It looks like there may be trouble in paradise. The relationship between Google and China seems to have hit a speed bump and may completely disintegrate altogether. China’s communist views are the heart of the issue. A country reputed for dictating to and oppressing its people, China values censorship over free speech and control over human rights. This not only doesn’t sit well with most Americans; it’s become a thorn in Google’s side.

Google Takes a Stand

In the aftermath of an investigation due to hacking and snooping by the Chinese government, Google is responding to China’s demand that the search engine filter and remove links they find to be offensive or against their agenda. Basically, the Chinese government wants to call the shots and wants to keep it’s citizens reliant on and believing in them without the influence of outside sources that will bring doubt into their minds and make them see the light.

Too bad for China. They’re looking in the wrong direction if they want help from America, let alone one of America’s biggest corporations, to achieve their quest for turning people from human beings into robots with little thought of their own. Americans won’t stand for it, and neither will Google.

A Question of Human Rights

In a country like the U.S, where human rights and freedom of speech are viewed as the most valued of ideals, it’s appalling to see what China is doing. It’s nearly beyond comprehension to imagine living in a place where every thought and action is not owned by the individual, but by the government, under the guise of “what’s best for the people.” Let that happen in America, and our government would have a case of mass hysteria on it’s hands. It just wouldn’t fly here.

That’s probably why Google has vowed to stop censoring search results in China and is now threatening to pull out of the country altogether. Google is still considering their next move and is still upset by what they see as a threat to the company. This is a situation that is not likely to end with happy faces all around. China is sure to lose.

It seems that the Chinese government has become accustomed to success and has taken it for granted for far too long. In a day and age where technology means everything and Google is leading the way all over the world, how will this affect China? Not having the support of Google or access to the company’s products is sure to have some impact on China, it’s government and the function of commerce.

The Future of China

While it’s sad to see a country so lost in an oppressive way of thinking they call progress and a real shame to see them lose a valuable tool of technology, the Chinese government only has themselves to blame. Google’s not at fault. Their an American company sticking to American values. Kudos to them! Still, the whole situation leaves one to ponder what the future might bring for China.

Will losing Google now open their eyes and eventually lead to their adopting of a more progressive and people-centered government? Will they someday follow the example America has set before them? Only time will tell. For now, China will simply have to live with the consequences of their actions.

Your site’s page rank is the way Google labels your sites popularity. The higher your page rank, the higher your site will appear in search engine results. All search engine optimization efforts are aimed primarily at increasing page rank value. One of main techniques Google uses to establish your page rank is assessing the number of backlinks there are for your site. Backlinks are links on other websites that contain your site’s URL. The more links there are on the web pointing to your site, the more popular your site appears to be.

Blackhat vs Whitehat

There are two schools of thought in the search engine optimization world; blackhat and whitehat. Blackhat techniques are considered unethical by many, and they are generally used by people who want  to get things done quickly without a lot of work. While blackhat techniques do work, and have given many success, whitehat techniques are seen as being more acceptable by search engines. Whitehat techniques are straightforward, by-the-book methods that also work, but require more manual work and persistence to succeed.

Most search engine optimization experts agree that whitehat techniques are more suitable for people who are looking for long term success, whereas blackhat techniques can bring quick but short lived success. Therefore, in this article we will focus on the art of getting backlinks using whitehat techniques.

Quality Content and Networking

One of the most fundamental ways to get people to link back to your site is by providing interesting and informative content. If your content is useful, then people will want to link others to your site by nature. Many people enjoy sharing information with their friends and family through social networking sites, blogs and forums. A good way to encourage backlogging on your site is to add social bookmarking buttons that give people the opportunity to easily promote your site for you.

It is also a good idea to comment on blogs in your niche, placing a link to your site in each comment. You should also become a member of as many forums as you find that are relevant to your niche. Become a contributing member and place the link to your site in your signature on every forum. This will attract targeted visitors, that are more likely to link back to your site.

RSS and Coding

Make sure you include an RSS feed on your website. RSS feeds keep your visitors updated when new content is posted on your site. This will give each now post much more popularity and therefore a greater chance of generating a backlink for your site. Another useful coding method is to insert a “Link back to me” or “Share this with a friend” snippet on your website.  This will make it easier for your visitors to share your site’s information with others, thereby creating even more backlinking opportunities.

