Google Videos Best Practices for How to deal with Most Common Problems Create When Crawling and Indexing Video Content

We'd like to highlight three best practices that deal with some of the most common problems create when crawling and indexing video content. These three practices includes ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you obviously point out this state to search engines.

1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt

Sometimes video URLs are included by the publishers in the Sitemap which are excluded by robots.txt. Care must be taken that your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs in your Sitemap which includes URLs for the:

• Play page
• Content and player
• Thumbnail

2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in

• Is your video only offered in some locales? The elective attribute “restriction” has newly been added.
• You have a choice of telling search engines where to play your videos and where not to play. With the tag, you have the choice of either including a record of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played all over, then you don't need to include this.

3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience

Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can effect in the search engine's index not precisely reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either representing that the video doesn't live, or to a different video. Viewers find this experience dissatisfy. Although we have mechanisms to notice when search results do no longer exist, we strongly recommend following community principles.

To signal that a video has been removed,

1. Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a cooperative page to be display to your users. Follow these practices to create effective 404 pages.
2. Indicate expiration dates for every video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the element) or mRSS feed ( tag) submitted to Google.

Site Speed in Web Search Ranking, Free Tools to Evaluate the Speed of a Website, How To Increase Your Site Speed

Site speed is the speed at which a site responds when a visitor hits the URL in the browser. And as this site speed became the hectic thing for Google and to relief this obsession Google included a new signal to search ranking algorithms.

Always site speed is an important factor for a website’s credibility because the visitors or website authors or website owners will feel happy if the speed is faster and moreover internet users love to spend on faster sites than slower responding sites. In Google’s internal study it clearly says that visitors doesn’t show interest or spare more time when a website responds slowly. By improving site speed it not just increases visitor’s interest on our site but also it reduces operating costs. And because of this importance Google took site speed into account as a factor in web search ranking. Google uses various sources in determining speed of a website comparing to other sites.

Free Tools to Evaluate the Speed of a Website:

Page Speed: It is an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on which is used for webmasters or developers to evaluate the performance of a webpage and get suggestions on how to improve them. It can perform several tests on website’s sever configuration and front-end code. Running Page speed on webpage gives a set of scores for each page and useful suggestions on how to improve performance.

YSlow: This is Yahoo free tool for improving webpage speed. Based on some set of rules YSlow analyzes a webpage and suggests various ways on how to improve the performance. Yslow is included in Firebug add-on and YSlow user guide is included in download.
Webpage test: It provides us to test the URL of a webpage. Test can be done from a specified location and it provides a waterfall view of webpage on load performance as well a comparison with an optimization check list. The below image shows chart speed of website experienced by users world-wide.

Google Webmaster Tools: In Labs, Site performance shows the page speed of a website. And there are many other tools provided to evaluate the speed of a website.


As Page speed is a new signal included in webpage ranking it doesn’t carry much importance for the relevance of a page. And currently Google doesn’t carry even 1 % of search queries while considering a factor Site speed into its algorithm. And this only applies for the search done in Google.com and English currently. If a website found not going much change in site rankings, it means that the site speed changes haven’t impacted that website.

It’s better to start looking at site speeds for better performances in site ranking in future.

Quality Links, How to Get Quality Links, Factors, Quality Back links, Link Building Strategies, Approaches to Get Quality Back Links

Before going into how we get quality links to our website, first start with why quality links to a website? We are having a newly built website with good design and best services but what if no visitors to the site, it just ruins the purpose of website. Link building is the procedure to solve the above issue. And getting quality links to our websites is a best practice for organic link building.

How to get Quality links to our website:

Relevancy: Unique content is always an ultimate way to impress search engines because search engines can only read text, not pictures. All quality websites looks for something in return when they give a link and it doesn’t mean money but expect an informational content or useful services that have a certain relevancy to their website. So submitting for relevant sites will probably a good way of getting quality links to our site.

