Google Analytics New Features

Google Analytics has added new features to provide more flexibility, customization and adaptability according to the needs of your enterprise.

These Features are categorized into Powerful , Flexible and Intelligent

Powerful Features :

• Engagement Goals: Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile.


• Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you're optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript.


• Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools you can use to perform advanced data analysis. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions.


• Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment

Flexible Features :

• Multiple Custom Variables: Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business.


• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted Sales report template will automatically be imported. You can also now select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.

Intelligent Features

• Analytics Intelligence: We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods.


• Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.

Source : http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-analytics-now-more-powerful.html

Matt Cutts Prefers HTML Sitemaps over XML Sitemaps

Matt Cutts from Google Prefers HTML Sitemaps over XML Sitemaps as HTML Sitemap is useful for both users and spiders.

He furhter explains an HTML sitemap is a single page which, is used by all the users to find a particular information related to the site. It is an old school landing page for users to find all (or most) of your pages on your web site via single page and is best suited for smaller sites.

An XML sitemap are not visible to a user, but useful only for search engine spider.

once you make an HTML sitemap, making an XML version is extremely easy. So, he advices, to do both.

For more information visit the below video

Google To Add Relevant Titles for Incomplete Search Results

Google is going to add relevant custom titles for incomplete search results as per page content . This was stated by Google search quality group in offical Google Blog.

According to Google search quality group "One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don't specify an HTML title — yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To "see" that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant. This makes it far more likely that you will not ignore a page for want of a good title.”

Google New Mile Stone : 1 Trillion URL Index

Google has announced last week that it reach 1 trillion URL index. In 1998 it had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark.

Google official Blog also stated that "We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data."

Google has now become leader in search engines not only in Traffic Share but also in URL Indexing.

Microsoft New " Browse Rank " Theory

According to News.com, Microsoft research team has recently come up with a new concept known as "BrowseRank". According to this new theory, BrowseRank can prove to be more effective than PageRank as it would rank pages according to the user online behavior and not by the number of web pages linked to a specific web page as done by Google PageRank.

According to the researchers who worked on the BrowseRank theory, "The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance." the research team included Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li from Microsoft Research Asia and Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shuyuan He of Peking University.

How is Browse Rank Calculated

BrowseRank takes into account the amount of time a user spends on a particular website. This helps BrowseRank in assessing the quality of the webpage. BrowseRank not only monitors traffic arriving via links, but also has the ability to monitor direct traffic visits via bookmarks or URLs that are typed in the Address Bar.

The Pages which are more interesting and have user popularity as termed as "Green Traffic."

Disadvantages of Browse Rank

As "Browse Rank " Theory takes into consideration the time spent by the user on the web site , it is understood that it default benefits more social networking web sites, which have less useful and quality content.

Google, Yahoo and Live Search Robots Exclusion Protocol

Wikipedia.org defines "The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. "

In Lay Man Words The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a way to inform or prevent or disable the search engine spiders from accessing all or part of a website.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that, together with Google and Yahoo, it would offer insight on their respective way to tackle the protocol.

This means that webmasters will be able to reap the benefits out of a common implementation of REP across Google, Yahoo and Live Search.

Common REP Directives
The following list are all the major REP features currently implemented by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.


1.Robots.txt Directives

Directive: Disallow

Impact : Tells a crawler not to crawl your site or parts of your site -- your site's robots.txt still needs to be crawled to find this directive, but the disallowed pages will not be crawled

Use Cases: 'No crawl' pages from a site. This directive in the default syntax prevents specific path(s) of a site from crawling

Directive: Allow
Impact : Tells a crawler the specific pages on your site you want indexed so you can use this in combination with Disallow. If both Disallow and Allow clauses apply to a URL, the most specific rule – the longest rule – applies.

Use Cases: This is useful in particular in conjunction with Disallow clauses, where a large section of a site is disallowed, except a small section within it.


Directive: $ Wildcard Support

Impact : Tells a crawler to match everything from the end of a URL -- large number of directories without specifying specific pages

Use Cases: 'No Crawl' files with specific patterns, for e.g., files with certain file types that always have a certain extension, say '.pdf', etc.

Directive: * Wildcard Support

Impact : Tells a crawler to match a sequence of characters (available by end of June)
Use Cases: 'No Crawl' URLs with certain patterns, for e.g., disallow URLs with session ids or other extraneous parameters, etc.

Directive: Sitemaps Location

Impact : Tells a crawler where it can find your sitemaps.

