Google to Announce Zebra Update?

Since the strikes of Panda and Penguin, the online world has been waiting with baited breath for the release of the next black and white monster.

There have been whisperings of skunks, orcas and magpies. But pandas and penguins aren't aggressive animals, and our sources from within Google have told us it will come from an altogether more placid beast...

Behold, The Zebra Update!

Looks menacing doesn't he?

But What Will The Zebra Update Target?

Panda hit on-site elements. Penguin mainly focused on off-site issues. Zebra is going to town on social...

• Too many retweets with keywords included around a link
• Facebook updates with too many shares from people not in your industry
• Any Google+ shares as this will look spammy (Google+ is a graveyard right, so any activity looks suspicious?!)
• Owning a Pinterest page - brands only use these for SEO benefit no?

If you've been creating great content which may be being shared extensively by people on the web, some of which might not be bloggers in your niche, then start looking over your shoulder. The Big G doesn't want anyone messing with their rankings.

It's time the social web started cleaning itself up, The Zebra Update is coming...

Source:- http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/Blog/google-to-announce-zebra-update-1805.aspx

How to Calculate (KEI) keyword effective indexing

KEI of a keyword or search term is the equation that you end up with that will tell you how easy a scrupulous keyword is to rank for. What this is supposed to do is emphasize pretty interesting which search terms to target in order to achieve traffic to our site. Sounds huge don’t it! If only it were that simple...

How to Calculate (KEI) keyword effective indexing

There are different variations out there about how to calculate KEI effectively, but I use and suggest the below:

KEI = (volume of searches per month)^2/(total number of competitors)

I said at the beginning of this article I would make this as simple as possible, so I will now attempt to explain how the above calculation works in terms of a real example

KEI=Global monthly Searches/competition

Definitely it will be 1 or less than 1.

But it's sure it's not greater than 1. It means the max KEI value of any keywords will be 1.

Choose a search engine to do the competition search and click proceeds. Wordtracker will show you keywords from your storage bin and their factors.

The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to identify which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

Pay particular concentration to the KEI Analysis. The competition is strong-minded by pointed each keyword phrase in the chosen search engine and finding out how many sites are using that keyword phrase. 

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Visits China's Top Search Engine

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By: Leslie Horn

• 12.20.2010
 
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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is vacationing in China, a country that has blocked his social-networking site for more than a year. Despite the ban, Zuckerberg has publicly expressed interest in China, and on Monday he met with the head of Baidu, the country's biggest search engine, the AFP has said.

"It makes sense – he is interested in the Chinese Internet, he's made that very plain," Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told the AFP. "Obviously this is one of the big dark spots for Facebook because it is blocked here in China. He has had a long-standing interest in China. I'm sure he wants to get the advice of someone who knows the Internet landscape well here."

Zuckerberg, who was recently named Time's person of the year, toured Baidu's Beijing office and dined with chief executive Robin Li in the company's "private dining halls," the AFP report said.

With 420 million Internet users, China is a market that the 26-year-old Facebook CEO would like to tap into. He recently told an audience at Stanford University that he is learning Chinese.

"It's kind of a personal challenge this year, I'm taking about an hour a day and I'm learning Chinese," Zuckerberg said. "I'm trying to understand the language, the culture, the mind set – it's just such an important part of the world. How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion-six people?"

Twitter is also blocked in China, and Google Google pulled out of the country, refusing to censor search results at the urging of the Chinese government. When conducting a search, Google Users in China are redirected to the Hong Kong domain, Google.com/hk.

Bloomberg said that Baidu has almost three times the Internet searches that Google does in China. In the third quarter, Baidu accounted for 73 percent while Google comprised 24.6 percent.

The Chinese government has a history of blocking the sites that it deems inappropriate or subversive. Most recently, that has included WikiLeaks and many sites that reported the leak of more than 250,000 classified U.S. embassy cables.

Zuckerberg is vacationing in China with girlfriend Priscilla Chan. Details about their itinerary haven't been disclosed, besides Kuo remarking that the two visited the Tibetan Lama Temple in the country's capital.

Microsoft Bing gains on Google

Monday, 20 December 2010 07:08
Patrick Stafford

More on Internet

• Apple overtakes Nokia in Aus market
• Google launches Android navigation in Australia
• New search engine uses people power
• Firefox 4 delayed until 2011
• Twitter releases app for Windows phone

Read more on:

• Bing
• ComScore
• Google
• Internet
• SEO

Microsoft Bing has gained some ground in the search engine war, according to the latest statistics from ComScore.

The figures show that Microsoft gained 0.3%, while Google and Yahoo each dropped 0.1%. AOL moved to the bottom of the most popular five engines, losing 0.1% to take 2% of the market.

"More than 16 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November," ComScore said in a statement. "Google sites ranked first with 10.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo sites in second with 2.6 billion, and Microsoft sites in third with 1.9 billion."

But despite Bing's recent successes, it has a long way to go before it can challenge Google, which was introduced a variety of features including Google Instant to help increase traffic.

Related Items :

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Companies : Google, Microsoft

AltaVista likely to end after 15 years

AltaVista, one of the web's best and most popular search engines in its formative years, is likely to be shut down.

Currently owned by Yahoo, it is one of eight services scheduled for 'sunsetting', alongside Deliciousm Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and others.

Launching in 1995, AltaVista had a minimalist interface unlike other search sites (which would later be adopted by Google), and covered more pages than were previously believed to even exist. Within a couple of years of launching it was getting over 80 million hits a day.

