Press Release Sites See Huge Drop In Google Ranking After Panda 4.0

Yesterday I reported at Search Engine Land that Panda 4.0 may have hurt press release sites and showed SearchMetrics data for PRWeb, PR Newswire, BusinessWire and PRLog all losing between 60% to 85% of their SEO visibility.

This drop seems to have come right after the Google Panda 4.0 update. The controversy around press release sites were mostly about links flowing from those releases, not necessarily the issue with the duplicative nature of that content. But let's be honest, many many press releases issued are content thin and spammy on the content end, not just on the link end. So maybe, just maybe, Panda 4.0 adjusted for it and the big sites felt it?

Sean from SEER also documented the drop via SEM Rush data and screen shots of before and after rankings for some press releases.

Here are SearchMetrics charts:

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Google Tag Manager: A Step-By-Step Guide

The more useful and relevant your site becomes, the worse it may actually perform. This happens because websites are continuously adding tags to enhance their tracking, optimization or other functionality; this ends up crowding pages with third party tags and may slower the website.

For this reason, the Google Tag Manager, a free solution for tag management, is very welcomed, especially by Marketers. In the past, everything was controlled by webmasters, including website tracking, which was highly technical as it required dealing with log files. Then, in 2005, Google made the JavaScript method widely available with Google Analytics, but it still required a technical integration by webmasters as it required adding codes to the website.

With Google Tag Manager, marketers will be able to add, edit or remove marketing and measurement tags without the intervention of webmasters. This will speed the process from the marketing perspective and will free webmasters to work on other important tasks.

Google Tag Manager Structure - Accounts, Containers & Tags

The structure used by Google Tag Manager is very similar to the one used by Google Analytics. In Analytics we have accounts that can contain several Web Properties (usually one per website) which can contain several profiles. Below is the hierarchy used by Google Tag Manager:

Accounts

The top-most level of organization. Typically, only one account is needed per company. Tags for all the company’s websites can be managed from this account by creating new containers. In order to create an account visit google.com/tagmanager and signup for the product.

To create additional accounts, sign in to your existing account, click on "Accounts List" (found on the drop-down on the top-left corner of the page) and click on the "New Account" button shown in the screenshot below.

You will be asked to fill in the account name, whether it will be used for We of Mobile Apps, the container name, the time zone and the domains that will be used. As a best practice, the account name should always be the name of the company while the container name should always be the website using this container.

Containers

A container holds all the tags for a specific website; as mentioned above it should be named after the website it is being used for. To create a new container select an account and click on the "New Container" button on the top-right corner of the page as shown in the screenshot below.

You will need to add the container name, time zone and domain.

Tags

Once you create a container, you can start creating tags for your website. Google provides a few templates for its own tags, but it also allows custom tags to be used. Below are some of the tags supported by the tool, for an explanation about each of them, as well as a complete list, check this help center article:

• AdWords Conversion Tracking
• DoubleClick Floodlight Counter
• DoubleClick Floodlight Sales
• Universal Analytics
• GDN Remarketing
• Custom Image Tags
• Custom HTML Tags
In order to add a tag to a container, navigate to the container, choose the tags section and click on the "New Tag" button on the top-right corner of your screen. See indications in screenshot below:

You will then reach the tag page. In this page you will be able to chose between the different tag types described above. As I wrote above, Google created templates for its own tags in order to minimize the possibility of errors.
Once you decide which tag to add, you will be prompted with a few details to fill for each tag type: e.g. Conversion ID and Conversion Label for AdWords Conversion Tracking or Web Property ID, Cookie Path and Track Type for Google Analytics. You will also be able to click on "Add Rule to Fire Tag" as seen below:

The rule will define the conditions under which the tag is fired. For tags that should appear in all pages of the website (like Google Analytics) a rule can be created to URLs that match a Regular Expression ".*" Another common usage would be to add tags to the conversion page only, so you might want to add a rule for an URL that equals the page address. For more information on rules and macros check this help article.

Publishing & Versions

Once tags are added to a container they are not automatically published, they must be "manually" published. Publishing is always linked to a container version, which is a snapshot of the container that can be made at any time.
If you click on the "Versions" left navigation menu, you can check versions by clicking on the numbers; it will take you to a page summarizing all tags included in this version and the rules applied to them. This is an excellent way to keep the tags organized for troubleshooting tagging problems.


Users & Permissions

Users are added to accounts and, by default, have "No access" to all containers in the account. For each container, there are four types of user access:
1. No access: user does not see the container listed in the account.
2. View only: user sees the container listed and may browse the tags, rules, and macros in the container, but cannot edit them.
3. View and Edit: user may add and edit tags, rules, and macros in the container.
4. View, Edit, Delete and Publish: user may add, edit, and delete tags, rules, and macros in the container as well as publish changes to the live site.
In order to manage user access see the indications in the screenshot below.


