“It’s been a success from our standpoint”, Cutts said.

When asked about the issues of false positives (people who feel they’ve been unfairly hit by Penguin when they weren’t doing any spam) Matt went on to clarify,

“We’ve seen a few cases where we might want to investigate more, but this change hasn’t had the same impact as Panda or Florida,”

“No algorithm is perfect. While we’d like to achieve perfection, our litmus test is, ‘Do things get better than before?’”

Matt also went on to clarify that penguin was designed to be quite precise, only acting against pages where there was a high confidence of spam being involved.

So what should you do if you were hit?

Google have said that those hit by the penguin update will need to make changes to their website or link profile in order to recover.

As we’ve mentioned before, bad linking practises seem to be a major cause of this penalty. Some of the things to look out for include,

1. Paid text links using exact match anchor text: For companies that want to rank for a certain term (such as “red widgets”) one way to accomplish this is by buying links from other websites with that exact matching anchor text. This is against Google’s guidelines, as Google would consider this a paid link that exists solely to manipulate PageRank, rather than to provide any value to visitors.
2. Comment spam: Two things proved problematic for websites trying to unnaturally rank for specific keywords: signatures in comments that contained exact match anchor text; and people who used a spammy user name (e.g., Best India SEO Company) as exact match text.
3. Guest posts on questionable sites: Although guest posts are a legitimate way to earn links to your site, sites dinged by the Penguin had links pointing to their website from sites filled with low-quality articles where the focus was on the anchor text rather than the content.
4. Article marketing sites: Thin content featuring links with exact match anchor text were another common factor among affected sites.
5. Links from dangerous sites: Do you have inbound links from sites that have been flagged for malware, numerous pop-ups, or other spammy issues? This was another factor that caused websites to lose their Google rankings, so links to and from web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” are a danger.

If you’re looking to clean up your link profile one technique you can try is called link pruning. This basically involves identifying poor incoming links to your website and taking steps to remove them.

Here is a basic outline of the steps to take,

1. Identify: You need to gather a comprehensive backlink profile for the site in question. There are several tools available that would accomplish this, including Google Webmaster Tools Backlinks Report, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.
2. Investigate: Go down the list of backlinks to find the rotten ones. It’s a time intensive step that requires you navigate to each link to evaluate its quality. After a while you may start to get a sense of what’s bad by the URL of the linking page alone. If you opt for using Majestic SEO, you have the benefit of their proprietary ACRank, a quality score that you can use to judge link value.
3. Send Requests: Create a template email requesting link removal that you’ll send to the webmasters in charge of the links identified as low quality. The template should candidly explain that you are an SEO or site owner trying to recover from a Google penalty and would he or she please remove the following links. List the URLs where the links can be found, the URL on your site they point to, the anchor text ─ all the info needed to easily find the link you’re requesting removed. To send the request, you may find contact info on the site, you may need to do a whois search, and you may need to do some sleuthing to get names and email addresses.
4. Follow Up and Repeat: Expect to receive four types of responses to your requests:● Remove link and tell you.
   ● Remove link and not tell you.
   ● Not reply or do anything.
   ● Will remove the link if you pay them. 

   In the case of the first, verify by going to the page where the link was and if the link was removed, check it off the list. If you haven’t gotten any response back from a contact in 2 weeks, check to see if the link has been removed. It may or may not. If it’s been removed, cross it off the list. If it hasn’t been removed, send a follow-up request.The process of link pruning requires multiple cycles. Each successive cycle will see more links removed. If you run across a webmaster requesting payment for link removal, let’s just say there’s a search engine who will be very interested to hear about this.

5. Communicate with Google: Throughout this process you must keep detailed records of your actions. A spreadsheet with columns for the linking URL, the contact name, the contact email, the date a request was sent, and responses or actions taken by the linking site. In the end you will not be able to extract all dubious links from the site but you will want to be able to show you’ve done everything in your power to extract manipulative links from your backlink profile.

Have you been impacted by Penguin? Feel free to leave a comment below.

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It turns out, though, that the MacBook Pro isn’t the only Mac getting in on the retina display action. After the news broke yesterday, ABC News heard from its own sources that the iMac would also be getting the retina display.

Not to be outdone, 9to5Mac, who broke the original story yesterday, did a little more source-mining, and learned that the MacBook Air will be getting a retina display, too. That, for those of you following along at home, means that all the major products in Apple’s Mac lineup – MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iMac – will be getting the same retina display treatment that the iPad got back in March.

