Google's Matt Cutts On Using ccTLDs

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, in another video answer, responds to the question about using ccTLDs (country code top level domain names). The question was "Should I use ccTLDs for sites not targeted to those countries?"

 The answer is pretty straight forward. If it is part of the list of generic ccTLDs that Google has specifically said there is enough use to warrant them to be generic, then go ahead and use them. If they are not on that list, then be warned, the site on that ccTLD may be localized to the country of the ccTLD.

In the Google+ post, one person brings up the domain youtu.be, which I used above to link to the video. In that case, it would be a ccTLD that is NOT generic, according to Google's own list. But since it redirects (well, a 302 redirect), it doesn't matter much. But if the main site was youtu.be and not youtube.com that would be an issue.

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Google AdSense: Responsive Design for Ad Units

Everyone is asking? What took so long?! Google has finally announced a beta of a new ad unit designed for responsive designed web pages.

In the past, Google said you can modify your ad code to make it work for responsive design web pages, but now, you have the option of using a native AdSense ad unit specifically for responsive design web pages.

To access this, go to your AdSense console, login and create a new ad unit. Then from the drop down of ad sizes, select "Responsive ad unit (BETA)." Yes, Google warns this is a beta.

Google AdSense Responsive Design Ad Units

For most serious publishers, they have already come up with a hacked solution to make their AdSense ad units work on responsive designed web sites or avoided it. But now, many will begin exploring this new beta option.

Google does warn:

Be sure to specify fixed pixel values when setting the width and height of the ad to be served.
Make sure that the specified width and height match one of our supported ad sizes. Please note that link unit sizes aren’t supported at the moment.
The new ad code is responsive on initial page load only. Subsequent changes to the ad size, such as a screen orientation change, will not cause a new ad to be displayed. We know that this is an important feature for many of you and we’re currently working to address this.
Always set a default ad size in case some media queries aren’t supported.

Forum discussion at Google+ & WebmasterWorld.

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Visit Your Blogger and Make Your Blogging Experience Better with Edit HTML Page

Today early morning I was in so happy mood. I don't know why? May be there was some special in my mind. After completing my routine work I visited my blogger account and stared the blogging like same days.

Do you know what I did observe there in my Blogspot.com (Blogger). I saw there some amazing updates by Google. Yes that was HTML Editor Page of the blogger.

You can watch is happening also.

Go to your blogger profile. And do some test regarding checking the updates. When your blogger login has been completed and return back to your blog profile. So click on the Template option and go to edit html. What is showing there?

There is nice HTML Editor Page that will fill you smarty and best blogger fillings like Notepad++ Editors, Dreamweaver Editors. You can find your coding easily by filtering the coding line.

Yes the latest blogger updates is for enhance the blogger users experience. You can easily jump to the Widget pages.  

I hope all blogger will test this experience and will share it in your groups.

Happy blogging. Google +

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Google Once Again Claims 67% Search Market Share

It’s hardly headline news that Google is by far the most popular search engine for users in the U.S. and most of the world. But what is headline worthy: for two of the past three months, Google has owned 67 percent of the U.S. search market.

Google hit the unprecedented search market share of 67 percent for the first time in November 2012, then dipped slightly to 66.7 percent in December, only to rebound to 67 percent in January, comScore reported.
In January 2012, Google’s search market share was still the far and away leader in the U.S., at 65.6 percent.
As we reported earlier this month, Google is the most popular search engine globally. That same report also revealed that Yandex had passed Bing to become the fourth most used search engine, behind Baidu and Yahoo, respectively.

Despite a renewed push with TV commercials promoting the Bing It On challenge, it seems U.S. users aren’t being convinced to break the Google habit. But it’s not all bad news for Google’s closest U.S. rival.
Bing reached a new milestone as well – 16.5 percent (up from 16.3 percent in December). In January 2012, Bing's U.S. search market share stood at 15.2 percent.

Microsoft’s search engine is still miles behind Google, even when you add in Yahoo’s Bing-powered search market share. Search results powered by Google totaled 69.3 percent in January, up from 69.1 percent in December, while Bing-powered searches held steady from December at 25.6 percent.