Use Cases: Point to other locations where feeds exist to point the crawlers to the site's content

2. HTML META Directives

Directive: NOINDEX META Tag

Impact : Tells a crawler not to index a given page

Use Cases: Don't index the page. This allows pages that are crawled to be kept out of the index.

Directive: NOFOLLOW META Tag

Impact : Tells a crawler not to follow a link to other content on a given page

Use Cases: Prevent publicly writeable areas to be abused by spammers looking for link credit. By NOFOLLOW, you let the robot know that you are discounting all outgoing links from this page.

Directive: NOSNIPPET META Tag

Impact : Tells a crawler not to display snippets in the search results for a given page

Use Cases: Present no abstract for the page on Search Results.

Directive: NOARCHIVE / NOCACHE META Tag

Impact : Tells a search engine not to show a "cached" link for a given page

Use Cases: Do not make a copy of the page available to users from the Search Engine cache.

Directive: NOODP META Tag

Impact : Tells a crawler not to use a title and snippet from the Open Directory Project for a given page
Use Cases: Do not use the ODP (Open Directory Project) title and abstract for this page in Search."

In addition to the above there are other directives supported only by Google

UNAVAILABLE_AFTER Meta Tag - Tells a crawler when a page should "expire", i.e., after which date it should not show up in search results.

NOIMAGEINDEX Meta Tag - Tells a crawler not to index images for a given page in search results.

NOTRANSLATE Meta Tag - Tells a crawler not to translate the content on a page into different languages for search results.

An overview of the Google Over Optimization filter

Google Over Optimization filter

If someone told you that the race to the top spot in Google search engine rankings is not easy, then he is probably telling the truth. As you enter the World Wide Web, you desperately want to be noticed. You want traffic to start flowing to your website and your website to be in the top of search engine results. But this is not possible.

At least it’s not possible to do his in a legitimate manner. In an aim to hit the top faster than the rest, some people create web pages for search engines rather than web users. These pages are called over optimized pages and they use a series of strategies to attempt to fool search engines.

These websites contain more competitive keyword phrases which have little or no link to the overall content of the page.

Google has a filter called the ‘Google Over Optimization filter’ which uses an algorithm to detect such web pages. The penalty is severe.

The penalty and avoiding Google over optimization Filter

It is said that the Google Over Optimization filter is also called the ‘-950 penalty filter’ because the ranking of that website goes down by 950 positions.

Yes, this is exactly what happens to any website that uses over optimization techniques. Most webmasters find that their website is suffering in the search engine rankings owing to a filter. But they have no clue why they have been filtered. How do you know if your website is over optimized?

It’s simple really. Do not employ each and every strategy that you read in a search engine optimization forum. The usage of the H1 tag is one such element. While many SEO users suggest that you use the H1 tag for keywords, there are others who suggest that you avoid them. Analyze to know what strategy top ranking web pages have used.

A look at Google spam filters

Ever since google became the search engine king, the responsibility on its shoulders has increased. The onus is on Google to keep its search results free of spam and fake websites to make every search a worthwhile experience for its users.

Considering that thousands of websites are created every day and a lot of these might be spam websites, the job isn’t easy at all. So google has created a set of manual and automated filters called as google spam filters.

Google spam filters

The aim of these filters is simple enough. Any website that uses illegitimate techniques to gain an undue advantage in search engine rankings will be greyed out and put into an imaginary quarantine zone.

In the quarantine zone the page rank of the website will suffer and according to the filter that has been applied, it can even go below hundred. To get out of the quarantine, the website has to stop using those spam techniques or it may have to wait till the penalty time period is over.

The top 3

The existence of these filters has been a widely debated topic amongst SEO specialists around the world. Some SEO experts go up to the extent of saying that there is about 15 google spam filters now. But there are some who say that there are none. Nevertheless, here are the top 3 Google spam filters that are said to be in use now.

• The sandbox: The google sandbox filter is a filter that prevents new websites from getting high rankings in search results. Every new website created will automatically go into the sandbox and as it ages, its credibility will increase. Gradually, the website will start faring better in search results.

• The Trust Rank: This is a very important filter and it takes into account the age, the quality of the inbound links of the website and the content. The trust rank means that google trusts your website.

• The domain age: This is another filter that does not allow newer domains to get high rankings.

Understanding Google Domain Age Filter

When you launch a website, you are entering a world that is as populated as the world that we exist in. Maybe it’s even more populated than the real world. The worst part is that every webmaster who launches a website wants to be at the number one spot in Google search engine results.

Now this makes the job extremely difficult for Google to go through each one of these websites and rank them on the basis of their content and SEO techniques. A lot of webmasters want to hit it big early and hence they choose spam techniques to get to the top really fast.