Of course, there aren’t any real details yet, since Apple hasn’t actually announced anything. It’s not clear whether the retina display will be coming to all these computers in all their size variations, nor whether there will also be (cheaper) non-retina display models available, nor how much a retina display Mac will cost. Nevertheless, assuming these reports are accurate, then this year’s WWDC should offer quite a lot to look forward to.

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How Rel=Author Works?

The entire concept is based on the blending of search with social. Author markups allow the writer of a specific webpage to link the page to his Google Plus profile page. This linking is a two way verification process and the Google+ page has to link back to the author’s webpage. Once the linking is done, the search results change dramatically. Author’s content will show up in search listings with a snippet of their name, Google+ profile image and the link back to the profile. The authorship image has been proven to be a great resource to increase click through rates.

Opting for rel=author will make your article stand out as Google will know you as the author and will rank the original source of the content higher. Seeing an author’s picture next to the article is a great way of earning the surfers’ attention and even their trust. This said, there are not many authors who have claimed their spot because a recent study has shown that only 1 in every 5 Google searches shows author markup in the top 100 results.

What You Stand to Gain from Author Markup?

The benefit in one line- your search result look credible and you get higher click through. Google has always emphasized the fact that it likes the pages with rich snippets better as people find them more informational and are highly likely to click on them. Rich snippets due to author markup highlight your listing, making it stand apart from the other results with no author markup attached.

The author information and photo (visible to even logged out users) of a verified Google+ profile comes with a lot of authority. The mark up is an excellent way for you to spread yourself on the social level as people can follow you to your Google+ profile page too. URL so if people like your article they can easily visit your profile.

Google has also launched the Author Stats program in Webmaster Tools where authors can get to analyze the number of impressions and clicks every post got.

SEO Benefits:

Google thinks of author markups as trust indicator for both their users and their algorithm. Google uses the information on credibility of authors as a ranking factor. The concept of Author Rank has risen out of the Rel=Author attribute. In other words authors who are verified will be trusted more and given more authority; and will find higher places in search results. Google wants to push forward quality content, not optimized content.

How to Implement Author Markup

The two requirements for implementing the Rel=Author attribute are: your blog/content source and your Google+ profile. Here is how Google tells you to do it:

1. Create Google+ Account

You can also create a Google profile. For this, you must use an email address with the same domain as your blog. Then you will have to verify the account by responding to an email sent from Google+. Fill up the profile details and provide your email in the ‘Work’ section of the profile to get your profile verified.

Now, when you will post with the same name you have on your Google+ account, and on the domain mentioned in your email, your posts will be linked by Google to your account.

2. Link your Google Plus profile to your blog

You can easily link from the ‘Profile’ tab on your Google+ page. Follow this route:

Edit Profileà Contributor toàEnter in your blog URL in the edit box

3. Link your blog to your Google+ profile

You must attach the link to your Google+ profile in the author box on your blog. Or you can also place this link in your “About me” section too.

The code you have to type for the same is:

<a rel=”me” target=”_blank” href=”[Your Google Plus Profile URL]“>[description of the link]</a>

4. Link your individual content to your Google Plus profile.

You can also link every article/post to your Google+ profile by linking your name in your byline. This effort is not needed on WordPress because you can use plugins like the Author Box Reloaded- to add the markup for you automatically.

If you are not on WordPress then, the code you need to hyperlink your byline is:

<a rel=”author” href=”[Author page URL]“>[Name]</a>

5. Test the linking

You can use this testing tool by Google to verify your Rel=Author markup and even see how your authorship snippet will look in search results.

Follow these easy steps and claim your authorship. See your posts in search listings with much higher credibility than ever before. 

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Charlie Bell, Vice President, Amazon Web Services, states, “Amazon RDS now supports three of the most popular relational database engines, giving businesses the flexibility to launch a managed Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL database based on the needs of their application. With Amazon RDS, customers no longer have to become experts in database set-up and management and can shift their focus to building and improving the capabilities of their applications. We’re excited to give Windows and ASP.Net developers new options for taking advantage of AWS to quickly deploy and easily manage their databases and applications in the cloud.”

Some might see this as a tactic to lure users away from Microsoft’s own Azure cloud environment. After all, the two compete – soon after Amazon launched its CloudSearch, Microsoft turned around and adapted Bing search to Azure.

In related news, a different sector under the Amazonian umbrella just beat out Netflix in a customer satisfaction survey, indicative of possible things to come, as Amazon delves further into the business of streaming content.

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Part history lesson, part education lesson; Cutts kicks off by explaining the journey that crawling has taken since he first started at Google. Actually when he first began working at Google, they only crawled website’s every three or four months. Imagine if that was the case now; webmasters and SEO’s would be up in arms!

