By, JR

I wanted to talk about Google Webmaster Tools for a minute. If you have not taken full advantage of all that GWT has to offer in your Internet marketing efforts, I strongly recommend you do.

First, you should create a central Google cccounts account and this way you can access all of Google’s tools, like GWT, Analytics, Adsense and more at: Create Google Account

Always submit your sites and sitemaps to GWT once they are complete. Forget all the crap you hear about “let the SE’s discover your site on their own.” This is stupid and you don’t have to wait. Google wants you to submit to them, they ask you to and recommend that you do, see it here.

Add Your Sites to GWT here

Besides submitting your sites for indexing and crawling, GWT offers lots of valuable tools to analyze your websites and their performance in Google, as well as detect any problems that may occur with them.

OVERVIEW TAB

In overview you can see how often your site is crawled and more important you can see the INDEX STATS.

Benefits: You can see which webpages are indexed, the current cache of your site, links to your home page and more.

DIAGNOSIS TAB

Web Crawl

Let’s you see any problems that Google had with crawling specific pages on your site, URL not found, HTTP errors and more (It will show those you blocked by robots.txt but you can ignore those).

A couple of days ago, Google announced a great new feature added to this section called “Linked From“, this will show where the source URL that the broken pages are being linked from, both externally and internally. Learn more about this feature at Google’s Webmaster Blog.

Benefits: Allows you to see real accessibility problems with your website pages that you need to address to make sure those webpages are indexable and working properly.

Content Analysis

Shows potential problems with Meta Tags and duplicate Meta Tags that may be occurring on your website pages. This just proves the point I hammered in Complete Guide to Meta Tags, that Google does pay attention to those. Contrary to some people’s beliefs that they are worthless, they need to be personalized and customized for EVERY page of your website.

Benefits: Allows you to optimize Meta Tags and shows you those you may have missed, as in duplicate Meta Tags.

STATISTICS TAB

Top Search Queries will show you 2 things:

1. Traffic - What keywords are being used by searchers to find your site

2. Impressions - The top 20 search queries in which your site appeared, and the percentage of the top 20 queries represented by each search.

Both of these also show your position in SERPS for those keywords/search terms.

Benefits: Essential analysis of what keywords your site is showing up for and ranking in.

What Googlebot Sees

This one is very useful and will show you 3 Things:

1. Anchor Text Phrases in External Backlinks to your site!

2. Keywords appearing ON your site

3. Keywords used in anchor text in external links to your site

Benefits: Huge benefits! Allows you to be sure your website is optimized for the keywords and phrases you want it too. Seeing anchor text phrases and keywords to make sure you are anchoring correctly in your backlinks for the keywords you want to rank for.

LINKS TAB

Pages with External Links:

This is a great one and shows you numbers of as well as all the pages on your site that have external links pointing to them.

Benefit: This is good for analyzing where you need work on building more deep page backlinks for your site. Remember when link building it is important to link not only to your home page but also to deep pages as well, learn more at: Article Marketing Backlink Techniques

Pages with Internal Links:

This one is to analyze your internal link building for on-site SEO. Remember that linking internally to pages within your own site is very important, not only for allowing Google to relate your pages with keywords but also to lower the bounce rate and allow for easier navigation for your visitors. Google wrote about good internal link structure on their webmaster’s blog just this week.

Benefits: Huge! Allows you to make sure that internal link structure is optimal and where it may need work.

OTHER TABS

Sitemaps

This is where you can see any errors or warnings about your sitemap that Google found. This is important analysis for indexing your site pages correctly.

TOOLS TAB

The Tools Tab has lots of features. A couple of important ones to be noted are:

Analyze Robots

Check your robots.txt file and if Google was able to access it without problems.

Set Preferred Domain

Here you can set how you want your domain to display in the index. You can set all occurrences of your domain to be either http://www.yourdomain OR http://yourdomain (without the www).

Benefits: This is important because people will link to you in different ways so, if you set a preference, you let Google know which URL you prefer and avoid any duplicate content issues that may occur.

By, JR

If you have a blog you know that you get trackbacks, which are alerts, whenever anyone is linking to your site’s content, and that is some of the best information you can get, to see who and what’s being linked to. If both the linker and linkee are using Wordpress then the trackback comes to you automatically. However, if the linker blog is not using wordpress, and is using another blogging platform then you may not get the alert, unless the trackback url was specially added and with Blogger, for instance, I do not believe that function even exists. For static websites these auto trackbacks do not exist at all.

This is where Google Alerts comes in. Google Alerts will notify you via email whenever a backlink to your sites/blogs shows up on another site or blog.