Register with DMOZ or Yahoo: Registering with DMOZ (Free web directory) or Yahoo (Paid) is not as easy as it sounds because they accept only high quality websites. But once the site enters into these directories it can gain a relevant link and can gain easy access to other linkable websites which are probably of highest quality.

Blogs & Forums: If the site is newly built and unknown, a good way of marketing these type of websites is to get into community discussions like forums or blog. But always be conscious of not to spam or soliciting of our own site. Building a reputation can drive visitors to our site easily, and they will pass on links and chance of visiting your site frequently. This will increase visitors and marketing process becomes easy. Remember good and unique content always attracts visitors and make them recommend.

Target Group: Targeting exact visitors to your site will be an effective way. And think of issues your users might face and finding out solution in advance and publishing them would be highly appreciated by visitors. This type of approach can bring merit-based links and loyal followers who help us in generating direct traffic.

Social-Media: Always entertaining content is favor for visitors to share mainly in social media services. In social media, humor way of approach always an easy and best way to market our website. This is one of the more powerful way of marketing stunts but it’s not recommended to rely on them for long period.

Avoid Exchanging Links: If the visibility of our website is important factor then it’s very important to avoid exchanging links with low-quality websites or buying page rank passing links. And short term growth is not possible in legitimate link building strategies.

Competitor’s sites: It’s always a good practice to follow similar sites in other markets and update the strategies will be another good way of approach.

404 Error Page, soft 404 Error, Practices, Page Not Found 404, Error 404 Page Not Found

404 Error

A 404 error page will appear when a visitor sends a request for a non-existing page on the site. It may be because of visitor clicked on broken link, page has been moved or deleted or visitor has mistyped a URL. 404 error is called because web server will send HTTP 404 error when a request is send by visitor for a web page if the page does not exists. Depending on ISP 404 error page will vary, it will not provide useful information to visitor and many users may quit from the site. We can solve this by giving useful information to the user providing a good custom 404 error page. We can create 404 error page as standard HTML page.

The following are the steps which can guide visitor of what they are searching for when they come across 404 error page:

• Tell visitor clearly that page they are searching for cannot be found.
• Try to have same look and feel of the webpage when a custom 404 error page appears.
• Make sure that ISP will return actual HTTP 404 error page instead of custom 404 page because there is a chance of Google to crawl custom 404 page and appear in SERPs.
• Tell Google of your site’s move using Change of Address tool.

Soft 404

We have two types of 404 on the web they are “Hard 404” and “Soft 404” or “Crypto 404”. Hard 404 is the page which appears when a web page does not exist which will be provided by the ISP or Web Server.  Soft 404 occurs when the non-existing page which visitor have requested have been linked to 200 response code. The 200 response code can be site home page url that does not exist or an error page.

This confusion can make search engines to crawl and index a non exist duplicate urls on the site. This may cause crawlers and bots not to visit frequently the exact website. To prevent it try to use a 404 error page and clearly specify that the searching url or information does not exist.

The following are the steps to correct Soft 404:

• Check soft 404 listed in the website using Webmaster Tools.
• Check navigation of 404 error page, 301 redirection and 200 response code page is correctly responding or not.
• Configure properly of HTTP response by Fetch as Googlebot of Webmaster Tools.

Conclusion: Using Webmaster tools, regularly check for Soft 404 and correct it for a website and insist to have a 404 error page provided by ISP or web server.  Check for the navigation of all the pages including 404, 301 and 200 responses of a website in order to not a have a confusion to visitor of a website, crawlers and bots of search engines. By the above steps, we can provide clear and specified information to the visitor and search engines.

Google Sitemap New Features - One File, Many Content Types.

Sitemaps: one file, many content types:

Google has introduced an astonishing feature that we can now submit various content types like image, video, mobile url, code, geo, etc. of our site in a single sitemap file because  now Google supports such  sitemap with different content types.

Google webmaster trends analyst “Jonathan Simon” has explained that the site owners are leveraging sitemaps as they wanted Google to know about their sites. As we know sitemaps are introduced first in 2005, from that time onwards additional specialized sitemap format was introduced for better accommodation of video, images, mobile or geographic content. As number of specialized formats is increasing, it is much easier for sitemap which supports the inclusion of multiple content types in the single sitemap file.

