Why Google Loves My Blogs (and How to Get it to Love Yours)

This guest post is by Melody McKinnon of Canadians Internet Business.

The latest algorithm updates from Google have broken the hearts of many blog owners. The search engine appears to have lost interest in many of them.

Yet on every website and blog I own, my attention from Google has increased—even on blogs less than a year old.

Naturally, I want to stay in Google’s good books so I’ve given this a lot of thought. I’ve concluded that Google is simply looking for blogs with a personality worthy of its love. It’s no longer a matter of superficial gestures and pretty words. This somewhat fickle search engine uses several factors to determine if you are ‘the one’, and I happen to meet that criteria by nature.

• I prefer to write (and read) posts that are packed with information that may not be easy to find online.


• I write for people and what they’re searching for. I answer the question, “What would I be happy to find if I was searching for this topic?” When that task is complete, I go back and lightly optimize for organic search.


• I’m consistently active on social media.


• I’ve built quality relationships with other bloggers.


• I’ve been marketing online since the 90′s. I’ve seen every manipulative trick and they all had one thing in common: they came back to bite people on the butt every single time.

Desperately seeking

Google is trying harder to find what people are looking for these days, so it helps to view the search engine as a person rather than an entity. If Google placed a personal ad, here’s what it would be seeking:

• Good looks and a great smile: custom design, limited advertising, and shareable images.


• Charm: social media and blog interaction. Give them something to talk about.


• Friendly and open: user-friendly blogs with easy commenting.


• Intelligence: deep, meaningful content that is truly useful.


• Unique: dare to be different and create unique content.


• Good listener: cater to the searcher, not the search engine. Are you really giving them what they’re looking for?


• Integrity: are you a cheater? Manipulation has no place in a good relationship with Google. Neither does copyright infringement, illegal activities, or hate content.


• Long walks on a Vancouver beach: geographically-specific content when applicable.


• Sincerity: thinly disguised advertising, superficial posts built around keywords, and buying links will not be tolerated.


• Highly respected: Google respects those who are respected by websites it respects. You may have to repeat that a few times to get it!


• Great attitude: upbeat stories, suitable for a family audience.


• Hang with a good crowd: avoid linking to, or being linked to by, the “slums” of the Internet.


• No hookers please: there’s nothing wrong with making money with your blog. The key is to give more than you get.


• Love yourself: you can’t expect anyone else to love you if you don’t love yourself. Produce a blog that you would love to read.


• Love them back: sign up for Google+ and take the time to learn how to use it. Add both a follow and share button to your blog.

Oh Google, your love means so much to me. I’m inspired by your efforts to control your wandering eye and focus on those who are truly worthy of your attention. You make me feel like the most special website in the world wide web!

Melody McKinnon holds 52 certifications in business, marketing, writing, nutrition, biochemistry & general sciences. She blogs for the newly relaunched Canadians Internet Business, All Natural Pet Care, and Petfood Industry Magazine.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Why Google Loves My Blogs (and How to Get it to Love Yours)

Google Penalizes Copyright Infringers: Are You At Risk?

This guest post is by Shahzad Saeed of TechAndProject.com.

Recently Google announced on its official blog that it will start penalizing sites that are accused of copyright infringement.

The announcement may reduce the content theft around the web, since now it is clear that if a site continuously violates copyright laws, it will lose search rankings and possibly even be removed from Google’s index. On the other hand, today’s technology makes it easier than ever to copy, modify, and share any information from the web. But the problem is that the vast majority of people do not care about copyright. This may now result in legal actions and loss of Google traffic.

How can you avoid Google penalties related to copyright? Here are a few tips.

A quick disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this does not intend to constitute legal advice. It is only the results of my own research.

Reusing content? Get the author’s permission every time

I’ve found many of my articles published on other websites without my permission. Some people assume that there is no copyright infringement if they steal the content, but credit the author’s website. This is incorrect.

Some others assume that the worst thing can happen as a result of copyright infringement is that they will receive take down notice from the author, and then, if they remove the copyrighted material, they will be out of trouble.