These alerts include everything:

1. Links directly to your website pages/blogs

2. When articles you write get republished on other sites that include backlinks to your sites in the resource box. This is also a great way to make sure that the republishers are following the article republishing rules by keeping your articles and links intact, as they are supposed to.

3. Whenever someone social bookmarks your sites and blogs.

4. Virtually any mention of your site’s on the web.

Set Up a Google Alert:

1. Go to Google Alerts and either log in to to your Google Account or set up an alert directly from the landing page.

2. Search Terms - Add the search terms for your alert, the best option for this is the HOME PAGE URL of your site. Also, you can set up a separate alert for your site name if you want, but then you will get emails when ANY word within your site name appears on the web.

3. Type - Choose COMPREHENSIVE

4. Choose How Often you will receive emails, I choose AS IT HAPPENS.

5. Enter your email

Repeat for each site and blog you own!!

That’s it, takes 2 minutes and you will be getting some very useful info!!

Do you guys use GA? Any tips for search terms?

By, JR

Yes, another article about duplicate content, I know, you guys may want to strangle me right now, but there is so much hype and misconception out there about duplicate content and the duplicate content Google slap that I just had to go there and since Google blogged about it last week, I figured now is the perfect time!

Over and over duplicate content is mistaken and distorted into something it isn’t. Some of the biggest myths are about article marketing and duplicate content.

ARTICLES AND DUPLICATE CONTENT - FACT AND MYTH

MYTH: You have to use some article spinner software, to change your articles around or you will get slapped by Google for submitting the same article to different article sites.

FACT: Totally UNTRUE and doesn’t even make sense. I can and do all the time, submit the same article to thousands of sites with Article Marketer and they always show up in search results for the keywords, some rank higher than others, depending on the article site, but they will all be there.

MYTH: Google will slap you for submitting the same article to different article sites.

FACT: Umm, okay how would they do this? In reality, logistically there is no way that Google can penalize the author even if they wanted to, which they don’t.

If, in reality, Google penalized for duplicate articles the logic would follow that G would have to penalize the article sites for publishing the duplicates and that would mean that there would be no article sites left since they often feature the same article submitted by the same author that is also published on other sites.

And, then would it also follow that if same articles were considered duplicate content, the millions of sites that syndicate and disburse articles and news feeds, such as that from the Associated Press, would have been banned long ago.

FACT: Duplicate Content has nothing to do with the submitting the same article. Duplicate content refers to the significantly noticeable duplicated content within the SAME domain or across multiple domains.

THE REAL MEANING OF DUPLICATE CONTENT

Really there are two forms of duplicate content, the malicious and non malicious types.

Non-Malicious Duplicate Content

Same exact content repeated across the same domain, usually because of the CMS design and without malicious intent by the webmaster.

1. Same content across the same domain, such as such as two versions of the same page, for example, a readable and print version on a website.

2. Blogs - By design blogs and CMS apps generate duplicate content, such as the same content falling under archives, tags and new posts listed on the home page.

Both of the above can be handled by indicating on your robots.txt file to block the search engine from crawling and indexing those pages.

Example of Robots.txt commands:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /print page/

Learn more ways to address such non malicious duplicate content on your sites at GWT on Fixing Duplicate Content Issues.

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”
-Google Webmaster Tools

Malicious Duplicate Content - The Real Penalty

Malicious duplicate content is the true culprit and WILL suffer a duplicate content penalty and basically applies to: Substantially same content placed on multiple pages, subdomains, or multiple domains to deliberately manipulate the search engine rankings, and get more traffic.

Last week Google posted a very comprehensive post about duplicate content on their Webmaster Central Blog that will hopefully crush the myths forever and end the constant barage of hype that exists about duplicate content, read it at: Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty

What do you guys think? Sick of duplicate content yet?

By, JR

I wanted to let you guys know about Google Insights, a new tool that gives online search trend information for niche and keyword research for Affiliate Marketing and niche website research.

Google Insights Offers Several Search Filters:

• Country/Region and Sub Regions, like US states
• Categories
• Time frames, like last 30 or 90 days, certain years

Niche Research Results:

Shows a graph of searches to see interest of the niche over time. Also shows trend and niche popularity results by US states!

I think the best data is the Top Searches and Rising Searches, which can give you ideas on the volume and therefore popularity of searches, as well as the searches that are rising.

By the way, this tool works with broad searches only, so no quotes or allintitle. It is more geared for general niche ideas and the trends of their popularity on the net.

