Mediaboss Marketing

Google has over 200 signals it uses to rank results. Given Googles legendary PageRank algorithm, based on links, it has led to a lot of people worrying about links way too much. Thats not to say quality links arent still important, but just because you have a whole bunch of links, it doesnt mean your site is going to rank well.

Googles Matt Cutts posted an interesting webmaster help video under the title: Will Google Provide More Link Data For All Sites? Its Cutts response to the user-submitted question:

In the wake of the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer, does Google Webmaster Tools plan to take up the reigns this product once provided to SEOs everywhere?

Cutts responds, What I think youre asking is actually code for will you give me a lot of links? and let me give you some context about Googles policies on that. I know that Yahoo Site Explorer gave a lot of links, but Yahoo Site Explorer is going away. Microsoft used to give a lot of links. And they saw so much abuse and so many people hitting it really, really hard that I think they turn that off so that people wouldnt be tempted to just keep pounding them and pounding their servers.

So our policy has been to give a subsample of links to anybody for any given page or any given site and you can do that with a link colon commandand to give a much more exhaustive, much more full list of links to the actual site owner, says Cutts. And let me tell you why I think thats a little bit more of a balanced plan. Yahoo Site Explorer, they were giving a lot of links, but they werent giving links that Google knew about. And certainly, they dont know which links Google really trusts. And so I think a lot of people sometimes focus on the low-quality links that a competitor has, and they dont realize that the vast majority of times, those links arent counting.

So, for example, the New York Times sent us a sample of literally thousands of links that they were wondering how many of these count because theyd gotten it from some third party or other source of links, he adds. And the answer was that basically none of those links had counted. And so its a little easy for people to get obsessed by looking at the backlinks of their competitors and saying, oh, theyre doing this bad thing or that bad thing. And they might not know the good links. And they might not know that a lot of those links arent counted at all.

So I also think that its a relatively good policy because you deserve to know your own links, he continues. I think thats perfectly defensible. But it doesnt provide that much help to give all the links to a competitor site unless youre maybe an SEO, or your a competitor, or something along those lines. So for somebody like a librarian or a power searcher or something like that, using link colon and getting a nice sample, a fair fraction of links to a particular page or to a particular website, is a very good policy.

I think thats defensible, but I dont expect us to show all the links that we know of for all the different sites that we know of, just because people tend to focus on the wrong thing, he concludes. They dont know which links really count. So they tend to obsess about all the bad links their competitors have and only look at the good links that they have. And its probably the case that surfacing this data makes it so that youre helping the people who really, really, really want to try to get all their competitors backlinks or whatever. And I just think its a little bit more equitable to say, OK, youre allowed to see as many of the backlinks as we can give you for your own site, but maybe not for every other site. You can get a sampling, so you can get an idea of what theyre like, but I wouldnt expect us to try to provide a full snapshot for every single site.

Links obviously arent everything, and if you follow Googles changes, its easy to see that other signals have been given a lot more significance in recent memory. This includes things like content quality, social signals and freshness. If youre that worried about the number of links you have, youre living in the wrong era of search.

Granted, links have value beyond search ranking. They still provide more potential referrals to your site, but in terms of Google, the search engine is moving more and more away from the traditional 10 organic links anyway, with more personalized results, fresher results, blended (universal search) results, and more direct answers.

View post:
Google On How A Lot Of Your Links Don’t Count

Google often does Webmaster Central Hangouts on Google+. This gives webmasters an opportunity to connect with Googlers and learn valuable tips about how they can get more out of their sites, and out of Google.

Googles Pierre Far announced a couple of upcoming hangouts for Tuesday, March 27, and Wednesday, March 28. Both begin at 2PM UK time, and last for an hour. Far writes:

US-based webmasters: please be careful with the time difference for these as Europe would have switched to summer time by then!

Where: Right here on Google+. It works best with a webcam + headset. You can find out more about Hangouts and how to participate at http://goo.gl/k6aMv

Topic: Anything webmaster-related: Webmaster Tools, Sitemaps, crawling, indexing, duplicate content, websites, web search, etc.

