Google has been seen saying following words about participating in the link schemes:

“…there are some webmasters who get involved in link exchange programs and other build partner pages just for the purpose of cross linking and disregarding the quality of links. This leaves a long term impact on their sites. But the strategy totally violate the set guidelines of Google Webmaster and can also have negative affect on search engine ranking results..”

When the Google is seen stating this, Microsoft is not left supporting its competitor:

“…use of techniques like Live Search index might affect the ranking of your website or even get your website removed from the search index. Settling down for link farms techniques can artificially increase the number of links to the webpage, but it is not genuine…”

Yahoo also believes that sites those are cross linked excessively are consider unwanted and thus, face lack of ranking problems.

Now the question arises, why would Skip Chilcott publicly recommend Link exchange scheme that is a semi black hat technique? Along with this, he would also endorse certain firms/ softwares to help you with adopting link exchange scheme.

Why Should we Discourage Link Exchange Schemes?

We have seen search engines becoming more competitive as well as useful for SEOs and even common researchers. All of us depend on these search engines to find relevant information. The reason why search engines have gained so much credibility is because they offer maximum information in quickly. As so many people have started gaming the search engines, this is resulting in more spam and less quality results. In order to stop receiving spam, we have to ensure that attributed like low quality links should not be taken into consideration by search engines. Google is one of the preferred search engines, which has not only discounted the bad links from counting but has also taken strict actions in order to prevent webmasters from googling the search ranking with shady SEO techniques.

It is true that reciprocal linking or participation in automated link exchange program however does not completely benefit users. These are only beneficial for the webmasters who game the whole system. And if despite of abiding to some strict rules, search engines are still gamed, they will lose their usefulness.

When a top notch employee of Microsoft gives a shady advice like semi black hat SEO, it clarifies the doubt that why Live search has yet not been successful in producing good results.

After identifying the mistake made by him in first post, Skip Chilcott came out with another post. For this, he took advice from colleagues over at Live Search. He made them share some expert advice about linking best practices.

Possible White Hat, which are Link Exchange

• The links that assist users in finding more relevant information about particular subject.
• Links, which are not meant for promotion or do not give link juice to a site that has spammy nature.
• Links that are meant for traffic and not at all for better search engine ranking.
• Links that you would also recommend to search engines due to the quality and highly informative details they offer.

There are some natural link building techniques referred by many Search Experts. These are:

• Should I Avoid Link Exchange / Link Trading Hubs? by Aaron Wall of SEObook.com
• 8 Ways to Buy Links without Buying Links written by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org
• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website written by Aaron Wall working for SEOBook.com
• The definitive link building strategy offered by Web Credible
• Five Link Building Strategies That Work by Brian Clark of Copyblogger
• Link Building Tutorial – A Complete Walkthrough written by Saad Kamal

Comments

Searchers despise the 404 error page, especially when it comes from clicking what looks like a relevant link in a list of search results. Too often, these 404s come up as an ineffective default page in the browser, leaving the visitor no other real choice but to hit the Back button and try again.

One may end up leery of future results from that domain, a brutal blow to a webmaster who may not realize without carefully checking the log files that people are hitting and missing something on their sites.

The biggest search engine, Google, prefers not to see this. It not only diminishes the value of the destination sites returning a 404 error, but the quality of its search results. A poorly configured delivery of 404 results may keep an otherwise dead page alive in Google’s index, to be found again and again.

It’s basic stuff, as commenters on the first of a short series of posts at the Google Webmaster Central blog noted. Is someone really a webmaster if they don’t know to return a 404 error when a page is not found?

Not all 404s are created equal, as Maile Ohye said at the blog today. A 404 could be a soft error or a hard one.

The soft 404 response is the undesirable result. This happens when someone tries to visit a nonexistent URL on a site. Instead of an error page, the website returns a 200 response code and sends the request to the site’s homepage.

On the user’s side, the person who encountered this probably questioned the sanity of the webmaster on the other end who let this useless result happen. It’s not a good way to earn repeat visits.

Give the visitor a real 404 page not found result, Ohye said. It’s a clear indication both to human and automated visitors about the status of the page.

Google plans to make a week of the 404, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of where they are going judging by Ohye’s comment about sending a helpful “Not found” message to the viewer. Webmasters have the ability to deliver any kind of page in response to a 404 situation.

Such a page could let the visitor know that, while the page they wanted isn’t there, other pages on the site may be exactly what they need. Weather.com demonstrates this well: this link brings up two types of content.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/the-joy-of-404-ing-2008-08/feed 3 http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-wields-updated-webmaster-tools-2008-08 http://www.webpronews.com/microsoft-wields-updated-webmaster-tools-2008-08#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:04:43 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=46536 Microsoft’s Live Search behavior should yield more information to site publishers as the company took its Webmaster Tools out of beta and tweaked them with some new features.

