new-google-quality-rating-guidelines

Below is a link to a very interesting new set of guidelines for quality from Google.
It confirms what Google has been working on for the last year.

Google is now putting a high emphasis on sites that are considered to have a high level of expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness. This is something that Google has been working on in their algorithms for some time, and shouldn’t be much of a surprise for webmasters to see this.
Lacking in E-A-T
Google’s brand new emphasis in the new Quality Rater’s Handbook is the idea of E-A-T, which is a website’s “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness”.
Too Many Ads = Low Quality to Google Raters.
In the past the raters only looked for spammy or deceptive advertising.
Today you want little or no advertising, especially on your home page.

online-password-manager-increases-SEO-productivity

Using a good simple online password manager will help your productivity and this also applies to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and marketing in general.

Everyone I talk with has 10, 20, 50+ different logins and passwords.  E.g. Websites, GoDaddy, Gmail, Banks, Google Adwords, PayPal, Bill Payments, Fidelity, SEO tools, etc.

Nowadays you should have a complex password that is different for each account you login to.

Password managers store all your passwords in an encrypted database that only you can access to prevent them from being stolen. For even greater identity protection, OnlinePasswordManager stores your passwords in a secure password vault in the cloud. Even if your computer is hacked or you accidentally download malware, scammers will not be able to get to your passwords because they are not on your computer.

How does one manage this and check their logins and passwords from from any device from anywhere in the world?

The answer is:

www.OnlinePasswordManager.org 

Please remember it is a .org not a .com

SEO-Process-Overview

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process is an ongoing continuing process that we perform every day for our clients. It is possible to become very successful with top natural/organic SEO rankings, as most (68% to 90%) searchers skip the paid ads. This large range is highly keyword dependent, e.g. if someone is searching for "buy refrigerator" vs. "what is George Washington's birthday". People searching to buy a new refrigerator have a higher probability of clicking on a paid Google Ad, then someone searching for George Washington's birthday.
The other major benefit of natural or organic #1 rankings is you do not have to pay per click.  Google Adwords can run as high as $182+ per click for highly competitive keyword phrases.
It is very important to stay with SEO methodologies long term in order to achieve the desired results.  If you stop this process your web traffic and rankings will drop, and it may be difficult to recover previous top rankings.
You can not turn natural SEO on and off like you can for Google Adwords.
Also website owners that jump around from SEO Company to SEO Company are in danger of being penalized by Google.
Google is very complex and secret so no one can claim to be 100% accurate as to why Google makes the decisions it does.  However we do know that Google has many different types of penalties some of which are manual and some of which are automated via advanced software algorithms.
The quality of your backlinks and the longer your backlinks are aged, make up major factors in the Google software ranking algorithms.  Please remember if you lose important authoritative backlinks, then you must start the aging process over from the starting line.  Besides losing PageRank, this also brings suspicion from Google, and you do not want that to happen.  Google detects all these changes looking for unnatural suspicious activities.

I have been doing some new testing on Google.  The changes made to a web page are indexed and applied to Google search results days in advance of what Google shows when you use the "show Google cache command".  So the freshest indexed data is first applied to Google search results, then days later Google updates what they show as cached.  This makes sense as it is more important to Google to use the freshly indexed data then to report and update the data Google has stored about a web page.  For example the newest article I have written in this blog is showing up in the Google search results five days ago.  However when I look at the Google cache for this blog, it still does not show that Google even knows about the newest article.

80% of Web Site Owners are Wrong about SEO and Link Building

We receive thousands of phone calls and emails every year, about SEO and Link Building. Eighty percent or more of the people contacting us have terribly wrong ideas about what works and what is important for outstanding results in the major search engines. Below are details, samples, and history of people contacting us with their requirements. Hopefully, you will find useful SEO information that will help your company grow and increase your profits.

Many people phone our company saying, " I need low cost SEO, low quality backlinks, and tons of cheap links. "

I respond, "Why?".... They say, "I want to out rank my competitors."
They think it is a pure numbers game. All links are equal and you get more and you win.

They want fast outstanding results, they want to be #1 for competitive keyword phrases in 1-5 months.

I reply,  "You do not understand how search engine optimization works, you need to look at this as a long term investment that you will be making as long as you are in business.  Good ranking results take at least 6-12 months to achieve.  Highly competitive keywords may take several years of SEO work and high quality merit based link building.  Then you have to maintain all this work forever or you will lose the top rankings you worked so hard to achieve.  Please remember your competitors are also working hard on their SEO and want to outrank you."

More on Link Building
Someone with fewer backlinks , e.g. Site A has 300 high quality natural embedded text links from topic related authority sites can out rank Site B with 20,000 low quality text links. Google now gives thousands of web site owners penalties for these low quality backlinks.
Unfortunately Google also has penalized many websites unfairly. 
Your competitors can have your web site sabotaged via black hat SEO experts.

