Google AdWords swap “Delete” With “Remove”

Google Ads on Google+ announced yesterday a small change to the language within its user interface (UI) that could have a big bang on how people view "old" campaigns. In about two weeks, AdWords will swap most instances of the word "delete" with the word "remove" in its UI. 

That means, advertisers will remove campaigns, not delete them. And even though the change may seem trivial at surface value, AdWords says it will help advertisers "better understand that removed objects are still available for future reference. For example, you can report on a removed campaign's historical act."

A Google spokesperson said this transform is just the terminology, and "anything you could do before the change, you can continue to do."

Heads up that downloaded reports will also have the "status" column values updated to show detached instead of deleted. 

"If you use spreadsheet macros or other scripting languages on these downloaded reports, we recommend you update them by July 21st, 2014 to to reflect this change," Google said in its announcement.

you might also like: Google AdWords Conversion Types

Tips to make Traffic Without Google

 There are several top blogs in your niche  that get hundreds if not thousands of visitors on a daily basis. The right way to do blog commenting is to cautiously read the post and if you have something helpful or meaningful to add to the conversation, then leave a comment.

The idea of commenting isn't to drop a link, but to add value to the conversation and to raise your network. Use your real name as the commenter and a proportion of readers will click through to learn more about you.

Pro Tip: If you have content on your site related to the post, use that URL as a link somewhat than the home page. Those who do click during will then have an even better user knowledge.

2. Content Aggregators

Just make great content and Google will incentive you with traffic, right? Maybe, if you have an familiar website with lots of trust and authority. Not so much, if you have a new blog or website. The workaround for this is getting your content listed on popular content aggregators, where lots of people will see it

Some trendy aggregators include:

•    Alltop bills itself as the "online magazine rack" of the Web.

•    BizSugar.com is a community of small business owners and entrepreneurs.

•    Growth Hackers is a community sharing online marketing techniques.

•    Hacker News is a social news website that caters to programmers and entrepreneurs.

•    Inbound.org is a community sharing and discussing content and online marketing ideas.

3. Forum Commenting

 As you are reading this, there are probably dozens of conversations happening around the Web that are connected to your niche. Joining or starting a forum conversation can result in immediate traffic.

As with blog commenting, this isn't about dropping a link, but rather about engaging a conversation and adding value to that conversation. Forum commenting reminds me of the show American Pickers, where they discuss finding the honey hole. When we find a forum where the client really "clicks" with the community, it can drive thousands of visits over time.

4. Google+

Forget the assumption that Google+ is going away – it isn't. If you need help getting started with Google+, please check out my Google+ Quick Start Guide. Google+ can drive loads of traffic, and you don't even need followers.

The strength of Google+ lies with communities. As with forums, the participants are normally hardcore fans of a given activity. We like to think of these folks as highly targeted prospects. Google makes it easy to find niche communities.

5. Guest Blogging

Matt Cutts' manifesto, "The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO," has been widely misunderstood as meaning that guest blogging is dead. It isn't. What Cutts said was this: "If you're using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop."

Guest blogging done properly has nothing to do with links – it's all about leveraging traffic.

Pro Tip: Read "Power Guest Posting for SEO" by Eric Enge and follow his instructions on the suitable way to guest post heading forward.

6. Q&A

Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers present another great opportunity to generate highly targeted traffic. If you can offer a genuine solution to a real problem, you may have a customer for life. At the very least, you'll build up good karma.

7. Reddit

If you can find a relevant niche or subreddit with a decent number of subscribers (thousands) and traffic, then Reddit is an option worth exploring. The key is to create useful content applicable to the subreddit. A percentage of Reddit users will read your content, click through to your site, and buy your product or service, if it is a good fit.

8. Social Media

Bet you saw this one coming. For most people, Facebook offers the best opportunity for traffic. The formula for success is pretty simple: Optimize your Facebook profile and link back to your website. Provide helpful and fun content on a regular basis. Make it easy to share your website content on Facebook by using a share button.

