Tweets as SEO boost?

Does Google index twitter tweets?

At this moment, no, Google is not telling us plainly (yet) if they are indeed indexing google tweets or not. But Search engine results show that the Google bots are already creeping twitter accounts and putting them on the results page of Google. Take for example this image showing that a keyword search can bring up a twitter account in the search engine result page.

PC World has even announced that now, Google will be able search your tweets right from the very first one you ever posted in the tweeter world.

To quote:

With Google's new Twitter search feature, you can view all Tweets within a specific day, month or year, using a graph that appears on top of the results. For example, it's possible to see what PCWorld Tweeted on April 3, 2010, iPad launch day.

As explained on the Official Google Blog, the feature's actually pretty handy if you want to see what people where saying on the day of a major event, such as Congress' passing of health care legislation. But as I alluded to in the headline, it also makes it easy for people to look at anything you wrote during a specific date or time period, as long as your timeline is public. (unquote)


The thought that tweets could have an effect on page ranking is really not improbable. This means that in the future (we just don't know how near that may be), google may just well enter the realm of social networking sites since it already had treaded the waters of twitter.com.  So what is the implication for this?

As early as now start optimizing your twitter accounts to be SEO friendly. If you are using tweeter to project updates and receive feedbacks from your customers, then you might as well optimize it to the fullest - just to be sure.

As for now, we'll keep watching Google updates - you'll never know.

How to SE-Optimize Your Twitter Account

The possibility of Google indexing Tweeter tweets is not really just a long gone dream. So before you get left behind, take time to plan for a feasible twitter account that is SE-Optimized.

Here are some steps that you need to do:

1. Choose a username closest to your brand. If you want a search engine boost using twitter, you might as well select a handle or username that is related to your brand. Or, you could also use a keyword as your username.

2. Don't neglect your twitter bio. You only get to put 160 characters worth of message here, so you might as well put your keywords or brand vision, description or purpose here.

3. Select a catchy user image. This does not add up to page ranking but it does help you gain more clicks by getting the interest of the readers to actually click on you.

4. Optimize your tweets. Put keywords on your tweet message, but don't stuff it - or you'll end up a spammer. And that will really slam your reputation on the ground, big time.

5. Gain Followers. More followers will mean mean more a larger market.

6. Shorten URLs that you tweet. Redirecting URLs are also quite useful since you have limited characters to use to get your message relayed. Go to URL trimmers like TinyURL, ow.ly, bit.ly and other URL shortener sites to provide backlinks to you. This is usually to avoid those really long URLs which will really eat up tweeting space.

7. Hash tagging your tweets. This will categorize that your tweet is about a specific category. This is usually done by putting a # before your keyword when you are making your tweet.

8. Retweeting. If you are going to re-tweet anything, make sure that it is relevant to your site or what your twitter account is all about.

Twitter Away Your Business

Birds are not the only ones who tweet. In fact, nowadays humans are learning how to tweet too, in a drastically fast pace.

Tweeting has now become a lifestyle for some. Like Facebook, tweeter is one of the most influential and most popular social media online networking sites of our time. And because millions have joined the tweeting chorus in the net, most companies realized that there are a lot of fish to catch in the sea of social networking, so they jumped in the bandwagon as well.

Now what benefits can tweeter offer for your business?

1. It's a great way to connect with clients and customers. If you have the opportunity, always offer others to follow you on twitter. In your main site, add icons that would help users to easily navigate their way to twitter and add you in a breeze. In that way, you could keep your informed about any updates or new happenings withing your company or about your products. At the same time, your customers could also forward their sentiments, suggestions, and praises regarding your product or service.

2. You get to promote your site to a large audience - for free. One thing that's beautiful about these social media networking sites is that most of them are basically offering free service to begin with.

Sometimes, riding along the tide is the right thing to do. So don't be afraid to test the waters and ripple your way to promotion by using twitter. It's easy to use. It's easier to  maintain. And the best part is, it's free. What more can you ask for? Tweet your business away now.

