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Google Does Its Bit To Save Energy March 24th, 2009 Google has always tried to be a socially responsible company, by espousing various causes from time to time. They are now trying to help save energy consumption and thus reduce global warming. In order to achieve this they will shortly be launching free software, which will enable users to keep tabs on their electricity consumption and improve its efficiency. In February this year, Google had announced that they would use their software skills to launch a program which would show home energy consumption in real time on the user’s computer or telephone, in an effort to reduce green house gas emissions. Director for Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, Google, Dan Reicher told Reuters that they were already having discussions with various utility companies in the U.S. Europe and Asia, and the product would be made available to the general public shortly. However no specific date has been announced for the launch as yet. He further says, “When I began getting information about my own home, I discovered that I had a 35 year electric motor running for my heating system. That was using huge amount of electricity. I did not realize that’s the change I need to make in my home.” It is very likely that such awareness will help others to save substantial amounts of electricity as well. In the meantime, the software known as PowerMeter or ‘smart’ meter is already being installed in some parts of Australia by the government owned electricity provider EnergyAustralia. This meter will charge higher rates during peak periods and lower rates at other times, thus allowing families to switch to non-peak hours for the usage of certain gadgets, and save on electric bills. According to studies conducted by Google access to home energy consumption is expected to save between 5 to 15% on monthly electric bills. The tool that is being developed will be open sourced. Adobe SEO Technology Center
March 20th, 2009
Adobe must be realising, at long last, that they are losing a lot of money by making Flash technology so search engine unfriendly - a fact that probably deters a lot of webmasters from using Flash, resulting in lost revenues for the company. To make ammends they’ve created the SEO Technology Center on the Adobe Developer Connection section of their site. Sites built with Adobe Flash technology have remained largely invisible on search engine results until mid-2008, when Google and Yahoo! announced the ability to crawl and index text within Flash files after Adobe agreed to cooperate with the search engines. The technology centre will help developers to build Flash applications that will be more search friendly in the future. The site describes difficulties that SEOs face and explains simple ways to deal with them. So far, the SEO Technology Center has five articles: search optimization techniques for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), an SEO checklist, information about enhanced search indexing of SWF content, and guides to the Adobe Flash Player version checking protocol, detecting Flash Player versions and embedding SWF files. Adobe has also informed that at present it would be more practical to offer HTML representation of content while the work on improving Flash technology is still in progress. Webmasters can use additional text, build static (HTML) version of their site or include content in a <noscript> tag. It is hoped that the creation of this SEO Technology Center for Flash will help small and medium businesses in particular, as they often do not have highly specialised personnel to deal with these problems. However, the damage may already have been done, and Flash technology, as we know it, will probably never recover to be considered an equally viable alternative to HTML for website SEO. Google PageRank Demystified
The Google PageRank is the subject of wide discussion and speculation in the search engine marketing industry. Many think that it has no impact on the ranking of a page in Google, while others believe it is important. This article explains the concept of PageRank and how webmasters can increase it. It also discusses the importance and impact of PageRank on a webpage's placement in the search engine results. What is PageRank? "PageRank" or "PR" is a term coined by Google to indicate the popularity of a page. The popularity of a webpage, according to Google, is determined by the number of links from other pages on the World Wide Web that point to this page. Google considers all incoming links to a page to be a positive vote, confirming the relevancy and superiority of a page. In other words, if page B and C have a link pointing to page A, Google will consider that B and C are saying that page A is good. Of course, Google does not consider only the number of incoming link a page has. It also considers the quality of this link. If page B has a PageRank of 5 and page C a PageRank of 3, Google will consider the link from page B to bear much more significance (a vote with a higher impact) than page C. Consequently, votes from pages B and C give a PageRank to page A. This PageRank is a grade between 0 and 10. This PageRank can be viewed on the little green bar in the GoogleToolBar. In order to view the PageRank a user should go into the options setting on the Google Toolbar and enable the service under the "More" tab. Absence of a green bar for a page means the PageRank is 0. A greyed-out PageRank indicates that the page has either not yet been indexed, assigned a PageRank or has been banned / delisted by Google. While the PageRank algorithm is extremely complicated, for the purpose of this article it is sufficient to understand that the PR is no more than a direct indication of the number and quality of links pointing to a webpage. What is a good quality backlink? In general a link pointing to a page, which can be crawled by Google and will contribute towards an increase in the PageRank would be considered to be a good backlink for that page. Plain text links, which consist of plain text (knows as the anchor text) surrounded by simple HTML link code are usually ideal. The URL referenced in the link HTML should point directly to the page e.g. http://www.accuracast.com/ and should not be redirected to the destination page via a script, e.g. /redir.php?linkdestination=123456. The Google algorithm cannot decipher script code and so it will not consider a redirected link to be a vote for the page in question. Other characteristics of good backlinks include:
Google's ongoing efforts to eliminate spam from the search results has led to a devaluation of links that have been paid for and reduction in the PageRank of websites that have a high percentage of low-quality backlinks. The former was a result of recent changes in the PageRank algorithm that led to a reduction in PR of a number of popular websites that sold links. The latter was a result of changes made in the Google algorithm that incorporated a new measure called Spam Mass. As a result, buying and selling links can adversely affect PageRank, as can having too many low quality links pointing to a page. Search Engine Optimisation Results from ethical SEO can take as long as 9-12 months for a new website. This is a good long term strategy, but will not help most new companies in the early months, as the search engines will not rank a new site for any competitive, high-volume keywords. Optimising your website is a good idea for longevity of the business. However, it is important to spend time on keyword research to identify search phrases that you could target, which are not being targeted by too many other competitors. Using those phrases on the site copy will help them rank, and there is a good chance that Google might rank your site even earlier for these key phrases than the more competitive ones. For example, an antique furniture retailer based in Hampstead, North London should start by focusing on key phrases such as 'hampstead antiques', 'north london antique furniture' and so on, rather than just 'antique furniture'. Even though the latter receives much more traffic, the number of other sites targeting the same phrase makes it much more competitive and difficult to rank for. Google Algorithm's Top Ranking Factors Thirty seven SEO professionals from around the world participated in a poll to vote on what they consider to be the most important factors the Google algorithm considers when ranking a site. The poll set up by SEOmoz asked these professionals to grade various factors according to the perceived importance. This article discusses the Top 10 positive factors. 1. Keyword Use In Title Tags The title tag is probably the single most important HTML tag, not only because Google considers it to be a very important ranking factor, but also because Google uses the title tag text to create the listing's heading (the blue link) on the search results. It is therefore equivalent to the headline of an ad inciting searchers to visit the site. 2. Global Link Popularity of Site Last year this would have been considered the single most important factor. However, recent changes in the Google algorithm have slightly reduced the importance of the overall number of inbound links pointing to the site. The factor is still extremely important and weight, authority and relevance of the links are also factored into considerations. 3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link The text contained within the link (between the <a> and </a> tags in the HTML) is called the anchor text. This text serves as a description of the link's target, and is hence a very clear indication to users and the search engine of what the target page will be about. As a result, this continues to be a very important factor in ranking a site. 4. Link Popularity within Site's Internal Link Structure Unlike external links from third-party websites, internal links are fully within the control of the webmaster. How these internal links are structured gives Google a very clear indication of which pages are more important for the site owners. Accordingly, Google perceives this as an internal vote for the importance of individual pages. 5. Age of Site Authority of a site, according to the Google algorithm is determined by two main factors: The number and quality of links pointing to it and the age of the site, in terms of the period of time that the site has contained indexable content seen by the search engines. Webmasters have no control over this factor. The only way to affect this is by buying old websites. 6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site Relevance has always been the mantra of Google ranking, and this factor is a mere extension of that fact. Not only is it important to have lots of links pointing to a site, but it is also important that a good number of these links are from sites related to the topic of the target page and the target keyword. 7. Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community Increased use of social networking sites and user generated content has turned the Internet and SEO around in the past year. Accordingly, a new factor now considered of importance is the link weight and authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world. 8. Keyword Use in Body Text Link bombs and spam linking enabled websites to be ranked, in the past, for keywords that were not even present on the site. This has changed. Google will almost never rank a site now based solely on links pointing to it, no matter how many they may be. Use of the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page is a must. 9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site This is all about PageRank of the site that is providing a link. Number and quality of links matter. The quality of the link is determined by its relevance and by its own link popularity. Hence, a single link from an extremely popular (high PR) website will be worth much much more than many more links from a relatively unknown site. 10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site Sudden spikes in the number of inbound links pointing to a site are unnatural. Google constantly monitors the frequency and timing of external sites linking to given domain, even though this may not be reflected in the link counts they show on their search results. A steady upward growth rate is always best.
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