The sitemap structure with multiple content types is said to be similar as standard sitemap which supports additional ability referencing the urls of different content types. The following example shows the sitemap that which refers to standard webpage for web search, image reference for image search, video reference for video search.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
        xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
    <image:image>
       <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <video:video>
    <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc>   
      <video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title>
    </video:video>
  </url>
</urlset>

 Here we can see it in webmaster tools how the multiple content types are submitted:

Let’s hope that the inclusion of multiple content types in a single sitemap simplifies sitemap submission. The other sitemap rules, like submission of maximum 50,000 urls in single file and file size limit of 10 MB uncompressed is still applied.

Google’s Speedy Enhancements Save You Time and Keystrokes

Google’s Speedy Enhancements Save You Time and Keystrokes

Speed is a general subject at Google. The idea and the aim of speed are baked into all departments of Google products, starting from Google Chrome to Google web search. Frequently, Google also simply develop features that help out to respond quickly for all the query terms. Whether by bringing the precise content that we look for by displaying it at the top of the search results page or by optimizing the method you search. Several of these speed enhancements save you time and keystrokes.

Two New Features Of Google This week

Sunrise and Sunset Search feature

The Sunrise and Sunset Search feature can be helpful forever to know exactly when you can look to get the best time for a morning jog or while arranging the best and exact moment for a wedding proposal. This week, Google is very much ready to launch a Sunrise and Sunset feature for search. The Sunrise and Sunset Search feature presents you the precise times of sunsets and sunrises for any location in the world. In contrast to the weather, sunrises and sunsets are fairly predictable, and accordingly, Google don't use a data source. Instead it relies on latitude, longitude and the current time and it calculates sunrise and sunset times. This calculation has been of attention to mathematicians and astronomers for millennia, thus they’ve had time to get it just right. And for the most of the locations, it’s accurate to within a single minute.

Google Search by Voice & more languages

Google Search by people’s Voice enables to search the web more rapidly than ever before by getting your responses with smaller number keystrokes. Initially, this Google Search by Voice service was launched in English, and was offered in the U.S., U.K., India, Australia and New Zealand. Later Google introduced this Google Search by Voice service in Japanese and Mandarin and expanded it to the number of possible users. Just a week ago, Google launched the service German, in French, Italian and Spanish. Known that local languages are major aspects in the performance of speech recognition. Google first launched this service in the four countries mainly closely linked with Spanish, French and German languages. This week Google focused on Korean and the launch in Taiwan of Traditional Mandarin.

How to start Google Search by Voice Feature

By visiting the Google mobile page of our country's domain (e.g.  In France go to m.google.fr) we can download the application to our phone’s operating system in our locale. This Google Search by Voice feature will be available for Android, iPhone and Blackberry phones. Eventually, Google’s goal is to bring Google Search by voice feature to speakers of all languages, hence keep on reading for more announcements.

SEO’s Magic Bullet, What is SEO’s Magic Bullet, Top Five Ranking Factors in Search Engines

There is big contradiction between many SEO’s when a question of Magic bullet comes, few believe the theory of magic bullet exists and few don’t. Well, it’s hard to change one’s belief in the platform of SEO. Let’s leave the existence of magic bullet theory but see what the theory saying and whether points benefit our SEO techniques or not.

Firstly, what is SEO’s Magic Bullet? It’s a process of solving or a magical solution to perplexity problem without any side effects or to say in simple words getting results with a minimum of efforts.  But to a fact there are no big secrets behind SEO.

Blogging is one such magic bullet. It’s nothing new word we heard but yes, there are many benefits behind blogging and can be considered as Magic bullet. Let me explain.

Few months ago, SEOmoz.org released their Search Engine Ranking Factors-2009, which are something like this.