So Google introduced a set of filters to counter spamming and create a search results page that has only quality websites in it. The Google domain age filter works on the policy that if your domain has been around for a few years, then the chances that you are a spam website are negligible. This is why google gives older domains a much better ranking than newer ones.

Can you get around it?

Does it mean that it will take a few years before your domain name gets some credibility? Not really, say experts.

• Buying old domain names is one way to get around this. If there is a domain that has been bought and parked at a domain parking service, then it will have good credibility at Google.



• Another work around is to buy the domain name early. If you are planning to start a few websites next year or so, then start now and book the domain names. Now tell google about them so that they start the evaluation process right away.



• Also if and when you are buying an older domain name, please does not change the WHOIS information or you risk losing all the benefits of buying an old domain name.

And keep in mind that this is only half the war won. There are a set of other filters that you have to combat in order to get high rankings.

Understanding the Google Trust Rank Filter

Google Filters - Google Trust Rank Filter

If you thought that a well detailed SEO program is enough to get you a top rank in the search results pages, then you are misinformed. The information that you have is only partially correct.

The complete information is that you need to follow this program routinely for almost one year to get out of the google sandbox and get into the google trust rank filter. Both these are a set of filters used by Google, which avoid new websites from gaining an undue advantage by using spamming techniques.

Some websites create thousands of back links at once using spamming techniques and dummy web pages to gain a high back link structure. This makes it possible to gain a high page rank the moment the website is launched defeating the very purpose of a search engine.

Hence the arrival of google trust rank filter might have actually benefited the web users but it has made life difficult for webmasters.

The Google trust rank

In order to get a good trust rank with google, you have to get quality in bound links to your website. Now this is not that easy to achieve and may even take years.

If you lose patience and resort to spamming, then you are out of the trust rank and into the sand box. Consider them to be the two sides of a coin that work in tandem. As the name suggests, the google trust rank filter is all about creating trust. Keep working on your web promotion using ethical practices and over a period of time as google gets to know your website better, your ranking will improve on the search results page.

Can you beat it?

This has been one of the most widely discussed things on the internet. Can you really beat the google filters? My advice would be to try and stick to legitimate SEO practices rather than trying to beat the filter and get into the sand box filter again.

Google SandBox Filter

Can you beat the google sand box filter?

Search engines have become far more equipped today to beat spammers at their own game. There was a time when websites used mass spamming techniques to reach the top of search engine results soon after their launch.

As a result, most of the top websites were beaten by the spammers and the quality of search engine results suffered.

Soon google allegedly came out with the sand box filter. The sandbox filter is considered to be a conscious effort on the part of google to prevent spamming websites from achieving a high ranking.

According to experts the google sand box filter is like a probationary time zone which may last for up to 3 months or even more. In this time period, the website may perform extremely poorly in organic search results. It is used to gauge the trust metrics of the website. This metrics will play an important part in deciding the future of the website in search results.

Different theories

There have been different theories surrounding the google sand box filter. Some say that the filter is aimed at postponing or ageing the back linking process.

Back links are crucial in giving the website a high page ranking. When the effectiveness of these back links are reduced, the website performs weakly until google ascertains the trustworthiness of the links.

However, off late many SEO experts have started to question the theories that support the existence of the google sand box filter.

Another theory says that the google sand box filter only affects English language websites. This means that any website with the .gov domain will not be affected.

The final word

The bottom line is that if you wish to achieve a top ranking in google search results, you will have to work for it by building quality trustworthy back links. You simply cannot follow spamming techniques to ensure that you reach the top.

Google Filters

The existence of Google filters

Google has simply come into existence and spun the virtual world around. It can now be called the central axis around which half of the virtual world revolves. Hence it is extremely crucial that you understand the way it functions. This is mandatory not only for the webmaster but also for the average netizen looking for information.

Google employs a set of algorithms to scan a webpage and bring up its search results. These algorithms are constantly updated every now and then to make them more effective and efficient in bringing up the results.

Also, the success of a webpage in the World Wide Web very well depends on its position on the search results page. Search engine optimization or SEO techniques were introduced to help a webpage rank better on search engine results pages.

But then Google incorporated these filters into their algorithms and once again, the rules changed.

What are Google filters?

There are almost hundreds of factors and variables that are programmed into a google algorithm and this makes it very difficult to identify if filters are used.

Filters are some rules that the search engines will follow to avoid unhealthy SEO practices.

For example, if you have built thousands of back links using an auto link creation program, then it is considered to be spamming by Google and the search engine will avoid the webpage altogether.

