Back in 2009, Google released Website Translator, a plugin powered by Google Translate, which enabled webmasters to make their site’s content available in 51 languages (now it’s over 60). Google says over a million sites have utilized it to date.
Google has now launched a new feature that lets users customize the translations and make adjustments.
“Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar,” explains Google Translate product manager Jeff Chin, in a blog post. “They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.”
To use the new features, webmasters can simply add the plugin and customization meta tag to their site, translate a page into one language, hover over a translated sentence to display the original text, click on “contribute a better translation,” and click a phrase to choose an automatic, alternative translation. You can also double-click to edit the translation directly.

“If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away — the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction,” says Chin. “If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries.”
The feature is currently in beta, and Google still considers it experimental, but if you can actually edit the translations yourself, you should have more control over how your text is displayed, which would be an automatic improvement to the plugin.
Here, you can find tools and resources to add translation to your site.

Source : webpronews

It's become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the "danger zone" in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus.

1. Cleansing Domains

While not technically a form of link building, 301 "cleansing" domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers just cut the trouble redirected domains loose like anchors, and float on into the night with whatever treasure they've gathered.
Link building through redirects should be easy to catch, as new links to a domain that is currently redirecting is hardly natural behavior. To anyone watching, it's like shooting up a flare that says, "I'm probably manipulating links." The fact that search engines aren't watching closely right now is no guarantee of future success, so I'd avoid this and similar behavior if future success is a goal.

2. Blog Networks & Poorly Executed Guest Blogs

I've already covered the potential risks of blog networks in depth here. Google hates blog networks - fake blogs that members pay or contribute content to in order to get links back to their or their clients' sites. Guest blogging and other forms of contributing content to legitimate sites is a much whiter tactic, but consider that a strategy that relies heavily on low-quality guest blogging looks a lot like blog network spam.
With blog networks, each blog has content with a constant ratio of words to links. It posts externally to a random sites multiple times, and with a lot of "inorganic" anchor text for commercially valuable terms. Almost all backlinks to blog networks are also spam.
I cringe when I see low-quality blogs with questionable backlinks accepting guest blog posts that meet rigid word length and external link guidelines. Quality blogs tend not to care if the post is 400-500 words with two links in the bio, and quality writers tend not to ruin the post with excessive linking. Most of us see guest blogging as a white-hat tactic, but a backlink profile filled with low-quality guest posts looks remarkably similar to the profile of a site using automated blog networks.
I'd obviously steer clear of blog networks, but I'd be just as wary of low-quality inorganic guest blogs that look unnatural. Guest blog on sites with high quality standards and legitimate backlink profiles of their own.

3. Article Marketing Spam

Article link addiction is still a real thing for new SEOs. You get one or two links with anchor text of your choice, and your rankings rise. You're not on the first page, but you do it again and get closer. The articles are easy and cheap, and they take no creativity or mental effort. You realize that you're reaching diminishing returns on the articles, but your solution isn't to stop - you just need to do more articles. Before you know it, you're searching for lists of the top article sites that give followed links and looking for automated solutions to build low-quality links to your low-quality links.
Most articles are made for the sole purpose of getting a link, and essentially all followed links are self-generated rather than endorsements. Google has accordingly made article links count for very little, and has hammered article sites for their low-quality content.
Maybe you're wondering how to get a piece of that awesome trend, but hopefully you'll join me in accepting that article directories aren't coming back. Because they can theoretically be legitimate, article links are generally devalued rather than penalized. As with all link spam, your risk of receiving more harsh punishment rises proportionate to the percentage of similar links in your profile.

4. Single-Post Blogs

Ironically named "Web 2.0 Blogs" by some spam peddlers, these two-page blogs on Tumblr and Wordpress sub-domains never see the light of day. After setting up the free content hub with an article or two, the site is then "infused" with link juice, generally from social bookmarking links (discussed below).
Despite their prevalence, these sites don't do much for rankings. Links with no weight come in, and links with no impact go out. They persist because with a decent free template, clients can be shown a link on a page that doesn't look bad. Google doesn't need to do much to weed these out, because they're already doing nothing.