This includes all the webmasters that do article submission SPAM (duplicate content SPAM), excessive and only low quality link exchanges, these do not work because Google considers that all junk and SPAM. E.g. A PR0 site exchanging links with other PR0 sites, to Google this is just junk to junk SPAMMY stupid SEO methods.
Please watch this video by Matt Cutts of Google:

list-of-directory-submission-sites-that-google-likes

By Tom Forrest
List of Directory Submission Sites.
List of directories that Google likes and that follow Google Guidelines.

Over the last few years Google has cracked down on web directories that violate Google guidelines.  You should not place your website on any free and low quality directories, you need fewer directory listings with better quality in order to be successful with Google and Bing.

So I decided I should give people a list of Internet directories that Google thinks are valid and that if you obtained a listing from these directories it would help you with direct traffic generation and also as a "good" backlink as far as Google is concerned.

1.     http://www.Clasione.com
2.     http://www.AllBusinessNow.com
3.     http://vlib.org
4.     http://www.picknbuy.com
5.     http://www.ipl.org
6.     http://www.seekon.info
7.     http://www.JoeAnt.com
8.     http://www.dmoz.org
9.     http://botw.org
10.   http://dir.yahoo.com
11.   http://MedicalHealthSites.com
12.   http://www.HealthFitnessNutrition.org
13.   http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus
14.  http://www.SearchPure.org

Comments from Matt Cutts of Google on what to consider when submitting to a Directory.

When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls?
If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory?
Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee?
For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url.
Matt Cutts, Google

bing-search-results-better-than-google-market-share

Update:  Eight months after I first wrote this article Bing search results are still better than Google search results.  Everything I state below is still correct.

Today in my opinion the quality of Bing's search results are better overall than Google search results.  In the past I never used Bing and now I am using it more often than Google.
The big change came in May of 2013 when Google started using its newest algorithms with very poor results.  Known top quality web sites were pushed down and lame, crappy and unreliable sites were put at the top of Google search results.  There are many cases where "landing pages" with the exact keyword match in the domain name and literally zero content are ranked #1 for some fairly important keyword phrases.  This is especially upsetting to webmasters as Google makes videos telling webmasters to focus on content and that website owners should not worry about search engine optimization.

Even after many people have complained Google has not fixed the quality of their search results yet.  Furthermore Google continues to treat webmasters poorly.
What do I mean?

1. Google continues to unfairly penalize good web sites; I have given proof and written several articles about this serious problem.  Google's staff can not even implement Google's own guidelines and rules properly.

2. Google continues to deny that any negative SEO even happens and that SEO sabotage is not possible, when I have personally seen many cases of this and there are many companies marketing these negative SEO services.
So no matter what bullshit claims and excuses Google comes up with, the bottom line is they have made several wrong strategic decisions and implemented a set of defective new algorithms, which have harmed their search results.

3.  Google has decided to squeeze all the money out of web Publishers that run Google Ads on their websites.  I talk with many hundreds of successful Internet publishers and I hear story after story of people that used to earn $11,000 per month from Google Adsense and now they earn $2,000 per month.  You ask how this is possible.
Well Google makes you sign an agreement that they will pay you by a secret formula, which Google will not reveal.  Yes as crazy as it sounds many people agree to this and whenever Google decides they can take as much money as they like and the Publisher is left with crumbs.

So why is Google not losing market share to Bing yet?

I think they will over time unless Google straightens out and starts treating Internet publishers better and quickly improves their current poor search results.

Currently Google still has 67% of search market share, and Bing has 29%, this includes Yahoo, since Bing provides all search results to Yahoo.
This is a good question to ask people to find out what level of knowledge they have about the search engine industry.
If a person does not know Bing provides all search results to Yahoo, then you know you are talking with someone that is ignorant of the search engine industry.

Frankly I wish better search engine companies would spring up and start giving Google even more competition.  I do not think Google is going to take any steps to fix the problems I mention above unless they start losing some market share.

In some ways it is sad to me, as I used to be very loyal to Google and now that Google treats me and all of its other clients/customers so poorly I am promoting and asking people to try Bing and other search engines.  I think the big problem for Google is many people are starting to see this in similar ways I am seeing it.
I think the part that bothers me the most is all the unfair penalties Google gives to web site owners.

* After I wrote this article I did a search on Google for "tom forrest htpcompany" and compared it to Bing's results.
Guess what Bing won, however how can Google screw up a basic targeted specific search like "tom forrest htpcompany"?
Google has had this example search correct for over eight years and now based on their new defect algorithms Google cannot even get this simple search right.