Google penalizes blogs and sites for a number of reasons. John Chow is the recent victim. He was taken off the google index recently for doing something that violated Google webmaster guidelines.

John had been running his “Link to me - to get linked back” scheme, whereby if you write a small review on his blog and link to him with the anchor text,”Make money online”, he would link back to you. Many bloggers linked to him and got linked back from John.

Now that John Chow is kicked out of Google Index, what does it mean to other bloggers who have linked to him?

Google says it clearly in it’s guidelines that -

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

So that means anyone who linked to John Chow is going to get the penalty this Google PR update. Yikes! Are you one of those?

Does it affect John Chow?

Nope. The man had made the blog hugely popular and enjoys a steady source of traffic.He’s even declared that banning from Google has done no detrimental effects on his income.

Does it affect you?

If you’ve linked to John, and he’s linked back - well yes may be. Only this Google PR update will tell you.

So what are the things that I shouldn’t do to get a bad reputation with Google?

Yeah, the guidelines are a bit boring to read through. so let’s me list out the most overlooked things by most of the people.

1. Choose a good server that has no downtime - Google does not like servers that has frequent downtimes. Worse - when the Google bots visit your site, if your server is down, they flag you red!
2. Don’t do those black hat SEO stuff like keyword stemming, cloaking, doorway pages etc.
3. Don’t use a hosting that has a shared IP of a banned user on Google - Google may think you’re friends?
4. Too much similar anchor text linking to you - Google guesses it out that you’ve done something artificial to get those links, hence banned.
5. Stupid link building campaigns - Like John’s stay away from them. They are temporary.

Since the Google PR update is nearing, make sure that your blog is safe of these troubles. Remember, no matter how huge or popular you are - if you are not white hat and genuine - Google is going to get you one day - once and for all!

If you'd like to stay updated with SEO, grab the RSS feed now !What's this?

So you started blogging only months back and already feeling bored with no backlinks, no popularity and no recognition? Think again.

For the blogging legends, success did not happen overnight. It took them years of posting, consistency, knowledge sharing and socialization(just to name a few) to make it big today. Ask anyone of those celebrity bloggers - they don’t live in vacation homes nor do they spend evenings sipping whiskey and wine in their yachts. They’d probably be writing a new post sipping a coffee.

I did a research on the top blogging legends on their initial days of blogging. I thought I’d find something interesting in these posts since they would be their best of all time.But not really. Many of them were on the usual - “How to get popular” and “how to get discovered” topics.(Yes just like you!) See for yourself.

1. Problogger - Darren Rowse, Sep 23 -2004
   Page rank explained was Darren’s first post, where he writes about what google page rank is. Google PR is one of the hot favorites of bloggers even today.
2. Labnol - Amit Agarwal, Jan 01 - 2005
   Amit writes about travel directions to get to India. He offers the route maps available online in his first blog article.
3. John Chow.com, Dec 31 - 2005
   John wrote his first post about how the year 2005 went(No link-sorry) and what he’s going to do in 2006. No making it top to the make-money-online bandwagon was not in his checklist. Instead it was - “Make This Blog Into Something Worth Reading”
4. Seth’s blog - Seth Godin, Oct 01 -2006
   Seth’s first posts was about effective speech.
5. Blogoscoped - Philip Lenssen, Dec 01 -2003
   Philips wrote first on Carl and Keyword stemming way back in Dec 2003. I was at college then
6. How to change the world - Guy Kawasaki, Oct 02 -2006
   Guy Kawasaki’s first post on his experience in returning from Mumbai after the IBM conference.
7. Kottke - Jason Kottke, March - 1998
   Kottke wrote his first post on what’s hyper text?
8. Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel, Oct 01-2006
   Steve started off with a bunch of links?

Interesting common factors

- Most of them started off with something “seemingly” silly.
- All of them were consistent with posting regularly.
- Most of them had either very less or no comments at all in the early posts.
- Most of them wrote on posts that were already covered by someone else.
- Most of them linked a lot to other resources.

The above posts were “discovered” from the blogs archive sections, (who ever featured it.) and it could be wrong. If you have better information please let know.

Guess what? This blog has been nominated for the Bloggers Choice Awards this season.

One of the comments - from Aaron on this thread gave light to this idea.

The blog is nominated under the category - Best Education Blog.

As you know, this blog aims at providing Search Engine Optimization tips to young bloggers in simple easy to understand, jargon free language.
Any blogger who wishes to increase traffic to their site can use the tips covered here. It’s free for all.
We charge no fees for the SEO tips that other “professional” SEO’s charge per hour.

So, if you like this blog, i request you to cast your vote for the Blogger’s Choice Awards.
Click here or follow the badge on the left panel.

Thanks for your support.

Now, upload your images to Imageshack, and post it directly to your blog through the Wordpress dashboard, while writing a post.

He did it first with the Google Sitemap plugin. Arne has brought out another plugin for wordpress that will enable you to upload the images to imageshack instead of your host. It’s an easy to use plugin currently supported by Wordpress 2.1

He says -

This plugin allows you to upload images from your WordPress post screen and to insert them with the thumbnail into your post with a few clicks.