5. (Paid) Site-Wide Links

Site-wide footer links used to be all the rage. Google crippled their link-juice-passing power because most footer links pointing to external sites are either Google Bombs or paid links. Where else would you put a site-wide link that you don't want your users to click?
To my point of avoiding the appearance of spam, Penguin slammed a number of sites with a high proportion of site-wide (footer) links that many would not have considered manipulative. Almost every free Wordpress theme that I've seen links back to the creator's page with choice anchor text, and now a lot of Wordpress themes are desperately pushing updates to alter or remove the link. Penguin didn't care if you got crazy with a plugin link, designed a web site, or hacked a template; the over-use of anchor text hit everyone. This goes to show that widespread industry practices aren't inherently safe.

6. Paid Links in Content

There will never be a foolproof way to detect every paid link. That said it's easier than you think to leave a footprint when you do it in bulk. You have to trust your sellers not to make it obvious, and the other buyers to keep unwanted attention off their own sites. If one buyer that you have no relationship to buys links recklessly, the scrutiny can trickle down through the sites they're buying from and eventually back to you.
If you do buy links, knowing what you're doing isn't enough. Make sure everyone involved knows what they're doing. Google is not forgiving when it comes to buying links.

7. Link Exchanges, Wheels, etc.

Speaking of footprints, I believe it's possible to build a machine learning model to start with a profile of known links violating guidelines, which you can acquire from paid link sites and link wheel middlemen with nothing more than an email address. You can then assess a probability of a site being linked to in that manner, corroborating potential buyers and sellers with a link graph of similar profiles. I have no idea what kind of computing/programming power this would take, but the footprint is anomalous enough that it should be possible.
Exchanging links through link schemes requires a lot more faith in a bunch of strangers than I can muster. In a link wheel, you're only as strong and subtle as your "weakest links." My opinion is that if you're smart enough to avoid getting caught, you're probably smart enough to build or write something awesome that will have superior results and lower risk than link wheels.

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication

High-quality syndication and wire services possess a few unattractive attributes for spammers: there are editorial guidelines, costs, and even fact checking. Low-quality syndication services will send almost anything through to any site that will take it. You'll end up with a bunch of links, but not many that get indexed, and even fewer that get counted.
My experience has been that press releases have rapidly diminishing returns on syndication only, and the only way to see ROI is to generate actual, real coverage. I still see link-packed press releases all over the web that don't have a chance of getting coverage - really, your site redesign is not news-worthy. I'm not sure whether to attribute this to bad PR, bad SEO, or both.

9. Linkbait and Switch

In this context, we're talking about creating a real piece of linkbait for credible links, and later replacing the content with something more financially beneficial. Tricking people into linking to content is clearly not something Google would be ok with. I don't see linkbait and switch done very often, but I die a little every time I see it. If you're able to create and spread viral content, there's no need to risk upsetting link partners and search engines. Instead, make the best of it with smart links on the viral URL, repeat success, and become a known source for great content.

10. Directories

Directories have been discussed to death. The summary is that Google wants to devalue links from directories with no true standards. Here's a Matt Cutts video and blog post on the topic. Directory links often suffer from a high out/in linking ratio, but those worth getting are those that are actually used for local businesses (think Yelp) and any trafficked industry directories.

1. 
   Would I pay money for a listing here?
2. 
   Are the majority of current listings quality sites?
3. 
   Do listings link with the business or site name?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, don't bother with a link. This immediately excludes all but a handful of RSS or blog feed directories, which are mostly used to report higher quantities of links. When I was trained as an SEO, I was taught that directories would never hurt, but they might help a tiny bit, so I should go get thousands of them in the cheapest way possible. Recent experience has taught us that poor directory links can be a liability.
Even as I was in the process of writing this post, it appears that Google began deindexing low-quality directories. The effect seems small so far - perhaps testifying to their minimal impact on improving rankings in the first place - but we'll have to wait and see.

11. Link Farms and Networks

I honestly can't speak as an authority on link farms, having never used them personally or seen them in action.
My sense is that this prediction came true over and over again. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

12. Social Bookmarking & Sharing Sites

Links from the majority of social bookmarking sites carry no value. Pointing a dozen of them at a page might not even be enough to get the page crawled. Any quality links that go in have their equity immediately torn a million different directions if links are followed. The prevalence of spam-filled and abandoned social bookmarking sites tells me that site builders seriously over-estimated how much we would care about other people's bookmarks.
Sites focusing on user-generated links and content have their own ways of handling trash. Active sites with good spam control and user involvement will filter spam on their own while placing the best content prominently. If you'd like to test this, just submit a commercial link to any front-page sub-Reddit and time how long it takes to get the link banned. Social sites with low spam control stop getting visitors and incoming links while being overrun by low quality external links. Just ask Digg.

