Weekly SEO news: 24 September 2014
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Starting today, the website audit tool in SEOprofiler also checks your web pages for spelling mistakes. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler is a powerful tool that detects problems on your website that can lead to bad rankings on Google and other search engines.

In the news: even websites with less than 10 links can get a Google penalty, your website must be significant to rank, more HTTPS problems, what you watch on TV might be a ranking signal, 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. New in SEOprofiler: website audit tool now with spell check feature

Starting today, the website audit tool in SEOprofiler also checks your web pages for spelling mistakes. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler is a powerful tool that detects problems on your website that can lead to bad rankings on Google and other search engines.

Industry-proven spell-check technology

The new spell check feature makes sure that your web pages are correct.

  • Proven: We use the same industry-proven spell check technology as Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe InDesign.
  • Comprehensive: Every page of your website will be spell-checked. In addition to the visible text on your web pages, the "alt" and "title" attributes, and the meta description tags will also be checked.
  • Multi-language support: if you have a multi-language website, you can specify two different languages for the spell-check.
  • Automatic language detection: the spell checker recognizes the <html lang> attribute, as well as the <meta name="content-language" content="..."> tag (but they are not required).

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Spell checking sounds easy but it isn't. The spell checker in SEOprofiler automatically detects the following:

  • It automatically recognizes and ignores commonly used brand names and product names.

    For example, if you sell a new product called the "HyperMixWire", then the spell-check will recognize the product name after spell-checking some web pages, and it will not mark the word "HyperMixWire" as a spelling mistake.

  • Our spell check knows more than 3,000 technical terms that is usually not included in dictionaries such as "SEO" (search engine optimization), "PPC" (pay per click), "Matt Cutts", or "retweet".
  • In addition, it recognizes the names of social media sites and tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and many more.
  • The spell checker knows about the Internet so it automatically recognizes and ignores Twitter handles, email addresses, URLs, domain names, file names, clock times (7am) and Emoji characters.

Fixing spelling mistakes made easy

We make it easy for you to fix spelling mistakes. Every possible spelling mistake is displayed with the corresponding HTML tag and the line number.

new spell checker

It's international: 47 languages

SEOprofiler supports 47 languages for the spell check:

  • English (USA)
  • English (UK)
  • English (Australia)
  • English (Canada)
  • English (New Zealand)
  • English (South Africa)
  • German (Germany)
  • German (Austria)
  • German (Switzerland)
  • Bosnian (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
  • Bulgarian (Bulgaria)
  • Catalan (all countries)
  • Croatian (Croatia)
  • Czech (Czech Republic)
  • Danish (Denmark)
  • Dutch (Netherlands)
  • Estonian (Estonia)
  • French (France)
  • Galician (Spain)
  • Greek (Greece)
  • Gujarati (India)
  • Hebrew (Israel)
  • Hindi (India)
  • Hungarian (Hungary)
  • Icelandic (Iceland)
  • Italian (Italy)
  • Latvian (Latvia)
  • Lithuanian (Lithuania)
  • Norwegian (Norway)
  • Norwegian Bokmål (Norway)
  • Polish (Poland)
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Portuguese (Portugal)
  • Romanian (Romania)
  • Russian (Russia)
  • Scottish Gaelic (UK)
  • Serbian (Serbia)
  • Slovak (Slovakia)
  • Slovenian (Slovenia)
  • Spanish (all countries)
  • Swedish (Finland)
  • Swedish (Sweden)
  • Telugu (India)
  • Thai (Thailand)
  • Turkish (Turkey)
  • Ukrainian (Ukraine)
  • Vietnamese (Vietnam)

Much more than just spelling mistakes

The website audit tool checks much more than spelling mistakes. Here's the complete list of things that are checked by the website audit tool:

  • Errors: broken links, server errors, timeout errors, empty titles, duplicate titles
  • Warnings: duplicate pages, duplicate content, http & https, www & non-www, no text content, little text content, no bot allowed, bot blocked, click depth, temp. redirect, too many links, meta desc empty, meta desc too short, meta desc too long, meta desc wasted, meta refresh, duplicate canonical, duplicate meta tag, page too big, title too short, title too long, title wasted, title tag twice, URL invalid, URL too dynamic, URL too long
  • Notices: anchor text wasted, H1 tag keyword, H1 tag empty, H1 tag missing, H1 tag wasted, image problems, meta robots none, meta nofollow, meta noIndex, meta nosnippet, perm. redirect (301), other redirect (303), temp. redirect (307), forbidden (403), redirect same URL, upper case URLs, rel. link to domain, canonical URL used, no spell check
  • Spelling mistakes: as of today, the website audit tool also scans your website for spelling mistakes. :-)

Try the website audit tool now

If you haven't done it yet, try the website audit tool now and make sure that Google and other search engines can index all of your web pages:

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week
Less than 10 links to site? Google still gives site manual penalty
"Apparently it doesn’t matter, whatsoever, how many links to your site you have. Even if you have 8 links pointing to your website, if those links are inorganic or violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, the site can still receive a manual penalty from Google."

John MuellerGoogle's John Mueller: your site does not rank because it's not significant

In an online discussion, Google's John Mueller told a webmaster that his site wasn't ranking  because the content of the website wasn't great:

"Your site is essentially the same as so many other sites that just reuse video feeds. That doesn't impress Googlebot much, so while i understand it's not trivial, I think in the long run it would be really helpful to just make sure that you offer something that users explicitly want to see from your site, something that they'll recommend over all of the other, similar sites, something unique, compelling and of high quality.

That isn't something which can be fixed with a meta-tag, so instead of spending too much time on the technicalities of language-detection, I'd take a step back and think about what you could do to make something much more significant."


Be careful of switching to HTTPS to improve Google rankings: the Buffer story

"Thinking about moving your site to HTTPS, in order to tap into the promised chance to rank better in Google? Buffer recently discovered that the technicalities of doing it could cause you to plunge in traffic. [...]

It sounds like it was an issue that Google hadn’t expected. But it also sounds like it’s a relatively rare one that might not impact many other sites and which has now been resolved by Google."


BingNew in Bing Ads: dynamic sitelinks

"Dynamic Sitelinks are clickable text additions to your ad that help enrich and enhance the information you’ve already supplied through your headline and ad copy.

While you would pay for a click on your ad’s headline, as this is dynamically created for you any clicks that occur on the Dynamic Sitelinks appearing within your ad are at no cost to you whatsoever."

Google granted patent on using what you watch on TV as a ranking signal
"The patent says that it might monitor what’s on TV in your area, and look for queries that might be related to that information. So, if someone searches for 'Eagles' and there’s a documentary about the band, the 'Eagles' playing on TV in your area, that’s a signal that may influence the search results you receive."

Search engine newslets
  • Introducing structured snippets, now a part of Google web search.
  • China blocks DuckDuckGo, the privacy search engine.
  • Google Maps navigation expands to 19 new countries around the world, mostly in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America.
  • Bing correctly predicts “no” win in Scotland independence vote.
  • Bing: beginning the next phase of image search.
  • Amazon beats Google, pays $4.6 million for .buy top-level domain.
  • Berlin pushes Google to reveal search engine formula.
3. Recommended resources

Everything you need

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  • automatic weekly website audits
  • tools for keyword research and analysis
  • competitive intelligence tools
  • automated ranking checks
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  • link disinfection tool
  • social media monitoring
  • white-label reports (web-based and PDF)
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