Page Load Speed And SEO - Matt Cutts

Any blogger or webmaster will know that Matt Cutts is one of the most reliable sources of information about SEO and how Google search engine works.We had recently discussed Matt Cutts tips on ranking number one on Google search and about how Google treats affiliate links, today I came across another SEO tip from Matt about page load time or page speed of a website and how it matters in the search algorithm.

Is Page Speed A Very Important SEO Factor?

Page speed is important as a search engine optimization factor, but it is not as important as relevancy and quality unique content.Matt says that page speed is important but the factors such as relevancy, backlinks are considered first and then if two sites have the same relevancy, then page speed is considered.The faster the page speed, the higher will be its ranking in Google search.

Having said this, the web pages or websites which have extremely low page load speeds like over 20 seconds might see a drop in their ranking according to the Panda Update (See if your blog has a Panda Penalty).

Why Page Speed Is Important?

Google's main goal is to make sure that people looking for search results have the best experience possible, they do not want to recommend sites to people which are very slow in loading and hence create an undesirable experience for readers.

Google believes in relevancy and an overall good experience to be the key.

What Can You Do To Improve Your Page Speed?

Google provides you the page speed tool to analyze your page speed and ways in which to improve it.Google provides you three types of categories in which you can improve your site speed.

• High Priority
• Medium Priority
• Low Priority

They also provide you with detailed instructions to correct the page speed inhibitors and hence make your site faster.

I hope this post helped out bloggers who are worried about their page speed.If you have any doubts, please leave a comment.All comments are welcome!

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Best WordPress SEO Plugins 2012

WordPress is arguably the best blogging platform, with tons of free and premium themes, loads of fun plugin options to optimize a website as well as an easy user interface.Search engine optimization of a WordPress blog is much easier than the SEO of a blogger blog, this is due to the large number of SEO plugins available for the WordPress platform, which is not available in the Blogger platform.So which are the best WordPress SEO plugins? We have made a list of some of the best WordPress SEO plugins for your use, you do not need all these SEO plugins, you will need only a few of them to have the best SEO advantage for your blog.If you are interested to know more about SEO, then please read - SEO blogs for newbies. So  let us begin -

Top WordPress SEO Plugins

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin:

Yoast is one of the most popular plugins used for the search engine optimization of a WordPress blog, one of the cool things about the Yoast plugin is that it allows you to add site-wide robots.txt command or you can add it to individual posts.The Yoast plugin is better than any other free SEO plugin for WordPress.Yoast is the next generation of the all-in-one SEO plugin, which I will discuss in the next point.

Get The Plugin

All-In-One SEO Plugin:

The ll-in-one SEO plugin is like the predecessor to the Yoast Plugin, I wrote about the Yoast plugin first as I did not want you to waste your time on this one.This was one of the first plugins for SEO on a WordPress blog that was used extensively until better versions came out.This plugin helps you to add your blog meta description, title and keywords to individual blog posts.

Get The Plugin

SEO Smart Link WordPress Plugin:

This is a great SEO WordPress tool for better interlinking of blog posts, you can set a link to a keyword and the plugin automatically links the words to the blog posts, you can have as many keywords as you want.This tool is not only great for better interlinking and indexing of a site, it also saves a lot of time while writing blog posts.You do not need to manually link to other pages of your blog.

Get The Plugin

Easy WP SEO Plugin:

This is one of the most important SEO plugins for WordPress as it takes care of your on-page SEO settings, with this plugin, you can ensure that your blog post is optimized to the highest level possible.The plugin has features such as readability, LSI, keyword density (keywords/total words).But this is not a free plugin, you will need to pay a small amount of money to acquire this WordPress plugin.

Get The Plugin

Image ALT Optimization Plugin:

This plugin helps you easily add ALT attributes to an image, adding ALT attributes to images can bring you a lot of traffic for that keyword through Google Image Search.Although this WordPress plugin takes care of the ALT attributes, it does not help in naming your image, you will need to do it yourself while saving the image to your computer.It is best to save the image names as a keyword of your blog post.

Get The Plugin

Smart 404 Plugin:

This plugin allows you to alter any broken links and 404 pages on your blog, this tool is very important for SEO as Google does not like broken links and 404 pages.You can read more about this in the - Check Panda penalty on your blog.

Get The Plugin

So these are some of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that I recommend, if you know of any other good SEO plugins for WordPress, then please let us know in the comments section below!