Similarly, the sandbox effect or the over optimization filter which is said to remove the pages that are crammed with keywords and the H1 and H2 tags are some of the examples.

The links filter which is associated with the links.htm page is almost certain to exist, say experts.

How to Avoid Google filters?

If you take all of the filters into account when optimizing your website, then SEO techniques become all the more difficult. But the best part is that SEO experts have started to introduce more and more methods to avoid these so called Google filters.

Google Updates its Toolbar with New Rating System

Google Tool Bar Update

Google recently made a change to its toolbar software which includes two new buttons: a happy face and a frowning face, These button allow users to rate webpages as they visit them.

Google Toolbar version 4.2 which will be used to roll out "VR" (visitor rating). Google VR™ will use a digg like system with a voting button on the toolbar to collect visitor ratings of the pageand the VR will be displayed via a blue bar similar to the PR bar.

SEO and Ajax

Its web 2.0 and the world simply cannot stop raving about how Ajax has revolutionized the internet. Well, for people who do not know Ajax is a new method to bring tremendous user friendliness to the internet.

It uses existing technologies and combines them to produce some extremely powerful applications. Yes, the user will be thrilled and more than happy with your Ajax website. But where does that place the webmaster?

Ajax is also one of the most un-search engine friendly technologies. That means that if you have Ajax applications on your website, then it is time to rethink your SEO techniques.

The biggest difficulty with Ajax is that it gives you very little options to manipulate the TITLE tags and page headers.

Accessibility has always been a problem with Ajax and what good is technology when users cannot find it?

A workaround

A lot of SEO experts have suggested that creating a second set of static views to be fed to the search engines might be a good option.

In simpler terms, you create a second website without the technology to make it accessible by search engines. The URL must delver the same content to both the users as well as the search engines. But this is not very creative nor is it very practical. Think about the amount of time and effort that goes into it. We also need specific inbound links that point to relevant sections within the virtual directory.

Different solutions

The above mentioned two are not the only workarounds that have been proposed. A few people also suggest that using the ‘noscrpit’ tag is a good way to deliver some static information to the search engines. This means, you create duplicate sections of the same page, one for Ajax and the other for the search engine. But once again, is this feasible? Only time will tell, if Ajax and seo can ever go hand in hand.

SEO for Web 2.0

Search Engine Optimization SEO for Web 2.0

For a lot of people, web 2.0 has been the birth of a new concept. For some, it has been a new set of rules that govern the internet now. But what is it in reality? How do you define web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is an idea that has developed considerably since the dot com bubble of 2001. Web 2.0 is a huge community of websites that is linking more websites together and increasing everyday.

User generated content is one of the prime features of web 2.0. Although user generated content can be relied upon to shoot a website to spotlight, websites have to rely on search engines to get better rankings. This is where SEO for web 2.0 comes in.

Most experts suggest that SEO is web 2.0 and that there isn’t much of a difference in the two.

SEO

The fact that user generated content is what is making websites grow horizontally and vertically makes it more difficult to use standard SEO techniques. There is very little editorial control and there are other problems that arise with structural arrangement.

In fact many insurmountable issues may arise with SEO for web 2.0. However, most of these can be overcome with tactful thinking and a set of tools that seem to be mandatory for success in web 2.0.

Blogs and wikis are the new set of devices that any website needs to have in order to engage newer users.

Interactivity

If you have heard about interactivity and elements like Ajax widgets and podcasts, then you are right. But these are extremely difficult for search engines to pick up and very often leave the spiders dazed. If you are using these in your websites, then you need to employ XML, RSS and mirror sites to ensure that you have search engine traffic flowing in all the time.

Overall, you can say that SEO is continually evolving to meet the challenges of web 2.0.

Google Labs - New Experimental Search

Google is experimenting with new feature on search results that allow users to vote up or remove search results they see.

This implemented as part of its Google Labs Program , which allows the user to customize the search experience by adding, deleting and moving search results.

This feature is limited to user specific search results. The sites disliked or deleted by specific user will not appear in his search results .

This is experimental feature and may be available only for limited period .

For more information visit : http://www.google.com/experimental/

SEO Tips to Get Higher Google Page Ranking

As the internet started to develop, immense marketing hype went into it and the result was a network of websites which had clustered information scattered here and there. But these websites were simply not willing to give out an external link.

Most of the links were internal and kept returning the user to square one. It was like a never ending loop. As a result google got into the act and altered its algorithms in the quest to make the web a better place.

Its page rank system is one of the key aspects of this change that has redefined the way the web functions. According to this system, the importance of a website could be determined by the number of inbound links coming to it.