13. Forum Spam

Forum spam may never die, though it is already dead. About a year ago, we faced a question about a forum signature link that was in literally thousands of posts on a popular online forum. When we removed the signature links, the change was similar to effect of most forum links: zero. It doesn't even matter if you nofollow all links. Much like social sites, forums that can't manage the spam quickly turn into a cesspool of garbled phrases and anchor text links. Bing's webmaster forums are a depressing example.

14. Unintended Followed Link Spam

From time to time you'll hear of a new way someone found to get a link on an authoritative site. Examples I have seen include links in bios, "workout journals" that the site let users keep, wish lists, and uploaded files. Sometimes these exploits (for lack of a better term) go viral, and everyone can't wait to fill out their bio on a DA 90+ site.
In rare instances, this kind of link spam works - until the hole is plugged. I can't help but shake my head when I see someone talking about how you can upload a random file or fill out a bio somewhere. This isn't the sort of thing to base your SEO strategy around. It's not long-term, and it's not high-impact.

15. Profile Spam

While similar to unintended followed links on authority domains, profile spam deserves its own discussion due to their abundance. It would be difficult for Google to take any harsh action on profiles, as there is a legitimate reason for reserving massive numbers of profiles to prevent squatters and imitators from using a brand name.
What will hurt you is when your profile name and/or anchor text doesn't match your site or brand name.
When profile links are followed and indexed, Google usually interprets the page as a user page and values it accordingly. Obviously Google's system for devaluing profile links is not perfect right now. I know it's sometimes satisfying just to get an easy link somewhere, but profile link spam is a great example of running without moving.

16. Comment Spam

If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments. I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.
I have no idea if it works that way, but it probably doesn't. I do know that blogs with unfiltered followed links are generally old and unread, and they often look like this:
Let's pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you? Maybe I'm missing something here, because I can't imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let's just hope you didn't build anchor text into those comments.

17. Domain Purchase and Redirect/Canonical

Buying domains for their link juice is an old classic, but I don't think I have anything to add beyond what Danny Sullivan wrote on the matter. I'm also a fan of Rand's suggestion to buy blogs and run them rather than pulling out the fangs and sucking every ounce of life out of a once-thriving blog.
Domain buying still works disgustingly well in the (rare) cases where done correctly. I would imagine that dozens of redirected domains will eventually bring some unwelcome traffic to your site directly from Mountain View, but fighting spam has historically been much easier in my imagination than in reality.
This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it should paint a picture of the types of spam that are out there, which ones are working, and what kinds of behaviors could get you in trouble.

Spam Links: Not Worth It

I have very deliberately written about what spam links "look like." If you do believe that black hat SEO is wrong, immoral, or in any way unsavory that's fine - just make sure your white hat links don't look like black hat links. If you think that white hat SEOs are sheep, or pawns of Google, the same still applies: your links shouldn't look manipulative.
I'm advising against the tactics above because the potential benefits don't outweigh the risks. If your questionable link building does fall apart and your links are devalued, there's a significant cost of time wasted building links that don't count. There's also the opportunity cost - what could you have been doing instead? Finally, clearing up a manual penalty can take insane amounts of effort and remove Google's revenue stream in the meantime.

{Source: seomoz}

Have you seen search referrals drop or rise since this update? Let us know in the comments.
The good news, whether you were hit by Penguin the first time or this time, is that you can recover. We’ve now seen that this can happen, and since we know that Google will continue to push data refreshes for Penguin, there should be plenty of chances to do so. Just think about all the Panda refreshes we’ve seen since February 2011.
We recently reported on WPMU, a seemingly quality site with plenty of fans on social media channels, which got hit by the first Penguin update. The site has now made a full recovery.
Here’s what the analytics looked like after Penguin:

Here’s what the analytics look like now:

