Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Submit Website to Google With Fetch

Google Fetch

Google has posted information on their Webmaster Central Blog with great news for expediting the indexing of a new website! The following is a repost of the article written by Jonathon Simon and Susan Moskwa:

The Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools now provides a way to submit new and updated URLs to Google for indexing. After you fetch a URL as Googlebot, if the fetch is successful, you’ll now see the option to submit that URL to our index. When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day. We’ll then consider it for inclusion in our index. Note that we don’t guarantee that every URL submitted in this way will be indexed; we’ll still use our regular processes—the same ones we use on URLs discovered in any other way—to evaluate whether a URL belongs in our index.

This new functionality may help you in several situations: if you’ve just launched a new site, or added some key new pages, you can ask Googlebot to find and crawl them immediately rather than waiting for us to discover them naturally. You can also submit URLs that are already indexed in order to refresh them, say if you’ve updated some key content for the event you’re hosting this weekend and want to make sure we see it in time. It could also help if you’ve accidentally published information that you didn’t mean to, and want to update our cached version after you’ve removed the information from your site.

How to submit a URL

First, use Diagnostics > Fetch As Googlebot to fetch the URL you want to submit to Google. If the URL is successfully fetched you’ll see a new “Submit to index” link appear next to the fetched URL.

Once you click “Submit to index” you’ll see a dialog box that allows you to choose whether you want to submit only the one URL, or that URL and all its linked pages.

When submitting individual URLs, we have a maximum limit of 50 submissions per week; when submitting URLs with all linked pages, the limit is 10 submissions per month. You can see how many submissions you have left on the Fetch as Googlebot page. Any URL submitted should point to content that would be suitable for Google Web Search, so if you're trying to submit images or videos you should use Sitemaps instead.

Submit URLs to Google without verifying

In conjunction with this update to Fetch as Googlebot, we've also updated the public "Add your URL to Google" form. It's now the Crawl URL form. It has the same quota limits for submitting pages to the index as the Fetch as Googlebot feature but doesn't require verifying ownership of the site in question, so you can submit any URLs that you want crawled and indexed.

Note that Googlebot is already pretty good about finding and crawling new content in a timely fashion, so don’t feel obligated to use this tool for every change or update on your site. But if you’ve got a URL whose crawling or indexing you want to speed up, consider submitting it using the Crawl URL form or the updated Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools. Feel free to visit our Webmaster Help Forum if you have more detailed questions.

As an Atlanta internet marketing company we're excited about this new capability to better serve our clients.

Learning From Your Online Competition

Digital Marketing Competitor Intelligence

Any business that has made, or is making, an earnest effort to achieve high organic rankings has undoubtedly encountered some online competitors that seem equally determined to have those same high organic placements. Rather than look away in disgust, maybe you should consider taking an in depth look at your online competitors to see what can be learned from their efforts. After all, they must be doing something right.

Ther are many things to examine when researching an online competitor. Many of these things are spelled out in an SEO strategies article that was posted online. You can learn about the page count of their site, amount of content on each page, keyword density, and obviously look at the source code for insights to their SEO strategy. A backlink check is another good way to find valuable off-page SEO opportunities.

Since your competitors have or are going through the same exercises as you, there is a golden opportunity to save yourseld considerable time, effort and money by learning from an online competitor, and adding your own special touches to improve your SEO results. This is a common practice when doing Atlanta internet marketing or internet marketing in any major market.


Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Bing Webmaster Tools Reports Now Include Yahoo Traffic Data

Today we received this email concerning the integration of Yahoo traffic data into Bing's Webmaster Tool reports. It's probably a good idea to let your clients know that their numbers may look a little beefier than normal.


Dear Bing Webmaster User,

Your Bing Webmaster Tools data just got more powerful!

Yahoo! Data now included in your account!

The Bing Webmaster team is pleased to announce the integration of Yahoo traffic data into Bing Webmaster Tools reports. Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports.

The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows:

On the Traffic Tab: Traffic summary report and Page Traffic reports will be impacted as follows:

Impressions – will go up based on combined data numbers across both search engines
Clicks – will go up based on combined data numbers
Click Through Rates (CTR) as appropriate for above (change only due to the mathematics involved in the first two items)

No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools.



As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages. At this time the data will be combined, not selectable. The data will also update in any market where Bing is powering Yahoo search.

For the month of August, accounts will note the changes in data numbers between the 12th and the 16th. September will be the first full month of combined data.

Hola, Ciao, Привет, Γεια σου, Salut!
Now serving Webmaster Tools data in 40+ languages

For our international users hoping to see data in more languages than English, all features in Bing Webmaster Tools are now available in the following 42 languages:

Arabic Basque Bulgarian Catalan Chinese - Simplified Chinese - Traditional
Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French Galician
German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Italian Japanese Korean
Latvian Lithuanian Malay Norwegian Polish Portuguese – Brazil
Portuguese – Portugal Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish
Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese

Essentially this means that all of the features current as of this blog post are now available in the languages above.

Opt-in to Bing Webmaster Tools for instant notification of your site issues, free advertising credit and other offers!

Want Bing Webmaster Tools to notify you when specific issues are found with your site or to send you free offers? Simply opt-in* to receive our Bing Webmaster Communications.

*To Opt-in: Sign in to your Webmaster account → Click on ‘Preferences’ on the top left hand side on your browser → Check the box in the pop-up window and click Save.

Watch for new content to appear monthly as we invest further in explaining features and highlight areas of work webmasters are focused on.

Visit Bing Webmaster Tools to see the new features in your account, and to access the new content.

Sincerely,

The Bing Webmaster Team

Friday, August 19, 2011

Video Site Map

To increase the probability of Google finding and indexing your videos you should create and maintain a video site map. Video sitemaps provide search engines like Google with important information to classify your videos for specific search queries. There are many pieces of information that can be included in a video sitemap including the URL's for pages where videos can be found, titles of videos, SEO keywords, thumbnail images, and more. The amount of information that you provide on your video sitemap will make a difference in how well a search engine can understand and place your video content.

Creating a video site map is relatively easy, and submitting a video sitemap to a search engine is a simple process. A video sitemap can be submitted to Google through Webmaster Tools, and there are other ways for other search engines. If you are reluctant to take on this task you can find affordable services from a video marketing company.

Google search results have a Video Onebox where indexed videos may appear. The Video Onebox is a group of videos that are presented based on a specific search query. Indexed videos by Google may also appear on YouTube.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Yahoo Site Explorer Service Set To End

Yahoo Site Explorer Ends

Yahoo has announced that their Yahoo Site Explorer service will soon end. Yahoo Site Explorer is a tool that is similar to Google's Webmaster Tools, which provides a user dashboard fro confirmed website owners to view performance metrics of their website. This shut down is due to a perceived duplication of services related to their arrangement with Bing. We are unaware of an exact date for the end of Yahoo Site Explorer, however it will probably be this year.

We recommend that anyone using Yahoo Site Explorer should make certain that they have added their website to Bing's Business Portal for a smooth transition, and as a safety measure in case there is a problem with data migration. And YES, you should already be using Google Webmaster Tools!

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For any special functionalities such as backlink checks there are numerous free services which can easily be found online. Most internet marketing companies won't see any problems from this change. In fact, it will probbaly make life a bit easier because there is one less place to monitor.