Spring Cleaning out of Session

Announcement by Google
• Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.

Google Removes Author: Search From Google News

By Navjot Singh
navjot singh
You can no longer search for articles from specific authors in Google News.

As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using the author: firstname lastname command at Google News brings up no results now, and Google has disabled it on purpose. If you think it has something to do with the rel=author movement, it seems that you’re correct. Here’s what a Google employee named Erik explained in the Google News help forum:



The author: search operator is no longer available. For author-specific Google News content, I would recommend use of the Authorship capabilities in Google News, introduced last month. Integration with Google+ circles means easier following and engagement between authors and readers.

Google Adds Author Stats To Webmaster Tools

By Navjot Singh

Google has introduced a new report in Google Webmaster Tools named “Author Stats.”

Author Stats shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. This will show up under Google Webmaster Tools in the “labs” section in Webmaster Tools. It shows the impressions and clicks of the stories found in Google and shows up when you associate your content with your Google Profile.

What Is “(Not Provided)” in Organic Search Traffic Keywords on Google Analytics?

For about two months we’ve noticed a (Not Provided) item on Google Analytics traffic reports under “Traffic Sources/Google Organic” section. This is an article that has done a good job explaining it. The basic answer is that the keywords surfers used to find this particular site were not shown because the searchers were logged into their Google account when conducting the search.

Raising awareness of cross-domain URL selections

A piece of content can often be reached via several URLs, not all of which may be on the same domain. A common example we’ve talked about over the years is having the same content available on more than one URL, an issue known as duplicate content. When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites. When the representative URL is selected from a group with different sites the selection is called a cross-domain URL selection. To take a simple example, if the group of URLs contains one URL from a.com and one URL from b.com and our algorithms select the URL from b.com, the a.com URL may no longer be shown in our search results and may see a drop in search-referred traffic.

Ten recent algorithm changes

Ten recent algorithm changes by Google.com

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.

Should I Change My URLs for SEO?

Written By Navjot Singh Mail to Navjot
Every SEO eventually gets fixated on a tactic. Maybe you read 100 blog posts about how to build the “perfectly” optimized URL, and you keep tweaking and tweaking until you get it just right. Fast-forward 2 months – you’re sitting on 17 layers of 301-redirects, you haven’t done any link-building, you haven’t written any content, you’re eating taco shells with mayonnaise for lunch, and your cat is dead.
Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme. I do see a lot of questions about the "ideal" URL structure in Q&A, though. Most of them boil down to going from pretty good URLs to slightly more pretty good URLs.

Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools reports

Written By Navjot Singh Mail to Navjot
Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports. Given the combined effort the Search Alliance represents, it makes sense to showcase relevant data from both engines within a webmaster account. Most areas and data within the accounts will not be affected. The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows:

Yahoo! Rolls Out Redesign for Search Results Pages

Written By Navjot Singh

At Yahoo!, we’re always looking for ways to make the Yahoo! Search experience even more organized and streamlined while serving the most relevant content. We have been working to unify the search experiences across web, multimedia, and vertical search results pages with a design that is clean and intuitive. Today, we are pleased to bring the latest design changes to life across various search results pages!

The following changes are available now on the Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports search results pages:

• Clean and Simple – A cleaner and simplistic look and feel that helps you find what is most important to you and to enable you to take action faster.
• Automatic Tabs – Easily accessible tabs will automatically appear right below the Search box to give you the specialized content you may be looking for on our other vertical search results pages. The tabs that may appear, based on the search results content, are Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports.
• Left Filters – Filters on the left side of the results will appear, for sorting results by time and related searches.

The query-aware tabs make it easier for you to dive into a specific vertical search experience, such as the Sports search results page example below. The related athletes filter on the left, combined with sports videos results on the right, also enhance this results page.

The improved News search results page will also include filters on the left for news sources, as well as news videos to the right of the search results.