Advertising and Marketing

Another basic way to get more backlinks is to advertise your site to other websites with banners. You should be able to find websites in your niche that have open banner space for a nominal fee. Many times this banner space only costs a few dollars per month. It is best to advertise on sites that are authoritative in your niche, this way you are targeting a specific audience.

Sometimes Google makes changes that are announced and other times they make remarkably silent changes.  In the case of Google Webmaster Tools, both types of changes have occurred – outdated software alerts and PageRank.  The recent changes are a reflection on how the company is constantly striving to keep up with its customers’ needs and desires.

Update alerts

In the case of the former, Google is going to incorporate a service that alerts webmasters of web site software updates and releases when these programs become outdated.  The reasoning behind this new service is that many web site owners are unaware of new updates.  Not applying them in a timely manner can lead to a hacked web site.  In fact, the company started out with merely sending alerts to web site owners of potential security issues and when this was well-received, Google decided to take it a step further.

The alerts are not limited to just software updates.  Google has set it so that web site owners will be notified of new modules or plugins belonging to existing programs (such as new Drupal modules or Joomla extensions).

How is Google managing to identify which web sites and programs need to be targeted?  The company parses the source code of each and every web page it crawls.  Normally, within the source code of these pages one will find software generated meta tags that indicate the program version number.  When a version number is lower than the currently updated program version, an alert is sent out to the web site owner. For the moment, update alerts depend upon software creators ensuring their version numbers are listed within the meta tags.

There has not been a specific time set for this newest feature to be rolled out, though Google indicates it will be soon.

PageRank

The other change that Google has made recently to its Webmaster Tool area is that of PageRank.  The removal of this particular feature was not announced – just silently passed off.  In the past, Google consistently informed web site owners that too much focus was being placed on PageRank when, in reality, it was not considered to be a tremendously valuable metric to follow.

The odd thing is, though PageRank has been removed from the Google Webmaster Tool area, it remains within the Google Toolbar.  Apparently it is considered to be too solid of a piece of the branding for Google to have it removed.

Though removed from the tools and left in the toolbar, Google has indicated the PageRank can still be considered useful.  It can indicate to the user how the web site is behaving within Google’s index.  If “green,” all is well.  If any other color, an investigation is warranted.

Google does wish to point its users to an FAQ page dedicated to Google and SEO – this area covers crawling, ranking, and indexing.  The fact is, PageRank is one of a couple hundred signals that can affect a web site’s ranking.

Whether silently removed or publicly preannounced, it seems Google is keeping up with its customers’ ongoing web site needs.

Though best known for its extensive suite of proprietary commercial products, as of late, Microsoft has been dabbling a lot more in the field of open-source development.  Many suspect that this is due to rising competition from major open-source players such as Red Hat, Adobe and Google.  It has just been revealed that Microsoft is working on a new content management software application along with a set of reusable compatible components.  Going by the codename of Orchard, the software details will be shared at the TechEd Europe event.  Perhaps the most surprising part about all of this is that Orchard is said to be a free open-source web CMS set to rival with popular systems such as Joomla, Mambo and Drupal.

While Microsoft is being tight-lipped and secretive about the project, we were able to gather some details on what is currently known about the Orchard CMS.

Orchard Overview

Orchard is Microsoft’s latest effort to distribute free open-source software with reusable components and a fully featured application capable of creating a wide variety of types of websites.  The company’s core team of expert ASP.NET developers is actively seeking contributions and guidance from the community of .NET programmers to help get the project off on the right in the early goings.  According to a representative from Microsoft, Bradley Millington, who has been anointed as Engineering Lead for the Orchid project, will be spearheading interactive discussions to invite the community to get actively involved on the ground floor.  Millington will be accepting input to get better understanding of what developers would like to see in the project, the components they envision for their own applications, and how to encourage the community to contribute to make the project a success.  Microsoft remarked that is open to discussing strategy, logistics, functionality and whatever else developers bring to the table.