Facebook in Your Business?

Maybe you have lost track of how many times you've hit that like button, but certainly all of us can point out that Facebook has really become a part of our daily lifestyle.

Ever since its conception in the year 2004, Facebook has eventually gained popularity and even outsmarted and left its previous networking counterpart behind eating dust - a lot of dust. What started as a Harvard college sophomore project ultimately became one of the most sought after social networking site around the globe.

Because of the massive amount of traffic that can be potentially obtained from this social networking site, it's no wonder that more and more companies are starting to set up their own Facebook page for other people to see. From small businesses to major brand names, majority of these companies have flocked Facebook pages to gain popularity - and gather "like button" hits as well.

Now why use Facebook?

1. It generates traffic. You can set up a page in Facebook about your brand, promote it, and start gathering followers or friends. Also provide a link to your main site in your Facebook page so that every time a user comes across your FB page and becomes interested in whatever product you are endorsing, they could take that step further and click on that link.

2. It's free. You do not have to pay a dime when you sign up for a Facebook account - but, if properly used for promotions, this could amass traffic more than you could ever imagine. And the good news is, you did not pay a thing.

Facebook is also used to get feedbacks from your patrons or customers. Because social networking is mainly interacting with other users, Facebook can crack the wall of non-communication into a more intimate company-to-customer relationship and interaction.

The Power of Social Media - Massive Traffic Generation Low - Cost Promotion

Facebook. Twitter. Stumble Upon. Del.icio.us.

Thousands or even millions of users flock these sites everyday. And with this tremendous user population, one can just imagine how these social media sites could help you interact with other people - or promote your business or website. Imagine the possibility of directing at at least a portion of those traffic to your site. Tremendous indeed.

If you are still not using these social media sites for your business or webpage promotion - then prepare to prepare consider your site as a barren traffic wasteland - or your feedburner meter flash mere two digit numbers for your traffic. More and more people are pulled into the social media networking wave that even top brand companies could not resist to sign up and  join in the community. Major companies like Ford,Starbucks, and Dell have joined the the entire bandwagon of tweeters online. Others also have corresponding pages in facebook.

Now why are more and more companies seeking the online social media sites nowadays?

1. To interact with costumers. Since the internet is such an in demand "commodity" for the current generation many businesses have sprung to make their own comfy niche in the worl wide web. And if you have already put up a webpage, you have all the reason to make social media accounts. Companies could set up online costumer service accounts using these sites to cater with the different complaints or suggestions, or gather commendations from costumers. This  is a very good way to improve your business and service through direct and real-time feedback from your band of followers.

2. To promote brand. The social media sites are also avenues where you could promote a product or your business for free . You could even post updates or recent releases about your product or company to your social media network.

3. To direct traffic to the main site. If you got your populace hooked and interested, chances are they will take a step further check out your main website.  So it is also equally important to put links in your  social media account pointing to your company site to generate traffic - and that's for free.

If you are planning to generate traffic to your site, better use and exhaust all means to get it so - and social media network is your way to go.

SEO 101: Web Vultures - Scrapers Come Into Town

Isn't it weird when, while browsing the net, you find yourself sitting in front of your computer, sipping your coffee, and then reading your own content - on a different site, claimed by a different person?

Yes, plagiarism on the net is really shooting up like crazy. And the internet community usually call these web parasites as scrapers.

Web scraping, according to the wikipedia, is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Scrapers utilize this method to obtain content from other sites. A scraping site may copy content from one site, or it may syndicate content from numerous other sites that are related to the scraper's web page.

Victims of the scraping trade are usually sites with high page ranks in search engines. These sites are logically vulnerable to these parasitic internet copying attacks since they can easily be found once you search for specific keywords.

Scrapers may use software to do the duplication process, but they may also manually search for sites and copy content without permission or due acknowledgment (there are black hat SEOs or just plain lazy bums who do this for a living).