As for Yahoo, CEO Marissa Mayer has made no secret that she’s not happy with the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, which has seen Yahoo and Bing basically swapping search market share over the past two years, rather than eat into Google’s gigantic lead. Holding to form, Bing went up, and Yahoo went down in January.
Yahoo’s search market share dropped from 12.2 percent in December to 12.1 percent in January. Yahoo’s search market share stood at 14.1 percent in January 2012. Yahoo has lost search market share 13 out of the last 16 months and has been dropping year-over-year dating back to January 2007, when Yahoo was at 28.1 percent.

Ask’s search market share dropped to 2.8 percent in January, down from 3 percent in December. AOL also declined – from 1.8 percent in December to 1.7 percent in January.

The number of core searches jumped to 17.6 billion in January, an increase of 11 percent compared to December. Google sites led the way with 13.1 billion searches (up 11 percent) followed by Microsoft sites with 3.2 billion searches (up 12 percent), Yahoo sites with 2.3 billion (up 9 percent), Ask Network with 536 million, and AOL with 331 million (up 7 percent).

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How Panda-Proof Your Website

Since Panda first hit the scene two years ago, thousands of sites have been mauled. SEO forums are littered with site owners who have seen six figure revenue websites and their entire livelihoods evaporate overnight, largely because they didn’t take Panda seriously.

Last year Google unleashed the most aggressive campaign of major algorithm updates ever in its crusade to battle rank spam. This year looks to be more of the same.

When you have a business or blog hosted online, you need steady and huge amount of traffic to the site. It should also be user friendly to drive the traffic. Attracting organic traffic from search engines can be the effective and cheapest way. But post panda effect, online marketers feel attracting traffic from search engines has become relatively tough. Google panda is a set of algorithms designed to get rid of low quality hosting websites or which are less user friendly.

Five Tips in Panda-proofing Your Website

• Avoid depending on auto generated content, this content are not on the favorites of search engines. If a search engines recognizes such content on your site, it will be regarded as spam content. And you might lose your traffic. 
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• Try to write unique content as your posts every time, pay specific attention on the length of the posts as well. A well detailed and lengthy post is entitled to be useful to the user as it will contain more information on that specific topic. The length of the posts should be at least 400 words and get rid of all the articles which have low content from the search results. You should also note that Google panda causes a wide-site penalty as opposed to page-by –page penalty. So, if one of the pages has low quality the whole site might be shut down. 
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• Get rid of all the pages that add little or no value to the site, such as disclaimer, about us, contact. Either assigns no index tags to all these pages or Robots.txt to stop crawling of these pages where ever possible.
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• Learn and implement SEO techniques on the site. A well researched and applied search engine optimization is likely to have positive impact on the site. Prior to writing the posts do a thorough research of all the high searched rich keywords and try including them in your post. But avoid stuffing keywords in the posts; this may affect the quality of your site. Build quality back links to your site. While looking for the back links be aware the Back links should be within your niche and from popular and authorized sites else they won’t be adding any benefits.
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• Building social media relations can be handier in tackling the panda effect. You can start with creating pages on popular social platforms such Google+, Face book, twitter and Digg. Link back these pages with your site and add various share bottoms on the site. Social trust adds huge difference to the rankings, specially +1 vote of Google. Google can give you high ranking based on these votes even if the posts may not be optimized, owing to the trust of the user on the social networks.

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Google updates Currents app, adds breaking news, quick Edition browsing and more

No matter where you fall on the print vs digital divide, there's no contesting the appeal of an easy-to-read magazine-like layout. Which is why Google's Currents app has plenty of charm for publishers looking for an auto-formatting solution.

Released a little over a year ago and updated to version 2.0 just today (Android-only), the platform now features a bevy of improvements, now adding in an Edition sidebar for quick browsing access based on genres, the ability to swipe vertically for in-Edition scrolling and horizontally to navigate to other "titles," a custom filter for highlighting sections of interest, a starring system for saving news of note, a Google News-curated breaking news section and, lastly, a new catalog design. If you're tiring of Flipboard or just feel you need a change from contentious redesigns, go ahead and download it at the source below.

Source: Google Play

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