

Cloud computing is changing the hosting location factor

Cloud computing is going to change the hosting location factor. The reason behind this is that sites can be hosted anywhere in the cloud, however, the web pages are served locally. So sites hosted in the cloud that have different versions (US, UK, AU etc) initially created to target specific countries, will all look like local sites to Google and therefore will start competing against each other. The site that has the highest authority will eventually outranks the others – e.g. if the US version of a site has the strongest authority, this would eventually outrank the AU version within the Australian market.

As cloud computing becomes more popular, Search Engines would change their algorithms to take this into account. This is going to revolutionise the way that sites operate across different countries and in different languages.

Google Caffeine and Cloud Computing

In June 2010 Google released the new Caffeine update, providing a new search indexing system allowing Google to index web pages on an enormous scale. Page speed became a factor in SEO and it started playing an important role in the rankings of websites in search results (especially for sites aiming to rank in a competitive space). One of the key strengths of cloud computing is the faster delivery of web pages, significantly improving the page loading time. Cloud computing allows the distribution of resources more efficiently and effectively and can have a huge impact on a site’s loading time.

Google and Cloud Computing

Google has been promoting cloud computing for quite some time. Matt Cutts on his Blog “Why cloud services rock” mentioned how “hosted services and storing data in the cloud [on someone else’s servers] can be better than doing it yourself”. Matt Cutts, in his video on “Big Changes to search in the next few years”, also commented that “As more people get comfortable with online computing, more of them will choose to store their data from onsite hardrives and store it in the “cloud”. As a result searching in the cloud for relevant information will become increasingly important”.

Article Source :http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/3749/

DaniWeb Claims 110% Recovery from Google Panda Update ......

This week, it was confirmed that Google had made a minor adjustment to its Panda algorithm update, which has drastically altered the search engine’s results several times since its first iteration in February. 

As Google makes hundreds of algorithmic changes each year, Google downplayed this as any major shift. The official statement, as obtained by Barry Schwartz, was

“We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

It appears that it may be more major than we originally thought. We had seen a few comments from webmasters indicating that their rankings had somewhat improved, but now Dani Horowitz, whose DaniWeb discussion forum was an apparently innocent casualty of the Panda updates’s wrath tells WebProNews that the site has made a full “110% recovery” as a result of this most recent Panda tweak. 

When we interviewed Horowitz back in May, she told us about some various tactics she was engaging in, which seemed to be having positive effects on her site’s search referrals.

While what she was seeing was far from a full recovery, it was enough to give webmasters hope that they may be able to climb their way back up into Google’s good graces, despite having been victimized by the update. In other words, there were enough other ranking factors that sites could use to improve their rankings to avoid being totally deprived of search referrals at the hands of Panda – good news for those sites with quality content that were casualties of Google’s war on poor content.

At the time, DaniWeb had a long way to go, however, to reach the levels of traffic it was seeing from Google before. Even more interesting perhaps, was the fact that Google seemed to be ranking DaniWeb well for things that didn’t make sense, while things that that it ranked well for previously that did make sense, were sending traffic elsewhere.

“Panda 2.3 went live on July 23rd and traffic just instantly jumped back up to normal that very day,” Horowitz now tells us. “We’re now seeing traffic at the same pre-Panda highs in some countries, while other countries are even better than ever. Overall, we’re seeing more pageviews than ever before.”

Here’s a look at global visitors and US visitors respectively since the beginning of the year (that’s visitors, not pageviews

“Notice that US visitors were affected on February 24th while global traffic wasn’t severely impacted until a month and a half later,” Horowitz points out. “The decline coincided exactly with the first iteration of Panda and the recovery coincided exactly with the latest iteration of Panda.”

“All of the changes I’ve made were documented in the official Google Support thread or in the video interview I did with you guys,” she tells us. “In fact, I hadn’t made any recent changes immediately before the recovery. I haven’t yet had a chance to investigate any specific long tail keywords yet either. Google Webmaster Tools looks very different from what it looked like back in March as a result of all the work I’ve done, but nothing that stands out between this month and last.”

She did add in the Google Support thread, “There were no big changes made immediately before the site came back, with the exception of a significant increase in my Google AdWords budget.” She followed this up shortly after with, “I mentioned AdWords because we use it heavily to increase registrations, which directly results in an increase in posts per day. If there was a correlation, then it was a sudden increase in new content followed the penalty reversal.”

Here’s our previous interview with Dani, so you can gain more insight into the kinds of things she was doing in the first place:

More WebProNews Videos

We’ll keep our eyes peeled for more reports of full recoveries. I have to wonder how many wrongfully impacted sites have seen their rankings jump back up. Either way, provided that DaniWeb’s recovery was indeed a direct result from this latest Panda tweak, other victims might find hope in that Google does continue to “iterate” on the Panda algorithm.

Have you noticed a significant change in rankings since the latest iteration of the Panda update? Any more ill recoveries? Let us know.

We’ll keep our eyes peeled for more reports of full recoveries. I have to wonder how many wrongfully impacted sites have seen their rankings jump back up. Either way, provided that DaniWeb’s recovery was indeed a direct result from this latest Panda tweak, other victims might find hope in that Google does continue to “iterate” on the Panda algorithm.

Have you noticed a significant change in rankings since the latest iteration of the Panda update? Any more ill recoveries? Let us know.

