The game of Google search rankings

Search engine optimization (SEO) specialists constantly keep a tab on sites appear where and on which keyword based searches, and can monitor the effects of major changes to Google’s algorithm. According to them, for sites that heavily rely on Google traffic flow, disappearing from the top pages of its relevant search results – usually the point at which most searchers invariably give up – can make a major difference to business survival and financial growth.

As one SEO expert perhaps rightly pointed out, most Google results are nothing but a zero-sum game, in backdrop of other websites that have gained at few other’s expense that have been severely hit by the latest reordering. They fall down dramatically in rankings on a specific set of key terms – and so their online traffic flow derived from popular search results comes down.

Google ‘targets’ low-quality sites

Many site owners are ‘puzzled’ and ‘perplexed’ by Google’s action, hoping that the aftereffects won’t be too drastic since a chunk of their traffic comes from it”. They are not being able to fathom clear reasons why their sites are being ‘targeted’ even though they put up original content. It would have been acceptable if they had copied & pasted text or were an aggregator of content. But many claim that they try to put up the best content and yet have been penalized.

What should be your strategy?

As the search engine giant claims, it’s starting to incorporate data, in some high-confidence scenarios, about the websites users block into its algorithms. The change will dig deeper into the ‘long tail’ of low-quality and low-impact sites to offer better results wherein the algorithm perhaps had earlier failed to make a correct assessment.

As a site owner, your strategy should be to adhering to Google’s quality guidelines that it sticks to for the purpose of finding, indexing, and ranking sites. I recommend that you follow these guidelines and guard against practices that may make Google penalize your site.

Sites that gain and lose from ‘Panda’ update

The Google official blog post mentions of the change first unveiled February:

“We are excited about this new ranking improvement since we believe it is a big step in the right direction of helping people to find ever higher quality in our results. We have been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.”

The algorithmic improvement is designed to help users find more quality websites in their search. Since then Google claims to have received positive response about the updates, as searchers are getting better results, and leading publishers are drawing more traffic. The update incorporates new user feedback signals to help people get enhanced search results.

Many high profiles sites likely to vanish from the Google search

A host of voucher & discount websites have been hit by the enormous changes, and so have sites like Mahalo and Ehow. Among the other most popular sites, which have seemingly been hit are About.com and myvouchercodes.co.uk. Certain sites like Pocket Lint have been penalized for having used redirection technique on affiliate links something that Google tends to view rather negatively. Among the winners are those Web-based platforms where users spend time going through pages, such as Techcrunch, This is Money finance site, Ebay UK etc.

Many such high profiles sites will nearly vanish from the search results after the downgrading. On the other hand, a handful of sites, such as the video site Vimeo and YouTube (incidentally owned by Google), as well as select technology sites like Mashable and Techcrunch are likely to  get a boost.

The update risks inviting the ire of not only Microsoft but also the European Commission, since it demotes Ciao that has complained to the EC that Google was leveraging its monopoly in an unfair way. This has sparked off an EC investigation.

For example, an alert will send you a reminder when the number of visitors happens to rise or fall beyond a certain limit on a particular day. This makes monitoring the site visitors’ behavior pattern easier.

A few quick tips

Most importantly, Google Analytics hardly costs you anything in terms of budget especially when you compare the resources incurred to a wide array of benefits that it offers. Before proceeding ahead, here are a few quick tips to make the most out of Google Analytics.

• Customize dashboard
• Export properly formatted PDF data files
• Put in place an alert setting

What does the tool do for you?

1. The tool essentially tracks all the critical data about the site visitors’ usage pattern over time.
2. It will precisely grasp the way they choose to interact with the various site elements and vice versa.
3. It always helps to seek expert inputs so as to go beyond your dashboard page and dig deep into several details and user-friendly features of the tool. Custom reports are among such handy features that it has on offer.

Custom reports to monitor and study site traffic

Just spend a few minutes mulling over what you really wish to find out in qualitative and quantitative terms as far as user traffic is concerned, Accordingly you can make a custom report. You can see every time you happen to log in. For instance, you may prepare a custom report that will show details, such as new visits, the unique visitors’ number, average time spent on the website as well as pageviews received for specific categories of your site. When you drill down into these details, you can see the keywords that have primarily been used for arriving at a specific webpage from the search engine.

‘Custom Reports’ link can be found on the bottom-left just under ‘My Customizations’. Using it is simple – click on ‘Create new custom report’ available on the top-right corner. Once you put in the dimensions or metric you require, it will do the job for you. It can’t get easier than this, so what are you waiting for?

Well how exactly Mail Goggles saves our drunken a$$

No Google is not going to take your alcohol test, When you enable Mail Goggles in your Gmail it will force you to answer some basic math tests in 60 seconds before the mail goes out.

Okay how to activate Mail Goggles
It’s really simple to activate Mail Goggles login to your gmail account then go into gmail settings then in the “Labs” tab turn on Mail Goggles. You can easily change the time and the difficulty level in “General” tab

If you are drunk you will most likely get the question wrong and when that happens Mail Goggles is

going to say “Water and bed for you. Or try again.” But be careful not to set the level too high because in your school days, if you were grounded for not passing those math’s exams you gonna have a hard time solving this in 60 seconds even if you’re sober.

Only problem which I can think of is if your keyboard has a calculator shortcut button and if you’re smart enough while you are drunk to make use of it to send those emails to your ex girlfriend or to your boss expressing you love then even Gmail cant save you