Stating Page Rank as a crucial parameter for deciding your website’s ranking in Google, Cutts explained

We basically take page rank as the primary determinant. And the more page rank you have– that is, the more people who link to you and the more reputable those people are– the more likely it is we’re going to discover your page relatively early in the crawl.

Among other topics Cutts covered in his video included how Google is laying great emphasis on the freshness of a website (hint hint, webmasters!), although he does not go into explaining how the freshness of a site actually affects the overall ranking in the SERPs. But basically, a website with fresh, up-to-date relevant content surely stands a better chance of being crawled and indexed faster than sites with old content.

Cutts’ attempt to provide an overview of how Google works within just 8 minutes is commendable but don’t expect to hear any new groundbreaking info. This really is a video targeted at marketers who are relatively new to search however the video’s can be helpful for understanding the basics. However, it is good to get an explanation of how the Google search engine works from someone who really knows what he’s talking about and who has been there from the start.

For those who want to take a look, enjoy!

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Still, Flashback is not quite dead yet – it’s only mostly dead. Boris Sharov, head of Dr. Web, the Russian security firm that originally discovered the Flashback malware back in April, told Forbes that “[i]t’s going very slowly, and there’s still a ways to go.” Nevertheless, he said, new infection rates are almost nonexistent and the number of infected computers – still around 460,000 – is dwindling by about 100,000 per week. At that rate, Sharov said, “I think in a month it will be over.”

Sharov said that the process of cleaning up infected computers is going far more slowly that it would have if Flashback had been infecting Windows-based computers, rather than Macs. Sharov blames Mac users’ tendency to view their computers as immune to threats posed by malware. Unfortunately, Apple itself has tended to encourage that view over the years. For example, the Mac’s supposed immunity to viruses was the subject of one of their famous “I’m a Mac” commercials back in 2007:

It is true that Macs have had far fewer problems with viruses and malware over the years, and it is true that the underlying structure of OS X is somewhat more secure than Windows. Nevertheless, part of the Mac’s supposed immunity is a factor of its smaller market share: there are far more Windows computer than Macs, and creating malware for Macs has been far less cost-effective than creating it for PCs.

The Flashback malware has had a huge impact on the Mac security landscape. For one, Flashback is one of the first Mac-targeted malware programs that doesn’t require user interaction to download and install. It gets in through a (now patched) flaw in Java that allows it to install on a user’s computer if they so much as visit an infected website. Additionally, Flashback appears to have been quite profitable. As we reported yesterday, at its height Flashback was netting its creators around $10,000 per day.

If other malware creators learn to duplicate Flashback’s success, it’s a safe bet that the era of the virus-free Mac is drawing to a close. While viruses may never be the kind of problem on Macs that they are on PCs, Mac users can’t afford to ignore malware completely anymore.

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Google has advised webmasters to ensure that the image filename must be related to the image’s content. If you have any other questions, then see them answered here by Google:

Q: Why do I sometimes see Googlebot crawling my images, rather than Googlebot-Image?

A: Generally this happens when it’s not clear that a URL will lead to an image, so we crawl the URL with Googlebot first. If we find the URL leads to an image, we’ll usually revisit with Googlebot-Image. Because of this, it’s generally a good idea to allow crawling of your images and pages by both Googlebot and Googlebot-Image.

Q: Is it true that there’s a maximum file size for the images?

A: We’re happy to index images of any size; there’s no file size restriction.

Q: What happens to the EXIF, XMP and other metadata my images contain?

A: We may use any information we find to help our users find what they’re looking for more easily. Additionally, information like EXIF data may be displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the interstitial page that appears when you click on an image.

Q: Should I really submit an Image Sitemap? What are the benefits?

A: Yes! Image Sitemaps help us learn about your new images and may also help us learn what the images are about.

Q: I’m using a CDN to host my images; how can I still use an Image Sitemap?

A: Cross-domain restrictions apply only to the Sitemaps’ tag. In Image Sitemaps, the tag is allowed to point to a URL on another domain, so using a CDN for your images is fine. We also encourage you to verify the CDN’s domain name in Webmaster Tools so that we can inform you of any crawl errors that we might find.

Q: Is it a problem if my images can be found on multiple domains or subdomains I own — for example, CDNs or related sites?

A: Generally, the best practice is to have only one copy of any type of content. If you’re duplicating your images across multiple hostnames, our algorithms may pick one copy as the canonical copy of the image, which may not be your preferred version. This can also lead to slower crawling and indexing of your images.