Apparently, Orchard is not Microsoft’s first attempt in the open-source content management space.  A while back, it was reported that the company was working on a CMS project called Oxite.  In December of 2008, Microsoft made an alpha version of the Oxite source code available under the MS-P1 (Microsoft Public License).  Mary Joe Foley of ZDNet hinted that Orchard could be right on time and become one of the first projects announced for the CodePlex Foundation.  Created to allow for the exchange of code and collaboration among software vendors and the open-source developer community, the Foundation recently released the first working draft of its Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines.  When Foley asked if Orchard was simply a revamped version Oxite under a different name, Microsoft did not respond.

We all know that Microsoft is very skilled at keeping secrets and rolling out big surprises.  Therefore, we just might have to wait until the TechEd Europe Session takes place on November 11 to get more comprehensive details on the Orchard project.  As soon we get something more concrete, we will surely try to pass along the news.

Internet users and webmasters have a variety of search engines to choose from these days.  Each engine offers standard search results along with features that make them unique.  Bing is one of the newest search engines on the scene, one that has the potential to go toe-to-toe with Google, the undisputed search engine king.

What is Bing?

Bing is a search engine developed by software giant Microsoft.  It is actually a revamped version of Live Search, Windows Live and MSN Search, each of which failed to put a chink in Google’s armor.  Though it gives you all the basics, Bing is being advertised as decision engine, due to the fact that is delivers more details about results than other search engines.  For instance, if you take your mouse and slide it to the right of the results onto the orange circle, a side window will appear giving you a brief description of the website.  That isn’t the only thing that makes Bing stand out as the plethora of features gives this search engine an identity all its own.

Video Previews

One of the most appealing features of Bing involves integrated video previews.  Underneath the “Video” tab, you can enter queries that are specific to video content.  After the results are returned, you can move your mouse over the desired video and get a nice comprehensive preview of what the clip contains.

Enhanced Shopping Options

Another unique feature integrated into the Bing search engine is a tool that makes shopping online much easier.  For example, if you click the “Shopping” tab and then enter “shoes” into the search box, you will get thousands of relevant results featuring the items and prices offered by various online retailers that sell shoes.  If you are specific with your search, you may find that some products qualify for special “Bing Cashbacks” as an added bonus.

Travel Tools

Bing also has features geared toward users who frequently purchase airline tickets online.  If you want to book a flight from Detroit to Las Vegas, the results will come back displaying links to CheapFlights.com as well as other relevant sites.  If you click on the recommended link and go through the Bing Travel interface, you can instantly compare prices against the provided schedule and determine when is the best time to schedule your flight.  This is definitely a great feature internet users can put to use.

Cash-back Program

As we mentioned before, if you search for something on the Shopping tab, you may see that a particular item qualifies for a Bing Cashback, which gives you certain percentage of your money back.  These items are a part of the Bing CashbackpProgram.  After purchasing an eligible item, you receive an email confirmation detailing your cashback savings.  Microsoft claims that you can make up to $2,500 a year with this program and receive your rewards via check, direct deposit or PayPal transfer.  In order to qualify for the Bing Cashback program, you must be at least 18 years old and have a Windows Live account.

Conclusion

Bing is certainly worth checking out and far more usable than Microsoft’s previous attempts.  Though efficient, its search results are still lacking in terms of the quantity and relevant ranking you get from Google.  However, that might all change if Microsoft and Yahoo combine their search expertise, which according to a late July announcement, could be very soon.

Yahoo Search is great and Bing is quickly gaining ground as a worthy search engine.  When Yahoo and Microsoft combine their specialties, they could become the collective kings of the search world.  This partnership could bring forth great things for both companies but as it stands now, Google is dominant and its search engine is the one all webmasters optimize for.  While Google can definitely help deliver the traffic you desire, you need to make it a priority to ensure your site doesn’t end up in its dreaded supplemental index.

What is the Supplemental Index?

Writer Andy Greenberg’s 2007 Forbes article entitled “Condemned To Google Hell,” best describes the supplemental index.  The article explains how two online businesses lost traffic and eventually sales because their pages fell into the deep, dark abyss where URLs are buried.   A major focal point of the story was to determine what could cause something like this to happen, speculating that purchasing links and duplicate content were among the culprits.  This was clarified by Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson, who let it be known that the supplemental index does not mean a particular website has been penalized.  According to Cutts, the determining factor to whether a web page makes it in the main or supplemental index is its page rank.  Despite this clarification, the supplemental index is the not place where you want your web pages to end up, especially if your trying to promote your business through SEO.