Once you've found out that your site content has been forged, there are three ways that you could do to stop it.

1. Contact the site owner. IF you can get his phone number, e-mail, or any other possible contact details, write that person a letter or connect with him or her and firmly but politely ask the owner to stop and delete all the plagiarized contents within the site.

2. If the problem still persists, contact the site host or the service provider, report the site and air out your concerns. They usually have customer service or complaint section that can cater to your needs.

3. If the site host or provider is taking a long time to respond, and it the offender still juices out your content, consult a lawyer. Or another option is going to an Information Technology expert.

SEO 101: URL-Making

A uniform Resource Locator, or simply an URL, is one of the most frequent things you see in the internet world. URLs work the same way as our real life addresses because it designates where a site is found in the world wide web. It works more like our real life addresses, that's why it is also popularly known as a web address.

Your URL also has a big impact in search engine optimization, so how do you make the most of your URLs? Create it the right way. Here's how:

1. Make a domain name that best summarizes your site. When a viewer reads your URL, he or she must already have an idea on what your site is about. For example, a person reading the URL www.tolkienianlegend.com will already have this idea, upon seeing the address, that the website is more or less about J.R.R. Tolkien and the contribution that he had given to the world.

2. Make it short. Short and concise is the game in URL making. Shorter URLs are visibly friendly both to users and web crawlers. Plus it would be easy to remember. You would not want to indirectly hinder the spreading of your site to other people like what happens in this scenario:

Girl 1: Oh hey, I found this really nice site about Tolkien.

Girl 2: Really? What's its web address?

Girl 1: www.lambegolmoredalamberontaruithorntirith.com

Girl 2: *nose bleed*

Right? :)

3. Put your keywords in the URL. If you are movie streaming site for example, you can create a domain like www.moviestreamingonline.com. Do not overdo it though. Spamming your keywords in your URL is also a bad idea as you could be directed to spam folders by spam filters. And hey, the address that says www.watchmoviesonlinefreemoviesstreamingdownloadmovie.com is really suspicious both to filters, crawlers, and human users as well. Plus, refer to rule no. 2.

4. Use hyphens as separators. If you really need to partition words in your URL,use a hyphen instead of other signs like asterisks (*), addition signs (+), and the likes.
The hyphen can be universally read by all search engines.

Properly creating your URL can give you a boost towards page rank dominion so go make your URL, and while your at it, make it the right way.

SEO 101: Keywords Can Make or Break You

Keywords play a very important role in the whole search engine optimization process. In fact, your site optimization will bank on selected keywords or keyword phrases in order to effectively rank on the search engine results pages.

What are keywords basically?

Every time you go to a search engine home page like that of Google, Yahoo and MSN, you are given the text box will you will input some words or phrases that corresponds to something that you want to gather information about. These specific words or phrases that you use to find data on the internet are called keywords or keyword phrases.

You see, search engine spiders index information that they crawl upon in the world wide web by categorizing them under relevant keywords. For example, you may have your telephone address book with you, which classifies the list of your contacts alphabetically. Under the letter A you may see the telephone numbers of the Aarons, the Armstrongs, or  the Akobayashis. In the same way, the spiders sort our the different sites by listing them with the keywords that they fall under. For example, if you optimized your site using the keywords: How to Wear Hosiery, then the crawlers would go index them under those keywords or other keywords closely related to it.

Different keywords have different searches or hits everyday. In addition, more sites listed in one keyword category, means more more and more competitors for you. That means you have to choose what keywords you would want to use to optimize your site with. SEOs make sure that the keyword or keyword phrase that they are using receives a good amount of searches per day. They must also make see to it that the keyword they selected will not let them drown in a vast sea of competitors. To achieve this, some SEOs use keyword generation tools to help them find the right keywords to use.