Download the plugin here

Advantages
- Easy to use.
- Save on server space and bandwidth.
Dis Advantages
- Imageshack may be banned in some countries - so your blog images may not show up.
- Since imageshack does not provide user account(like picasa or Flickr), if you don’t save the urls, the image cannot be traced if lost.

But it is a handy plugin for bloggers who post more images in their posts. Using images extensively will eat up your bandwidth and server space.This one’s a redeemer.

There are millions of options and you have only seconds to make a decision. Every internet surfer has a time bomb attached to his head while surfing.
You waste your time on a slow website, and you are missing valuable information on another website.

So nobody wants to wait for information, if you don’t provide it, there are other better sites that will provide the same or better information.
This makes it crucial for every blogger to optimize his pages, so that the information a surfer is searching is delivered within no time.

- Images.
Images are crucial. You can’t take them off completely.Ensuring that the images that appear on your page are of low file size and is optimized for web, will bring down the page load time drastically. You can make sure that your images are optimized using photoshop.
Open the image in photoshop and select Save> Save as optimized and it will give the best option to save the image suitable for web.

Replacing CSS with images images with CSS, is a better option to bring down your page load time. many of the tabs, buttons etc can be easily replaced in a more professional and clean looking way using CSS.

- Tables.
Many Wordpress templates uses tables in it’s code. nothing wrong but too many tables can increase your page load time and increase the size of your code.Try to code without tables and replacing them with CSS.It helps in bringing down the page load time.

- Scripts.
Scripts from other sources are a major factor in increasing page load time for blogs. Since all of us use lot of third party addons like Mybloglog, Directory buttons, Technorati buttons, Widgets etc - all of these widgets call javascript from their own websites which increase the page load time drastically. If possible, cut down on the number of widgets, and keep only the essential ones. Otherwise, don’t put all of them on the index page at least.

- Video Ads.
Vide ads are a hot favorite these days.There are many video ads available, but unfortunately, they increase the page load time very much.
To beat it - try to place the ads in the lower end section of the template. please don’t place them at the header or top part of the template.In such a case, the content will display only after the video is loaded - on dial up connections. This will screw up the user-experience.

- Youtube videos.
Another element what’s very commonly used among bloggers. Though YouTube videos are optimized for quick loading, placing one video each in every post is a big mistake. If you post one youtube video on each post(at various times) then it all ends up on the index home page, on all the posts.This will make things horrible, forget about page load time, it gives more than one option to the user and it will confuse them.So make sure that out of all the posts that appear on the index page,only one video appears.If you have set 4 posts to appear on the home page, let there be one youtube video in every 4 posts - not more than that.

- Flash Content.
Flash is becoming less popular these days but, there are blogs that use small flash elements on the header and side templates. Very bad.As an SEO, i hate flash elements, because they only present visually appealing elements which does not work for visitors(though they are appealing to you).They are not SEO friendly and should be avoided from the template if possible.Worse, they increase the page load time by double.So cut them off your template and keep it minimal.

So, keep these elements on your template to a minimum and rely more on CSS where ever possible, so that your visitors find it easy and a pleasant experience to navigate/use the site.

If you are wondering how to find the page load time of your site or blog, here is a cool tool that will help you find it element by element.It shows how each element of your page template affects your page load time on each internet connection speeds. If you are using a T1 connection, then this post may not look useful for you but before deciding, try accessing your blog on a dial up connection. Because that is the real testing ground.If the blog takes time on a dial up connection - you need to use this tool and trim down those frills.

Found an evil tweak the other day, one blogger was displaying his feedburner status on the main page and the number shown on the stats was strange - because this is a regular blog i visit, I can’t remember this blog(can’t disclose the name) having this many subscribers at any time. Curious, I took a closer look at the feedburner status and found that the image is a fake.

It was photoshopped and showed a fancy number - the image was but linked to the feed url. At first look, nobody would suspect at the stats. The numbers had a smudgy edge - which is what pulled me towards it.

I was wondering if you guys would support this or not? It is true that, if a blog can flaunt it’s subscriber count, then the visitors have a natural tendency to follow and get subscribed. But is faking the subscriber count, ethically correct? Though the blog will get more subscribers, wouldn’t it be the same as lying to them?

Wordpress by default is search engine friendly - a little too much sometimes that there are lot of chances for duplicate content.
Your Archives page, Feed, Index page are all sources of duplicate content.

And duplicate content is a serious issue with Google, as it would throw the pages into the supplemental index -and that would affect your traffic. Oleg Ishenko writes a great article on how Wordpress creates duplicate content, and how you can avoid duplicate content from appearing in your wordpress blog.

He thinks - Adding ‘noindex, follow’ tags, Adding unique meta description, Using more tag and preventing spiders from crawling feeds and auxiliary pages, should do the trick !

I would add one more point to it - Avoid posting articles in more than one category. Labelling posts in more than one caetgory simply multiplies the duplicate content on each of those categories. And this is also user-friendly.

Salutes to the man - indeed a great article!