Google Insights is not a tool that should replace your regular keyword research tools that give you more detailed information, such as number of searches BUT, it can be used to enhance your niche research and offer more insights into the trends of what people are searching for.

By, JR

We all know about Wikipedia right? In similar fashion, Google has just launched Knol, basically a Knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic at knol.google.com

I was searching for migraines the other day and I noticed a knol.google link in the SERPS. Not having heard of Knol. I did some research into what it was. After that I looked closely at the SERPS and realized that not only was the very new Knol article sitting on Page 1 it was sitting above several authority migraine sites, that were PR5 and PR6.

Could it be that Google is actually biased and sway their algo to their favor? :eek

Actually, since the day after the launch of Knol, Knol articles have been mysteriously outranking other well known and established sites, and hitting page 1 of SERPS, bypassing high authority and high PR sites for respective keywords.

Today I read a post, Google Knol - Google’s Latest Attack on Copyright, by Aaron Wall, of SEOBook, who did a little test of his own where he copied an article on to Knol that he wrote on the PR5, high authority and well established article site, work.com, and lo and behold the Google algorithm chose to bypass the previously published content and Aaron’s Knol took the higher spot in the SERPS. Hmmm.

Also of interest is that Google knows the content is duplicated, because on Aaron’s Knol there is a pretty little box that’s header reads “Similar Content on the Web” and lists Work.com as the source.

All this leaves little doubt that Google favors its own interests even when the content is previously published by high authority sites.

What is scary about Knol:

Usually when someone uses content from your websites under a creative commons license, it is fine because you get the backlinks as a pay-off. But, on Knoll all out bound links are NO FOLLOW so you get absolutely no value or credit from your content being used.

Plus, the hideous fact that your content can be used against you. If your content is hijacked and published on Knol, then Knol may outrank your site, even if you have high authority.

Knol and Internet Marketing Benefits:

On the flip side, this favoritism can be used in our favor for Internet Marketing and especially for those sites that are not high ranking authority sites and need radical promotion, traffic and Internet Marketing efforts.

After all, this blog is about Internet marketing and wherever we can find an Internet marketing edge we need to use it. Right?

Research some new keywords for your sites/blogs and write some Knols. If your site is really low in SERPS, you can use the existing keywords of your site, this way you will sit high in SERPS and not have to worry about out ranking yourself.

Link to your sites/blogs as references to drive traffic and for promotion, even though the links are no-follow the readers of the Knol will get exposure to your site.

Write comprehensive articles. Have several paragraphs and subheaders, the Knol WYSIWYG allows for h2 and h3 headers. Make sure to use keywords in title and about 5% density throughout. Pretty much same techniques as I explain for Squidoo and for subpage content as explained on 6 Step Checklist for On-Site Search Engine Optimization.

Include images when applicable. Don’t spam!! Don’t write garbage, write well written content. Write as a professional and establish yourself as an authority within your subject, this will deliver more clicks to your site.

What do you guys think, is Google wrong? Is this business as usual? Can you really blame Google for favoring their own sites?

By, JR

Just found out that Google is doing another Page Rank update. Three of my sites went up thanks to all the link building efforts. This is the fun part, where the link building efforts of Internet Marketing pay off!

Remember to continue your link building efforts daily. It may be tedious, and boring but it is crucial for Search Engine Optimization and Page Rank and of course for climbing in the Search Engine Page Results (SERPS).

There are times when it may seem like it’s all useless and lame and that you hate anything related to the word link. You want to take that anchor text and chuck it far over a nice high bridge. You will want to shoot yourself when the last thing in the world you want is to see another hyperlink, but then the gates open and beautiful music starts playing, you are swooped up by snow white angels and carried off into Page Rank Bliss.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but believe me it all pays off in the end.

Top Page Rank Increase Link Building Methods:

Relevant Link Exchange

Article Marketing: Article Marketing 101 - Huge Internet Marketing Benefits

Directory Submission

Do-Follow Social Bookmarks: Social Marketing 45 Social Bookmark Sites

I am not going to go over the details as I have written detailed guides on this before:

Are you Pulling Enough Link Juice? Link Building Basics

13 Ways to Link Building that Also Increase Website Traffic

Internal Link Building for On-Site Search Engine Optimization

The Importance of Anchor Text in Link Building

AND, remember the do-follow blog comments, you can find do-follow blogs by keywords with Do-Follow Diver Search Engine.

Also, I offer a do-follow link in comments. So leave a comment and you will get a nice backlink!! Make sure to use your good anchor text ;-).

Now, go build links!!