Google Launches Google + To Battle Facebook

Google Launches Google+1 To Battle Facebook

Google has finally unveiled Google+1, the company’s top secret social layer that turns all of the search engine into one giant social network.

Google+, which begins rolling out a very limited field test on Tuesday, is the culmination of a year-long project led by Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social. The project, which has been delayed several times, constitutes Google’s answer to Facebook.

The search giant’s new social project will be omnipresent on its products, thanks to a complete redesign of the navigation bar. The familiar gray strip at the top of every Google page will turn black, and come with several new options for accessing your Google+ profile, viewing notifications and instantly sharing content. The notification system is similar to how Facebook handles notifications, complete with a red number that increases with each additional notice.

Circles+

That’s where Google+ begins to diverge from Facebook, though. The focus of this social project is not on sharing with a mass group of friends, but on targeted sharing with your various social groups. To do this, Google uses a system called Circles.

Gundotra explained that most social media services (read: Facebook, Twitter) haven’t been successful with friend lists because they’ve been designed as a “tack-on” product rather than being integrated at every level. Gundotra also believes that current friend list products are awkward and not rewarding to use.



Google+ Circles is an attempt to address that challenge. The HTML5 system allows users to drag-and-drop their friends into different social circles for friends, family, classmates, co-workers and other custom groups. Users can drag groups of friends in and out of these circles.

One of the nice things about the product is its whimsical nature — a puff of smoke and a -1 animation appears when you remove a friend, and when you remove a social circle, it rolls away off the screen.

Photos Group Video Chat

It’s clear from the extended demo that Gundotra and his team have thought about every aspect and detail of Google+ thoroughly. The photo, video and mobile experiences are no exception.

Google has created a section specifically for viewing, managing and editing multimedia. The photo tab takes a user to all of the photos he or she has shared, as well as the ones he or she is tagged in. It’s not just photo tagging, though: Google+ includes an image editor (complete with Instagram-like photo effects), privacy options and sharing features.

The video chat feature might be one of the most interesting aspects of Google+. Gundotra and his team thought about why group chat hasn’t become a mainstream phenomenon. He compared it to knocking on a neighbor’s door at 8 p.m. — most people don’t do it because it isn’t a social norm. However, if a group of friends are sitting on a porch and you just happen to walk by, it’s almost rude not to say hi.

That’s the concept behind “Hangouts,” Google’s new group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chatroom alone. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” The result, Google has found in internal testing, is that friends quickly join.

One cool feature of Hangouts is that it doesn’t place a chat window on the screen for each participant. Instead, Google changes the chat screen to whoever is currently talking. It quickly switches from video feed to video feed, moving faster in bigger groups. The maximum members in any video Hangout is 10, though users can get on a waitlist and wait for someone to leave.

Content Discovery Through Sparks

To spur sharing, Google has added a recommendation engine for finding interesting content. The feature, Google+ Sparks, is a collection of articles, videos, photos and other content grouped by interest. For example, the “Movies” spark will have a listing of recent and relevant content for that topic.

The system is algorithmic — it relies on information from other Google products (e.g. Google Search) as well as what is being shared via Google+ and through +1 buttons.

The goal, according to Gundotra, is to make it dead-simple for users to explore their interests and share what they find with their friends. Google+ is attempting to become the one-stop shop not only for sharing content, but for finding it as well. In some ways, it reminds us of Twitter and its mission to become an information network, and “instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

Mobile

Google will also be launching mobile apps for Google+, starting with Android. The Android app includes access to the Stream, Circles, Sparks and multimedia.

The addition of these features in a mobile app isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise, though, is the app’s auto-upload feature. Any photo or video you take on your phone through Google+ will automatically be uploaded to your computer, ready to share. These uploads aren’t public, but the next time you log onto your desktop, the photos button in the status bar will have a number, indicating how many new uploads are available for sharing. It keeps these photos and videos available for sharing for eight hours after upload.

Gundotra says that Google intends to launch apps for Google+ on other platforms in the future.

Conclusion

Google freely admitted to me during our conversation that its previous attempt at social, Google Buzz, did not live up to expectations. Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of product, says that part of the problem was that Buzz was just “tacked on” as a link on millions of Gmail accounts, something that Google won’t be repeating. Horowitz also says that, unlike the Buzz rollout, Google+ is a project that will roll out in stages.

In many ways, it reminds us of Gmail’s rollout. Invites to Google’s email service were so sought after at one point that people were selling them for $50 or more on eBay. While that type of fervor may not hit Google+, we expect the artificial scarcity will drive up interest while giving Google time to work out the kinks.

No matter what Google says, Google+ is the company’s response to the rise of Facebook. The two companies are in heated competition for talent, page views and consumers. While Google controls the search market and has a strong presence on mobile with Android, it hasn’t been able to crack the social nut. Its most successful social product, YouTube, had to be acquired, and it still ranks as one of the most expensive acquisitions in the company’s history.

Has Google finally nailed social with Google+? We’re going to publish more of our thoughts on Google’s new social network in the next few hours, but we will say this: Google no longer gets a free pass in social. It must prove that it can draw users and keep them engaged in a way that doesn’t replicate Facebook or Twitter’s functionality. Only time will tell if Google has finally found its magical arrow.

Marketing SEO+1 :)