Since last month’s Image Search update, we have made the above changes to the Image search results page, plus we have added:

• A larger pool of Facebook images to also include public profiles and fan pages
• A richer “Latest” pictures experience from across even more Yahoo! content
• Better recommendations at the end of galleries

Below is an example of the Image search results page for the “President Obama” query, which brings you the latest, most relevant pictures to the top, and indicates how long ago each image was published.

Twitter Web Analytics

Written By Navjot Singh | Mail to Navjot

Twitter is a powerful platform for websites to share their content, and drive traffic and engagement. However, people have struggled to accurately measure the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to their websites, in part because web analytics software hasn’t evolved as quickly as online sharing and social signals.

Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.

The product provides three key benefits:

• Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
• See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
• Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration



Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.

Canonical Tags- Get the credit you deserve!

Written By Navjot Singh

Does copied content within your own site hamper your site’s ranking? How do you authorize others to use your content and still make sure that you get the search engine credits for the same? These are some of the questions which our SEO experts often face and we have tried to answer these questions here.

Google introduced the concept of the Canonical Tag way back in 2009. It intended to eliminate problems arising due to self-created duplicate content. Web site owners would be able to, by utilizing canonical url tags, give hints to search spiders on which pages to consider original and index higher.

How does it work for you?

The canonical tag is a link that is placed in the HTML header of a web page.

For eg:



This link is to be placed on the copied page. On encountering this link on a web page, search spiders would treat this page as a copy of the original namely http://www.myseopandit.com All the link metrics now flow to the original page. By using this tag, you can ensure that the right content is treated as original and gets the necessary credits for the same.

How is it different from 301 redirects?

Even 301 perform a similar function except that it redirects the visitor to the original page. Canonical tags, however, keeps the visitor on the same page while transferring the link metrics to the original page. In short, 301 redirects both visitor and search engine spider while canonical tag only redirects the spider.

Also from a technical perspective, 301 needs the expertise of a developer while canonical tags only need a basic understanding of HTML.

A word of caution:

DO NOT USE CANONICAL TAGS TO TRANSFER THE LINK CREDITS FROM YOUR INTERNAL PAGES TO YOUR HOMEPAGE. It is not at all a very SEO friendly decision. Your Home Page ideally should not be the only important page on your site
While placing the canonical link in your code, ensure correct formatting and double check the url of the original web page. A wrong url may do a lot of damage.

And now coming back to where we started, you can add canonical links to the copied pages on your site and advice search spiders not to crawl those pages but transfer all link credits and link juices to the original page. You can allow others to publish your content provided they are ready to add canonical links on their site page transferring all link credits to your page.

For more questions on canonical tags, you can post your query as a comment and we would be happy to explore the topic further together!

Google expands search results to include deeper site links

Written By Navjot Singh Mail to Navjot

Search engine result page element, Google sitelinks has been pushed forward with an extension for showcasing major webpages' popular sub-pages. It would therefore mean that the size and number of the sitelinks are on the rise.

Browsers can now dig deeper into the websites showcased in search engine results, thanks to Google adding more details of sub-pages within popular sites in its rankings.

The move will especially boost searches for particular products or brands, because such searches will now showcase results from deeper within a particular site.

Listings of sub-pages displayed in this way include a title and a snippet of the meta description for each page. The more certain Google is that the site presented is the one being searched for, the more deep-page links will be presented – up to a maximum of 12, according to some site

The sitelinks will also group together results from pages from the site concerned which would normally appear lower in the search rankings.

More detailed sub-page listings will improve the service offered to searchers who know approximately what they're looking for. "When Google predicts your target site accurately, the sitelinks work as a quick access point to the core elements of the site,"

Meta descriptions and titles would now be of much more importance which is a point worth noting. The optimization of the said aspects for the space provided would even be a point to think of as a googler.