Q: We sometimes see the original source of an image ranked lower than other sources; why is this?

A: Keep in mind that we use the textual content of a page when determining the context of an image. For example, if the original source is a page from an image gallery that has very little text, it can happen that a page with more textual context is chosen to be shown in search. If you feel you’ve identified very bad search results for a particular query, feel free to use the feedback link below the search results or to share your example in our Webmaster Help Forum.”

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Using the right tools can save hours of banging your head against the desk trying to find quality websites that might be interested in adding links to their pages. In fact, not only will the right tools save time, but are likely to return better results in terms of both likelihood to acquire a link and its quality.

With so many link building tools on offer, I have shared below my pick of the top 5.

1. Open Site Explorer
   From the SEOmoz team, Open Site Explorer does what Yahoo Site Explorer pretty much did except that it includes more data like nofollow/dofollow, anchor text, Page Authority and Domain authority. If you go for the ‘Pro’ version (at $99 a month) you get access to this tool’s full capabilities.

 

2. Raven Tools
   By installing the Raven toolbar in your browser you can organize your links as you work, easily adding URLs of pages you find, webmasters you contacted, and links you are actually able to acquire.
   Not only does it then save and organize these pages by website type, but it can also periodically go back to these pages and check if the link disappeared.

 

3. Ontolo
   What sets Ontolo apart from the rest is that it is a backlink discovery tool that will continually search for new potential link partners. By automating certain parts of the discovery process, Ontolo has the potential to be a huge time saver as it is estimated at cutting down typical time spent on research by 80%.

 

4. BuzzStream
   BuzzStream is designed specifically to aid the link building process. It is going to be most useful for SEO’s who are engaged in large scale link building campaigns which involve a lot of research, direct approaches to webmasters and purchasing of links.

 

5. Majestic SEO
   Majestic SEO is a website browser that allows you to see which sites are linking to your competitors’ pages, so you can determine how difficult it will be to beat them in the SERPs and identify new opportunities to build links back to your own site. The program offers a free report for any site you control, though to access the full spectrum of data, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version (starting at $49.99 a month).

Have you got another link building tool you use which should be added to this list? If so, feel free to share it below.

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Dave’s Answer:

Well, Mr. Bond, it sounds like some good spy software for a computer in the SMERSH offices, but perhaps that’s not your intention. Still, it opens up a bit of a can of worms if you are letting others use your computer while you’re running any sort of spyware or monitoring software that actually tracks and stores their action.

That’s not exactly what you’re asking me, but it’s not hard to subvert the script I’ll share for that purpose. Then again, guns don’t kill people, bullets do. Um. Nevermind.

Anyway, yes, if you are willing to write a short shell script that you’d run in Mac’s Terminal application, it’s quite doable.

The key is a program called screencapture.

To see how to use it, you can simply type its name into Terminal directly with “–help”:

$ screencapture --help
usage: screencapture [-icMPmwsWxSCUtoa] [files]
  -c         force screen capture to go to the clipboard
  -C         capture the cursor as well as the screen. only in non-interactive modes
  -d         display errors to the user graphically
  -i         capture screen interactively, by selection or window
               control key - causes screen shot to go to clipboard
               space key   - toggle between mouse selection and
                             window selection modes
               escape key  - cancels interactive screen shot
  -m         only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
  -M         screen capture output will go to a new Mail message
  -o         in window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window
  -P         screen capture output will open in Preview
  -s         only allow mouse selection mode
  -S         in window capture mode, capture the screen not the window
  -t
 image format to create, default is png (other options include pdf, jpg, tiff and other formats)
  -T Take the picture after a delay of , default is 5
  -w         only allow window selection mode
  -W         start interaction in window selection mode
  -x         do not play sounds
  -a         do not include windows attached to selected windows
  -l capture this windowsid
  files   where to save the screen capture, 1 file per screen

That’s a lot of data to absorb. The key flags are “-tfmt” to specify the output format and “-x” to disable the screen capture sound. You can add a time delay, but we’ll do that with a looping structure in the shell itself so that it’s reinvoked every “n” seconds.

Kind of like this:

while true ; do
   sleep 30
   screencapture -tpng -x capture.$(date +%F-%T).png
done

There are more graceful ways to come up with an incrementing filename, but we’re just using date and time so that a typical resultant filename might be capture.2012-04-15-16:24:25.png.

Want to take a screen cap every 15 second or five minutes? Just change the sleep variable.