Let me talk about my experience. I published an article titled Top 10 deadliest air crashes in the last 10 years on my own blog. At the time, Google brought a nice amount of traffic to that post. But recently, when I Googled the keywords related to that post, I’ve found that it’s no longer listed even in the first ten result. Instead, a ripped post was there. It was republished in an article gallery where users are paid for the content! I’ve found the same article reproduced without my permission on other blogs as well.

Sometimes, it is nice to see that your work has been used by many people around the web, even if they are not crediting you. I don’t care if someone gets paid a small fee for my article; what I worry about is suffering a Google penalty if someone steals my content.

If you plan to copy more than a few words or phrases from someone’s post, ask the original author for permission to republish it. If you copy copyrighted material without getting permission from the author, and crediting the author, your actions will infringe their copyright. If you cannot get the author’s permission, restate the ideas in your own words.

Determine if permission is needed

In some cases, using work without permission is allowed. For criticizing, commenting, and news reporting, short quotations are considered fair use. You can also use material that’s available in the public domain.

Finally, you are allowed to use a brand name on your site under nominative fair use laws. In this case, your usage of the name would not be considered trademark infringement because the use is unlikely to confuse consumers, as you’re merely using it to identify the brand without suggesting affiliation or sponsorship with the brand owner.

An example is Windows7sins.org—a site where free-software enthusiasts criticize the use of proprietary software especially Microsoft Windows.

It is really important to identify what works come under public domain and which don’t. Public domain materials include federal government documents and materials produced before 1923. If material was produced between 1923 and 1978 without a copyright notice it is also considered to be in the public domain.

For a blogger this does not matter much, unless they’re copying material from printed sources, because the web didn’t take off until the late ’90s.

On the flip-side of all this legislation, if you want others to have free use of your work, you can explicitly make it clear that you do not assert any copyright ownership. You can learn more about the public domain here.

Use materials licensed under Creative Commons

As you might know, Creative Commons (cc) enables you to license your own writing, photos, videos, or anything you’ve created for reuse by others, and it’s free. The CC license tells people that your content is available for mixing, copying, and modifying with their own content and creations. It automatically grants third parties permission to use your work.

Creative Commons is not a license that allows the reuse of any work, but it is less restrictive than standard copyright. In order to identify what you can do and can’t do with Creative Commons-licensed material, you should check what type of license the material is available under. Here are the different types of Creative Commons licenses.

• Attributions: authors specify that the work can be copied if a credit is given to the author like linking to the original article.


• Derivation: authors specify if the work can be altered or only verbatim copies of the work are allowed to be reused and shared.


• Commercial or non- commercial licenses: authors specify if the work is allowed to be used for any purpose, or only for non-commercial purposes.


• Share-alike: authors specify that if the work is reproduced, then the derived work has to use same license (or they may specify that it doesn’t).

Using Creative Commons-licensed content is a good choice, but attributing it properly can be difficult and a bit confusing.

The first rule of thumb of using licensed content is to attribute the creator properly.  Open Attribute is a simple tool I suggest for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC-licensed work.

Most bloggers and webmasters use Flickr to find images for their own blogs. Not every picture on Flickr is free to use, though. Some of the Flickr images are “All rights reserved”, so you can’t just copy and use them unless you have got permission explicitly from the owner.

For finding a Creative Commons-licensed images, you can use Google Advanced Image Search. If you are a Flickr fan when it comes to using images for your blog, use the advanced search and limit your results to Flickr or any other specific domain that you are interested in.

WordPress users can use the Flickr pick a picture plugin to find suitable pictures from Flickr.com. Another useful plugin is Free Stock Photos Foter, where users can find free—and freely available—stock photos.

Another important thing to keep in mind is not to hotlink the images that you use. Many people are lazy, and when they upload the picture they just bulk upload it—they might not have given name, title, and tag to each and every picture on their site. If you then hotlink those pictures and do some basic image optimization techniques on your blog, chances are high that you will outrank the source picture—not good if you want to stay on good terms with the image’s owner. So the best practice is to host the image yourself instead of hotlinking it.

Add licensing information on your site

You can see, most of the mainstream websites have some kind of copyright messages on the site. Displaying a copyright message is not necessarily needed to claim your rights over your blog and its content—as soon as you publish an article on your blog, it is automatically copyrighted.

