Nov 28 2011

Top 8 SEO Tips for a Better Google Places Ranking



Is your Google Places page showing up at or near the top of local business listings in search results? If you answered no, then keep reading.

Here are my top eight tips to improve your Google Places page’s chances of being found by local searchers:

1. Get Verified
The first step to get your Google Places listing on Google SERPs is to get it verified. This can be done through Phone SMS, Phone Call or through mail. Google will send you a pin code which you simply have to enter into your Google Places account.

2. Add keywords to your business description, but not too many
Throughout the setup process of the Google Places page you can describe your business in up to 200 characters. While you should use your most important keywords in this section, don’t just stuff keywords in. Write a useful, compelling description that will appeal to readers and Google.

3. Use the right categories to describe your business
With the categories you have to play by Google’s rules a little bit – you need to choose at least one or two categories that actually exist. Start typing and see what Google suggests to you, then you will still get the chance to invent three categories based what you actually do.

4. Make the most of the ‘Additional Details’ area
Not only is this a great way to get some more details of your business onto the page, it is also a great place to insert some of those keywords that will rank well. Most people just don’t seem to bother filling this in – stay one step in front of the competition!

5. Get list in other online business directories
Listings of your business in directories such as Local.com, Yellowpages.com, your local city’s chamber of commerce, or a directory affiliated with your profession can help boost your Place page’s ranking.

6. Space out the time when customers’ reviews are posted
Google will smell a rat if your reviews appear all at once. This might cause Google to push your Place page down in search results. So make sure your customer’s post their reviews in a steady stream.

7. Don’t forget to add videos and images
While this isn’t going to be a huge help to boost your ranking, geo-tagged photos and videos in particular may give you a bump. You can add up to 10 photos and up to five videos for free and these may make your Places page more appealing to searchers.

8. Monitor your Places page statistics.
By logging into your Places page account every so often you will be provided with a variety of statistics to help you better optimize your page. This includes the top search queries that caused users to see your listing and how many clicks occurred to your website over the past week or month.

These are just a few Google Places page optimization tips you must follow in order to get good rankings, do you have any additional tips? If so, we would love you to share them with our readers below.

Related posts:

 

Nov 27 2011

SEO: How to create an effective title

Category: SEOadmin @ 11:07 am


By Nick Harrison

Achieving SEO success for your website, your blog or both has a lot to do with the web or blog page title for these two reasons:

1: Google and other search engines use your webpage title (the title that appears on the top of your browser) or your article title to help determine which web pages to index using a specific search term. When you do a search for a keyword or phrase you will notice that practically all of the website links that you see have the keyword or phrase in the listed titles of the queried results.

2: An effective title will likely increase your CTR (click-through-rate). When people are using a search engine, their brains are focused on their search agenda: finding the first link that appears relevant to their search queries.

So, How do you create an effective title for SEO?

SEO how to:

SEO success starts with knowing the specific terms that people are searching for. Let’s use this very article as an example. Before doing any research, this article was originally named “Creating effective SEO titles.” After doing research, I learned that few people, if any, are searching the phrase “creating effective SEO titles.” There were also only 1,300 searches per month for “SEO titles” and 5,400 search queries for “SEO title.” Combined, 6,700 searches per month can produce some traffic if you are ranked near the top of Google’s search listing. However, I found that 1,830,000 searches per month have searched the phrase “SEO how to.” Worldwide, there were more than 11,100,000 searches for that phrase versus 26,600 for my original title. Even landing on the second or third page, I will more than likely get significantly more traffic with this new SEO-focused title. Plus, with the revised title “SEO: How to create an effective title,” I am focusing on the search phrase that is a lot more popular, while at the same time not ignoring “SEO title(s)” as a phrase.

For this research I used Google’s Adwords Keyword tool, which is free to use.

A popular misconception is that if more people are searching a term or phrase that it is harder to get a high position in the rankings. A lot depends on how much competition that search query has and how Google views your site overall as far as trust.

Analyzing competition for search terms is well beyond the scope of this article, but by doing research on what people are searching for, you can much better target your articles to where the traffic is.

CTR: Getting people to click

When people are searching for something specific, that is where their focus lies. This is precisely why I started this article’s title with “SEO: How to” because that is the term I feel is going to garner the most traffic. Google makes keywords and phrases that were searched for bold in the results. By having the term first, it may make it easier for my article to stand out since the searcher is more likely focused on finding that specific phrase vs. a title with scattered keywords.

Although having the phrase appear in succession vs. spread apart in the title may not necessarily change my results, it may help the post stand out more to end-users.