It’s worth noting that Cutts was aware of this site, as James Farmer (the site’s owner) was able to get it brought to his attention, following the initial Penguin update, via an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Cutts had provided some examples of the kinds of links that were likely hurting it. This was all discussed in our previous article, but to summarize, WPMU distributes WordPress themes, and a lot of blogs, including spam blogs were using some of them, which included links back to WPMU in the footer.
Ross Hudgens from Full Beaker provided some assistance and advice for Farmer, and blogged about the experience at SEOmoz. He notes that Farmer opted to ask blogs to remove the links, rather than applying nofollow to them, but it was actually an internal change that Farmer was able to make, which ultimately might have had the greatest impact on the recovery. Hudgens writes:
The most perilous piece of WPMU’s link profile came from one site – EDUblogs.org. EDU Blogs is a blogging service for people in the education space, allowing them to easily set up a subdomain blog on EDUblogs for their school-focused site – in a similar fashion to Blogspot, Typepad, or Tumblr, meaning that each subdomain is treated as a unique site in Google’s eyes. Coincidentally, this site is owned by WPMU and Farmer, and every blog on the service leverages WPMU theme packs. Each of these blogs had the “WordPress MU” anchor text in the footer, which meant a high volume of subdomains considered unique by Google all had sitewide “WordPress MU” anchor text. In what might have been a lucky moment for WPMU, this portion of their external link profile was still completely in their control because of WPMU ownership.
In what I believe is the most critical reason why WPMU made a large recovery and also did it faster than almost everyone else, Farmer instantly shut off almost 15,000 ‘iffy’ sitewide, footer LRDs to their profile, dramatically improving their anchor text ratios, sitewide link volume, and more. They were also able to do this early on in the month, quickly after the original update rolled out. A big difference between many people trying to “clean up their profile” and WPMU is time – getting everything down and adjusted properly meant that many people simply did not see recoveries at refresh 1.1 – but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen at all if the effort persists.


Farmer was also able to get one of the blogs that Cutts had initially pointed out the links from, to remove the links. According to Hudgens, he also did some other things, which may have played a role in the recovery, such as: implementing canonical URLs to clean up crawl errors and eliminate unnecessary links, fixed some broken sitemaps and submitted them to Webmaster Tools, fixed some duplicate title tag issues (which Webmaster Tools reported). He also submitted the site to the form Google provides for those who think they’ve wrongfully been impacted by Penguin. Twice.
It’s also possible that the exposure this site has received in the media, and in front of Matt Cutts could have helped. We’ve certainly seen penalties come from such exposure.
Not everyone will be able to get such exposure to make their cases as strong to Google, but Google does look at the submissions to that form, so if you’ve determined that you’re in compliance with Google’s quality guidelines, and you still think you were actually hit by Penguin, that’s a good place to start your recovery efforts, but you’ll probably want to continue to dig as much as you can.
Look at all of Google’s quality guidelines. Are there any areas where Google may think you’re in violation? Make the proper changes. Cutts recently pointed to the following videos as recovery advice:




He also said the following tips from Marc Ensign “looked solid”:

• Create a blog and consistently build up your site into a wealth of valuable content.
• Work with a PR firm or read a book and start writing legitimate press releases on a regular basis and post them on your site.
• Visit blogs within your industry and leave valuable feedback in their comments section.
• Link out to other valuable resources within your industry that would benefit your visitors.
• Share everything you are creating on 2 or 3 of your favorite social media sites of choice.
• Position yourself as an expert.

Virginia Nussey at Bruce Clay put together an interesting step-by-step guide to “link pruning” which might help you clean up your link profile, and ease your way to a recovery. She recommends setting up a spreadsheet with the following headers: Target URL, Source URL, Source Rank, Source Craw Date, Anchor Text, Image Link, ALT Text, Nofollow, Redirect and Frame. Then, she recommends adding the following to the spreadsheet, for webmaster contact info: Owner name, IP Address, Owner Address, Owner Email, Owner Phone Number, Registrar Name, Technical Content, Name Servers, Net Name, Created, Updated, Expires, Data Source (what site/registry was the resource for the contact gathered?).
From there, it’s just about sending removal requests and seeing what happens. Hopefully lawsuits aren’t part of your strategy.
We’ll have more discussion with Farmer to share soon, and perhaps he’ll be able to shed a bit more light on his own Penguin recovery. In the meantime, if you’re been hit, perhaps you can view his story as one of hope and inspiration, before you go starting over with a new site (which Google has also suggested as a possible option).
Penguin will be back again. You can recover. Remember, there are always other non-Penguin signals that you can try to improve upon too. You certainly don’t want to forget about our old pal the Panda.