Keeping Your Site Above Ground

To keep your web pages from falling into the depths of the Google supplemental index, we recommend following these four tips:

1.) Unique Page Titles – This is a basic step that often gets overlooked.  Put a little extra effort into your page titles as it helps in terms optimization, usability and more clickthroughs in the search results.

2.) Unique Content – There are many reasons why your pages may not be as unique as you think.  This could be due to a shopping cart or CMS flaw, but the more identical content you have at multiple URLs, the better chances you have of being tucked away in the Google supplemental index.  Go through your pages and make sure you have at least 100 words of unique content.

3.) More Quality Links – Trust has become a key aspect of quality link building.  By gathering links from a few trusted sites that are already ranked, you will show Google that your site can be trusted and is worthy of the main index.  If at all possible, try to get some links from high ranking sites.  Though some argue that this won’t do much in terms of ranking, it could be a winning factor in the way of indexing.

4.) Internal Page Links - Many sites have dozens of inbound links, but all of them are pointing back to their homepage.  In several cases, the homepage of the site makes it into the main index while all the internal pages are abandoned and swept into the supplemental file cabinet.  To avoid this issue, you may want to pick out your most relevant internal pages and get about four to five links coming back to them.  Even if you have previously left them unattended, don’t worry because the Google bot will typically revisit your site and crawl those internal pages again.  This time, they will make their way into the main index instead of being left behind in Google hell.

Google has a terrific set of webmaster tools that cannot only help you analyze your site for SEO purposes, but also make it more efficient and easier to manage.  The majority of these tools can be found in Google Webmaster Tools, an amazing package that contains a variety of very useful features.  This toolkit gives you a lot of power, allowing you to upload your sitemap directly to Google , check to see when the search engine spiders last crawled your site, tell Google how you want the URLs for indexed pages to appear and much more.  Let’s go over some of the key benefits and determine how they can aid in your analysis and optimization efforts.

Learn How the Spiders Work

Perhaps the most essential information Google Webmaster Tools provides you is a comprehensive section that details exactly how the search engine robots view your site and where you rank in terms of keywords.  When a bot crawls and indexes your site, you can see what keywords led to its indexing and what order they are being ranked in.  If your targeted keyword is nowhere near the top of the list, this gives indication that you have a little more work to do and might want to redesign your site for better optimization.  Google Webmaster Tools also lets you see the percentage of your website traffic that originates from those keywords.

For example, let’s say Google detects that your primary keyword is “laptop computer.”  You may think this is a good keyword to go after until seeing that you are ranked #500 and receiving very little traffic for it.  However, when you notice that you ranked #7 for laptop notebook and are generating quality traffic for that keyword, you might then want to re-optimize to achieve even higher rankings.  The information you get back from these tools can prove golden.

Identify Potential Problems

Google Webmaster Tools also offers a feature that allows you to check and see if any dead URLs exist on your site or web pages that the search engine spider can’t get to.  There is another section that tells you if any potential problems related to your site have been found in the text or meta tags.  The package also has a feature that lets you view data for both your internal and inbound links.  This information will you identify the pages on your sites that have links coming in from other sites and what sites they are coming from as well as the pages within your website that have internal links.

Additional Tools and Traffic Boosters

The Tools section of Google Webmaster tools is an area that can help you create a robots.txt page, optimize for Google images, analyze different areas of your site, or remove URLs from the Google search results.  These tools can really prove handy when it comes time to fine tune your site and boost traffic.

Google Webmaster Tools is a must-have for the serious webmaster.  The package offers a number of great features and all of them are free to use.  To get your hands on Google Webmaster Tools, you can purchase a web hosting plan from a host that offers it or simply get it directly from the search engine masters themselves.

As internet and web technologies evolve, security becomes more of a problem for webmasters and online business owners.  The threat model has grown immensely over the years, and internet users are forced to deal with a number of challenges.  Some of the biggest threats plaguing the cyber world today involves one of the biggest names on the internet – Google.

