Hi, Hope you're doing well.

I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah

Hope my answer helps you. I am still kind of a beginner. Other professionals, feel free to correct my answer.

Here's what I think. There is no exact definition on number of times you should use a keyword. But if you look at the language, lot of times you can tell it is keyword stuffing. Think about it this way. With semantic search, knowledge graph, contextual meanings, schema markups, Search engines have become really smart to know what content relates to what. By over using the keyword, you are actually failing to provide meaning to your content. There are other details that go with it, such as what do people usually click on when they search for "office space in NY" etc, what do other people link to etc.

The language should be conversational. Using the word office space multiple times is actually taking away the opportunity to mention other things. It could be something like square feet details, paint colors, lease time etc.

Google has clearly said that Google is for users, not webmasters, or websites. Why do you think they made the whole meta keywords irrelevant?

I am probably trying to confirm your doubt that yes you are most likely keyword stuffing. Also, you are making it more obvious by making the texts bold. Google would more likely find something else that provides more value.

It is definitely able to read the alt tags, as you know, and other tags. Alt tags is usually for crawlers, and other screen reader software to decipher what the image is about. I would probably stick to alt texts not more than a sentence.

It is also able to read href's, and the anchor text it contains. Nobody exactly knows how exactly Google functions, but from experience, I want to say, href is definitely a part of their ranking algorithm. The URL structure matters too. For example, www.example.com/ny-office-space.htm will make more sense then a randomly generated url that is something like, www.example.com/123456-space.htm

I would probably try to think differently about content. Having a diverse language is probably more beneficial, as far as it is relevant, and it is even more beneficial if you go above and beyond. For example if your topic focus is "apples", it is good to talk about apples, but it would be better if you talk about history of apples, different kinds of apples etc.

I would think about having a diverse language in terms of how it would benefit users, or people who search on the web. I would probably not think about having a diverse language just because you can rank. Obviously that is the goal, but Having that thought process might actually hinder your ability to provide good valuable content. If your content is good, Google will definitely rank. Not sure if everyone will agree to this.

Also, I would probably do something like how hard it is to rank for "Office space", and that in NY. sometimes also because of high competition, you might need to up your game even more. Moz, has a "Keyword difficulty tool" which can help you determine that.

You can also in your webmaster tools see how Googlbot reads, or fetches your content for the home page. Lot of times, things could be inadvertently be blocked in robots.txt. For example if you are blocking the whole images folder, and your CSS, javascripts etc, are in the same folder, Google will not be able to read your content the way a normal user sees your content. Making google read your content as close to as a user does, will probably help you more!

The question probably needs more detailed answers. All other professionals can feel free to add/correct. I personally feel that your page is not spammy, but it is, if not more, slightly keyword stuffed.

Hope I helped you clear some of your concerns. Good luck with everything!

found it. it deals with the sitemap. It's auto generated. I also think it deals with search result and a high CTR.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

I was curious how certain sites have links under their rich snippet texts? is it from google authorship?

iaNqX.jpg

Robert,

next time you want to quote me, at least quote the full sentence. Also, the word software, never was mentioned or said. You don't need an article spinning program to re-spin an article.

Also, maybe you should try blogging instead of posting your clients on free directory sites which require little to no work. oh and low domain scores.

yeah, I recommend getting them to write an article and do some some spinning to that article and repost it on other blog sites with high domain authority.

From there, ask them what kind of research do you want them to do for them regarding the services they offer, and look at what their competitors have to say about that subject and come up with your own words. Re spin that and repost that on other blogs.

Then use google's feed burner to link those blogs.

i mean i do inhouse seo for a very high competitive niche market, where our competitors do some shady stuff, so it's hard to stay in the "white hat zone"

just my two cents.

As Allstar mentioned, what's your keywords? use those.

Obviously you're creating links to manipulate your client's rank and i understand, they want results.

Look at your competitor's backlinks and try to post on the ones that have high domain authority. within a few months and a few hundred back links your client will be in competitive standing against them with their own keywords or the keywords you chose for your clients.

and if you dont already know http://www.opensiteexplorer.org for looking at your competitor's backlinks.

Are there any benefits to linking a shortened url vs. an anchor text when I am link building?Would linking via shortened link such as tinyurl cause problems with SERPS? Also, would it be more beneficial to short link to the homepage or landing page?

Thank you Thomas.

I just used that search query, and I received only 3 results. I am 100% sure we have more than 3 sites linking to us..lol. We are back linked to 1,000s of sites. Is there another search query.

Basically, I want to see our competitor's backlinks. I have used open site explorer, but they only pull up back links that are months to years old. I want to see if they have any fresh back links, and also to check if the back links we have provided are index and searchable on open site explorer(which i've only seen 1 new back link that's 2 months old).

Any ideas?