To use this, simply type the above into the Terminal — I recommend moving into a new subdirectory first so that the screencaps don’t take over the Desktop — then minimize the Terminal window and walk away. As long as they don’t kill the shell, it’ll diligently keep taking a screen capture every “n” seconds until you either run out of disk space (not good) or kill it.

Done capturing? Just open up the Terminal window again and press Ctrl-C.

Now, use this wisely and appropriately, please.

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In March, they released their most recent list of 50 algorithmic search quality changes.

Any major algorithmic changes typically send SEO’s into a frenzy trying to figure out what they mean and how to adjust their strategies accordingly. Google is constantly making minor algorithmic changes, usually 30-40 per month at least.

That’s the crazy thing about SEO when you think about it – we are simply playing a game, and the rules of the game change constantly. We must be totally batshit crazy by now, right?

Could you imagine if the same logic was applied to something like football? Imagine if in the middle of the game, a touchdown suddenly becomes worth 4 points as opposed to 6? Oh the humanity!

But this is the industry we’ve chosen, and Google is always trying to make their search results better for the end user, so we go round and round (more power to them I say).

To save you the trouble, I’ve went ahead and pointed out which of their March changes I thought was most key for you to consider and apply in your day-to-day SEO strategy.

1. Sitelinks data refresh

Google said:

Sitelinks data refresh. [launch codename "Saralee-76"] Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the respective site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the order of weeks).

My SEO Advice: Sitelinks are generated to show users the most relevant and popular internal pages of your site (I typically see 6 or so). As an SEO, you can’t really tell Google which pages to show, but what you can do is try to make some of your key pages more relevant using practical SEO best practices.

That means beefing up the quality of the content on your site’s key pages, and building links (and social exposure) to your site’s most critical internal pages (as opposed to always sending links to the homepage). I can’t guarantee that this will change how your Sitelinks appear, but but it may help.

2. Better indexing of profile pages

Google said:

Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

My SEO Advice: I’ve been saying over and over in the last couple months (and so has Google), social and SEO are now intertwined – see points #5-6 in my last post on six good SEO ideas.

Aside from that, if you’re a company who wants to dominate brand-related searches, fill out your flipping social profiles – then USE THEM to engage with your customer-base socially!

3. Link Anchor Text

Google said:

Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

My SEO Advice: They made two mentions of how they may handle anchor text. Although there have been many attempts to weed out low-quality sites with lots of low-quality rankings (see: Google Panda), I imagine that you’ll still see spam to some degree in your search results. However, I think sites that use appropriate link anchors that fit within the context of the page, and SEOs who build links where the link anchor text again fits the context of the page should see a long-term benefit (i.e. links that match content’s theme rather than just randomly stuffed in the page and not making sense with the content around it).

In addition, there may be more value from links that come from new publishers, rather than links that simply show up magically on old content. Se keep building your links ethically, and make sure that the content around your links matches the page’s context appropriately.

4. Improvements to Freshness / Improved Detection of Old Pages / Improved Detection of Dates for Blogs and Forums

Google said:

Improvements to freshness. [launch codename "Abacus", project codename "Freshness"] We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.

More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project codename “Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users.

Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages. [launch codename "fibyen", project codename "Dates"] This change improves the algorithm that determines dates for blog and forum pages.

My SEO Advice: It’s no secret. Google likes content. And for that matter, Google also likes fresh content (see: Freshness Algorithm Update). So the improvements to freshness have a few implications, (1) keep your site’s content up to date and relevant for your users – don’t let it get stale, (2) make sure your site architecture supports the creation of new content, and (3) consider implementing something like a blog so that you can release fresh content on a regular basis.

In additon, just know that some older blog posts and forum entries may not rank as well as time goes by, necessitating either the need to create new content, or to improve the content that exists within those pages to make them more relevant and up-to-date with the times. Making updates to old and out-of-date posts is a good practice that can lead to a better user experience and good SEO results due to the equity the page has gained over time.

5. Improvements to processing for detection of site quality

Google said:

Improvements to processing for detection of site quality. [launch codename "Curlup"] We’ve made some improvements to a longstanding system we have to detect site quality. This improvement allows us to get greater confidence in our classifications.

My SEO Advice: Again, although you may continue to see some spam in your search results and some sites manipulating the algorithm by gathering low-quality links, Google will continue to improve their site quality algorithms, and you’d be best suited long-term from an SEO perspective to stick with highly ethical tactics, and focus more on creating a great experience for your site’s users, as well as push out great content.

Well, that’s it for Google’s March updates. I’ll be back next month with thoughts on their April updates. Until then, let me know what you think? How have you adapted your strategy over time as Google changes algorithms?

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