How to insert an RSS Button to Your Blogger Blog

To understand how RSS works in plain English, here is a video by the Common Craft Show, showing how important it is to have an RSS feed to your site or your blog:

Now that you have known how the necessity of having an RSS feed for the convenience of your blog viewers, you may want to put an RSS button to your Blogger blog so that your viewers can conveniently subscribe to your feeds.

Here is how to do it:

1. First, search for an RSS button icon. Make sure that you are not impeding any legal right by using that icon. Try searching for free for use RSS buttons.

2. Upload it to an image host. There are a lot of popular image hosting sites on the web now. If you don't know any, try searching the internet for one.

3. Once you have uploaded your image, copy the "direct link" of your image URL.

4. RSS feeds are usually place in the most conspicuous places of your blogs so that your readers could easily spot it. Try putting it on the upper right or upper left corner of your blog.

5. Go to the Page Elements portion of your blog, located by clicking the Design tab of your blog account. Click the Add a Gadget box.

6. A window will then appear. Choose the JavaScript/Html option.

6. Retype the code that you see in the following image, replacing the my blogsite address with your webpage adress. Place it in the content text box. On the other hand, Write RSS Feed or any description of the link that you want in the title box.

7. Click save.

8. Preview your blog.

SEO 101: Beef Up Your Content

As the old adage says: Content is King.

It still is. That is why if you are planning to construct a page that you would want the entire internet world to see, you might as well create one that would make them stick around fro more. Like a good restaurant which entices patrons with their quality dish and service, a good web site is one which holds quality content that is worth your time and effort to read.

When you write good content, you are, in a way, also indirectly providing good service to any one who may stumble upon your site. People come to the internet to look for information because it has a seemingly infinite databank of resources. Letting your visitor be disappointed by some gramatically hideous, out of the world,  automatically generated articles displayed on the page will just tarnish the your reputation or your company or product name.

So how would you write good content?

First thing first: Write it yourself.

If you are endorsing a product, point out the advantages of the perks of your commodity but do not overexaggerate it to the point that your inflating your product's purpose. State clearly what your product is for, how much it costs, its buying, delivery or shipping instructions, and why your customer needs to buy it. A little story regarding how your product was made would not hurt too.

If you are writing a personal blog, you can take the challenge of picking a random topic and relate it to the theme that your blog is categorized for. You can even ask kids for one. You'll never know what you'll get.

The important thing is, don't be a copycat.

What if you don't know how to write?

You could buy any instructional material on creative writing or writing effectively. You can also enroll in copy writing courses if your grammar isn't really an eye candy. Or if you are working on a strict budget, search the net. I'm sure there are valuable resources there that will teach you how to write decently - and the good news is, they are usually free.

Once you have quality content rolling, you'll get an influx of loyal followers that will even subscribe to you, or keep tabs fo your recent updates. Content is King. And it will continue to be for a very long time.

SEO 101: SEO in New-Bee Language - A Beginner's Guide

There is a huge circus pandemonium going on regarding this SEO industry. With all the seasoned SEo specialists domineering the "game field", is there any way that neophyte aspirants could even up in this playing field?

Why use the internet for my personal and business needs?

The world wide web is the only place up to date that gathers different people from different walks of life. This the rendezvous of millions of users each day, coming from varying places around the globe. The internet is like a deep ocean teeming with fish of diverse origins and species. Now think of yourself as a fisherman, how can you get those voluminous number of fish inside your net?

What is SEO - and don't get technical!

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. In simple terms, SEO is simply the method of optimizing a site to be able to at least enter the top ten ranking or page one in the search engine. Examples of search engines are sites like Googl, Yahoo, or MSN, which provides users a homepage for researching information that can be found in the web.

Why would I want to rank in those pages?

If you are using the internet as ground to promote a business, a product, a site, or yourself, your main goal is to direct as many possible visitors to your page for them to know what you are proposing or endorsing. In our present generation, the users of the internet rely on the search engines to find information located somewhere out there in the vast database of the online sphere. After typing keywords in the text box and hitting the search tab, the engine will then give you a list of webpages that are relevant to your search. The webpages in the top ten list or the first page of the result often get more clicks which means more visitors and more chances to actually introduce your product or concept to somebody.