Click Fraud

A relatively new type of internet scam, click fraud is a plot that mainly targets advertising companies, in this case, that target is Google.  Many scam artists have used this ploy to take advantage of PPC (Pay Per Click) programs by republishing ads on other web pages.  While this isn’t necessarily an illegal practice, the major issue is that it becomes easy for virtually anyone to create a rogue website and publish a list of ads.  These ads in turn, aid directly in click fraud by allowing the publishers to act as middlemen and share revenue from the Google AdSense advertising program.  Most people participating in this scam are doing so on such a small scale that their treachery often goes undetected.  However, others are in it for substantial gain, utilizing advanced software tools the trick the advertising company into believing that the clicks originated from different computers or even different countries.  Another form of click fraud is used to cost the competition money or eliminate them from the ad rotation by maxing out the amount of funds the business has set aside for their budget.

Fighting click fraud can be a costly venture, especially when factoring in expensive legal fees.  While preventing this practice is difficult, organizations can protect themselves to some extend.  This can be done by searching for suspicious patterns of repetitious activities such as clicks that originate from the same IP address, a sudden surge in clicks originating from a small group of keywords, or a boost in click-throughs without any notable increase in business transactions.  Anyone involved in PPC should beware of this scam as it can cost you severely.  Although more search engines are aware of click fraud, nothing is guaranteed and policies for reimbursement may not work in your favor.

Google Hacking

Google hacking is another threat increasing in popularity.  As the name implies, this exploit revolves around the widely used Google search engine.  Hackers utilize Google in seek of passwords, error message and even web cam connections, all of which can give an intruder the key they need to penetrate an insecure server.  Unfortunately, default error messages often reveal more information than they should, details that can be very useful to the knowledgeable attacker.  There are also a number of sites that enable attackers by providing them with comprehensive details on how to commit Google hacking.  Server administrators can protect themselves from this malicious ploy by setting up custom error pages, disallowing directory listings and avoiding putting HTML links on web pages that will entice Google spiders to search the page.

Is Google Secure?

Although Google has been the target of numerous exploits as of late, it remains a reputable entity that is doing all it can to mitigate the threats.  Be that as it may, it is important to know that attackers are using the Google name to commit scams, thus you should always take the necessary measures to protect yourself.

Search engine optimization has proven to be one of the most effective methods used to generate traffic to a website.  If you are just starting with your first site, you may feel as if Google and other prevalent search engines are playing favoritism and giving rankings to more popular sites.  Although popularity does have something to do with the results, there are a number of factors that go into the equation.  This article will help you understand where to focus your efforts when trying to attract the search engine spiders.

Keyword Implementation

You probably know that most internet users rely on search engines to find what they need whether its information, entertainment or products.  The role of search engine spiders is to crawl the web, find information relevant to a certain topic and index it for listing.  For example, if a web surfer enters keywords such as “IT consulting” into a search engine, the results will consist of web pages that have content most relevant to that field.  Keywords are a very important aspect of SEO and must be properly fused into your web pages in order to entice the spiders and boost rankings.

Keyword Position

The actual positioning of your keywords also plays a critical role in the search engine algorithm.  The idea is to present your information to the visitor almost immediately.  This basically means that you need to insert your keywords as soon possible – in the page, article header and preferably the first paragraph.  Experts will tell you that sites with keywords at the top of the page generally rank higher than those that don’t.  Without taking keyword positioning into account, you stand the risk of ranking incredibly low or not at all.

Keyword Spamming

As we mentioned, keywords are a highly effective weapon in the race for rankings.  However, they can also lead to your downfall.  There is such a thing as overusing keywords, something the search engines refer to as spamming.  This practice all started with overzealous webmasters who stuff as many keywords and phrases into their web pages as possible, trying to force their way into the search engine rankings.  To prevent this, search engines are designed to automatically disqualify web pages deemed as having too many keywords.  Whether it is you or designer putting the site together, keyword spamming is something you certainly want to be cautious of.

Popularity

When it comes to search engine results, popularity is taken into account but it isn’t the type you may think.  Popularity is determined by the demand for particular keyword and backlinks.  Often referred to as inbound links, backlinks are formed when you have your URL posted on other sites.  The key is to get your link listed on other sites in your niche.  The more it is posted on the web, the more popular it becomes.

Conclusion

Trying to understand search engine results and how they are calculated can be a complex undertaking.  During your SEO campaign, keep in mind that nothing is guaranteed as some keywords are tied to very competitive markets.  For this reason, you should never waste all of your time on optimization to the point where other vital aspects are neglected.