Source : webpronews

For many marketers and website owners, our daily to-do list is already taking up the majority of our day. However, all you need is 15 minutes each day (I like to do it first thing in the morning or while eating lunch) to read a few other industry blogs. Why waste your time reading other peoples’ blogs? Well, aside from using their experiences and expertise to further your own knowledge and keep up with industry trends, reading other blogs can actually end up helping your own SEO.

Here are a few ways reading other blogs can help your SEO:

1. Inspiration for your own content marketing.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from my SEO clients is that they don’t know what to write about for their content marketing; they feel like they have nothing good to say. Well no one says you can’t take your own spin on a great topic someone else wrote about! You could write a response blog (just make sure you link to the other post), which is great for getting a dialogue going, or you could take one or two nuggets of information from another blog post and expand upon it for your own blog or article marketing. By reading other industry and competitor blogs, you also get a good idea of what people ARE NOT writing about. What niche can you fill that no one else has a claim to yet? This is a great way to help differentiate your brand.
2. Blog comments = inbound links.

Blog commenting is a great source of links. Every time one website links to another that first website is passing along some of its link juice to the second site, which helps that second site perform better in the search engines. Just remember that more links is not always better. You don’t want to rely solely on blog comments for your link building, as the search engines like to see a diversified link portfolio. You also don’t want to give a blog owner the impression that you are spamming their blog with a dozen comments each day just so you can get more links from their site.
3. Get an idea of what keywords your competitors are targeting.

Great content should always be written for human readers first, search engines second. But when you’re reading a blog post that has been optimized for SEO you can usually get a pretty good idea of what keyword that post is going after. Knowing what keywords your competition is targeting can help with your own keyword research. You’ll have a better idea of how competitive certain keywords are, which keywords your target audience is using and what long tail keywords are/aren’t being used.
4. Find great guest blogging opportunities.

Every now and again, one of the industry blogs you read each day might put out a call for guest writers (they may already have an open invitation out there!). Guest blogging is a great way to get valuable inbound links, build your online brand presence and reputation, connect with your online audience and more. By becoming a loyal reader of a few industry blogs, should the call for guest writers ever come you’ll have a good idea of the kind of content they regularly publish. This will help you write a guest blog post that is more likely to appeal to the blogger/editor.

Source: searchengineoptimizationjournal.

Google’s Penguin update has been somewhat divisive in the search industry. There have been Web sites that were negatively impacted by the update while Google says that Penguin was a success. One of the most persistent rumors, however, has been Google pushing out an update to Penguin. That never seemed to be the case.
Saturday brought word from Matt Cutts that an update had been pushed through. Unfortunately, Cutts was light on details.
It’s not immediately clear what the update covers or fixes from the original launch of Penguin back in April. A few legitimate sites claimed to have been hit by Penguin and lost traffic as a result. One theory is that the Penguin 1.1 is meant to address those legitimate sites that were targeted.

If you recall, Penguin has been billed as Google’s method of cutting down on Web spam and other nefarious parts of the Web. One of the main concerns that Penguin addressed was the use of backlinks. It was found that sites being linked to by lesser quality sites were affected by Penguin as well. This led to Chris Crum reporting on a new method that had these sites threatening to sue other sites over their use of backlinks. Nobody wants to have poor quality sites linking to them in this post-Penguin world, but linking isn’t illegal. That leaves the threat of a lawsuit the only option for those sites that rely on search to get traffic.

It remains to be seen if the newest Penguin update has had any kind of effect on search. It might have been a smart on Google’s part to release the update on Memorial Day weekend to avoid any major outcry. It leaves them a few more days to work out any minor kinks that may be in the algorithm.
Still, Matt Cutts refers to Penguin 1.1 as a “Minor weather report.” It’s highly possible that the update doesn’t contain anything that is Web shattering. Google is remaining mum on the details for this update. We’ll probably have to wait until the next update on algorithm changes to find out.

Until then, check out our comprehensive guide to appeasing Penguin. It contains all the tips you need to know to keep a quality Web site and retain or increase your traffic in the post-Penguin world.
[Source: webpronews.]