Search Engine Optimization

Dear Google, Should I Focus On Content Creation Or DMCA Takedowns?

by Mahesh Mohan on April 25, 2013 3 Comments

As a blogger, should I focus on content creation or spend enormous time on finding content scrapers and then for filing DMCA Takedown notices? Please advice…

I’m very much annoyed that you continue giving higher ranking to content scrapers even after your so-called algorithmic updates Panda, Penguin, Caffeine, etc. I completely understand when a higher authority website outranks ours even for an exact match "title search".

But there’s no excuse when a spammy content scraper website continues to outrank the original blog posts. Recently you published a Webmaster video where Matt Cutts explains how Google finds it difficult to find the real author of an article.

Forget Content Marketing, Let’s Focus On Content Curation

by Mahesh Mohan on March 21, 2013 Leave a Comment

A content curator is someone who aggregates content from across the web. They’re not the ones who copy stuff from the Internet and repost the same on social media, blogs, etc. Content curators are passionate about what they share and hence they “curate” content before sharing by adding more information and value to it.

Content Curation is different from Content Creation because curators don’t generate any significant content by themselves. Their primary goal is to find interesting stuff and then re-publish the same by adding their own views about the content.

Everything You Need To Recover From Google Panda & Penguin [Tips & Resources]

by Mahesh Mohan on February 27, 2013 1 Comment

If you’re an SEO then you probably know that Google Panda is two years old. The first Google Panda Update (or farmer update) was on February 24, 2011 targeting content farms (and those made for search engine sites) and it was a nightmare for webmasters. And then there were more updates to penalize websites that were over-optimized (Google Penguin), using exact match domains, pages with too many above the fold ads, etc.

I love all these updates as it improves the search experience of users and that’s obviously the goal of a search engine. That said, Google is STILL far away from that “perfect” search engine definition.

Content Scraping? Here’s How To Deal And File A DMCA Notice

by Mahesh Mohan on February 23, 2013 5 Comments

Whenever I publish a blog post I manually search Google to make sure that the post is indexed. And yeah, Google used to index my latest blog posts in real-time until few months back. Nowadays there’s a short delay in indexing but nonetheless, the crawling speed is not bad.

Now what’s annoying is content scrapers. I noticed that another blog was copying all my latest posts by fetching the same from RSS feeds. And what’s even more uglier is that it’s ranking higher than me even though Google is indexing my articles before the spammer’s blog. It’s really embarrassing to see original articles showing as supplemental results (omitted results) on SERPs.

The Definitive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Handbook

by Mahesh Mohan on February 12, 2013 2 Comments

If you’re a newbie or someone who wants to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) then searching through a plethora of options on the Web is a task by itself. SEO is changing daily and you probably don’t know where to start, what to follow, and what to ignore, right?

I started writing this blog post as a link building resource blog post and then decided to cover (almost) all the aspects of SEO linking to some of the best resources available. If I have missed any interesting resource or an aspect of SEO then feel free to comment below and I’ll add it to the list.

The Only 7 Tools You’ll Ever Need To Check Page Speed Performance

by Mahesh Mohan on February 7, 2013 1 Comment

First there there was Google Panda that penalized low quality websites and then after a year there came Google Penguin which penalized websites that violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.

In 2010 Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) announced that Google is incorporating site speed in search ranking. It literally means that websites that load faster will be ranked higher than sites which are slow. Google’s philosophy is that faster websites create happy users and it improves the user experience. It appears like patience is a virtue but not for web users as New York Times reports that an eye blink is just too long to wait for impatient web users.