Where do I start from here?

Now this is what SEO 101 New-bee guide is for. By knowing and understanding the concepts behing Search Engine Optimzation, you can start to promote your web page online and also begin to competitively rank in th Search Engine pages. More SEO 101 New-bee Guide are coming up made especially for SEO beginners like you.

Vlogging for SEO?

With the rise of video hosting sites, video logging has also rapidly emerged in the mainstream of internet connectivity. The wikipedia claims that vidblogging or vlogging actually started to gain momentum in the internet popularity race in the year 2005. With the rolling development of vlogging, how can we use this in Search Engine Optimization?

Now, what we know is that, the search engine bugs do not have the ability to scan video content. They only read the html tags used. That's why SEO Specialists are really wary in recommending videos as a major or main feature of a web page or web design. But is there no way to remedy this?

Of course there is. You can still video blog and not compropmise your optimization at the same time.

The trick here actually, is simply transcribing your video. (So take note that you also need to make your video keyword rich so that the transcribed copy would be the same.) This would be like putting subtitles to films that a certain group of people could not understand.

You can use video blogs to boost your business, your career, your company, or your product. You can find a lot of disadvantages when you utilize a video to get your message across than just normally using a typical text-heavy blog. These Vlogging tips and reminders are also helpful for you who are just starting out to venture the world of video blogging. Whether it is for entertainment or business purposes, video blogs is surely the way to go when it comes to contemporary online blogging.

New-Bee Guide: How to Create Reciprocal Links in Blogger?

Remember how easy it was to embed a video using Blogger? With Blogger's built-in features, putting reciprocal links that web directories are requiring you is also an easy task to do.

What is a reciprocal link?

Harvest SEO defines it as a "two-way link involved in a link exchange. To illustrate, website A has a link to website B. If B returns a link to A, then that link is called a reciprocal link. Reciprocal links are helpful in improving website rankings as it benefits both sites." Remember, links that are directing to you have a lot of weight for pushing you on top of the page rankings. The Article directories are doing a great service of listing your site so that an inbound link will be attributed to you, but, as compensation, you need to also have link of their site on yours. That is the essence of reciprocal links. It's basically a symbiotic relationship between you and the article directories in order to help other fare well in the search engine ranking pages.

How do you insert a reciprocal link in your Blogger blog account?

Just follow the following steps:

1. Click the Design tab on your blog.

2. Now after you click on Design, you will go to the Page Elements page where you can add or edit a page element in your blog.

3. Look for the Add a Gadget box in the Page Elements page and click it.

4. A window will then appear. Select the HTML/Javascript option.

5. After you have chosen the HTML/Javascript box, you will see another window. The Title text box is for whatever label you are going call your link. The Content text box is where you paste your code that the web directory has given you as a reciprocal link.

By doing these steps you can now place reciprocal links on your Blogger blog.

How to Maximize Link Building

Links are very important if you are optimizing your site. In fact link building  is a key aspect in Search Engine Optimization. To achieve that high page rank you must have plenty of links pointing to YOU. The question is, how do you do it? Here are a few tips to maximize link building for fellow newbies:

1. Submit your site to Web directories.
Sites that automatically submit your URL like freeswebsubmission.com can help you submit to a number of web directories in one click of a button. Web directories are the yellow pages of the internet. However, they usually request a reciprocal link before they would enlist your web page in their site. This may take weeks of waiting. You can also manually submit your sites to the different directories.


2. Get involved with blog communities.
These sites are niches for you to introduce your site to other people. But before you go on and post like crazy in blog sites and forum boards, remember that these places must also be relevant to your page. Don't just go on posting like a maniac on the first blog or forum that you stumble upon the net, unless you want top be branded as a spammer.