Pro Tip: Depending on the niche, Twitter, Vine, and Instagram have all proven to be successful in driving significant traffic. If you have the resources, test these out as well.

9. YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Web, giving out more than 3 billion searches a month. To put this in perspective, it's bigger than Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL combined and should not be ignored.

In my experience, the best performing videos for many e-commerce websites are how-tos and tutorials. Niche videos can drive tons of traffic.

10. Email

The number one message delivered by top affiliate marketers is "the money is in the list." In reality, every business can profit from a mailing list. With robust and easy-to-use email services like mailchimp to manage lists and campaigns, there's no excuse for missing out on this opportunity.

A Word of Caution

Most, if not all, of these opportunities have been impure to some extent by spammers over the years. I'm not suggesting that you act like a spammer. The point of this post is there are legal ways to use these channels to deliver valuable information and drive targeted traffic to your website.

You might also like: SEO changes 2014

The major slip that PPC Advertisers Make

The biggest in PPC is one that’s not easy to fix, but it’s completely necessary for success in PPC: neglecting to focus on conversions.

No Conversion Tracking at All.

The lack of any type of analytics or conversion tracking is appallingly common. I see this most regularly among traditional advertisers who are familiar to offline methods of advertising. Even if they have a Web presence, most of their traffic comes from offline channels that can’t be effortlessly tracked to their source. As a result, these advertisers do not have a good tracking system in place. Yet, many of these advertisers understand they are behind the times, so they are worried to try PPC.

Tracking Code Installation Errors.

While the analytics vendors make it sound easy to install conversion tracking, it’s really a technical and often challenging process. I’ve had more than one experience with an unwitting advertiser who placed the Google or Bing conversion tracking pixel on every page of their website. While it’s fun to see a 300 percent conversion rate, it’s not very significant.

Make sure to follow code installation instructions very carefully. And if you’re the agency providing the code, give clear directions on where it should be placed.

URL Tagging Errors.

This one is typically the fault of the PPC manager. We’ve all done it – and hopefully, we’ve all caught the mistakes before they became too costly. Tagging errors can be a minor nuisance or an luxurious error. The best-case scenario is that visitors will reach the correct landing page, but their visit won’t track properly. The worst case is that the tagging error causes the whole URL to break, sending the visitor  to a 404 error page.

Always check and validate your tagged URLs before launching a new movement. It only takes a few minutes, and it’s worth the effort.

If you’re using Google Analytics, and your AdWords account and Analytics accounts are linked, you won’t have to worry about tagging your AdWords URLs. Also, Bing newly launched a long-awaited auto-tagging feature. Bing Ads auto-tagging will mechanically append tracking tags to your PPC campaigns. It’s a much-anticipated feature – be sure to take advantage of it. 

Not Going Deep Enough.

If you’re using auto-tagging, you should be able to get all the detailed data you need to properly optimize your campaigns. But some third-party analytics programs want manual URL tagging.

Resist the excitement to simplify the tagging process by only tracking at the engine or campaign level. You must tag down to the keyword level at a minimum to effectively optimize your PPC campaigns.

If you find that you’re running into challenges with getting the data you need, don’t desolation. Both Google and Bing offer free conversion tracking scripts that will not only track campaign data, but display it right in the interfaces. Most social PPC engines also offer a conversion tracking script. It’s a good idea to install these scripts anyway, if probable, as they offer a redundancy to your other tracking package, enabling you to spot issues with code or other discrepancies rapidly.

Not Setting Goals.

Believe it or not, many advertisers embark on a PPC campaign without setting goals first. If you haven’t decided on metrics that define achievement, it will be impossible to focus on conversions. Take the time to define the actions on your website that indicate a conversion has taken place. For e-commerce, it’s typically sales. For lead generation, you’ll want to track lead form fills. For any type of website, there might be other actions that show a hand-raiser: spec sheet downloads, "contact us" form fills, video views, etc.

