Weekly SEO news: 20 February 2007
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're taking a look at three Google spam filters than can prevent your web site from showing up in the results.

In the news: News about Google site targeting ads, spam problems at Google and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Facts of the week: 15 Google spam filters and how to avoid them - Part II

Google tries to keep its search results as clean as possible. For that reason, they have a variety of spam filters in their ranking algorithm that try to remove low quality web sites.

If your web site gets caught by one of these filters, it will be very difficult to get high Google rankings. In the next articles, we'll take a look a the 15 most common Google spam filters and we'll tell you how you can get around them.

Google's link farm filter, the broken link filter and the too many links filter

Google heavily relies on inbound links to determine the position of a web page in the search results. To make spamming as difficult as possible, Google also have a variety of link filters to make sure that only the right links are considered.

Participating in a link farm system won't increase your search engine rankings. Actually, you can hurt your rankings if you link to a link farming scheme.

The broken link filter is not actually a filter but the effects are the same. If you have broken links on your web pages and if not all pages on your web site can be found through links on your web site then Google cannot index all of your pages.

Many broken links also indicate that your web site is not very professional and that it should not be listed in the top results.

The too many links at once filter is applied when your web site gets very many links in a short time period. Too many links at once can lead to problems with all big search engines, not just Google.

How to get around these filters

Don't use link farms to get links to your web site. Better use a serious tool to get high quality links to your web site. Do not use black-hat techniques or link spamming to avoid getting caught by Google's too many links at once filter.

To make sure that the broken links filter is not applied to your web site, make sure that all links on your web site are intact and use a sitemap so that search engines can find all pages on your web site quickly and easily.

Further information on how to get the right inbound links can be found in this free link popularity eBook.

Next week, we're going to take a look at three more Google filters that might prevent your web site from getting high rankings on Google.

2. Search engine news of the week
Google is developing artificial intelligence (AI)

"<>The worlds most dominant online company, with the largest conglomeration of computing power the world has ever seen, is trying to build artificial intelligence, and according to [Google CEO] Page it isn’t that far away either."



Google apps suite to add docs & spreadsheets

"Google Inc. is finalizing the integration of Docs & Spreadsheets with Google Apps for Your Domain, another step in its strategy to build a suite of hosted applications for organizations."



Google lets site targeting advertisers pay per click

"Google will soon let advertisers bid on a cost-per-click basis for ads they target on specific publisher Web sites. Right now, advertisers using Google's site-targeting feature place bids based on cost-per-thousand impressions."



Search engine newslets

3. Articles of the week
Canonicalization made simple

"Canonicalization is 'the process of converting data that has more than one possible representation into a 'standardized' canonical representation.' Plainly speaking, search engines like Google use a canonicalization process to present users with short and sweet URLs."



A growing spam crisis at Google?

"Every search engine spammer is familiar with the technique. The spammer locates ranking sites (especially .edu, .org and .gov TLDs) with a vulnerability that allows users to create and manipulate content on the site [...] The spammer floods the doorway page with thousands of inbound text links (usually themselves comment or guestbook spam) and viola -- instant organic search ranking."



Is Google overrated? Tapped out? Due for a fall? Two experts take sides.

"By its own acknowledgement, Google is not a well-rounded company. Google declares it does 'one thing really, really well': Search. Google is dependent on search for 99% of its revenues, inspiring Wall Street to deem it a 'one-trick stallion.'"

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4. Recommended resources

Another award for our freeware tool Link Popularity Check

Just like our other software tools, our freeware program Link Popularity Check has received the "100% Clean and Safe to install" award from DownloadSofts.com.

You can download Link Popularity Check here.




"I am ranked first on the page on Google."

"For about 1 year I have been working on improving my website using the suggestions made by your IBP program and have moved up to the top 3-4 spots on Google for my major search terms....often I am ranked first on the page!

I have many competitors using the same search terms but your suggestions have put my site above almost all of them! Keep up the good work and thanks for such a great program."
James Rex, www.flywayspecialties.com



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