3. Utilize Social Media sites.
Social Media sites are  one of the greatest places in the online world to interact with other people and promote your site. If you want to get substantial amount of traffic to your site, join as many social media sites as you can and start posting useful content there that back links to your site. Thousands of people are logging in to social web pages like squidoo and hubpages every day, so don't miss a chance to get them to visit you online.

To know how important social media is today, here is a video which explained Social Media in layman concept.

The thing is, traffic will not come to you overnight. You have to maintain and spend time establishing links tyo these sites and promoting your page to other users. Put too much links on a page and google will penalize you, put none, and your site is  probably  microcosm of a ghost town. Remember, the essence of building is, basically, you start from the bottom, and work your way to the top.

Link Building: Knowing How Powerful Links are in SEO

What is a Link?
A link or a hyperlink is a method in the internet to bring a user from one page to another. It is composed of html codes that is readable by a computer browsers. When you are surfing the web and you happen to come across a text that is highlighted with a different color or if it is highlighted every time you hover your mouse arrow over it, chances are, you are looking at a link. A link can be a text or an image. Every time you click on links, you are transferred by your browser to another page. Basically, links are connectors of the different sites in the world wide web. It facilitates connectivity of the billions of pages posted in the deep vast online world.

How Significant Are Links in SEO?
Now in Search Engine Optimization or SEO, links are one of the primary reasons that can boost your rankings in a search engine's natural listing. This has been tested, proven, and even abused by many people online. Back links, or the links that usually point back to you, is one of the primary measuring tool that will make you fare well in the page rankings. Linking to a site is usually a way of saying that you recommend it. More links going to you means that your page is surely a popular one, trusted by many other people.

The issue here is not solely the quantity of links though. The links must also come from relevant sites and respected communities. Some people abuse link building and just spam their links on many different places across the web for the sake of that "high PR". Try maximizing the use of links the right way to get the most out of it.

How Would You Know How Many Sites are Linking to You?
There are also ways to determine how many sites are linking back to you. The video below demonstrates how to monitor  the back links to you using the google and the yahoo search engine.

To Do it in Google:
Just go to the internet search engine and type in link:http://www.yourwebsiteahere.com and press search. You will be then given a report regarding back links to you. Example, if you do this to check for links to http://www.wikipedia.org:

You can see that there are a total of 3,440 sites that are linking to it based on the google search.


To Do it in Yahoo
Type linkdomain: www.yourwebsitehere.com in internet search engine and click the search tab. You will be then directed to a page where all sites that back link to will be shown. If search the same site we used above in yahoo:

We can see that the links rise up to 7,310,751! (Yes, we notice the huge discrepancy between the two search engines, but as to why the results are as such is new fodder for a blog post. :D)

Protect and take care of your links and secure youself a high page ranking.

Recognize a Spam Blog: Stop Sploggers From Spreading Part II

 Characteristic no. 6
* Blogs with keywords in the URL.  Then they are followed by characteristic no. 2. If you find this characteristics in a particular blog, then it's time to raise your Splog Suspect flag.

Characteristic no. 7
* Blogs that does not allow comments in their posts. Okay, although some blogs do this, majority of the Splogs really ban comments in their posts. Normal bloggers usually just set it in a way that they can moderate the comments. Sploggers do this so that other spammers could not also spam in their comments page by the time they achieve a high rank in the search engine results pages. No comments means no additional burden of deletion or moderation. That's also one characteristics of Splogs - they are low-maintennace blogs.

Characteristic no. 8
* Blogs that steal content. You stumble upon this blog, read it's post - and realize that you are reading your own write-up! Sploggers, because they simply have no time to create their own content, resort to completely or substantially stealing other people's ideas. 

Characteristic no. 9
* Its content is trash. Really. Just read it. If the sentences just do not add up to each other or if the posts are really prone to grammatical lapses, then you might be looking at a potential Splog.