I also have noticed that articles with concise titles do better than those without. This is both from search engine results as well as social media sharing. A user shouldn’t have to figure out what your article is about because your title is confusing or too clever.

If you want to increase your traffic, research what people are searching for and incorporate those terms or phrases into your web page and article titles. It can substantially improve your traffic for years to come because SEO is the gift that keeps on giving.

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Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Connect with Crain’s via Facebook and Twitter. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Follow Ann on Twitter at @AnnDwyer_Crains.


 

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Article source: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20111114/BLOGS06/111119930/seo-how-to-create-an-effective-title

Nov 26 2011

Google Places: How Eye Tracking Heats Up Conversions and Clicks

Category: Search Enginesadmin @ 11:06 am


Advertisers and marketers have known for many years about how a viewer’s gaze travels across visual media. The effectiveness of any successful advertisement relies on understanding how the eye moves across a page, why it is drawn to particular areas, and what causes a viewer to linger at a given spot.

Modern persuasive advertisements stem from classical and renaissance artists. The great artists of antiquity were well versed in the use of spatial relationships and how the eye moves across a space.

In the 21st century, we see modern advertising employing these well-established concepts and are so well entrenched in our minds that the same techniques permeate every facet of advertising in use today.

Eye Tracking and Click Mapping Google Places

google-maps-tattoo-near-hamilton-on

A Toronto-based Canadian company, Mediative, spent a great deal of time and research using eye tracking technology, remote surveys, click-mapping and in-person interviews to determine how people interact with web sites.

Last month, Mediative concluded an in-depth study to determine how people interact within the search results of Google Places listings. The study was designed to determine which ads received more clicks and attention; listings with images, or those with customer quotes.

The main questions Mediative were hoping to answer were:

  • How do individuals interact with the search results from Google Places listings?
  • Where do people look on a page?
  • Do listings with reviews get more attention?
  • Do people really look at the maps?
  • Does Google’s “Golden Triangle” still receive much attention?

The methodology was based on a simple study using real page captures from Google map searches. The study enlisted 12 participants for in-person research and another 90 online participants to be studied with eye-tracking software.

The Main Findings

Each participant was given the same scenario. They were asked to make an imaginary road trip with stops in Hamilton, London, Winnipeg, and Edmonton and to choose a place for a friend to get a tattoo in each of these cities based on the available information in the Google Places search results.

The main findings of the study concluded that:

  • While top-listed results get the most attention, the listings below it received a high proportion of the viewers gaze as well as the map. These results were fairly consistent between both study groups.
  • Most clicking occurred on the same spots that the eyes were shown to have lingered on site.
  • The third result down in the listings which had reviews seemed to have boosted its popularity suggesting that being in the top-listed position id good, but social signals can be a significant boon to lower ranking sites.

google-golden-traingleMediative observed that Google’s Golden Triangle is still relevant in understanding how a viewers gaze travels across the screen.

In much the same as printed material, a viewer’s gaze begins at the top of the listing. The eye scans from left to right, as it moves down to subsequent listings. The viewer scanned less of the listing’s content the further down the result was located.

(The Golden Triangle is a based on established understanding of various cultural perceptions and interpretations of printed media. In Western cultural we printed media top to bottom, left to right. In other cultures the heat map would read right-to-left and vertically bottom to top.)

Additional Findings

Some of the other findings of the study concluded:

  • Listings that included images received more clicks and attention.
  • Maps generate a significant amount of the viewers’ attention.
  • When the top results have fewer reviews, lower results get more visual attention.
  • When no reviews are present, the top listing receives the most clicks.
  • If your site isn’t in the top listing, or doesn’t have reviews, it will usually be ignored; especially when other listings do have reviews or social signals.

Marketing Takeaway

The results of this study are significant to those currently employing, or who are considering employing the use of Google Places into their online social presence and marketing strategy. The understanding and implementation of these concepts are shown to have a substantial effect on businesses.

The research offers solid evidence to show that by maximizing your use the listings with SEO, maps, images and reviews, businesses can realize significant increases in click through rates and conversions.

Join us for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn about PPC management, keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability, and more.

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2124918/Google-Places-How-Eye-Tracking-Heats-Up-Conversions-and-Clicks

Nov 25 2011

Reorganizing internal vs. external backlinks

Category: Internet Newsadmin @ 11:04 am


by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re making a change to the way we categorize link data in Webmaster Tools. As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site. Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.