Even if you are using PPC for awareness, you should be tracking actions that point out visitor interest. Whitepaper downloads, views of a key page, or even time on site are metrics that can be used to indicate "conversions" in an awareness campaign.

you might also like: Google AdWords Conversion Types

Significant Features From Google Webmaster Tools

Website owners and developers all over the world previously use Google Webmaster tools to analyze, monitor, and optimize their site. And those who aren’t using this free feature to their advantage should start instantly. The awareness you get from monitoring keywords, links, alerts, and manual actions is priceless.

1. The Best Not-Provided choice for Keyword Data

Since the dreaded message plagued analytics reports, it is not possible to figure out which keywords are the most creative. Even though it’s not quite the same as before, you can still access some of the keyword transfer data you lost.

To start, Google provides insights into impressions and clicks, and allows you to see how visitors are getting your site. You also have data regarding the click-through-rate, so you’ll know what percent of people determined to click on your site’s link, and finally the average place of your site in the search results.

Monitoring the keywords over time may give you a clue on what works for your site and what is the direction you should take concerning the keywords you need to rank on.

The information provided in the Search Queries tab in combination with the Google Analytics data will give you more relevant information about your ranking keywords. Keep in mind, the data provided by Webmaster Tools isn’t 100% complete, and they display only a small piece of keywords for sites with lots of ranking keywords.

 2. Monitor Your Site’s Link Profile

I can’t stress the significance of the “Links to your Site” feature from Google Webmaster Tools enough. You can see exactly what websites link to you. For sites with more than 100,000 links, Google may not list the entire the backlinks.

You also have the choice to download the URL lists in a CSV or a Google Docs file and use it in a variety of back link analysis processes.

3. Get E-mail Notifications About Your Sites Penalties

GWT directly alerts you the instant you’ve been penalized by Google or if there are any other problems with your site. This is one of the bread-and-butter basics since this is the only place where you will notice if there have been physical actions taken against your site, if you’ve been the aim of a malicious hacker, or if there are robots.txt or crawling issues.

You do have the option to set GWT to send you email notifications so you’ll be notified quickly, even if you plan to do other stuff besides monitoring the site on the tool.

4. pick up Your Site Using The Disavow Tool

It’s not all fun and games with GWT and sometimes, from one reason or another, you might be struck with the punishing hammer by the omnipotent entity called Google.

If your site is raising a lot of red flags to Google, it’s going to be reviewed by a human and it will be penalized until the guideline violations are resolved.

But, don’t let that rain on your parade –  it’s not the end of the world. Since Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t proffer specific information regarding the links that were focused upon when the manual actions were taken, you can browse through the links and see which one are abnormal

5. Recognize Broken Pages on Your Site

As a marketing rule, if you try to get visitors to your store but you don’t have the product on the shelf, they are going to go away and head to your competitor. It’s the same when it comes to sites. When people can’t contact your site or certain pages from your site, they’ll go back to the search results page and click on another link. It renders all your SEO efforts useless and nobody wants that.

Looking at the Crawl Errors feature from Webmaster Tools from time to time can save you from disappointing many visitors.

You’ll have data about URL/site related errors that were recognized when GoogleBot was crawling your website so you can fix the problems and pick up the user knowledge.

Conclusion

This article was destined to offer you a solid idea of how useful Webmaster Tools can be. Building a healthy website that continues to grow and performs well in search results isn’t simple. It requires paying notice to many different things, but these tool make it significant easier.

you might also like: Google Webmaster Tools To attach JavaScript Debugging Tool

Why a Site punch by Google Penguin Won't pick up

When Google launched the Penguin algorithm April 24, 2012, a lot of sites who had relied strongly on low-quality link building were severely affected. I frequently hear stories from business owners who were hit hard over two years ago and haven't been able to pick up.