Characteristic no. 10
* Blogs with posts containing a particular word or phrase that is repeated all through out the article. That word or phrase is usually the keyword or keyphrase that Sploggers are aiming to get ranked highly for. And if the overall thought of the article really just does not add up - it's another Splog alert for you.


Those are some of the characteristics that you may observe whenever you encounter a Splog. But remember again though, not all users who create blogs to generate income are Splogs. Everything still depends on the content that you read. As long as it can be useful to users, even if it sells a product or promotes an advocacy or a company, it is still a blog. Do know when it those sites get overboard though.

Think twice of reporting a suspected Slog to Blogger. For all you know, you may be reporting a blog  used by a genuine blogger who had efforted to construct his blog from scratch and who has a substantial number of folowers and visitors. A month of suspension or blog deletion may be a really big blow for those people.

Recognize a Spam Blog: Stop Sploggers From Spreading Part I

 How do you identify a Spam Blog or Splog when you happen to meet one? If you find that most of the descriptions that I listed here aptly fits a blog that has been bothering you lately, there a very high probability that that blog is a Splog.

Characteristic no. 1
Observe the post - if there are a good number of links in one page that point to a single site, that blog is probably a splog. This one of the foolproof ways to check if  a blog is genuinely a blog or if it is simply faking it. To make sure if the blog is just link spamming, try to look at the other blog posts. Are the articles written on each post similarly peppered with links to the same site? If yes, you've got yourself a Splog Suspect.

Characteristic no.2
* Blogs that are merely scraping information. There are a lot of scraper sites created in blogger. By Scraper Site, we mean those blogs who simply "scrape" , juice out , or cut content from other blogs when all they do is just to redirect you to another site which they probably promote.

Characteristic no. 3
* Blogs with absurdly innumerable posts. Sixty to ninety posts a month is passable. But two hundred to more than a thousand posts a month? Dude are you a robot? Or maybe an automatic article spinning and blog posting software program?

Characteristic no. 4
* Blogs with only a single post, and which has characteristic no. 1. Seriously, this is a fake blog. After successfully posting  a page with links directing to their site, the owner leaves the blog to flies and cobwebs. It served its purpose. There's no one maintaining it anyway.

Characteristic no. 5
* Blogs that have suspicious company name or product name in their URL adresses, especially if coupled by Characteristic no. 1. Remember, not all blogs with this attribute are fake blogs. Some people just make use of their blogs for generation of money - you can't deny that. Even blogger has a monetize section in each of their accounts right? Using blogs for money is not really the issue here, because there are some blogs that do that and yet, they still provide content that are interesting to many readers. A splog is different. Splogs are ALL links and NO content kind of blogs.

Click to continue to read more of how to identify a Splog.

Blackhat SEO: What Usually Gets You Walking in the Dark Side of SEO Part II

You have read some of the most common Blackhat SEO techniques in the previous post, now we will discuss other "desperate" measures employed by Blackhat SEOs in trying to gain Page Rank dominion:

Cloaking
When you intentionally manipulated your site so that a web crawler could see it differently from an actual user, you are using a cloaking technique. This is also similar to creating doorway pages that redirect users to another page. Cloaking techniques are used to get a really high ranking in search engine results. It is, however, a direct violation of the Google Guidelines which specifically says not to "deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users." No one is excempted in this rule and even big companies are liable to become penalized if they violate this, like how Google imposed a penalty to BMW Germany for cloaking their site.

Code Swapping
In code swapping, a certain page is optimized so that it would get a high ranking, but once in does, the content of the page or the site is partially or completely altered. This is also considered as a form of cloaking or user-deception.


Wikipedia Spamming
As we all know, Wikepedia has an open-edit ability. Some people take advantage of that feature by shamelessly and spuriously peppering the site with their links that are sometimes even unrelated to the wiki entry.

Page Hijacking
Yep. Planes are not the only ones who get hijacked, your internet page could be too. Page hijacking is defined by wikipedia as a form of spam indexing which is produced through "creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites" or also the competitor site.

