Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo has announced the first Yahoo Search update of 2008. Sharad Verma from Yahoo Search said that Yahoo has been rolling out updates to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the past couple days. Yahoo tells the update will be done soon, but you may notice "some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

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Best Practices For Webmasters

Best practices for many webmaster issues.

Site Verification Files and Meta Tags
Yes, you should keep your verification file or meta tag live to maintain your status as a verified owner.

Site Verification Best Practices
If you have multiple people working on your site with Webmaster Tools, it's a good idea to have each person verify the site with his or her own account, rather than using a shared login. That way, as people come and go, you can control the access appropriately by adding or removing verification files or meta tags for each account.
You may want to keep a list of these verification codes and which owner they are connected to, so you can easily control access later. If you lose track, you can always use the "Manage site verification" option in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to force all site owners to reverify their accounts.

What's the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories?
When it comes to Google, there aren't major differences between the two, so when you're making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors.

Underscores vs. Dashes
In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you're providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not.

Keywords in URLs
It's always a good idea to be descriptive across your site, with titles, ALT attributes, and yes, even URLs, as they can be useful signals for users and search engines.

Moving to a new IP address
We got a question about changing a site's IP address, and provided a few steps you can take as a webmaster to make sure things go smoothly. Here's what you can do:
Change the TTL (Time To Live) value of your DNS configuration to something short, like five minutes (300 seconds). This will tell web browsers to re-check the IP address for your site every five minutes.
Copy your content to the new hosting environment, and make sure it is live on the new IP address.
Change your DNS settings so your hostname points to the new IP address.
Check your logs to see when Googlebot starts crawling your site on the new IP address.

Proxies
A few webmasters were concerned that proxy services are being indexed with copies of their content. While it's often possible to find duplicate copies of your content in our results if you look hard enough, the original source is most likely going to be ranked higher than a proxy copy.

If your question isn't covered here, you can find even more questions and answers in Sitemaps Help Group.

Search Engine Optimisation - Tushar

Sitemap FAQs

FAQs about Sitemaps

Q: I submitted a Sitemap, but my URLs haven't been [crawled/indexed] yet. Isn't that what a Sitemap is for?
A: Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed.

Q: If it doesn't get me automatically crawled and indexed, what does a Sitemap do?
A: Sitemaps give information to Google to help us better understand your site.

Q: Will a Sitemap help me rank better?
A: A Sitemap does not affect the actual ranking of your pages.

Q: If I set all of my pages to have priority 1.0, will that make them rank higher (or get crawled faster) than someone else's pages that have priority 0.8?
A: No.

Q: Is there any point in submitting a Sitemap if all the metadata (, , etc.) is the same for each URL, or if I'm not sure it's accurate?
A: If the value of a particular tag is the same for 100% of the URLs in your Sitemap, you don't need to include that tag in your Sitemap.

Q: I've heard about people who submitted a Sitemap and got penalized shortly afterward. Can a Sitemap hurt you?
A: Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap.

Q: Where can I put my Sitemap? Does it have to be at the root of my site?
A: Google recently enabled Sitemap cross-submissions, which means that you can put your Sitemap just about anywhere as long as you have the following sites verified in your Webmaster Tools account.

Q: Can I just submit the site map that my webmaster made of my site? I don't get this whole XML thing.
A: There's a difference between a (usually HTML) site map built to help humans navigate around your site, and an XML Sitemap built for search engines.

Q: Which Sitemap format is the best?
A: Google recommend the XML Sitemap protocol as defined by sitemaps.org.

Q: If I have multiple URLs that point to the same content, can I use my Sitemap to indicate my preferred URL for that content?
A: Yes.

Q: Does the placement of a URL within a Sitemap file matter? Will the URLs at the beginning of the file get better treatment than the URLs near the end?
A: No, and no.

Q: If my site has multiple sections (e.g. a blog, a forum, and a photo gallery), should I submit one Sitemap for the site, or multiple Sitemaps (one for each section)?
A: You may submit as few or as many Sitemaps as you like (up to these limits).

If your question isn't covered here, you can find even more questions and answers in Sitemaps Help Group.

Affordable SEO - Tushar.