Addressing the needs of webmasters, and doing it well, will contribute to the overall success of Microsoft’s desires for Internet profitability. The company wants to compete with Google on search advertising, no small challenge now that Google has Yahoo locked up with a deal to place ads on Yahoo Search.

Things can change, and they do so by being responsive to the needs of one’s customers. Microsoft recognized its need to reach webmasters with tools that make working with Microsoft’s Live Search a better prospect.

It’s taken Microsoft some time to ramp up and chase after Google, which published its Webmaster Central some time ago. Google tends to update that service regularly, and Microsoft followed suit with updates to its version of webmaster assistance.

Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools present ways for people to reach out for more traffic and analyze it once they have arrived. An update noted on the Live Search Webmaster Center blog showed it leaving beta, bringing along some updated tools as well.

Webmasters need to know how well Live Search crawls their site. Microsoft hopes to shed some light on this by presenting “crawl issues” encountered during the spidering process. The feature shows which of four types of issues the Live Search crawler encountered:

• File Not Found (404)

• Blocked by REP
• Long Dynamic URLs
• Unsupported Content-Types

As grizzled webmasters can see, Microsoft is just starting to catch up with Google in this regard.

Microsoft also said they enhanced the tool that gives details on the backlink data for sites. A limited look at that information during the beta period for Webmaster Tools expanded to show more data about those backlinks.

Additional tweaks gave webmasters more options to filter data, and a download option to pull that data to the desktop in comma-delimited (CSV) format. It’s a small step for Microsoft, one that the corporate masters overseeing the effort need to watch closely and ensure it receives continual updating to satisfy webmasters who are used to what Google provides.

Rich Page touted a quintet of useful analytics tools that should complement what webmasters run today. His Web Analytics World post kicked off with an alternative to the popular Google Analytics package that the search engine makes available at no cost.

He suggested the relatively new Woopra for consideration.  Page liked the real-time visitor analysis feature, and the ability to pop up a chat window with a visitor to help them or solicit feedback.

Webmasters can view overlays of site activity with Crazy Egg, which can reveal where people click on a site. Places that show up as not being clicked often present themselves in this view, making it easy to see what needs work.

Page also recommended Enquisite for reporting on search activity, 4Q for surveys to pull in feedback from visitors, and ClickTale for greater visibility into visitor activity, a la Crazy Egg.

One webmaster who believes he has suffered at the hands of such "Googlebowling" tactics isn’t convinced that Google looks closely enough at potential abuse coming from specially crafted inbound links.

At Search Engine Roundtable, the assertion exists that a little sneakiness by a webmaster will be the only item needed to build and target a rival, and drop it from Google’s rankings. A post at Google Groups detailed how the targeted webmaster would experience such a sudden loss:

Create a bunch of links pointing toward of all your enemies and competitors’ websites then use some really nasty porn Anchor text Keywords. Don’t link the porn keywords to the site’s main or index page, DO link the porn to a single specific page on the site and use that same page as the only page to link the porn too. Googlebowling works better if you embed the links into a video or flash (please note the example).

A Google staffer followed up on the post, claiming the site targeted by the Googlebowling ought to be looked at more closely, and in the context of Google’s quality guildelines.

"Looking at the site that you mentioned, I could imagine that studying our Google Webmaster Guidelines, in particular the quality guidelines, would be time well spent," Google’s John Mueller said.

"Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site."

In a mildly direct way, Mueller suggested the site’s low quality, not the inbound links, needs work. As far as evil linking and site rankings go, Mueller said in a follow-up that in theory the linking cited could cause a problem in some "borderline situations," but still suggested the webmaster in question needs to study Google’s quality guidelines.

Quality guidelines are on the minds of advertisers in particular this month, as Google continues to tweak what it thinks is and is not a quality experience for the arriving visitor. Much has been made of the advertiser side of quality guidelines, but they certainly apply in other ways on Google.

The company’s Maile Ohye talked about serving pages and their indexing by Google’s crawler as part of her post at Google Webmaster Central. The post comes in response to webmasters interested in a discussion of certain webserving techniques.

Webmasters who use geolocation or IP tracking to deliver content based on location need to be careful not to accidentally “cloak” their pages. In cloaking, a site delivers one type of content to the Googlebot crawler, and by extension to people finding the site in Google Search, and much different content to an arriving visitor.

Google doesn’t approve of the practice. “This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you’re in a high-risk category,” said Ohye.