Closing Thoughts

In summary, the Google Tag Manager is an important tool for online businesses, it makes marketing and measurement easier and more secure. In the words of Google:

"Google Tag Manager allows you to conveniently manage tags (such as tracking and marketing optimization tags) on your site. You can add and update AdWords, Google Analytics, Floodlight and non-Google tags from the Google Tag Manager user interface instead of editing site code. This reduces errors, frees you from having to involve a webmaster, and allows you to quickly deploy tags on your site."

Read More .. http://goo.gl/mJTZ5C

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Google Algorithm & Ranking Shifts On Fire This Month

Despite Google saying nothing is going on, we've been seeing signs of major changes and reports of major changes in the Google search results and rankings.

Again, over the weekend, I've been getting private emails with tons of public chatter in the WebmasterWorld and even BlackHatWorld forums about Google making a lot of changes over the weekend.

Some are suspecting a massive Penguin update is about to hit, while others think it might be a Panda refresh and others think it is just Google's normal actions on link networks. It is almost impossible to tell without a confirmation from Google, for all we know, it can be all three or more.

Even the tracking tools are all over the place, it seems like it even broke MozCast, SERPS.com shows major activity on Saturday, so does SERP Metrics and Algoroo.



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Google's Matt Cutts: Anticipate The Query To Better Control Titles In Google

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why and when Google may use something other than your title tag for the search results title snippet.

Matt Cutts suggested that it is best for your to try to anticipate what the user will search for when crafting your title tags. When you do that and then when it matches the query, then Google will likely show your title tag.

Google uses three criteria when determining if they should use your title tag:

(1) Something that is "relatively" short
(2) Have a good description of the page and "ideally": the site that the page is on.
(3) And that it is relevant to the query.

If you fail on these criteria, then Google may use (1) content on your page, (2) anchor text links pointing to the page and/or (3) may also use the Open Directory Project.

Here is the video:

Read More:http://goo.gl/TJP8Of

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Google Preparing Large Update? Shifts On May 2nd & 7th

I mentioned there was some chatter about a Google update on May 2nd but now we are seeing even more chatter and signs of flux in the Google search results on May 7th.

These signs of shifts in rankings, spikes in crawl rates, often, but not always, are early warning signs of a major Google update happening in the near future.

Here are flux/volatility charts from MozCast, SERPS.com, SearchMetrics and Algoroo:

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Google Shows Ratings Snippet 8 Out Of 11?

Dan Barker spotted a fun rich snippet in Google where the ratings displayed for an IMDB movie result was 8 out of 11. Out of 11, not 10, 11. Dan posted this on Twitter and said "The only title on IMDB where the review is out of 11."

Here is a screen shot:

If you actually look at the markup it indeed says the bestrating property is 11, so technically this is what they are passing to Google.

Other movies do not do this, such as Frozen:

 Read More:http://goo.gl/7pE8ls

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Why is so much Panic around after Penguin 2.0 Update?

Google Penguin 2.0 update officially rolled out on May 22nd, 2013, already there is been a rumor on this update from past few weeks earlier, everyone (everyone?) is really excited and some (lot of) are really scared. At last, Google hit the panic button and boom, a huge algorithm update has been rolled out, which impacted around 2.3% of English-US search queries (that’s huge!), let’s put how many have benefited a side and talk about how many have been hit and suffered. The answer is, literally a lot (oh common, stop blaming Google now), if you see any SEO blog or any other top SEO related websites, everyone seems panic. Lot of people are saying that SEO is dead, look for social opportunities, it won’t work anymore etc etc.. button it.

This post will help everybody who are literally scared or affected by the new penguin 2.0 update, I want to explain few of your doubts here about the penguin 2.0. Let’s do this..

Is SEO Dead?:

No, never. SEO is not dead but becomes a little harder for spammers, now you will say that you are a genuine guy and you wrote quality content, you have quality backlinks but still you get affected, why?. This means your quality content is really not quality enough to beat the other competitors, why don’t you visit the pages of those competitors and check why they are better than you, what quality links and content they have which you don’t. Most of the advertisers and webmasters don’t do that, instead they blame Google, yell in the forums and send wrong signals such as SEO is dead blah blah blah. Stop this nonsense, seriously!

SEO is not dead and never will be in the future, one should understand that SEO is an art of designing the web better and delivering the people what they want.

Is Google Penguin Update Good or Bad?

Definitely it is a great improvement over all the previous updates, it has a significant impact on the search results, lot of websites have suffered the wrath of the penguin 2.0. Also there is a massive said on the internet that this update has only improved the traffic for big and established websites and only victims are small websites. Now the question is how much it is true??

I am not saying that it is 100% good, but I can say that it does the thing actually it intends to do. Taking down the spammers and ranking only genuine guys, this job is perfectly done by both Penguin and Panda updates.

How do we get our Rankings back?