However, a copyright notice can be useful if you need to defend your rights to your blog in court. The following is the common format for displaying copyright.

© [Full Name] and [Blog Name], [Current Year or Year Range]

[Source]

No matter what size a blog is, no blog is secure from content theft. Some bloggers license their blog under creative commons license by arguing the issues of content theft and difficulty in discouraging copying under the (DMCA) Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Some bloggers, like Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.net, encourage readers to copy their content to their own blogs any way they need—even without attribution.

If you own a blog licensed under Creative Commons, it’s a good idea to use WordPress plugin called Creative Commons Configurator. This adds your CC license near the footer of your posts, and in the head of your blog. This will be visible only to robots, but ensures your approach to copyright is clear to all—including Google, which means you should avoid their penalties when others reuse your content.

My advice? License images and videos under CC, but not the text of your blog if you don’t want your blog get penalized by Google. But what about you? Do you protect your copyright, or license your content for others to use? Tell us how you do it in the comments.

Shahzad Saeed blogs on TechAndProject.com where he talks about Technology for students. If you want to learn web designing either to become a freelancer or to be an employee feel free to read his article series on web coding.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Google Penalizes Copyright Infringers: Are You At Risk?

How I Tweaked my WordPress Blog to Rank Better in the Search Engines

This guest post is by Jonathan of NutraSol Natural Center.

As bloggers and website owners, improving our websites is an absolute must, and search engine optimization is important if we want to get more traffic through search engines.

I have been familiar with SEO since before I started my first blog on professional business strategies. I came across it during the research stage when I was trying to learn everything I could about creating a website. Once I was exposed, I was instantly hooked.

What interested me the most about SEO was the challenge of competing with other sites to appear on the first page of Google for my target keywords. It is almost as if SEO gives us esoteric super-powers that are only fully understood by a small community of internet marketers.

After learning enough to get me started, I created some blogs and conducted experiments that allowed me to learn a few tricks on my own.

Using WordPress features for SEO

Not long ago, I started a Spanish blog on home remedies and alternative medicine. It’s not in English—my apologies—but that’s the blog I first implemented this technique on.

When I started it, I had envisioned it as a reference site where people could go and find information on natural remedies, so I decided to have the articles on static pages rather than blog posts. 

I also decided to have the names of the ailments in the page URL. For example, for hypertension, I had the URL http://www.informenatural.com/hipertension/  on a static WordPress page. 

The logic behind this approach was to have a reference page for all the ailments I covered, and people could go there just to get this information. It was going well and traffic was growing little by little, but suddenly, a light bulb switched on in my head. 

I decided to turn my static-page reference site into an online magazine instead, and to feature articles that would encourage social activity where people would be allowed to leave comments. Effectively I wanted to move from a static informational website to a blog.

The problem was that in order for me to do this, I had to turn all the pages I had into posts.

Turning pages into posts without losing links

The site was already two years old and I had backlinks around the web that I didn’t want to lose. But I also knew that I couldn’t have the old pages and the new posts existing together because that would create duplicate content issues for my site with the search engines. Not only that, but all of the pages were in Google’s index and some were ranking in the first page of search results for some of my target keywords.

Now, you may be thinking, “Why didn’t you just give the posts the same URL as the pages?” or “Why didn’t you just use a 301 redirect?” The reason is because I was going to turn all the articles I had into posts, and I didn’t want one post to have a permalink with a specific single keyword term such as Hypertension. I also preferred to have more pages indexed by the search engines anyway.

So, I decided to take a different approach. I decided to turn the single keyword terms into categories so that I could keep the same URL structures and can keep all the inbound links my blog had acquired over the years.

I also decided to do this because the single keyword term in the URL could then be used to direct users to other articles that have to do with that term.  For example, www.informenatural.com/hipertension would no longer lead to one article on a static page; it would be the page to go to to find all the posts related to that subject.

Here’s how I did it

By default, WordPress category pages contain the word “category” in their URLs. For example, informenatural.com/hipertension would be converted to informenatural.com/category/hipertension. 

In order for things to go as planned, I needed to remove the word “category” from the category permalinks. I did this by using a WordPress plugin called WP No Category Base.  Doing this allowed me to maintain the URL and preserve the permalinks in the format I originally had them in.

