Google Updates Webmaster Quality Guidelines

May 25th, 2006

Just a quick post. As many SEO consultants do, we monitor Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines closely to glean any information and try and read into the subtext of any changes made. Well a few new bullet points have just been added today:

• 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.
• If a site doesn’t meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn’t meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request reinclusion.

Nothing that really effects our clients.. but a warning to those who expect their site to rank well that it needs unique content, not just displaying products from another site. After all why should Google index an affiliate site that doesn’t provide anything more than the official site does?

Google AdWords - Ad scheduling announced

May 25th, 2006

In the neighbourhood of Microsoft at Search Engine Watch Live last week, Google unusually for them announced a service upgrade before it goes live. From June this year AdWords customers will be able to schedule their adverts to run only at weekends, or weekdays.. or in fact on different days of the week. They’ll also be able to narrow their advertising down to displaying at certain times of day.. or to set different maximum bids for different times or days. Mike Mayzel from Google gave the following information to SEW -

• We are releasing this ad scheduling functionality at the request of advertisers and agencies who have asked for greater campaign management control.
• AdWords’ new ad scheduling functionality will enable advertisers to drive greater returns from AdWords by providing them with more granular control over when their ads run and how much they bid.
• Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.
• Small business and local advertisers can now schedule their ads to run only during business hours.
• More sophisticated advertisers can now better capture & exploit intra-day and intra-week cycles of buyer behavior.
• We are planning to role it out to all advertisers next month.

The move comes shortly after the launch of Microsoft adCenter - which offers this kind of targeting and much more in the way of demographics. It seems that the big G see adCenter enough of a threat to implement some of it’s features into their industry leading offering.

DMOZ and MSN Listings

May 23rd, 2006

DMOZ, the human edited directory project, is one of the largest directories on the internet, and a listing in it can boost your visitor numbers dramatically. It’s also used by many other sites for their own directory, including Google. One thing that frustrates webmasters however is that so much importance is placed on the listings found within the DMOZ directory that MSN and Google sometimes use the description from DMOZ as the description of your site in the SERPs.

Now, usually this isn’t a problem.. but what if the description isn’t great for your site? Or what if the site has entirely different content from when it was added to DMOZ, and it’s description isn’t relevant any more? MSN has listened to webmasters and given a way to opt out of using the DMOZ description for it’s listings.

How do you implement it?

Place one of these tags with the other meta tags on your page.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

or

<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

Keep in mind, it may take a few weeks for MSN to notice this tag in your pages.

Inquisitor search interface

May 18th, 2006

Monitoring your site development with Google Alerts

May 17th, 2006

For those of you promoting websites, or just wanting to keep up to date with your site’s progress in Google, here’s a neat little trick using Google Alerts

Create an alert with your domain name, choosing ‘News and Web’. Select how often you’d like reports via email.

• site:www.domain.com will send you a report of new pages indexed by Google
• www.domain.com -site:www.domain.com will send reports of any new links to your site that are indexed by Google

Enjoy!