Every webmaster who suffered the penalties will get one chance, but remember that don’t panic until you get a manual take down notice. If you got it already, then it is time to act fast and fix those mistakes, in a recent conference Google’s web spam team Head, Matt Cutts said that repeat offenders will be punished seriously. That mean no further chances, one mistake and one correction.

If you don’t receive any manual actions, that means you are affected by the algorithm updates. In this case to regain your rankings you need do a little struggle and it is a time consuming process to get your rankings back.

Tips to get Rankings back!

1. Clean your internal website mess, this may help Panda affected users. Clean unnecessary links and old pages from your website.
2. You don’t know how to do link building then learn it from your competitors, you may ask why they will teach you? they won’t but their website do. You can check their link profiles using some tools like Opensite Explorer.
3. Try to capture authority links, make sure each link is absolutely relevant to your website or niche.
4. Definitely an increasing importance of Google plus and other social signals indicates that you can recover from this type of effects with some good social signals and popularity.
5. As everyone is shouting about content, this should be your first priority of all. Write a wonderful content in your pages, having one great content page doesn’t help. Try make each page a great source for information.
6. Authority forums are always your friends, participate healthy in forums and discussions and let the visitors know about your brand wherever it is possible.

Hope you enjoyed the article, please don’t forget to share it and leave your comments, questions and suggestions in the below section.

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Free Directory List with Highest Page Rank

Sno.	Directory Url	Page Rank
4	http://www.alistsites.com/	0
2	http://www.bestfreewebsites.net/	2
1	http://worldweb-directory.com/	3
22	http://viesearch.com/	4
23	http://www.prolinkdirectory.com/	4
24	http://www.tsection.com/	4
25	http://www.gainweb.org/	4
26	http://pegasusdirectory.com/	4
27	http://www.synergy-directory.com/	4
28	http://www.onlinesociety.org/	4
29	http://247webdirectory.com/	4
30	http://www.w3catalog.com/	4
31	http://free-url-submit.com/	4
32	http://www.1abc.org/	4
33	http://www.ananar.com/	4
34	http://rdirectory.net/	4
35	http://www.1websdirectory.com/	4
36	http://picktu.com/	4
37	http://www.9sites.net/	4
38	http://www.livepopular.com/	4
39	http://www.businessseek.biz/	4
40	http://www.directory-free.com/	4
14	http://www.somuch.com/	5
15	http://www.a1webdirectory.org/	5
16	http://www.amfibi.com/	5
17	http://obln.org/	5
18	http://mastermoz.com/	5
19	http://www.ellysdirectory.com/	5
20	http://www.linkspurt.com/	5
21	http://vision-iq.com/	5
3	http://www.scrubtheweb.com/	6
8	http://www.submissionwebdirectory.com/	6
9	http://www.marketinginternetdirectory.com/	6
10	http://www.siteswebdirectory.com/	6
11	http://www.usalistingdirectory.com/	6
12	http://www.gmawebdirectory.com/	6
13	http://www.ukinternetdirectory.net/	6
5	http://www.sitepromotiondirectory.com/	7
6	http://highrankdirectory.com/	7
7	http://www.abc-directory.com/	7

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Google’s Matt Cutts: Over Time Backlinks Will Become Less Important

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a video that backlinks, over time, will become a little less important. Matt did say that backlinks in the Google ranking algorithm still have many years left in them.

Matt explained that Google is focusing a lot now on working on ways to determine if a web page is meets the expectations of an expert user. They do this currently by looking at the links to the page, the reputation of the site and pages and the quality of the content on that particular page.

When Google is better at understanding actual language, natural language, which you see with their conversational search efforts. Google will be better to understand expert user’s queries and match them better to a better answer.

Read More: http://goo.gl/YeQtIa

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Google's Site Removal For HTTPS Will Remove HTTP Version Also

Might be obvious for most of you but not all know that if you use the site removal tool to remove your HTTPS site within Google Webmaster Tools, it will also remove the HTTP version.

Google's John Mueller warned about using it that way in a Google Webmaster Help thread.

John wrote in the thread:

No -- please don't request site removal of the HTTPS version. That would remove your whole website (both HTTP and HTTPS). That's almost certainly not what you want to do. If you don't have a proper HTTPS version, then the best thing to do would be not to serve anything on HTTPS. If none of your users ever go to the HTTPS version, then that's not critical (but those who might get there accidentally would see a scary warning in their browser).

Read more: http://goo.gl/D9naSq

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Keyword Rich Domain Names Next To Be Hit By Google

It should come to no surprise of readers of this site that Google and Matt Cutts next target will be domain names ranking too well on the merit of the keywords being in the domain name.

We covered several times already on how well keyword match domain names rank in the Google search results. We also documented that Google's Matt Cutts said he would look at keyword match domains while giving a presentation at PubCon.

In any event, new news. Google's Matt Cutts posted a video recently saying they are going to look at this stuff, again. Here is the video:

Read More:http://goo.gl/i2knZM

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