You can manage many different types of sites in Webmaster Tools: a plain domain name (example.com), a subdomain (www.example.com or cats.example.com), or a domain with a subfolder path (www.example.com/cats/ or www.example.com/users/catlover/). Previously, only links that started with your site’s exact URL would be categorized as internal links: so if you entered www.example.com/users/catlover/ as your site, links from www.example.com/users/catlover/profile.html would be categorized as internal, but links from www.example.com/users/ or www.example.com would be categorized as external links. This also meant that if you entered www.example.com as your site, links from example.com would be considered external because they don’t start with the same URL as your site (they don’t contain www).

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

As always, drop us a comment or join our Webmaster Help Forum if you have questions!

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/gbGy47yUC-Q/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

Nov 24 2011

New Google tools for SEO

Category: General Web Newsadmin @ 10:52 am


 

Google has recently released a new tool in its Analytics product, which enables you to link your Google Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account.

It’s early days yet, but I’d recommend that anyone involved with SEO should use this feature to enable some pretty powerful keyword research. You’ll see why in a minute.

First of all, I’ll take you through how to set this up; luckily it’s pretty straightforward.

Step 1. Jump into the new (beta) version of Analytics which you’ll see in the top right-hand corner of your account once you’ve logged in.

Step 2. Drill down into Traffic Sources and click the (new) “Search Engine Optimisation” report.

Step 3. The next thing you’ll need to do is link your Webmaster Tools account to your Analytics which you can see next.

Step 4. Pick the account you want to associate the Analytics with and you’re pretty much good to go.

Once this is all set up, what you’ll see is some really interesting new data about the keywords you rank for, how many visits you’ve received from them, the popularity of the search terms, as well as each keyword’s click through rate.

There’s an example below:

At an agency level, we’ve already started looking at this as a new keyword research tool. Our research using exact match impression keyword data from AdWords shows that the impressions listed in Analytics is pretty close to the impressions from AdWords on various keywords.

Using the impression column above means you can do some pretty accurate keyword research in my opinion.

The other interesting report is the Landing Pages report, which when you add a new dimension such as “Google Property” you can see where your traffic is coming from in terms of Google Image Search, Mobile search and the web.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

Tags:

Nov 23 2011

This Falls into “Be Careful what you Advertise”



Groupon creams small bakery with orders for 102,000 cupcakes
By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY

A wildly successfully Groupon promotion wiped out a year’s profit for a small British bakery that had to hire outside to fulfill orders for 102,000 discount cupcakes.

The “Need A Cake” bakery in Woodley had offered 12 cupcakes, which normally cost around $40, for $10 or a discount of 75%. Owner Rachel Brown, who normally fields about 100 orders a month, was swamped with 8,500 orders before she bailed out, the BBC reports.

“Without doubt, it was my worst-ever business decision,” said Brown, who has run the bakery for 25 years, the BBC reports.

Read the complete story…

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/

Nov 23 2011

Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

Category: General Web News,Internet Marketing,Internet Newsadmin @ 10:46 am


Written by Jonathan Simon Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Webmaster Level: All

The Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools now provides a way to submit new and updated URLs to Google for indexing. After you fetch a URL as Googlebot, if the fetch is successful, you’ll now see the option to submit that URL to our index. When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day. We’ll then consider it for inclusion in our index. Note that we don’t guarantee that every URL submitted in this way will be indexed; we’ll still use our regular processes—the same ones we use on URLs discovered in any other way—to evaluate whether a URL belongs in our index.

This new functionality may help you in several situations: if you’ve just launched a new site, or added some key new pages, you can ask Googlebot to find and crawl them immediately rather than waiting for us to discover them naturally. You can also submit URLs that are already indexed in order to refresh them, say if you’ve updated some key content for the event you’re hosting this weekend and want to make sure we see it in time. It could also help if you’ve accidentally published information that you didn’t mean to, and want to update our cached version after you’ve removed the information from your site.

How to submit a URL
First, use Diagnostics Fetch As Googlebot to fetch the URL you want to submit to Google. If the URL is successfully fetched you’ll see a new “Submit to index” link appear next to the fetched URL.

Once you click “Submit to index” you’ll see a dialog box that allows you to choose whether you want to submit only the one URL, or that URL and all its linked pages.

When submitting individual URLs, we have a maximum limit of 50 submissions per week; when submitting URLs with all linked pages, the limit is 10 submissions per month. You can see how many submissions you have left on the Fetch as Googlebot page. Any URL submitted should point to content that would be suitable for Google Web Search, so if you’re trying to submit images or videos you should use Sitemaps instead.