However after rebranding itself as a portal in the late 1990s and branching out into other areas like email and shopping, it lost market share to the up-and-coming Google search engine.

In February 2003 it was sold to Overture for only US$140 million, despite being valued at $2.3 billion in 1999.

Overture was later acquired by Yahoo.

China launches Google rival

PTI, Dec 21, 2010, 03.31pm IST

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Tags:Search Engine|People's Daily|Goso.Cn|Google

China's search engine has been launched by the country's largest newspaper the 'People's Daily'

BEIJING: After taming Google into submission, China has launched a new search engine of its own to make foray into its 420 million strong net users' market, a move believed to be aimed at taking firm control of the web media. 

Known as 'Goso.cn', China's very own search engine has been launched by the country's largest newspaper the 'People's Daily', which is the official daily of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). 

The state-run media already holds sway over the country where the flow of information is tightly controlled, and the move to introduce its own search engine signifies its aim to take control of the web media as well. 

The move came as blog news is catching up fast posing a direct challenge to the hold of official media in the country. 

Google was involved in a face-off with the Chinese government in March this year after it shut down its Chinese search engine and re-routed mainland users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong, protesting cyber attacks. 

Google, which resisted attempts of censorship for many months later gave in and got its license to operate in China renewed only after it agreed to abide by all restrictions. 

Months later, the country's largest newspaper has launched a news search engine which came after six months of trial operations, state-run English dailies the China Daily and Global Times reported. 

The launch of the "People Search Engine" is part of authorities' efforts to enhance the CPC international communication capacity, Zhang Yannong, president of People's Daily, said. 

Given the fact that most of the rules and regulations of the information industry were set by foreign companies, and that several countries view development of the Internet as part of their national strategies, China must develop a search engine with independent technology, thus creating a good Internet environment for 420 million, China Daily quoted a "netizen" Zhang as saying. 

"The search engine is an Internet tool that obviously has ideological characteristics," he said. Deng Yaping, general manager of Goso Network Limited, said Goso.cn is a vertical search engine product that integrates news, news forums, pictures, blogs, videos and micro blogs. 

Since its renewal, Google operated on a low profile in China and Google Earth Maps did not even take part in the bidding, leaving the floor open to mostly local competitors. 

China has already launched its own version of earth maps which showed Arunachal Pradesh as part of southern Tibet. 

Goso.cn is expected to go after local search engine Baidu.com, which expanded it operations taking full advantage of Google's problems.

Read more: China launches Google rival - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/China-launches-Google-rival/articleshow/7138974.cms#ixzz18p0KjzrQ

Make Your Web Pages Faster For Your Users and Search Engines

In the world of the modern web it is vital that you keep your web pages fast for your users to see and use, this is also true for search engines as Google is now going to take into consideration load times when indexing websites.

It can be very difficult to make these web pages smaller and faster with clients requiring high quality images/ graphics and dynamic effects such as videos and slideshows. There are however a number of things a web designer can do to make sure that the website is at top speed.

Image compression

It is important to make sure that any images used within the website are at their smallest file size without losing quality. There are many graphics programs out there that can help you to re-size your images so that they are smaller. It is also important to use the correct formats such as GIF and PNG.

The GIF format (Graphics Interchange Format) has been very popular on the web for a number of years due to its ability to create very small file sizes.

You do not really want to be creating large images through this format as you will see a loss in quality but for buttons, small images and backgrounds it is ideal.

The PNG format (Portable Network Graphics) has taken over the GIF in recent years due to its great compressed quality and low file size. PNG is great for logos and other large sized graphics.





       


    
External CSS Files

CSS is a very powerful web tool and when used well it makes websites look amazing. It can however slow down the performance of a website if it is used internally (inline) because it gives the browser too much code to read through at once. The best way to use CSS is externally, linking it in to your HTML.

Every great website needs a good style sheet or two but there are many websites relying on 4 or 5 style sheets which slows down performance and the way a search engine crawls the site. Try and keep CSS files down to a minimum and make sure they are external.

External JavaScript

JavaScript works wonders on a website helping it to look and feel more dynamic but just like CSS, if it is used too much internally it can slow down your webpage and give search engines too much code to look through when crawling your site.

Use JavaScript files externally and link them into your HTML for optimum performance.

Unnecessary code

When looking through the code of a website there is very often areas of code that really do not need to be there. This could be due to various developers and designers working on the same project or a website that has had changes over the years.

Unnecessary code like this makes the browser read things that are unimportant or non existent, which will slow the load time of the site. Just take the time to read through the code and strip out any areas that aren't needed.





       


    
Server

Good hosting is key to the speed of any website. Make sure that your server is up to date with the latest processors and can handle the traffic your website is getting. If you have a website that attracts thousands of hits then shared hosting will just slow down the website and make it unavailable to others, this is where a dedicated server is needed.

Keeping a check on your hosting can really speed up your website and keep users happy.

Script compression programs

It is a good idea sometimes when running various scripts and style sheets to run them through compression software which will compress JavaScript, CSS and HTML files to ensure that they are as small as possible. This will help to make the webpage fast.

There is one problem when doing this however, if you use a program like Mozilla Firefox's Firebug to inspect your code, it can be hard to find the exact area you need. This is because it tends to bunch things like CSS together as so it can be hard to spot the areas you wan tot change.

About the Author: Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales. He has worked in the SEO and Internet Marketing world for many years, and working in partnership with another company has launched the new SEO business. http://clearwebservices.com/ - For More Information, please call 01594 835 857 or email info@clearwebservices.com.