Thursday, November 29, 2012

Google launched the news keywords tag in September, designed as a way for news publishers to work around the fact that often the key terms they want their stories to be found for don’t make it into the story headlines.
The primary reason for this are two-fold. First, it can sometimes be awkward or make a headline lengthy to ensure the most relevant terms someone might search for appear within a headline.
Second, there are plenty of journalists who simply can’t get idea that they are writing for digital, where descriptive headlines are crucial, and instead want to stick with headlines that make more sense when seen in the overall context of a printed page.


Bing's New Webmaster Guidelines

Bing has published its first set of webmaster guidelines, offering website owners general guidance on best practices related to SEO for Bing’s search engine.

> Content - Content is what Bing is seeks

> Links - Bing wants to see links grow organically, and abuses to this such as buying links or participating in link schemes (link farms, etc.) lead to the value of such links being deprecated.

>Social -   If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals.  These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.


> Indexation - The main pathways to being indexed are:
  • Links to your content help Bing find it, which can lead us to index your content
  • Use of features within Bing Webmaster Tools such as Submit URL and Sitemap Upload are also ways to ensure we are aware of your content
> Technical - Here it checks Site's page load time, robots.txt, redirects, canonical tags

> SEO 
  • title tags – keep these clear and relevant
  • meta description tags – keep these clear and relevant, though use the added space to expand on the tag in a meaningful way</li> <li><b><alt></b> tags – use the field to describe an image so we can understand the content of the image</li> <li><b><h1> </b> tag – helps users understand the content of a page more clearly when properly used</li> <li><b>Internal links </b>– helps create a view of how content inside your website is related.  Also helps users navigate easily to related content.</li> <li><b>Links to external sources </b>– be careful who you link to as it’s a signal you trust them.  The number of links pointing from your page to external locations should be reasonable.</li> <li><b>Social sharing </b>– enabling social sharing encourages visitors to share your content with their networks</li> <li><b>Crawlability      Ref- http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a<br></b></li> </ul> </div>

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

A security bug in Google Webmaster Tools has given users access to old accounts and websites that they’re no longer supposed to be able to access.



Webmaster Tools accounts is that users are finding themselves with sudden access to accounts that they once had access to, but no longer do; i.e., former clients, employers and the like. That bug is presumably giving a lot of power to individuals that shouldn’t have it — power to deindex, disavow links, unverify the current/legitimate webmaster’s access, and even redirect sites to other verified domains in the user’s account. It also reveals a lot of link, search, index/crawl and other data to users that shouldn’t be able to see those things.
 


This is a serious problem and Google’s silence on it so far suggests that they’re still trying to sort out what’s happening and why — and how to fix it.

Google fixed this issue and according to them, Google Analytics was not impacted.