Submit URLs to Google without verifying
In conjunction with this update to Fetch as Googlebot, we’ve also updated the public “Add your URL to Google” form. It’s now the Crawl URL form. It has the same quota limits for submitting pages to the index as the Fetch as Googlebot feature but doesn’t require verifying ownership of the site in question, so you can submit any URLs that you want crawled and indexed.

Note that Googlebot is already pretty good about finding and crawling new content in a timely fashion, so don’t feel obligated to use this tool for every change or update on your site. But if you’ve got a URL whose crawling or indexing you want to speed up, consider submitting it using the Crawl URL form or the updated Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools. Feel free to comment here or visit our Webmaster Help Forum if you have more detailed questions.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/tyYb-oayJyQ/submit-urls-to-google-with-fetch-as.html

Nov 19 2011

Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes Brands Are Still Making

Category: SEOadmin @ 11:00 am



Last week I asked on Twitter to see what common SEO mistakes were still being made by retail websites. This received a great response, so I thought I’d share the top replies with our readers.

I’ve picked some UK high street retail examples to help display the issues raised, but please note that we have no connection with any of these websites – so this is an outside perspective. There may be logical reasons for the examples which we are unaware of, but these have been used in order to highlight where SEO mistakes are commonly made.

 

Non-descriptive URL structure

Ideally you want to keep your URLs concise and keyword descriptive. So automatically generated, ID-based URLs aren’t going to help your SEO, unless you’re aiming to rank for g474502s2 - in which case Next.co.uk have dominated market share!

Next SEO

Long and messy URLs generated by CMS

Some content management systems really make a mess of URLs. From an SEO perspective you want to have full control over re-writing category-level URLs such as this one on Argos:

Argos SEO

Linking to multiple homepage URLs

This is a common mistake – which is getting better across many sites, but if you click the logo or homepage link on some sites, you’ll find that rather than getting sent back to the root domain, you’re taken to a duplicate copy of the page on a new URL. See this example on House of Fraser:

House of Fraser SEO

Poor title tags/meta descriptions

I’ve worked with a CMS before that didn’t allow you to edit title tags at all – that was a bit of a problem! Hopefully your site won’t be quite that bad, but too often people just think about SEO for generating rankings – what about click through rates and conversions though?

Crafting an enticing title tag and meta description should be as important as writing a high CTR, converting AdWords ad – notice the difference between these two listings for Marks and Spencer – surely MS would prefer you click on the natural free listing given the choice!

Marks and Spencer SEO

No user-generated content/reviews

For conversion rates alone, having reviews and user-generated content is an excellent way to boost your site’s performance. See this case study on how onlineshoes.com increased sales by 119% due to user reviews. But it’s also a great way of adding extra content to your products – giving the search engines that extra 200-300 words of unique and what should be well-optimised copy (because it’s about the product) could well be enough to make a significant increase in search rankings.

It could certainly be worth testing at the very least for a lot of brands, for example Ted Baker:

Ted Baker SEO

Forgetting about branded product search

One of the first things I check with our e-commerce and retail clients is branded search results. It’s often just taken for granted that you will be ranking for your branded keywords, so it’s assumed that non-branded search and first-time visitors is the main target. However, this isn’t always the case and it definitely shouldn’t just be assumed – these are almost certainly going to be your top converting keywords, so a small amount of effort here can easily pay off to ensure that you’re generating the majority of traffic – which let’s face it you deserve, it’s your product after all!

It’s amazing how many brands don’t rank for their own products though – check out these results for Sony W510 12MP which are dominated by Argos and Amazon:

Sony SEO

Lack of static on-page content

Many websites struggle when it comes to having good, optimised content deeper in the site. For example, product pages which have very little descriptive text written about them could be much better optimised for search. See this example from Monsoon, which showcases the product reasonably well, but does little towards telling users and the search engines about it:

Monsoon SEO

Pulling search results in as category pages

As above, sometimes category pages are very weak on content and often these are just search results which are being pulled into a page. Yes it may do a job for the user – but surely a bit more text here would help to give the search engines a bit more to go on. It doesn’t even have to be too detailed – a quick description underneath “Mens Hats, Gloves Scarves” on the Debenhams site here would be a big improvement to optimise for the phrase “Mens Hats”, which they currently bid on using PPC, yet fail to rank in the top 50 positions in Google organically for:

Debenhams SEO

Webpages content too image-based

From the websites I’ve reviewed today, I’ve actually been quite impressed that most of these have now moved away from having content which is too image or flash-based. This is a clear SEO issue to avoid, as you want your site’s content to be as well optimised as possible – which means it should be text-rich. Topman is an example of a site which hasn’t quite got there yet – the only text currently on their homepage is navigational:

Topman SEO

Duplicate content – same product, multiple categories

I’ve seen several retail sites in the past where they have caused duplicate content issues by having category-level subfolders within the product URL. Here’s one example from Blacks, where they have a product which is listed under two different categories, so they’ve ended up with two URLs for what is exactly the same product:

Blacks SEO
Blacks duplicate content

Because they sit under both categories, the URLs are duplicated – so ideally it’s normally best to avoid using category-level subfolders in product pages – see Amazon for an example of this. Also, canonical tags are there to help get around this issue if it exists – but ideally you’ll want to have each product page in a single location. Hope that makes sense, but Dan’s written a much more detailed post on product URLs causing duplicate content issues – so you should read that one if it doesn’t!

So those are the top SEO mistakes we’ve found retail websites are still making – a big thanks to Malcolm SladeRishi LakhaniPaul RogersStuart TurnerAshley HaywardDaniel BianchiniIan Galpin and Edwin Hayward who contributed via Twitter. And if you have any questions or comments on what you’ve found to be the biggest challenges, it would be great to hear about this in the comments.

Comments

 

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Article source: http://www.seoarticles.com/2011/09/28/top-10-retail-seo-mistakes-brands-are-still-making/

Nov 18 2011

Google Snaps Up Katango, Social Contact Sorter Meant for Facebook

Category: Internet News,Search Engines,Web Marketingadmin @ 10:58 am


From SearchEngineWatch.com

katango

Google has just acquired startup Katango, makers of a Facebook friends list generating iPhone app released this July. Shortly after its debut, however, Katango’s autogenerator faced serious competition from Facebook itself, as it rolled out its new Smart Lists feature.

Luckily for Katango, Facebook isn’t the only game in town. It seems Google appreciates the value of a list maker to help Google+ users more easily sort their contacts into Circles.

Facebook’s Lists allow users to share content with select audiences, though it never really caught on until Smart Lists came out. Google+ can now use Katango’s social sorting algorithm to help users sort out contacts into Circles based on the type or volume of interactions and other factors.

The acquisition brings some great talent to Google as well; co-founder/chairman Yoav Shoham is a Stanford computer science professor, while fellow co-founders Thuc Vu and Michael Munie are Stanford PhD grads. The amount of the deal is undisclosed.

Robert Scoble interviewed Shoham this summer; check out the video to learn more about Katango and how it works.

 

This is Google’s 24th acquisition of 2011. Earlier today we reported on Google acquiring Apture.

Join us for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn about PPC management, keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability, and more.

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2124557/Google-Snaps-Up-Katango-Social-Contact-Sorter-Meant-for-Facebook

Nov 17 2011

Work smarter, not harder, with site health

Category: Internet Newsadmin @ 10:43 am


Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster level: All

We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to easily see what needs your attention the most, without having to click through all of the reports in Webmaster Tools for every site you manage.

Here’s what the new home page looks like:

You can see that sites with health problems are shown at the top of the list. (If you prefer, you can always switch back to listing your sites alphabetically.) To see the specific issues we detected on a site, click the site health icon

or the “Check site health” link next to that site:

This new home page is currently only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your Webmaster Tools account (either verified or unverified). We’re working on making it available to all accounts in the future. If you have more than 100 sites, you can see site health information at the top of the Dashboard for each of your sites.

Right now we include three issues in your site’s health check:

  1. Have we detected malware on the site?
  2. Have any important pages been removed via our URL removal tool?
  3. Are any of your important pages blocked from crawling in robots.txt?

You can click on any of these items to get more details about what we detected on your site. If the site health icon and the “Check site health” link don’t appear next to a site, it means that we didn’t detect any of these issues on that site (congratulations!).

A word about “important pages:” as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration Crawler access Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics Crawl errors Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on “important pages.” Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.

Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website “unhealthy;” in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site. But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.

After you’ve resolved any site health issues we’ve flagged, it will usually take several days for the warning to disappear from your Webmaster Tools account, since we have to recrawl the site, see the changes you’ve made, and then process that information through our Web Search and Webmaster Tools pipelines. If you continue to see a site health warning for that site after a week or so, the issue may not have been resolved. Feel free to ask for help tracking it down in our Webmaster Help Forum… and let us know what you think!

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/3ftulkOthEU/work-smarter-not-harder-with-site.html

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