Hello,

I've been using open site explorer, dabbled with seo spy glass, and other back linking sites, but I was wondering if there was a manual way of searching for back links? Such as site.www.widgets.com +keyword -widgets.com to show me results of all the sites pointing to www.widgets.com, or pointing to the keywords linking to widgets.com. I do enjoy Open Site Explorer, but it takes a few months index the back links ive done.

No. Only things you can do, as far as I know are:

1. clear your history(i do from the beginning of time)

2. Sign out of Google/Gmail

3. Make sure your preference search is set to OFF.

since I keep track of my keywords on a google doc, I just open up Internet Explorer and save the rankings on there(I use dual monitors).

Hope my answer helps you. I am still kind of a beginner. Other professionals, feel free to correct my answer.

Here's what I think. There is no exact definition on number of times you should use a keyword. But if you look at the language, lot of times you can tell it is keyword stuffing. Think about it this way. With semantic search, knowledge graph, contextual meanings, schema markups, Search engines have become really smart to know what content relates to what. By over using the keyword, you are actually failing to provide meaning to your content. There are other details that go with it, such as what do people usually click on when they search for "office space in NY" etc, what do other people link to etc.

The language should be conversational. Using the word office space multiple times is actually taking away the opportunity to mention other things. It could be something like square feet details, paint colors, lease time etc.

Google has clearly said that Google is for users, not webmasters, or websites. Why do you think they made the whole meta keywords irrelevant?

I am probably trying to confirm your doubt that yes you are most likely keyword stuffing. Also, you are making it more obvious by making the texts bold. Google would more likely find something else that provides more value.

It is definitely able to read the alt tags, as you know, and other tags. Alt tags is usually for crawlers, and other screen reader software to decipher what the image is about. I would probably stick to alt texts not more than a sentence.

It is also able to read href's, and the anchor text it contains. Nobody exactly knows how exactly Google functions, but from experience, I want to say, href is definitely a part of their ranking algorithm. The URL structure matters too. For example, www.example.com/ny-office-space.htm will make more sense then a randomly generated url that is something like, www.example.com/123456-space.htm

I would probably try to think differently about content. Having a diverse language is probably more beneficial, as far as it is relevant, and it is even more beneficial if you go above and beyond. For example if your topic focus is "apples", it is good to talk about apples, but it would be better if you talk about history of apples, different kinds of apples etc.

I would think about having a diverse language in terms of how it would benefit users, or people who search on the web. I would probably not think about having a diverse language just because you can rank. Obviously that is the goal, but Having that thought process might actually hinder your ability to provide good valuable content. If your content is good, Google will definitely rank. Not sure if everyone will agree to this.

Also, I would probably do something like how hard it is to rank for "Office space", and that in NY. sometimes also because of high competition, you might need to up your game even more. Moz, has a "Keyword difficulty tool" which can help you determine that.

You can also in your webmaster tools see how Googlbot reads, or fetches your content for the home page. Lot of times, things could be inadvertently be blocked in robots.txt. For example if you are blocking the whole images folder, and your CSS, javascripts etc, are in the same folder, Google will not be able to read your content the way a normal user sees your content. Making google read your content as close to as a user does, will probably help you more!

The question probably needs more detailed answers. All other professionals can feel free to add/correct. I personally feel that your page is not spammy, but it is, if not more, slightly keyword stuffed.

Hope I helped you clear some of your concerns. Good luck with everything!

Hi, Hope you're doing well.

I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah

Robert,

next time you want to quote me, at least quote the full sentence. Also, the word software, never was mentioned or said. You don't need an article spinning program to re-spin an article.

Also, maybe you should try blogging instead of posting your clients on free directory sites which require little to no work. oh and low domain scores.

No. Only things you can do, as far as I know are:

1. clear your history(i do from the beginning of time)

2. Sign out of Google/Gmail

3. Make sure your preference search is set to OFF.

since I keep track of my keywords on a google doc, I just open up Internet Explorer and save the rankings on there(I use dual monitors).

yeah, I recommend getting them to write an article and do some some spinning to that article and repost it on other blog sites with high domain authority.

From there, ask them what kind of research do you want them to do for them regarding the services they offer, and look at what their competitors have to say about that subject and come up with your own words. Re spin that and repost that on other blogs.

Then use google's feed burner to link those blogs.

i mean i do inhouse seo for a very high competitive niche market, where our competitors do some shady stuff, so it's hard to stay in the "white hat zone"

just my two cents.

As Allstar mentioned, what's your keywords? use those.

Obviously you're creating links to manipulate your client's rank and i understand, they want results.

Look at your competitor's backlinks and try to post on the ones that have high domain authority. within a few months and a few hundred back links your client will be in competitive standing against them with their own keywords or the keywords you chose for your clients.

and if you dont already know http://www.opensiteexplorer.org for looking at your competitor's backlinks.