To join, you obviously need a Google+ account. The thing is, theyre only limited to 10 participants, but people tend to come and go, so even if you cant immediately get in, you might be able to squeeze in sometime within the hour. Its a chance to get some direct advice about your site from Google, so depending on how pressing your issue is, it may be worth waiting to get in.

Go here to see the original:
Google Webmaster Hangouts: 2 You Can Join In The Near Future

Monday night Google posted an update on the Google Webmaster blog named Upcoming changes in Googles HTTP Referrer.

It read:

Very confusing - I thought, why would Google want to label organic search traffic as direct referrer traffic? Is that a privacy thing? Okay, don't pass keyword data, which you stopped doing since Google defaulted to SSL search. But now to take away the knowledge of the traffic coming from search vs a direct hit? Really?

You can read how confused I was about this on Google+.

Danny Sullivan reached out to Google for more details and got more information for his story named How A Google Change May Mistakenly Turn Search Traffic Into Referral Traffic.

(1) This only currently impacts browsers that can support the HTTP referer, which is only the latest version of Chrome.

(2) Google Analytics will automatically adjust to make sure this traffic is not labeled as direct traffic but rather search traffic.

(3) Google will communicate to other Analytics companies about the change in hope they adjust their software as well.

The issue here is, of my Google organic traffic, 33% of it is from Chrome users. And Google sends this site about 90% of it's search traffic overall. I am already missing 30%+ of my keyword data due to the (not provided) issue with SSL search.

Yea, Google has keyword data in Webmaster Tools, but it is not enough.

Read the original:
Your Search Traffic Might Be Labeled As Referrer Traffic: Google HTTP Referer Change

19-03-2012 09:41 This is a quick tutorial on how to add a user to Google Webmaster Tools.

Read this article:
How to Add User to Google Webmaster Tools | Gnome Tips - Video

Google posted a new Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts today. The question at hand this time is: How much time should I spend on meta tags, and which ones matter?

This one is also significant because Cutts submitted the question himself. That means, he felt this was an important enough issue, that even though it wasnt submitted it by a user, needed to be addressed.

So the conventional wisdom a few years ago was that meta tags mattered a whole lot, says Cutts. You really had to tweak them and spent a lot of time to get your keywords right, and did you have a space, or a comma between your keywords, and all that kind of stuff. And weve mostly evolved past that, but the pendulum might have gone a little bit too far in the other direction, because a lot of people sometimes say, dont think at all about meta tags. Dont spend any time whatsoever on them, and so let me give you a more nuanced view.

You shouldnt spend any time on the meta keywords tag, he says. We dont use it. Im not aware of any major search engine that uses it these days. Its a place that people dont really see when they load the browser, and so a lot of webmasters just keyword stuff there, and so its really not all that helpful. So we dont use meta keywords at all.

This is actually not the first time Cutts has posted a video about this topic. There was one from several years ago, where he basically said the same thing about the keywords meta tag. At the time, Google talked about how it used the description meta tag, as well as the meta tags google, robots, verify-1, content type, and refresh.

Heres a chart from Google Webmaster Tools, which breaks down how Google understands different meta tags:

But we do use the meta description tag, Cutts continues in the new video. The meta description is really handy, because if we dont know what would make a good snippet, and you have something in the meta description tag that would basically give a pretty good answermaybe it matches what the user typed in or something along those lines, then we do reserve the right to show that meta description tag as the snippet. So we can either show the snippet that might be the keyword in context on the page or the meta description.

Now, if the meta description is really well written and really compelling, then a person who sees it might click through more often, he says. So if youre a good SEO, someone who is paying attention to conversion and not just rankings on trophy phrases, then you might want to pay some attention to testing different meta descriptions that might result in more clickthrough and possibly more conversions. So dont do anything deceptive, like you say youre about apples when youre really about red widgets that are completely unrelated to apples. But if you have a good and a compelling meta description, that can be handy.

There are a lot of other meta tags, he says. I think in the metadata for this video, we can link to a really good page of documentation that we had, that sort of talks about which stuff we pay attention to and which stuff we dont pay attention to. But at a 50,000-foot level, dont pay attention to the keywords meta tag. But the description meta tag is worth paying attention to.

Go here to read the rest:
Google: Actually, Meta Tags Do Matter.