A new beginning Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing announced the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how it could improve the webmaster tools. User wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes their sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

create a wikipedia page

Before creating an article you should search to check that there is no suitable article that already exists. In the search box near the top right of a page, type the title of the new article, then click Go. If the Search page reports "You may create the page" followed by the article name in red, then you can click the red article name to start editing the article. The very first thing you should write in a new article is a list of the source(s) for the information in it.

Create article for Wikipedia page

Ø Consider creating the article on your user page first. Also make sure that an article does not already exist on the subject, perhaps under a different title. If you find an existing article on your subject, it is best to redirect the name you were thinking of onto the existing article.

Ø Gather references both to use as source(s) of your information and also to demonstrate notability of your article's subject matter. References to blogs, personal websites don't count—Extra care should be taken to make sure that articles on living persons have sources -- articles about living people without sources may be deleted.

Ø Do not create pages about yourself, pages that advertise, personal essays or other articles you would not find in an encyclopedia.

Ø Be careful about copying things, controversial material, extremely short articles that are just definitions, and local-interest articles about places like schools, or streets that are of interest to a relatively small number of people.

Ø If your article will require multiple edits or a significant amount of time to properly list references or make presentable, it is recommended that you place the template {{newpage}} on top of the page to signify to other editors that it's a work in progress. Another option is to start creating the new article in a subpage of your user page. This allows you to take as long as you need to complete a presentable article

Ø Keep making improvements

Ø Add references and External links sections at end of this page.

Meta Refresh VS 301 Redirect

Why use the Meta Refresh Tag?

Many people use meta refresh tags to tell the search engines that their pages moved. It is not the most elequent way to do so though.

What does the Meta Refresh Tag Look like?
Place in the head of your page copy. The number is a measure of time to redirect the browser to the new location.

What is the problem with using a Meta Refresh Tag?

One of the bigger problems with this is that it is a common spam technique. Some people suggest setting the meta refresh to at least 5 seconds to avoid any ranking penalty.

What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is a perminant change of location code. It tells a search engine spider that a page or website has moved.

What does a 301 Redirect look like?

Redirect permanent / http://www.newurl.com/cool/

The 301 redirect code goes inside a .htaccess file either at the root level or in a local level. You can also use a 301 redirect to move just a single page.

Redirect permanent /oldpage.htm http://www.newurl.com/cool/

Let's Get Social Comparing Facebook Like vs. Google +1

Google’s new +1 feature was one of SMX Advanced Seattle most engaging sessions and, as a speaker, I have received a wide variety of feedback and questions. It seems this feature has fomented a great deal of speculation and inquiry. Here is a bit more food for thought.

Like vs. Google +1: What Are The Main Differences?

As Google product manager Daniel Dulitz mentioned, Google +1 is an annotation system which reinforces the interactions between organic and paid results, web pages, and your Google contacts.

That being said, your Google contacts are not necessarily your friends… and, you need to have a Google account to fully utilize the +1 feature. As a result, Google +1 acts as a collective rating system helping results be more trustworthy, but not adding the social infrastructure.

While Google’s +1 feature does draw upon a user specific network, it does not have the same social connotations of Facebook’s network. The +1 feature does function as a validity creating mechanism but does not contribute to the same social infrastructure that accompanies Facebook.

The Facebook Like is different in practice on several levels. Any website that is liked on a Bing search result is propagated into Facebook and vice versa. This means that something liked in Facebook will be shown on Bing despite any user interaction with the search platform.

This gives Bing/Facebook two avenues in which likes can be accrued as well as two ways to view the information. Additionally, Bing’s system is already privy to a year’s worth of information stemming from Facebook Like data giving Bing/Facebook a significant jump over Google.

Bing also brings forth popular pages based on global anonymous Facebook Like data – meaning that some anonymous Likes show even though searchers are not connected to Facebook, and makes it easier to go to Facebook after seeing a search result to have a “conversation” about that search query.

Note that you need a Facebook account to be able to see all these interactions; but unlike Google +1, you can create a Facebook account using any kind of email address.