Internal Linking Strategy

Internal linking strategy is the best of all times and easiest way to control your site output in terms of SEO.

Through better Internal Linking Strategies you could gain and long last your keyword rankings in search engines. Its all about valuable site based optimization know-how.

I have tried to summarized some best practice strategies as below

Top Internal Linking Strategies

a) Keep Internal Links Absolute.
Absolute Link simply means - use full URLs for your links. Rather than "/yourpage.html" use "http://www.yourdomain/yourpage.html". Absolutes help pages pull each other up in the rankings as they get older. If the page gets scraped, you ensure copied links remain in tact and provide link value back to your web pages.

b) Limit Your External Links.
Limit your external links so that you can focus where this link value is being directed. There should not be more than 10 external links per page.

c) The Anchor Text
This is the most important part. The text in your links is key, even with internal linking - so stay focused on your target keywords and phrases with your anchor text.

d) Keep Your Keyword Phrase Targeting Focused.
Don't fall into the trap of trying to get hundreds of top 10 rankings from one page. Focus on just a few keyword phrases per page and really target them in your SEO efforts. Any additional top rankings are a bonus.

e) Contextual Linking Counts Internally
Don't just rely on navigation and isolated site links to connect your internal pages. If you place links within web page copy - it provides more relevance and internal value to the link - just as it does with external inbound links.

f) Power Up on New Pages
If you're looking to launch a new page or give an existing page a ranking boost - ensure your top 5 internal pages are sending valuable link juice to it. This will give it a vital rank boost in the search results.

If you have any suggestions then please write in comments.

Tushar

The Google Webmaster Tools Quick Start Guide

Google has created the Google Webmaster Tools Quick Start Guide to help webmasters learn the features and reasons to use the tool.

The ten step guide displays details on the dashboard, the overview section, the diagnostics section, the top search queries screen, crawl stats page, the "What the Googlebot Sees" page, the links page, the Sitemaps section, and the tools page.

This is a great place to for those new to SEO and Google.

Tushar

Live Search Problems

Do you have problems in indexing with "Live Search" then you could take advantage of Live Search Webmaster Center.

You could use the webmaster tools to fix the crawling and indexing problems of your website with Live Search. With the new Webmaster Tools you could add the sitemap of your site to Live Search. Validate the robots.txt file. View the statistics of your site as on Live Search.

Here is the link of Live Search Webmaster Tools

http://webmaster.live.com

Live Search Engine Optimization Tushar

SEO Startup

If we talk about SEO then there are certain factors which should check while uploading or updating a website.

Do the robots.txt file is formed properly for all the spiders to crawl? Does the sitemap is complete?

I have tried to find out some basic steps which you should check if you want to go wise with your website in terms of Search Engine Optimization.

1) Check that all the pages that you want to include in your site are there.

2) The naming convention of the pages should be distinct and SEO friendly.

3) Proper title and meta tags have been used.

4) Avoid using frames in your webpages.

5) A website map should be there like sitemap.html with links to all the pages of your website.

6) Include a 404 page not found or error handling page.

7) Add all the off load functionality code such as css, js etc

8) Add a robots.txt file which should be in correct format.

9) Create a sitemap.xml file and add this sitemap.xml to various search engines.

Please do let me know if you have any suggestions.

Tushar

Search Engine Results

Is there any solution if you want to search simultaneously on various search engine.

Yes, a meta search engine named as "Zuula" is there which lets you run concurrent searches on eight different search engines. It has a tabbed format that allows the user to switch on to search results of various search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa etc. Currently it allows simultaneous search on eight search engines.

If you want ot see Search Results Pages in addition to your favorite search engine then it could be very useful. With the tabbed format you could do that at a click of a mouse. And apart from normal search it lets you perform separate searches for blogs, news, images and jobs.

With the Edit Tabs option you can customize the order of the tabs as per your preference, filter adult content and even determine the number of search results per page.

So see the results yourself!!!

Google PR

I think Google has updated the PR (Pagerank).

The Pagerank of my blog tusharagarwalinfo.blogspot.com has jumped to 1 from 0.

So guys what are you waiting for. Check the PR of your site or blog. Google has updated PR yesterday.

And probably there may be a PR update again somewhere around 14 Feb 2008 as I guess.