Google To Index SVG Files

Today Google announced that it will start indexing SVG files.

What is a SVG file?

Below is definition is provided by Wikipedia

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a family of specifications of an XML-based file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and dynamic (i.e. interactive or animated).
The SVG specification is an open standard that has been under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999.[4]

UP to this point Google either didn’t index them or only index them when it thought it was needed. But now it seems that they are indexed all SVG files regardless of if it is necessary or not. If you don’t want your SVG files to be index, you can use robots.txt and meta tags in the page with nofollow, noindex. (Learn how)

Google has advised webmasters to be patient as indexed all SVG files may take some time since web is so huge.

Pay Close Attention to Your Adwords Quality Score

Small businesses have tendency to focus only on short term results, mainly due to their budget constraints. That is also true when they are running their PPC and Adwords campaigns. They make all sort of short sighted decisions, such as suddenly reducing their bids on keywords, their daily budget, and even shutting off their PPC. In their defense, they claim to be very conversion oriented, which is a great thing, but one thing they must understand that PPC campaigns take some time to optimize, and as more data is collected, they get cheaper and more effective. So patients is a virtue.

Improving your quality score is important because it will reduce your CPC rate, and improve your ad position because more impressions for your ads, the higher your ad position will be, and that means better Click Through Rate (CTR), and hopefully better conversion.

Also improving your score means your ads show higher, and that could help you show ad extensions (site links, product images and extensions). See Adwords Ad Extensions.

Bidding high on keywords or increasing your daily budget isn’t the way you can improve your quality score. There are other factors such as using better keywords, better keyword and campaign organization, writing better ads (some refer to ad copy), more relevant landing pages, and consistent Adwords campaign in order to improve your historical data with Adwords.

I came across a case that gets into detail on how you can improve your Adwords quality score that I thought I share. The article is from back in 2007 but the tips are good till today.

Other relevant references;

Google Adwords Help; Quality Score
Testing External Factors for Quality Score

It’s Official, Yahoo Organic Results is now powered by Bing – Not PPC Yet

According to Bing Blog, the Yahoo and Bing merges are over and Yahoo now officially uses Bing engine to search its websites.

How will this effect your ranking?

Your ranking results will change but that does not mean it will be exactly identical of Bing. That is because number of websites and contents indexed by Yahoo is different. You must remember that Yahoo is  only using Bing’s engine but it is still searching within its own content and indexed websites.

For example when I look for for search marketing consultant in Los Angeles, I find this blog ranked secondon Google, third on Bing, but 13th on Yahoo!

As far as PPC, according to my account manager at Yahoo, the transition won’t be happening until end of September or middle of October so Yahoo is still using its own PPC platform for now. But they should move that to Bing as well around that time.

As mentioned  in my earlier post about Yahoo and Bing transition merge, it is more important than ever for a for a search engine marketer, where he or she specializes in SEO or PPC.

Had a blast in San Diego, Again

I took Friday off work so I can take care of some personal and family matters in the morning and afternoon then later I hit down to my town San Diego.

The reason I claim San Diego to be my town is because I lived there for 4 years and during those 4 years I had great time and experience. So I like to go back to San Diego as often as I can. I still have many friends and colleges. Even my dentist, Dr. Brookes who owns San Diego Dentistry.

One of my favorite places is this hidden hookah bar in San Diego called Ali Baba’s Cave near La Jolla and UCSD. I like that place because of its friendly atmosphere and staff. I am friend of a few of them as well and they are always nice to me. It’s a great place to start pre partying there before hitting to downtown and Gas lamp district, where it is heart of San Diego’s nightlife.

But San Diego isn’t only known for its nightlife. It’s also so many things you can do during the day. Beaches, Museums, restaurants, sea world, the Zoo, the convention center, Coronado, the Padres and the Chargers are few attractions among many other things in San Diego. And of course North County, cities like Encinitas or Carlsbad is a great place to have Sunday Brunch on the way back up north.

So many things to do in San Diego and so much good time one can have so visit San Diego, if you have never been there or if you haven’t been there recently. I guarantee you will have fun.

Now I have a great weekend, I am looking forward a productive week.

Google is at War with Link Sellers

Page Rank Update is over 20 days late as of today. Google usually update’s it’s page rank approximately every three months give or take a few days to keep people guessing however rarely this late.

Last Pagerank update was called the Mayday update but it happened end of April. Some sites dropped ranking and traffic, and some gained ranking and traffic. Mayday update was somewhat big because it seems that it was targeting paid links and artificial links.