Here’s a Wordpress plugin that can cure content duplication on your blog It says that it adds the nofollow meta tags to the category pages. So that’s half-done.I personally think that you got to follow the other steps suggested by Oleg Ishenko above, to ensure that duplicate content doesn’t appear at all on your blog.

If you don’t know nothing about robots.txt and controlling robots through Meta tags -and don’t want to take the pain of editing the txt file in your root folder and disallowing each search engine crawler manually - worry not! There is an easy way to get this done in Wordpress.

Goto Dashboard> Options> Privacy settings.

You will find two options here.

1 - I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines
2 - I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Now, it’s obvious that the first option is what you need.Ensure that the second option is not selected.

What happens when you select the first(Correction - Second) option?
It causes the - meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ to appear automatically into the page head section of every page. Thus it will not allow Google or any other search engine to crawl the site at all.

It also creates a robots.txt file in the root folder(Only if the WP installation is in the root folder, and there is no existing robots.txt file), in which the command for disallowing all crawlers into the entire directory.

Ensure that you select the first(I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines) radio button. Be a smart SEO.

This week’s speed links feature sites that offer excellent and untold Wordpress SEO tips.
Must appreciate their efforts to think on things that a normal blogger would not.These posts are great resources on simple easy to understand - jargon free SEO.

1. 5 reasons why you should submit your site to Yahoo Site Explorer - Kev found some new features on Yahoo, convincing enough to submit to yahoo.
2. Whether to move to wordpress from blogger or notTeli Adam thinks that you should start from scratch on your new blog. I think he should read my migration from blogger to Wp post.
3. Michael Martini writes about how to avoid duplicate content while using Wordpress. He has good link resources there too.
4. How to make a Wordpress SEO link directory - By Sizlopedia.com

If you know of other Wordpress SEO tips(out of the box ones, not the title tag optimization please), please let me know.

Recently, i had moved from blogger to wordpress - to a new host.It was not a cakewalk and i came across many hurdles while doing so.Yet, I’ve managed to retain my traffic and Google juice.
In the light of my experience, here are a few tips for you to watch out for if you are planning a migration from blogger to wordpress without losing your valuable traffic and google juice..
I’ve tried to make this a consolidated post including the Migration process - The SEO factors involved and coping with the after effects of it.If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Smooth transfer of your posts.
The biggest bottleneck when moving from blogger to wordpress is to move or copy your posts to the new host.
Earlier, there was a plugin to get this done. But now,since Blogger has updated it’s feed - it’s broken.

But, Wordpress has upgraded it’s version(2.2.1 as of today) and the Import feature is now well equipped to import your blogger posts from it’s RSS feed.
So all you got to do is make sure that your WP installation is up to date. If your host provides the old one, grab the latest version from www.wordpress.org and install it yourself.Directions to install Wordpress here

Importing the posts from Blogger
Go to your Wordpress Dashboard > Manage > Import > Blogger

On selecting Blogger, it would ask for granting permission to access your google account.
Login with the email account you blog on Blogger, and click the “Grant Permission” button.
Presto! That’s it. posts imported.

Note
Wordpress imports your posts from the RSS reader.So, if there are any additions to your RSS feeds, like footer text, etc - remove it from the blog feed settings or those text also will appear on your new posts.(For live example, see my posts imported frm blogger, you would see a “Visit the blog for more articles” text beneath every post.)

Tweaking your Wordpress.

Go to your .htaccess file via Control panel>File Manager and make it writable(CHMOD666)
Customize your permalinks

Dealing with Categories - In your blogger account you could have posted articles in multiple lables, so take some time and prune those categories in each post. This could be time consuming but, it helps in the long run.So you better make it right now.

Part 2 - Letting Google know.

After successfully setting up your Wordpress blog and importing posts, it’s time to let the Search Engines know.

- For this, go to your Google Webmasters account and add the new domain there.
- Do the verification as Google suggests.
- Make a sitemap
Create a sitemap of your new site using this sitemap generator tool and save the sitemap.xml file to your new hosts root directory(newdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
- Go to your Google Webmasters account dashboard > Select the new domain > Sitemaps and submit the new sitemap url there.

Now, you have to wait for 3-4 days for the google bots to crawl your site. A smart way to make this quicker is to get someone link to you.

As google crawls the new site, it will show the number of URL’s crawled in the statistics tab. It would be the same as listed in your sitemap.xml file.

Now, check if there are any broken url’s in your statistics. If there are, download the CSV file.

This is again a time consuming task - you got to check all your posts and check for broken links in it and correct it.I can’t find a plugin or tweak to beat it - if you know, please let me know.

Now, that Google has indexed both your new domain and old blogger account - goto the blogger account and delete the blog.

It’s also a good idea to request deletion of content from Google. But I’m not sure if they will entertain it if your blog isa small one, say with less than 100 posts. I really don’t know the criteria by which they decide whether or not to approve deletion from the Index, but they declined me.

Note - Ask all your backlinks(search for link:yourolddomain.com on Google) to correct their links to your new domain. Write them an email - it works!