In many cases the stories are terrible ones of small business owners who hired an SEO firm or consultant to help them get better their rankings, not knowing that the work that was being done was going against Google's excellence guidelines. And now, many of these small businesses are having to cut staff and losing a lot of money because they can't find a way to get well their Google presence.

Reason 1: You Haven't Done a methodical Enough Link Cleanup

If you were adversely precious by Penguin, it's because you have unnatural links pointing to your site. We know that there can be factors other than links that can contribute to a Penguin hit, but bad links are by far the most significant cause.

In this Webmaster Central Hangout with Google's John Mueller, when asked whether disavowing was equivalent to removing links in the eyes of Penguin, he responded:

"From a theoretical point of view, using the disavow tool is enough...from a practical point of view it 

In most cases, if you paid for the link or made the link yourself, it's unnatural and it needs to go! There can be some exceptions such as locally relevant directories. But, the vast majority of the time, a self-made link is an unnatural link.

Reason 2: shocking Disavowing    

In almost every case, if you're going to disavow a link, disavow it on the domain level.

It used to be that you could run into problems by uploading the wrong type of file for your disavow that it wouldn't work but now you will get an error message if you upload an shocking file type. For example, if you tried to upload a .csv instead of a .txt file you'll get something like this:

Pay close concentration to errors that display once you have uploaded your file such as the one below: This type of thing can happen when you try to convert a non-UTF8 file to UTF8. The access would be accepted by the disavow file, but most likely Google wouldn't disavow example.com properly.Here is more information on some important things you should know about the disavow tool.

Reason 3: You Need to Wait for a Penguin restore

This seems to be a hard concept for many people to grasp. You won't see the profit of your hard work until a Penguin refresh happens.

As the last refresh was October 4 , there are many people who are waiting anxiously for this to happen. I can't tell you how often I get an email from someone who wants to give up on their Penguin hit site because they have done everything they can think of doing and have not seen recovery. Again, recovery isn't going to happen until Google refreshes the algorithm and decides whether your link profile is once again trustworthy.

And here is some hard news to swallow: Some sites will need to see two Penguin refreshes before recovery happens. The reason for this is that in some cases, it can take up to six months for your disavow file to be completely processed.

Reason 4: Your Site Doesn't Have Enough Good Links to Rank Well

In many cases the only reason why a site was ranking well in the past was because of the power of links that Google is now able to recognize as unnatural. If this is the case, then removing and disavowing all of your bad links is not going to be enough to see you make a dramatic recovery.

Google is working harder and harder to get to the point where the only links that count toward a site are ones that truly are earned votes for that site.

Reason 5: Other Factors Are Holding Your Site Back

Penguin may not be the only thing that is holding your site back from ranking well. I've seen numerous sites that were dealing with both Penguin and Panda problems.

Panda is a filter of trust similar to Penguin, but deals primarily with on-page quality rather than links. If the Panda algorithm is affecting your site then you're going to have to deal with your on-page issues in order to recover. Here's more information on the Panda algorithm.

Conclusions

It is possible to recover from Penguin, but it isn't easy. You need to do an extremely thorough cleanup of your links, your disavow file needs to be fully processed, you need to wait for Penguin to refresh, and you need to have a site that is worthy of ranking well even without the power of unnatural links.

Here's an example of a site that saw not only a complete recovery with Penguin, but once Google started trusting their links again they were able to see the benefit of the new good links that they had obtained while they were under Penguin's thumb.

You might also like: Tips to Recover From Penguin

Significance of Thin Content

What is Thin Content?
Google helps us to know how our sites should behave via their Webmaster Guidelines. While this is a regurgitation of common sense for those who know how not to be an uber-spammer it doesn't help us to get a handle on what thin content truly is.

How to Assess Thinness

 
Thin content in many cases is not as clear as understanding that you do not scrape copy from other sites or exist to collective content. You need to take a detailed look at the mission of your content, what purpose it serves, and how your visitors digest and connect with your content.
Common SEO tactics of the early 2000s are no longer relevant; there is no need to build content solely for keyword rankings instead of providing added value to users.

