The Bad Side of Getting Inbound Links from Client Websites

Attention web design companies. If you are fond of putting your link at the footer section of websites you built, make sure you ensure the website is thoroughly tested and error-free when tested. And if installed with content management system, make sure that pages will not display undesirable content even when client’s designated staff makes crazy updates.

Otherwise, you’re simply showcasing inept workmanship. (If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at the lower right portion of the screen capture above.) While the link helps you in your SEO efforts, the appearance of your brand in that odd page displayed might just drag your profile down.

Google Maps Paid Version

BBC News reports that Google Maps will soon be a paid service — to websites deemed heavy users of the supposed free service. “Heavy” is certainly a subjective word but the report says starting Jan 1, 2012, Google will start charging websites for using Google Maps API when they reach above the 25,000 map hits in a day.

Google is rumored to be charging $4 per 1,000 views in excess of the limit.

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60 Site SEO Audit Checklist

Reviewing SEO in an audit sometimes can be overwhelming. We all want to make a systematic approach so we are able to address two important issues: a) Make use of time efficiently and b) Ensure we don’t miss any relevant SEO issue. Hence this SEO audit checklist for webmasters who don’t want to engaged with a consultant and learn more about SEO at their own pace.

1 Indexed pages
Use the “site:” operator in Google search (for example enter “site:seo-hongkong.com“) and verify how many pages are indexed in Google.

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BarCamp Hong Kong 2011

For the first time since it was first held in Hong Kong in 2007, I will be joining BarCamp, a gathering of enthusiasts not necessarily like-minded but collectively embrace the culture of open learning.

Photo credit: www.yopyblog.com

Described as “an ad-hoc “unconference” born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment”, BarCamp provides a platform for people to share, learn or both without the formalities quite common in organized conferences. That means you may a master of iPhone app development but nobody’s going to prevent you from sharing your passion for landscape photography. Predictably, I shared about search marketing in 2007.

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Site Structure Pitfall No. 238: Failure to Add Index Pages for Subfolders

One of the things I sometimes encounter on local websites is the ’404 Error’. Although seeing the custom 404 is an upgrade over the generic error message generated by web browsers or web servers, such errors are deemed unnecessary and paints a bad impression of the website. Not that we clicked on a broken link has generated this ’404 File Not Found Error’ page but a random ‘hack’ of removing the trailing filename will reveal this error.

For example, it very is common to view Hong Kong Observatory’s pages during time of inclement weather conditions. With a wealth of timely weather information — from synchronizing time to climate change — the Hong Kong Observatory is the place to go. However, when it comes to organizing content, the site is a bit wanting.

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Spell Check: Low PageRank Value May Be Caused by Spelling Errors

A relationship between low Google PageRank and bad spelling and grammar has been revealed in a video just made public. In the video, shown below, Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google makes a correlation between site content littered with poor spelling and grammar structure and low PageRank value. In a response to a question about whether or not spelling or grammar matters when Google evaluates websites, to which Cutts responded:
“We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page — how reputable we think a particular page or site is — the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”
Cutts says grammar and spelling issues are not currently used as “direct signal” for search ranking; your page may have a perfectly edited content but still fail to rank prominently especially if the page fails on other aspects such as lack of focus on keywords, relatively fewer inbound links or poor navigation structure.

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Google Webmaster Reports in Google Analytics

When Google Webmaster Tools was introduced, its purpose was distinctive from other notable tools such as Google Analytics, provided by Google for free. It helps webmasters diagnose accessibility problems, view search engine activity statistics and set preferences such as preferred domain or crawl rates.

As Google Analytics and Google Webmasters started to introduce more tools, it has become evident that certain functions and reports are better utilized without switching over to another account. For example, while Google Analytics tells me which keyword referred traffic into my client’s website, it doesn’t tell me what is the click-through percentage is the site getting relative to number of times the website appears on search engine results. The latter can be answered by reports generated by Google Webmaster tools. Although this tool has been with Google Webmaster tools for quite some time, it was not introduced until 2007, at the time when Google Analytics and its keyword referral reports was roughly a year and half years old.

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How to Add User Access to Google Webmaster Tools Accounts

When working with clients, it is common to access various Google reports using different accounts.

For example, if the client has already set up Google Analytics tracking for his website prior to working with me, he may grant me access using my Google Account. Doing so offers me convenience in using my account to log in without offering complications. That’s because an account used to access Google Analytics may also be used to access other applications such as email, photos, blogs and documents which client obviously doesn’t want me to access.

With that in mind, Google Analytics made it easier for us to add someone else’s account or our accounts be added by administrators who manage our sites. In the same light, Google Webmaster tools also offer a similar way of adding access to the diagnostic tools it offers to websites.

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Google Redefines Internal, External Links

Google has mad a small yet significant change in how it defines internal and external links.

What we previously know before as external links are no longer classified that way. Links coming from subdomains used to be known as external are no longer grouped as such.

Based on its Google Webmaster blog post

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

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‘Gmail’ Search Query Returns Unexpected Results in Photo Results

For some reason, typing ‘gmail’ as search query will yield unexpected results, Barry Schwartz discovered in his article at Search Engine Land.

Google’s Photo search, unlike the more prominent Image search, displays results culled from Picasa Web Album, a photo sharing website similar to Flickr. Picasa allows free 1 GB storage Google Account users. Google’s default image result is extracted from Google Images, a sophisticated search tool that allows users to fine-tune search results based on image dimensions, color, or type (clipart, photo, etc).

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