According to Google’s link scheme guidelines, you are not supposed to buy links other than for purpose of advertising and in that case you are supposed to put nofollow on it or prevent pagerank juice with JavaScript that way search engines know that is an advertising link and not editorial links.

But m any webmasters and SEOs continue to violate this guidelines because they find it hard to get links that are in accordance of Google guidelines. Or they lack good link building strategy and skills so they buy links.

Google has been at war with link brokers. They even dropped a few of them, such as Text Link Ads, from their SERP a few years ago in order to make an example of them to rest of the link brokers. Also I recently noticed, if you search for “paid links” or “text links” you will no longer see any PPC ads by any text link brokers whereas a couple months PPC ads were visible. It seems that Google is willing to go that far, in its war with text link sellers.

Up to this point, Google’s search quality team has been optimizing their algorithm to bring the most relevant search results and avoiding spammed websites as much as possible. And Google’s web spam team, has been in charge of writing web filters in order detect spam if it bypasses the algorithm written by the search quality team. They also do a ton of human auditing and manual work. About 3 months ago Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, call out for others to report webspam to Google. He singled out “paid links” and Google even created a separate spam report form just for reporting paid links;

But Google hasn’t stopped there. Mayday update, effected the sites that bought links heavily but they are not stopping there either. As I mentioned earlier, pagerank update is unusually late, and many SEOs suspect that Google is up to something big. And from latest patterns of Google’s behaviors and algorithm changes, it seems that paid links are on top of Google’s search quality team and web spam team agenda.

So if you are buying links, be prepared for consequences and don’t buy links unless you absolutely have to and know what you are doing.

Yahoo – Bing Organic Transition Happening Now

According to Search Engine Land, Yahoo and Microsoft have begun organic transition. In that article Yahoo announced

This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers. You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Microsoft bought Yahoo last year, to boost up its share on search and compete with Google and has put heavy focus on its relevantly new search Engine Bing. We all have seen those Bing commercials haven’t we? If not you can see all Bing commercials on youtube.

Anyway back to topic

What does this mean to you?
This means, that as a search marketer, that you need to keep a closer eye on Bing. Bing has stepped up its efforts to take some market share away from Google and has improved its algorithm and it is promoting it heavily and it is working. Many users now “Bing it” when they are searching and don’t be surprised if Bing one day gets as big as Google or even bigger, considering how Google is being distracted doing a ton of other stuff. Below is what the current search engine market share;

A better visualization format of all market shared was posted on SEOMoz; SEO Powerpoint Slide Deck.

Microsoft has potential to win all Yahoo shares over, and near its shares to 1/4 of search market which is huge for search marketers.

I will start researching more about Bing SEO and write more about it on this blog. Also if you have good articles about Bing search engine optimization, please submit it and I will publish it on this blog if I find it useful for my readers.

Quality Content is King

Google and other search engines love content. Content is what drives their business and brings them their revenue. Online advertisers want relevant advertising solutions and nothing is better than relevant content. Google makes millions of dollars just from their content network advertising alone. Also they use website’s content to make their search more relevant which helps them make billon of dollars. (See Google Revenue). But the key is that they deliver high quality content. As content is their best tool promote their relevancy of search, they put a lot of emphasis on quality of content.

What is a high quality content?

In theory, quality content is what users like and find helpful and useful. But since Google cannot read people’s mind, about whether they like a particular content on a website or not, Google has a few methods to determine the usefulness and quality of content in their algorithm;

Some of these are factors such as proper spelling and grammar, relevant information to the site, natural position of keywords (Google doesn’t like keyword stuffed content), content and webpage load time, number of words,  and whether it carries any useful picture or graph.  Some search experts even suspect Google looks at analytics information or information from webmaster tool looking at things like time spent reading content, bounce rate, etc.

But the most important factor is back links to your content. If you content has natural back links to it, then Google values that content more. The more relevant and high quality links you have to your content, the more important the content becomes to Google.

The question is that with so much content on the net, how do you make your content stand out in order to get links to it?  Below are some of the ways I have been successful submitting my website content

• Write Unique and informative Content: The idea is that if content is unique and informative, users will find it easier and will link to it.
• Promote Your Content: You can do some self promotion by submitting an excerpt of it to article submission sites, press releases, and other blogs linking back to it. You can also participate with your online community such as forums, blogs, to promote yourself and your website or blog.
• Encourage Users: Act as an online sales person who is selling his content. Find ways to ask your users to link to you or to subscribe to your blog rss feed. (Email marketing has been an effective way for that)
• Be creative: People do creative things to get links and traffic to their websites. Vblogging, embedded videos, audios, nice catchy pictures, very unique headlines can help.