After doing this, I copied the content from the page to the post, with my keyword terms in the titles and permalinks of the posts.  Then, I deleted the pages.

This allowed me to maintain my links and transform my static-page site into a blog. I conducted keyword research, found the long-tail terms that I wanted to rank for, and included them in the permalinks of my posts. 

After that, I signed into my Google Webmaster Tools account, and used the Fetch As Google tool to submit the new URLs.

Grow your traffic with WordPress

These changes have allowed my traffic to increase tremendously and I predict it will continue to grow with time.

WordPress gives us the flexibility to do many things with our blogs and it allows us to stay organized while we’re at it.  If you find that a post is not ranking well enough for a keyword, you can always do some keyword research to find a better phrase with more searches and change your URL to include that term.

Experiment with your blogs, using WordPress features to your advantage, and you can help your blog grow like never before.

Do you use WordPress features to help your search rank? Share your favorite tip with us in the comments.

Jonathan is the founder of NutraSol Natural Center and LocalRoamer.Com. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and he is currently enrolled in courses to get a degree in Nutrition. Jonathan has designed 2 blogs on natural remedies to educate his customers for his store at Informe Natural and Earth Doctor.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I Tweaked my WordPress Blog to Rank Better in the Search Engines

Customize your posts with permalinks

Earlier this year we introduced a suite of new SEO features that help ensure your blog, posts, and images are accurately indexed so they appear correctly in search results. Today we’re happy to introduce another feature that enables you to more effectively customize your search preferences - custom permalinks.

When you write a post, Blogger automatically generates a permalink based on the title of the post. Until now, blog authors have had no control of the permalink. Custom permalinks give you more control of your blog and posts. These new custom links also provide readers with more information about your post when scanning search results.

If you prefer to use a custom permalink, you can do so via the “Permalink” option in the Post Settings box. 

To create your own URL for a specific post, simply select “Custom URL”, and enter your new URL in the field below. If you wrote the post in June of 2012, your new URL will look like this:

www.nameofblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/customURL.html

The bolded area is the portion of the URL that is customizable.

If the custom permalink you entered already exists, Blogger will attempt find a free one for you.

At present, the characters allowed in a custom URL are limited to: a-z, A-Z, 0-1. The only special characters available are underscore, dash, and period.

Click here to read more about custom permalinks in the Blogger Help Center.

Happy blogging!

Customize your search preferences

Hi Bloggers.

Ensuring that your blog, posts, and images are accurately indexed so they appear correctly in search results is valuable. Today we introduced a suite of new features that enable you to more effectively customize your search preferences. Managing how your blog is viewed by search engines is an important aspect of maintaining a healthy blog, regardless of whether you’re new to blogging, or a seasoned veteran.

Here’s an overview of what we added:

The first thing you’ll notice is a new “Search preferences” option under the “Settings” tab.

Clicking it will display three sub-sections: Meta Tags, Errors and Redirections, and Crawlers and Indexing. When enabled, some of these features, such as Search Description and Custom robots header tags will also appear in the “Post settings” area of Blogger's post editor as well. For example, if you elect to create a Search Description, you may do so for your blog, and/or individual posts.

Also available is the ability to add a custom “Page Not Found” (eg. a “404”) message, and Custom Redirects for pages on your blog.

While most of the new features are located in the Settings tab, a few others can be found in the post editor. For example, we’ve introduced the ability to incorporate “alt” and “title” tags to images in your post.




Last but not least, you’ll also find a “rel=nofollow” link attribute in the link tool. Checking this box means that you don’t want this link to be considered when web crawlers are searching for information they’ll use to index your page.

While most of these features are easy to understand and use, others, such as custom robots header tags are geared toward advanced users only, hence the warning message:

Before diving in, I would encourage a quick read through the Help Center articles. They’re comprehensive, and do a great job translating some technical concepts to the layperson.




We hope you enjoy the new features. It’s all part of our effort to bring you a much improved and modernized Blogger. Next week, we’ll be holding a Hangout on our Google+ page to talk with you about your experience with these features and answer your questions. Follow us on +Blogger for details.




Happy blogging!






Bruce Polderman, Product Manager