| Weekly SEO news: 7 February 2017 |
Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.
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If your web pages contain spam, Google might penalize your website and your rankings might drop. In addition, you won't make a good impression on your website visitors if your web pages contain spam.
If your website contains a blog or a public forum, chances are that spammers will try to abuse your website by posting deceiving content and links. Google recently gave some advice on what you can do to avoid user generated spam on your website:
1. Secure your website forum by keeping your forum and blog software updated and patched
Spammers take advantage of security issues in older versions. For that reason, it is important that you keep your software up-to-date.
2. Use CAPTCHAs to block robots
In general, spam is created by automated robots. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) requires users to prove that they are human beings before posting something on your site. A popular CAPTCHA service is Google's reCAPTCHA.
3. Block suspicious behavior and check the top posters
Set time limits between posts and block excessive traffic from individual IP addresses. There are other activities that distinguish automated bots from human beings. Most forum platforms offer configurations that automatically block suspicious behavior.
If a new user has an excessive amount of posts, it's a good idea to check these posts to make sure that they are not spammy.
4. Disable some types of comments
You might disable comments on old blog posts of forum entries. It is unlikely that very old entries get legitimate replies. If your forum is only an archive, you can disable comments completely.
5. Use the moderation features of your blog and forum software
For example, users might be required to have a certain reputation before they can post links. Anonymous posting should be disabled completely. Posts from new users should require approval before they are publicly visible. Most blog and forum tools offer such a feature.
6. Blacklist obviously spammy terms
If you find out that many spam entries on your site contain the same words, block these words. Most forums and blog tools offer features that enable you to automatically mark posts with particular words as spam.
7. Use the rel=nofollow tag for links in user generated content
By default, most blog tools automatically add the rel=nofollow attribute to user generated links. Nofollow links will deter spammers from targeting your site.
8. Use anti-spam plugins
In addition to the above, anti-spam plugins can help you to keep your blog and forums spam-free. A popular anti-spam service that offers plugins for many blog and forum systems is Akismet.
User-generated spam can have a negative effect on the rankings of your web pages. For that reason, you should make sure that this does not happen.
If you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines, your web pages must have the right content and good links. The tools in SEOprofiler help you to get these. If you haven't done it yet, create your SEOprofiler account now:
Unconfirmed Google algorithm
update may be better at discounting links and spam
The update seems to have happened around February 1, 2017. It may have been a tweak to how Google Penguin detects and discounts spammy links, or it may be a totally new algorithm."
Google
Japan releases a new ranking algorithm
This is not related to Google other algorithm update that targets low quality links and link networks. It only applies to Japanese sites.
Desktop
search remains very important
+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++
- Google’s other Googlebots don’t affect Google Search.
- Google adds carousel search filters.
- Yext hires (ex Bing) Duane Forrester as VP of industry insights.
- Google has been quietly placing more ads in search results.
- Google's new interstitial penalty sometimes leads to false penalties.
- Fewer visitors, more sales. Here's how to do it.
- Google: how to optimize the crawl budget of your website
- New Google patent: how search engines see entities and what you have to do about it
- Why spending less on paid search marketing can lead to a better website experience
- Are you ready? 2017 is going to be the year of mobile (with instructions for you)
- View all past issues...
Do you need better rankings for your website?
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