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How Google Treats Affiliate Links In Terms Of SEO

Every blogger and webmaster has several ways in which he makes money online and affiliate links are one of them.Affiliate links are one of the best ways to make money from a site provided the website has a lot of traffic.Many of the new generation bloggers prefer to have affiliate ads rather than adsense ads as they feel there is more earning potential in affiliate ads rather than adsense or other ppc programs.Before we get into how Google treats affiliate links, let us discuss briefly what affiliate links are.

What Are Affiliate Links?

Affiliate links are those links which when clicked by a reader takes them to a landing page of a service or a product.If the reader buys said service or product, then the "referrer", which is you, get paid a commission from that.Obviously chances of this happening are lower than the chances of people clicking adsense ads, but usually affiliates pay out anywhere between 10-200$ in commissions which is why some bloggers prefer affiliate links.

Affiliate Link SEO - Matt Cutts

Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about the way in which Google treats affiliate links, in terms of passing on  pagerank and SERP juice.

(PS: Take a look at those Penguin Dolls in front of Matt Cutts)

Let me breakdown what Matt Cutts had to say about the way in which Google handles Affiliate links.There are two types of affiliates -

• Affiliates Recognized By Google
• Unknown Affiliates 

Affiliates Recognized By Google

There are several big affiliates such as HostGator, GoDaddy etc who are recognized by Google, so they can easily take care of the affiliate links going back to these affiliate networks.There is no doubt in Google's mind when it comes to these networks that they are affiliates.

Unknown Affiliates 

These are affiliates who are not recognized by Google, they may be start up affiliates such as easywebcontent, which are not well known.For these kind of affiliates it may be better suited to add a rel="nofollow" code after the link as this will tell Google that you do not wish to pass on SERP juice to the link and hence proving it that it is not a paid link which is used to improve ratings, rather it behaves as an advertisement.

So this is probably all you need to know about how Google treats affiliate links in terms of SEO.If you have any information to add or have any suggestion to make, please leave a comment, all the comments are welcome!

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Next Page Rank Update July 2012?

Bloggers and webmasters are yet again eagerly waiting for the next Google Page Rank update which may increase or decrease the page rank of  their website.The last page rank update happened a couple of months ago in May, May 3 2012 to be precise, so we are heading into the zone where the next Google page rank update may appear.I am positive that there will be an update the toolbar page rank at-least by the end of the month as it would be three months since the last page rank update.

What Can We Expect In The Next Page Rank Update?

The next Google page rank update may see the page rank of many websites such as updowner.com, which have been caught by the Google Panda Update for either selling links, hosting malware, producing content that have been copied from other sites, low quality content, or sites with low page load speed.

A really good example of this is seoroundtable.com, which has been penalized in terms of page rank reduction due to openly selling links to other websites from their homepage.You can see the proof of this, as Barry himself agrees that his site has had a penalty in terms of Page Rank reduction in this blog post.

If such big websites with huge amounts of followers and influence over the internet can be penalized, surely the smaller sites which do the same are not going to spared.Hence I feel that in the next page rank update, these websites will get a lower page rank than they already had.

How To Avoid The Page Rank Drop In The Next PR Update?

If your site is performing any of the activities as mentioned above, then you need to take some preventive measures to ensure that your page rank does not drop.The important thing is that you make these changes early enough to give Google sufficient time to ensure that you have made changes to your site, so that it falls back into the "good zone" of webmaster policies that Google has laid out.

Google may require a week or a couple of weeks to notice that your site has changed for the better, it may even take Google until the next Panda Refresh to see that your site is not breaking policies any more.So correct the mistakes as soon as possible.

See if your blog has a penalty from panda.

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Spam Links From UpDowner.com? What To Do?

Google had publicly declared that the links coming back to a website or blog from the domain updowner.com were considered as spam links, Google had even gone to the extent of contacting many webmasters with warnings about spam links from updowner.com through webmaster tools.See what you can do about your webmaster tools warning.

Google has noticed tons of links going to websites from updowner.com and hence has classified the domain as a spam link farm and any links going out from that particular domain was not to be counted for any domain rankings.Presumably the ranking of updowner will fall drastically come the next Panda Update.

If you do not want to be a victim of this, then you must make sure that you do not have any links from them.You can try the new disavow tool from Bing Webmaster Tools to remove the backlinks.Google too is reportedly going to come up with a disavow tool to help webmasters and bloggers get rid of such spam links which can harm the ratings of their website.

Please leave comments below, if you have any new information about the spam links from UpDowner.com.

Get more info on the spam links from that domain here.

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