Top five ranking factors

• Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links – 73% (Very High Importance)
• External Link Popularity - 71% (Very High Importance)
• Diversity of Link Sources – 67% (Very High Importance)
• Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag – 66% (Very High Importance)
• Link Distance from Trusted Domains – 66% (Very High Importance)

According to above statistics we can understand the importance of keyword ranking. And other keyword specific ranking factor is On-Page. See this.

In Title Tag: Importance for the keyword in the title tag is 66% and considered to be very high. Blogging provides an option of generating new webpages continuously, all with keyword-rich title tags. Generally in blogging title tag is taken from headlines and following SEO practices means already integrating keywords anyway.

First word of Title Tag: Importance for keyword using as first word of title tag is very high and of 63%. The very first word always attracts the reader and creates interest. So by positioning the keyword in the beginning always benefits. And choose the keyword keeping first the reader in mind then optimizations.

In Root Domain Name: Importance for keyword using in root domain name is of 60% and considered to be very high. If it is to boost ranking company name through blogging, attach the blog to your sub-directory or sub domain. (Ex. bipsum.com/blog or blog.bipsum.com)

Page-Specific Link Popularity Factors for Ranking:

Keyword-Focused Anchor Text: Very High-Importance of 73%. When we create links, others will use our titles or headlines and this can be another reason for placing keywords in headlines. And many visitors may attract to the anchor text keywords we use.

External Link Popularity: Very High-Importance of 71%. Sharing blog through good social media channels like twitter, face book, digg etc. creates a chance of more quality links and quantity too.

Link Re-Working is also considered to be one of magic bullet. Link reworking is a process of modifications of links from the sites which are already linking to our site.

From the examples explained above, magic bullets main aim is to how rapidly we rank in the top of Google search result. Apart from the above points the main and important things to remember is that content is king and Back links are considerable factors of SEO’s magic bullet.

SEO Link Building Guide Link Building Guidelines Link Building Info Link Building Strategies

Link building is the good way to be successful on the web and to rank high in the search engines. You have to be popular towards customers to know them what are you offering. So we need to build links of our site on the web. Link building is having different strategies by which we can increase links of a site on the web. Link building is very beneficial for search engine optimization.

Search engines will give high priority for backlinks to a site, which will be an advantage for rankings on SERPs. Building up backlinks on the web is not an easy way for a website, to get the best results for your business. The main target is to get good inbound links for a site. Links are the important factor which helps search engine in determining the level of popularity of a site on the web. If you have more links from other sites to your site then your site will be ranked highly by all major search engines. There are some important things that you must consider while exchanging links with any other site. Ensure that the site is complete, and have a good content for a website to rank high.

Simple way to do link building is to type the keywords on which you want to promote your site and see the results that come up. Browse the sites that are in the SERP and try to exchange link with them. Another important thing to keep in mind to have link exchange with higher page ranked websites.
Link Building can be obtained by the following ways

• One way Link Building.
• Two way Link Building (Reciprocal Link Building)
• Three Way Link Building.

Try to get backlink from high page ranked and natural websites which will be more benefit for high ranking by search engines. We can have chance of fast indexing of a website. Get backlinks from the websites which are often have fresh content in their web pages. Gather more backlinks from news websites and other websites which will often change their content which will benefit our website to have high page rank.

Link Building and Link Exchange can be done for Free Directories, Paid Directories and Websites.

Summary: Links are very important factor that helps search engine in determining the level of popularity of any site on the web. To increase page rank and have popularity of the website we can perform the above link building strategies.

Impact of Social Bookmarking on Search Engine Optimization

Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking is considered as the process useful to internet users that they can share, organize, search and manage bookmarks of webusers. It is also said to be a method of tagging a website and saving it for later i.e instead of saving them to web browser, you can save it on web. As bookmarks are online we can easily share them with our friends. If we want to create our own socialbookmarks, we have to register in the social bookmarking sites. It can be a easy root or method to market our website.

Process Of Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking is becoming requisite to take reliable steps to increase number of visitors on daily basis to our website. Most of the bookmarking sites allow us to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or belonging any category like technology, shopping, politics, blogging, news, sports etc.