For example, if your webpage has a hundred inbound links coming to it chances are that it can have a high page rank in google.

Development

As a result, webmasters now started to create dummy sites for giving out links for their web pages and soon had pages with a million inbound links.

Once again, Google altered the algorithms and this time, the sites which give out the links are also judged on the basis of their page ranks.
So unless you have a link coming in from a web page with a high page rank, that link is not valued. So the result is a network of websites that not only have quality information to share but also work towards bringing in more useful websites to improve the network.

TIPS

• Focus on keeping keyword rich but relevant content in your website. The balance between the two should be perfect.
• The only way to make your website popular is by improving the quality of the content within.
• Link building is a significant way of improving traffic and page rank.

Importance of Google Page Rank

Searches and search engines have come a long way indeed from the old days. Today, complex algorithms and techniques are at work behind the scenes to make the result much more satisfying and relevant for the end user.

Take Google’s extremely popular Page Rank system
for example. This system came into place well before Google was actually created. But now it is the sole system in place on the World Wide Web that decides on the importance of a page within a website and gives it a numerical ranking from 1 – 10.

So if you have a Page Rank of 1, it means that the particular webpage has received the most votes or inbound links. Most of these votes have to be relevant or important ones.

How it works

The number of inbound links that is generated by a page is the primary factor that determines it page rank. For example, if a page A has an outbound link to page B, then that link can be called as a vote from A to B. But how popular is Page A?

This is also a determining factor when the value of the vote is counted. This brought to fore the concept of link building and link popularity.

Today, a webpage that is crammed with keywords cannot deceive a search engine. It looks into the Page Rank as well to determine how important the webpage really is.

So even if you have several inbound links to your webpage, it does not guarantee you a high page rank.

Because, the relevance of the pages which are giving you those links are also taken into account. You can say that the page rank of a document is based on the Page Rank of the document which is giving it links.

This truly remarkable concept which has redefined the way the internet functions was achieved with the help of a simple algorithm.

Benefits of LSI for SEO

SEO has been the mantra of success for many a websites until now. The formula has been tried and tested and it has worked as well. The results were pretty much based on keyword density rather than the context in which the keyword has been used. Hence it was necessary to identify all the keywords which had the same meaning which a user might look for. For example, a user looking for ‘red kitchen cabinets’ might look for ‘kitchen cabinets red’ ‘red colored cabinets’ and many more such keyword variations all of which mean the same for him. But for the search engine spider they are all different keywords.

LSI

Now we have a new method of SEO called Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI is based on identifying a group of keywords and the context in which it is used in the text. It creates a much more natural approach to search engines and results rather than the more mechanical approach which was common until now. If you look closely at a search results page you will find at least three to four sites that are loaded with keywords but do not have any relevant content in it. This can be avoided with LSI. Apart from the specific keyword, users will also find those sites which have relevant information.

The benefits

Now when you do an LSI based search on music, you will not only have the results with the word music. You can also find radio, mp3 and stuff like that. It incorporates methods like Single Variable decomposition and creating a database of relevant keywords. Also common stop words are eliminated. These new results based on recall, precision and ranking has surely revolutionized the way search engines function. It also means that a web developer has to make sure that each and every word on a page is important and not just the keywords.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) : The new face of search

Latent Semantic Indexing

How do you look up for information on the internet? You type in the words in a search box and wait for the information to come up. But if you go through the results in detail, you will find that after the first few results pages, the rest are all irrelevant to the term that you searched for.

This is the retrieval method that is popular the world over today but will be soon replaced by a highly sophisticated model called LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).

LSI is a new concept based retrieval method which uses a term and document matrix to describe or bring out the occurrence of terms in various documents. The results have been known to be 30% more effective than any conventional form of search that has been used.

Why it works

The reason why LSI works can be attributed to a term called ‘Shared words’. If you are searching for the term ‘mobile phones’, you might miss out on the result pages which also have the words, ‘Cellular Phone, lightweight, camera phones, etc.

While the user may find these words alike, that’s not how a spider thinks. LSI eliminates this problem by searching according to the concept of a searched term rather than its presence in the result pages.

It eliminates a lot of hassles for both the searcher as well as the content provider who does not have to carefully craft out a database based on keywords.

How it works

Most LSI software uses a completely automated system that is called Singular Value Decomposition. By using this, it creates a semantic or concept space and then improves successful retrieval of data.

In simpler terms, an LSI based model will be able to identify that cellular phones and mobile phones and lightweight phones occur in the same context and hence the results will be much more detailed and relevant.