Screaming Frog

 
Run a URL scrape of the site and export this list to sort URLs by word count. Also sort URLs by folder. Are you seeing that half of your blog content features posts that are 250 words? This is thin content.

Google Analytics

 
Review All Pages section and sort by exit rate. For those pages you see that aren't particularly expected to usher an exit, what you had expected to have a better user acceptance, are you seeing 75 percent or higher bounce rates? This is thin content.

This data is telling us that users aren't getting what you might expect out of page. Granted, you may have scientific issues, too many external links opening in the same window, or other SEO mistakes occurring, but at least you'll understand where to adjust your focus.

Open Site Explorer

Review the backlinks for your domain. Step into the Top Pages tab to gain an accepting for what content on your site is receiving links. You may find that what links you do possess are to the homepage and high level pages and that there are pages or site sections with no real link authority.

When you export this list also take note of page level associated tweets, Facebook shares and likes, and Google+ +1's. Again, this may collect information on what content of your site lacks authority from a social or buzz perspective. Google is looking at these factors as well to gauge the latent for thinness.

Do Bots Value Your Content?

 
We have a beautiful good feel for what thin content may exist on our site, but let's take Google's lead on what but be thin in their eyes.

Take a trip back into Google Analytics or make your way to Google Webmaster Tools. We will want to take a look at the last three months of Landing Page idea data. Export this and sort by folder. Are there folders of your site that you are noticing which hold little impression value?
We're going to do another task with much the same intention.

Where to Put Your interest?

The development above identified thin content and inversely it also showed us what isn't thin. Take a look at those pages and site sections that hold authority, great search presence, and user commitment, and take notes. This are the personal guidelines you will have for reviewing the thin content you have found.

What to Do With the Thin Content?
 

You're going to have to gaze at each page or folder of thin content and ask yourself a few questions:
 

•    Should it die/redirect? If there is no genuine value for this page anymore, let's not allow this content to impede users, or dilute internal link juice or crawl budget anymore.
 

•    Should you revive a section? If the content is just poorly written and has aesthetic issues you just may have to do some tweaking in order to revive this content.
 

•    Should you no index? If you feel that even though the content is thin it still may benefit some users or is a part of the conversion course then this may need to stay. Let's go ahead and meta robots leave out these pages though so that we are taking them away from search crawler view.
 

•    Should you reduce internal linking? The page holds some value but doesn't do well and you just can't seem to part ways with it. In the least begin to shrink internal linking to this page so it isn't in the common route of search engine crawling as well as a distraction for site users.

Conclusion
 

You may have been scratching your head as to why your overall site performance hasn't been doing well and on the other hand not looked genuinely enough past perceived success to see what page/section opportunities exist. This process will let you to find what thin content exist on site, but also what quality content exists to help mold your personal site standards of content quality.

New Google Updates

If you've ever had to move a website, you've maybe been faced with the fear that Google might not figure out that the website is new and it will suffer in the search results until they manage to sort out what happened.

Google has updated their guidelines to help webmasters deal with moving sites, with issues that might come up due to moving a site to responsive design.

Google has also updated information to include moving a site with no URL change, such as if you were to go to a new hosting provider or a new platform that was able to keep the old URLs intact.

When it comes to moving a site that has utterly new URLs, Google goes into quite a bit of detail on how webmasters should map old URLs to new ones, and things to also keep in mind to fix any stragglers that somehow get missed in the transition.

If you have a website that serves different URLs for mobile users versus desktop users, also remember that Google has new smartphone recommendations for webmasters that detail accurately how to handle these kinds of situations, as well as benefits of using responsive design to improve these issues.

When you move your site, you can use Google's change of address tool within Google Webmaster Tools. You need to have both sites confirmed, both the old domain and the new domain, and it is quite simple to do by following instructions.

you might also like: Google Webmaster Tools To attach JavaScript Debugging Tool