Steps to be taken in the process of social bookmarking:

• Choose the bookmarking site in which we are going to tag a site to it.
• Register with the chosen bookmarking site.
• Install browser extensions or bookmarking toolbars as some of the sites lists few ways that you can make social bookmarking easier such as IE toolbar, firefox extensions.
• Add bookmarks by using the tools that which have been installed earlier.
• Invite your friends as social bookmarking is meant to be social.
• Social Bookmarking is used to expand its vision to not only to your friends’ bookmarks but also to other people who tag with same keyword.

This can be simply defined as method bookmarking which is posted online, catalogued with comments and tags, and shared with your friends/others.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Social Bookmarking:

Advantages:

• The main advantage of the social bookmarking is “Search Engine Optimization” because these sites are highly search engine optimized.
• By using bookmarking services you can experience immediate traffic to your site.
• The main theme of these services is that we can place our favorite websites list in single place and browse whenever and wherever required by using the internet.
• It ranks the resource based on the number of times it has been bookmarked by users rather than rank it according to number of external links.
• It is considered as the best place for promoting your site.

Distavantages:

• Informal vocabularies is one of the drawback of social bookmarking in search data point of view i.e
• No standard set of keywords
• Mistagging occur due to spelling errors
• Tags which have more than one meaning
• It is not designed with the proper hierarchy of relationships between tags.
• Spam and corruption is another disadvantage of social bookmarking. The more ofen the webpage is submitted the better chance that the page is found.

spamming occurs as the same webpage is bookmarked multiple times and/or by tagging each webpage of the website by using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust their security to overcome abuses.

Impact Of Social Bookmarking On Search Engine Optimization:

Social Bookmarking is becoming best way for the website owner's to draw the attention to their site. It exposes the site to a wide group of people who run their own blogs indexed in search engines as regular website are. The following are the few points to explain impact of social bookmarking on search engine optimization:

• Indexing of sites are done faster as the sites are bookmarked fastely by humans.
• Brings the additional traffic to the site. So that the page rank of the site will increase.
• Links will be picked by other websites through social bookmarking site.
• Defines the quality of particular site and differentiates it from other web sites.
• The quality of the site can be measured always. As more number of people bookmark a site the better quality and relevance will come to know.
• Categorizes the bookmarks using tags or keywords which are useful later when we are trying to find a specific bookmark or similar bookmarks.

Google Search Results New Look, Change in the Google Search Results

Google has changed the Look and Feel of the search Engine page with more sophisticated features. Google has been experimenting since last few months by inserting a “Show Search Tools” option in the left navigation of the home page. With the positive feedback and after several experiments, today Google has increased the power of search which showcases the latest search results and terminology by including the left-hand navigation in the search results page.

This new tools increases the relevance of the search query with extra search tools. In the past, Google introduced Universal Search, the Search Options panel and Google Squared. In Universal search, the relevance of the query will be more. It has included “Everything” options in the left pane which helps you to search different a type of query’s which allows to you switch to specific type of result you are looking.

The Search options panel increased the richness of search results. The new left-hand navigation has various search tools like images, discussions, books, updates in which you can use the relevant tools of your search query. 

Google Squared is used to compare the entities and ideas. “Something Different” is a feature which was built on Google Squared feature. This is not only used to find the search results but also to find the other entities, namely images, books and videos etc , which are specific to the user query.

Along with this, Google also changed its Logo features. Google removed the shade of the logo image which was present in the lower side of the Logo.

Finally, Google with its new features has increased the richness of the search and to the point what we are looking for.  New left-hand navigation bar would be a search feast for the visitors, bloggers, and webmasters.  Compare the previous and the present search results bar in the below figure.

Advantages of New Google Search

• Left Navigation menu bar increases the richness of the search.
• Left navigation not only increases the relevance of the query but also displays related topics
• Left navigation will suggest the tools that are most relevant and helpful to your query.