Scraper Sites
These are also commonly known as Made For Adsense sites. These sites or blogs are usually optimized to get a high or decent ranking in the search engine pages but the main purpose of these sites is to get users to click on the ads that are found on the site. The content of the page are usually just "scraped" or copied from other sites, and usually, they redirect users to other sites. An example of these are blogs or pages that have a proliferation of "Click here to watch live video streaming" links.

There are plenty of other SEO methods that are devised to cunningly trick both users and search engine bugs and maybe some techniques still remain undisclosed. But we can be assured that any attempt to poison the SEO system will be appropriately answered with counter measures. Good people will reign over scheming bad people - well, almost always. :)

Spam Blogging: Are Fake Blogs Invading Blogger Too?

Yes, and they are also swiftly overtaking and domineering the whole blogosphere at a drastically fast pace.

The Blog Herald reported that, according to a survey that was conducted by the Google Blogscoped, a whopping sixty percent of the total blogs here in Blogger were Splogs or mere Spam Blogs. Out of fifty blogs, thirty were found to be of no particular use at all. When the number of blogs tested had been raised to a hundred, forty two percent were discovered as fake blogs.

Blogger Philipp Lenssen, an avid tracker of Google updates, commented that:
“Google itself shows there are around 7,500,000 pages hosted on Blogspot. If we extrapolate the number, we might estimate Google is hosting 4 million spam pages. (Of course, this number is by no means in any way precise.) Even though I expected some amount of spam, I was surprised just how much it is. From the small sample I took it looks like on average, a site hosted at Google's Blogspot is more likely to contain spam than anything else.”

So there you go. Our neighborhood blog may be one of those spam blogs we are talking about. Is it possible to report spam blogs to Blogger?

Yes, you can definitely report a spam blog. Blogger provides a service wherein they check the blog in question that you submit. Now that you have realized that you can combat fake blogs in Blogger, you might want to know how to identify a spam blog.

Blackhat SEO: What Usually Gets You Walking in the Dark Side of SEO Part I

The following are the customary modes to tweak your site the Blackhat SEO way:

Keyword Stuffing
This method covers placing a specific number of keywords in the article content so as to improve keyword density. A lot of keywords in the content will lure the web spiders into considering that the page is relevant so that it can promptly be seen during a search engine hit.

Hidden or Invisible Unrelated Text
Joseph Alvini of Web Designs Org. describes this as a way of "disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within HTML code such as "no frame" sections, alt attributes, zero-width/height divs , and "no script" sections." A Search Engine company will most likely ban your page or site from appearing in the search if it is found to have hidden texts.

Link Spamming
The Spam Abuse Net defines spamming as "flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services." In the same vein, link spamming is putting an excessive number of links in one page to trick link-based search engine alogarithms. Links can also be spammed in the comments section of blogs or forums.

Link Buying or Selling
This is one ineffective method that will only lead you to unnecessarily shell out money. There are companies or sites that offer buying or selling links - be wary of those people. Search engines tend to elude sites that are selling or buying links, so spending for those could be really useless since the web crawlers would not index them anyway.

Link Farming
Some sites from an agreement to one another to exhange links that direct to each other. Webopedia identifies link farming as the "process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase search engine optimization. The idea behind link farming is to increase the number of sites that link to yours because search engines such as Google rank sites according to, among other things, the quality and quantity of sites that link to yours."

Spam Blogging
Spam Blogs, also known as splogs, are "empty" blogs whose main purpose is to generate links that direct to the main site that is being optimized. Wikepedia aptly defines spam blogs as "fake blogs". Unfortunately, most blogging service sites breed a lot of these spam blogs. Even Blogger has spam blogs. In fact, according to estimates, one out of five blogs in Blogger are spam blogs.

See more Blackhat SEO techniques exposed in the second part of the discussion.