by Prakash Rangarajan on July 17, 2011
In March this year, the Farmer / Panda update hit headlines and in April, a second version of Panda hit the web sphere. May saw Panda 2.1 and finally by the end of June, Panda 2.2 update sought to add more teeth to Google’s quest to clean up the search results. All through these tumultuous months in search, Google Dance was the norm for quite a few sites affected by the update. If in 2010, the buzz words were new web indexing system (Caffeine) and long tail queries ( Mayday), this year with Panda on the prowl, the clarion call is all about quality, social assent, solid credibility and user experience.
[Read On…]
by Prakash Rangarajan on March 3, 2011
The recent Google Algorithmic update (starting with the US index), a week back, popularly known as “The Farmer Google Update” promises to do away with low quality sites, content scrapers, content aggregators that don’t add value to a healthy web ecosystem. This would also mean sites with original content buffeted by unique prespectives, deep analysis and useful takeaways will always achieve higher rankings in the long run, providing a better Google search experience for the end user.
[Read On…]
by Prakash Rangarajan on November 2, 2010
Finally, the wait is over. Google, Bing, it is time to welcome the new challenger Blekko which promises to add a new “spin” to the search engine stakes. Launched on Oct 31st after being in some time in beta testing, Though not positioned as a Google Killer , Blekko might still have enough surprises up its sleeve to be the next best alternative to the biggies.
[Read On…]
by Prakash Rangarajan on January 22, 2010
SeoMoz has released an awesome tool for link analysis, OpenSite Explorer a couple of days back that has taken the SEO world by storm. Taking advantage of an free offer for registered members for the first 48 hrs I had a productive time checking out what promises to be the best link analysis tool available (Y! Site Explorer lags behind in comparision)
[Read On…]
by Prakash Rangarajan on December 11, 2009
XML Sitemaps are URL lists that gives a leg up to search engine spiders to easily find available URL’s to crawl and update their index with the latest website information. XML sitemaps serve as fodder for the search engines unlike the usual HTML sitemap which is meant as a navigation tool for human users.
In simple terms, XML sitemaps give Search Engine spiders an authoritive list of URL for indexing with additional meta data like the last modified date, frequency of change (updates) and page priority (hierarchy of importance vis a vis other pages).
[Read On…]
by Prakash Rangarajan on November 1, 2009
Is your site suffering from keyword cannibalization? It does happen sometimes when the same keyword or keyphrase is targeted on multiple pages of the website, that can possibly have a negative effect on your rankings. What happens is that the search engines are served multifold choices for the patricular keywords and hence is forced to pick and choose whichever it feels is the best fit. This is a classic case of limiting to a great degree the search potential of your website. It is poor form really, putting all eggs in one basket and not being able to levearge the long tail of search.
[Read On…]
by Prakash Rangarajan on September 9, 2009
Before we get into the www or no www choice for your website domain url’s, it makes sense to have some clarity on Canonical URL’s. In simple terms, canonical means “standard” or “authoritative”, so the canonical URL is the one you would want the search engines and users to see. Technically www.website.com and website.com would mean different things to the search engines. This might create the possibility of self created duplicate content in the SE index as also the added factor of split in link popularity.
[Read On…]
