Privacy Policy and Ad Networks

Google Adsense and many ad networks generally require a privacy policy to be posted. 

The main theme of privacy policy is to make the visitor aware of the fact that the servers hosting web page captures information about user. The ad networks use cookies to store information about visitors. It also will keep track of the user preferences. The content might be customized based on user browser media type. A sample privacy policy of this web site can be seen at the Privacy Policy link at the bottom of this page.

Google will not update PageRank anymore?

It's sort off official? Google is not going to update the pagerank any more. This is as mentioned in 'English Google Webmaster hangout' by John Mueller. You can see the video here. For relevant part on pagerank see the video from 19 minutes onward.

Linkless SEO

In the start of web, pages were indexed in search engines by submitting them to web directories. You make a web site and register it against a category/subcategory. The most famous of them was Yahoo, the golden age of Yahoo.

However which page show in search in the order of rank required the search engines to crawl the page and based on keyword density put them in an order. The problem is that everyone want number one position in the search result, so people started stuffing pages with keywords. By keyword analysis search engines tried to understand the quality of a page against a keyword.

Came Google and came the idea of page rank. The premise was that people can manipulate their own

Spammy way of promoting web pages

There is good and there is bad. There is yin and there is yang. There are good ways to building web pages and there are spammy ways of doing that. I have covered the aspect of quality of content in a different post here. Now let's look into the other way of building pages also known as spammy way. Building spam is about building pages whose sole aim is to get high in the search to drive the traffic their way. 

Let's look into various such concepts which come in the category of spamming and may lead to deindexing from search engines or a possible ban. Most of these concept have a useful element in it but with time these were manipulated to rank higher on search results.

Quality of Content

There is an old saying in web "Content is the king". Finally what makes or breaks the thing in long run in web is the quality of content. In fact, it's not just the web but any industry which depends on content. Take it to a more abstract level, the make or break in the long run is the content of your actions that will be a huge determinant on the quality of success. There are other aspects like marketing and positioning, which are important but we will not get into here. But the core of everything is the quality of content, if you are looking for a long run. If you are looking for a flash in the pan than other aspects become more important than the content and those are personal choices in terms of handling

Nofollow links

Inbound links are very important for the success of a web page. Google considers those inbound links to calculate the web page's pagerank. The more inbound link a page has got, it means higher authority is assigned to that page and the page appears higher in the search results. The higher the page gets into search result, the more chance it has got for user visiting it. 

Earlier for Google, pagerank was a very important criteria to decide the location of page in a search result. Though with time Google has been moving out of it and it is one of the signal among more

PageRank

Pagerank is one of the most important terms in web and is named after Larry Page, founder of Google.  Pagerank is a sort of ranking given to a page in the world wide web or Internet. Google assigns a page rank of 0 to 10. 0 is the lowest rank and 10 being the highest. 

Pagerank in simple terms

Pagerank simply means the authority or the importance of a page. The simple idea on which page rank is based is the number of inbound links pointing to a particular page. Inbound links are the href or anchor tag in other web pages, that point to current web page. For more detailed discussions on various links you can follow here.

Think it in real world. How the authority or the rank of a person is determined. It's by how many

Pageviews difference in Blogger, Analytics and Adsense

If you have a blogspot  or blogger account and you have enabled Google analytics and adsense, one common confusion is the difference in page views. Usually blogspot account shows page views way higher than analytics and adsense account. For example if I take a representative statistics, it's as follows:

• Page views in Blogger : 907
• Page views in Analytics : 267
• Page views in Adsense : 203

You might see different numbers but the general pattern is 

Page views of Blogger > Page views of analytics > Page views of Adsense.

Bots in Web

Bots stand for robots and in the web these are applications which traverse the web. Search engine do employ bots to crawl the web pages and build the search index. Google spiders are a kind of bots, which crawls the pages and build the index against keywords. If you want to see how spider bots crawls a page  do the following:

• Go to Google webmaster tool.
• In the Crawl menu on left hand side and click on 'Fetch as Google'
• Now if you click on the link displayed in the table under column 'Path', you can see the page as seen by Google bot.

What you would see is basically a HTML page and that's the Google spider sees. It then parses that page and tries to make a judgement about the content of the page. Based on the content it associates

Increasing traffic of a website

Increase traffic to a site is the mantra of success in the web. The more traffic comes to the site, the greater is the monetization capability. It's also a big business at the moment. But is it easy to increase the traffic to a site? I thought so and I tried too many things, but I would say that it is still a black art for me.

I have launched couple of sites and the earning was not the purpose. As I used to do workshops and trainings, I found it a easy way to share the things online. All the tutorials including videos were

Links in SEO World

Links are the web addresses. The page that you are reading right now has a web link, the link that you are seeing on the browser address bar. Every link is unique. What that means is that a link cannot point to more than one web page at a given point in time. Along time scale it might be pointing to different pages, but at a point in time it always points to one web page. A web page however may have multiple web addresses.

A link is specified by HTML anchor tag. For example, if you want to link back to my home page, than the tag would go as follows:

<a href="http://www.lalitbhatt.net">Lalit Home Page</a>

Sandbox effect and Search Engines

What is sandbox effect in search engine optimization? It's about a phenomena that the new domains do not get similar weightage as old domains. Though Google has maintained that there is as such no official filter like Sandbox effects bit in words of Matt Cutts from Google "There is no sandbox, there are just elements of the algorithm that may look and act like them."

So even though there are no filters for sandbox but there is a sandbox effect, which we cannot deny. From SEO perspective that means the impact of effect needs to be incorporated.

Let's take a day to day example to understand this phenomena. Suppose you are looking to make a new wardrobe and you are looking for someone who can make it for you. One aspect that you would like to understand is the workmanship quality of the individual. How good is the carpenter in his trade?