Oct 18

Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance. Other signals include things like our analysis of your site’s content, its relevance to a geographic location, etc. As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.

How do these signals factor into ranking?

Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?

Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. Here are several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.
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Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general

  • Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.
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  • Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.
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  • Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.
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  • Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

(From Official Google Webmaster Blog)

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Oct 18

When webmasters put content out on the web it’s there for the world to see. Unfortunately, most content on the web is only published in a single language, understandable by only a fraction of the world’s population.

In a continued effort to make the world’s information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.

Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our “Translate My Page” gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.

The gadget will be rendered in the user’s language, so if they come to your page and can’t understand anything else, they’ll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.

Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don’t want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:

Email us at <span class=”notranslate”>sales at mydomain dot com</span>

And if you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:

<meta name=”google” value=”notranslate”>

to the <head> of your page and Google won’t translate any of the content on that page.

Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API Google launched last March.

With these tools Google hopes you can more easily make your content available in all the languages Google supports, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

(From Official Google Webmaster Blog)

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Oct 3

Comment spam is bad stuff all around. It’s bad for you, because it adds to your workload as well as server load (especially some servers with limited Database Queries). It’s bad for your users, who want to find information on your site and certainly aren’t interested in dodgy links and unrelated content. It’s bad for the web as a whole, since it discourages people from opening up their sites for user-contributed content and joining conversations on existing forums.

So what can you, as a webmaster, do about it?

A quick disclaimer: the list below is a good start, but not exhaustive. There are so many different blog, forum, and bulletin board systems out there that we can’t possibly provide detailed instructions for each, so the points below are general enough to make sense on most systems.
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Make Sure Your Commenters Are Real People

  • Add a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs require users to read a bit of obfuscated text and type it back in to prove they’re a human being and not an automated script. If your blog or forum system doesn’t have CAPTCHAs built in you may be able to find a plugin like Recaptcha, a project which also helps digitize old books. CAPTCHAs are not foolproof but they make life a little more difficult for spammers. You can read more about the many different types of CAPTCHAS, but keep in mind that just adding a simple one can be fairly effective.
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  • Block suspicious behavior. Many forums allow you to set time limits between posts, and you can often find plugins to look for excessive traffic from individual IP addresses or proxies and other activity more common to bots than human beings.
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Use Automatic Filtering Systems

  • Block obviously inappropriate comments by adding words to a blacklist. Spammers obfuscate words in their comments so this isn’t a very scalable solution, but it can keep blatant spam at bay.
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  • Use built-in features or plugins that delete or mark comments as spam for you. Spammers use automated methods to besmirch your site, so why not use an automated system to defend yourself?  Comprehensive systems likeÂ