Google likes the first-click free approach to web content, just as it does for content showing up in news results. Someone arriving at a page from Google expecting to read a story, and slamming into a login screen instead, won’t care for the experience.

Worse, since Google sent the person to the page in question, the person will more likely blame Google for the poor experience, rather than the cagey webmaster hoping to pull a conversion this way.

Google needs content. Without it, there are no search results, and no multi-billion dollar contextual ads feeding the bottom line (which they will talk about today after the market closes.)

Sometimes a site publisher picks up a new domain and needs to make sure visitors, and search engines, don’t get lost with the move. The Google Webmaster Central blog discussed that topic, starting with the essential 301 redirect.

Using 301 redirects serve as a way to get people and crawlers to the new domain. It also serves a higher purpose: helping webmasters avoid potential duplicate content penalties to their rankings within search results.

It’s a work-intensive process, but can be automated as shown on Wikipedia.

Google included in its suggestions the idea that a change for rebranding or redesign purposes might be accomplished best in two phases: site move first, redesign second.

"This manages the amount of change your users see at any stage in the process, and can make the process seem smoother. Keeping the variables to a minimum also makes it easier to troubleshoot unexpected behavior," Google’s Ríona MacNamara said.

Webmasters who want to control their content and its entry into search indexes sometimes turn to the NOINDEX meta tag to help. Here’s the problem: it isn’t being handled consistently at the major search engines, according to Cutts. Even Google isn’t sure what to do with pages tagged as NOINDEX.

“The question is whether Google should completely drop a NOINDEX’ed page from our search results vs. show a reference to the page, or something in between?” Cutts said in his post. Options fall into one of three possibilities: drop a NOINDEX page from the index, show links/references to those pages, or find some other middle ground.

Naturally the topic has generated some webmaster debate. One commenter at Cutts’ post said it’s “disrespectful” to index something marked as NOINDEX. Most of the follow-up comments expressed similar sentiments.

You can express yours in the comment section below, too.

>>> What are your thoughts on paid links? Do you agree with Google’s hard line? Comment here…

Well as it turns out, not ALL search engines are as hard line on these issues as some claim to be. MSN Live specifically has now gone on the record that none of the above are necessarily taboo.

Over the holiday break, Jeremiah Andrick, product manager for MSN Live Webmaster Tools, stopped by our offices. We did a lengthy video interview where we chatted about all kinds of good searchy things. Highlights of our chat included some of the emerging differences between Live Search and engines like Google on subjects like cloaking and paid links.

Google doesn’t like cloaking because it can be used to spam and fool their crawler.

Google doesn’t like paid links because their algorithm places such a high emphasis on links as a quality indicator, and paid linking subverts their system’s integrity.

Google’s solution to these problems has basically been to disallow paid links and cloaking and punish the sites that disregard their rules by penalizing or even booting them from the index.

Much to my surprise, MSN isn’t exactly following Google in this regard. They obviously aren’t going to recommend anyone use cloaking and paid links, but they don’t discount either practice as forbidden.

MSN Live Search is becoming a lot more interesting. Initially, Microsoft’s revamped search product drew some criticism for being basically a Google spin off in appearance, with less than stellar results.

The folks in Redmond haven’t just been sitting around though. The quality of their results has shown some nice progress, but more impressive (and promising) has been the quantum leaps they’ve made in terms of communicating with the webmaster community.

Paid Links:

In our video interview, you might notice that Jeremiah says to avoid paid links. Apparently, the Live Search crew has reevaluated their stance on paid links. Live Search’s Nathan Buggia, in an email on the subject of paid linking said the following:

"Paid links are a gray area. Are they of value to the end user? Sometimes they are. Often they’re less valuable and less relevant than the organic links on a page. We reserve the right to treat them that way."

The operative phrase here is "a gray area". That’s not saying paid links are forbidden or evil or a bannable offense. Some paid links are crap, some… not so much so. Live Search is working on methods to evaluate and qualify links – paid or otherwise – before they ascribe authority to them.

When Jeremiah says in the video to avoid paid links, it would be more appropriate to rephrase that as ‘avoid bad (irrelevant/junk) linking’.

Indexing issues:

Webmasters have issues with Live Search indexing sites properly. I asked Jeremiah what he thought people were running into when Live Search wasn’t properly indexing them.

Jeremiah said most indexing issues fall into one of three categories:

1. Problems with design

2. Problems with content

3. Technological issues

According to Jeremiah, "It tends to be technological issues, or the content itself, that’s the problem," when people are having trouble being indexed correctly. "Most people are kind of hip to using better structure in their site," so design isn’t as often the culprit.

Jeremiah cited a mix between design and content as a specific problem. "Most publishing systems and CMSs a lot of people are using were designed 3 or 4 years ago," he said, before the now widespread recognition of the importance of crawlability and SEO in site design. As a result, some of these systems aren’t exactly the most efficient or effective in making a site’s content crawlable.

In terms of being totally optimized, Jeremiah said, "People do what they can, but I don’t think they always do enough or that they are not necessarily doing the right things".

But even under ideal circumstances, Jeremiah admits "you’re not going to get everybody and you’re not going to get everything out of everybody." As proof, Jeremiah offered a poignant example: "MSDN TechNet is a tier 1 site with eight or nine million documents in 42 different languages… I can tell you that it is not 100% indexed."

Their goal is likely common to all search engines… 100% indexability of everything. But that is just not a reality at this stage of search evolution.

Cloaking:

We’re all pretty clear on Google’s position on cloaking by now. It’s a pretty simple and straightforward ‘no’. Never. Under no circumstances. It’s evil, it’s bad, it’s spammy. Don’t do it.

While MSN Live doesn’t exactly endorse cloaking, they do seem to have a slightly softer stance on the issue. Jeremiah and I talked about companies who make heavy use of Flash and other non indexable graphics on their sites.

At one point, we talked about Nike, whose site is made completely out of Flash. Jeremiah was quite up front about it, saying, "They break some of our rules just to get to the point where they can get all of their content indexed. They do a bit of cloaking and things like that."

Google of course, still indexes Nike. I’m pretty sure if MSN knows they cloak, Google can probably figure it out as well. I don’t look for Nike to suffer any Google penalties – much less be thrown out of the index for it though. However, if you aren’t Nike but maybe just a smaller webmaster, I don’t know that you’d be afforded the same considerations from Google. I’d just about bet on it.

On one hand you have Google, who apparently selectively enforces their strict no-cloaking policy depending on who you are. On the other hand, you have MSN saying sure, it goes on and while we don’t encourage it, we aren’t necessarily going to boot you from the index for it. Interesting, no?

Conclusions:

At the end of the day, we didn’t hear too much in our video that we haven’t heard a few times before from every other search engine. Jeremiah told us in terms of SEO, "It’s always the basics. Keep it clean, let’s try to be natural, and as Live Search grows we’re going to try to provide better results for people when we’re able to do that algorithmically."

All pretty standard party line stuff. With the exception of their obvious difference in their stance on cloaking, and paid links, it could have been a Matt Cutts interview in many respects.

It’s not so much what was said, as it was who was saying it. Keep in mind, this is Microsoft. Typically, they don’t say diddly – or didn’t used to, at least.

I think this interview may be emblematic of an interesting movement going on at Microsoft. Traditionally, MS has been perceived as a closed empire – operating secretly behind closed doors, dispensing information strictly on a ‘need to know’ (or as subpoenaed) basis. Recently though, they seem to be trying to reach out a lot more.

Take for example, some of Jeremiah’s quotes: "The thing that Nathan and I are trying to do, and that is to bring more transparency… We want to endear ourselves to you and want you to want to work with us." From Microsoft? Really?

Then on GameSpy I see an email from their Xbox division publicly apologizing for holiday problems with the Xbox Live network. Could this be a kinder, gentler Microsoft emerging in 2008? And more importantly, will it lead to more marketshare for Live Search and more traffic for site owners?

Do you agree with Microsoft? Do you agree with Google? What are your experiences with paid links? Comment here…

On Google Webmaster Central Blog and in the post titled "A Festivus for our webmasterus." Google says "If it’s good enough for the Costanzas, it’s good enough for Webmaster Central: it’s time for a Festivus for the rest of us (webmasterus)!"

The most apt things to remember for starting celebrating Christmas celebration by Googlers seem to be the new developments which have come about as the most popular Webmaster Tools features which the blog considers to be the "Feats of Strength — for 2007."

First is the queue are the webmaster tools which help you to "view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded." and that you can ask Google to remove what you want out of the URL Further the message center allows you to communicate with Google on the issues. And the non-English domain name registrations is helpful for people "outside of the English-speaking world."

While Google wants to get feedback about the tools, however they’ve specified the form as well "Just remember that bots may crawl this blog, but we humans review the comments, so please keep your grievances constructive. " Constructive criticism about their "blog or Help Center, and stuff you’d like to see in the discussion group" could help further the cause.

And how do the Googlers wish the reader on the holidays, "On behalf of the entire Webmaster Central team, here’s to you, Festivus Miracle and Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006 — happy holidays. See you in 2008. "

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