Google Testing A New Label For Slow Websites In Search Results

Site load speed was all the rage a few years ago, and was considered as a plus point. In fact, it became an important search ranking factor in 2010. But what about all the SEO developments over the years? The paradigm must have shifted? Well, it sure has, onto content quality and usability. So should you still focus on a fast load speed, or will an average speed do the job?

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Blogger Will Now Automatically Create Sitemap.xml File For All Blogs

There's big news with regards to sitemap files in Blogger. If you have a blog running on Google's Blogger platform, you no longer need to worry about creating and maintaining a custom sitemap and then submitting it to search engines. Google will now automatically create a sitemap file in your root directory, eliminating the need for third-party sitemap services on Blogger.

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How To Get Your Content Displayed In Google Quick Answer Box?

Google's Quick Answer box - while useful for the casual searcher, creates a lot of challenges for webmasters. On the one hand, if your content is used by the Quick Answer box, you get prominence. But at the same time, if users can get their questions answered on the SERPs, why would they click through to your site, right? Their utility is debatable. Today, however, we will talk about how to get your content displayed on Google's Quick Answer box.

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How To Fix Your Website When It Gets Hacked?

It's not uncommon for sites - even large ones with lots of protection - to get hacked. Security is a major problem these days. And if your site gets hacked, it can get damaged in a number of ways. You could lose all your data, or lose its ranking due to malicious activity. So while you can take periodic backups, you cannot prevent someone from hacking into your site. The best and most practical thing to do in such an event is to recover your site as fast as possible so that the effect of the attack is neutralized/minimized.

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Google Labelled Your Site As Hacked? Here's How To Fix It

Is your website being falsely labelled in search results as a 'hacked' website even though there's nothing wrong with it? There isn't cause for concern, because it might not be something 'hidden' that you apparently can't detect. Google is reportedly working on a new hacked page classifier, and as a result, a number of websites are getting incorrectly marked as 'hacked' in search results.

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What To Look For When Hiring Ghostwriting Services?

Are you looking to hire a ghostwriter? As you know, there are a large number of individuals and service providers offering such services, and businesses are increasingly hiring them to write business eBooks or blogs to serve their marketing purposes. However, the question remains: how do you hire a ghostwriter? A recent post by Vorongo posted by Cameron on what do you need to look for when hiring a ghostwriter inspired us a lot and we thought we can share our experience on this subject to better help webmasters in hiring authors for their blogs.Check out these five must-have qualities your ghostwriter should have.

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How To Get Free 100 GB OneDrive Storage?

When it comes to online productivity wars, no one probably does it better than Microsoft. With their recent transition into this whole 'cloud first' persona, it has become harder for competitors to stand their ground. A few days back, we shared Google's offering of an extra 2 GB free space on Google Drive. Today, we were staggered to see Microsoft offering a humongous 100 GB of free space for OneDrive users.

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How to Track Invalid Adsense Clicks Using StatCounter

A lot of things can happen online, some of which are beyond your control. One of these is invalid click activities that are caused by a number of things, but can lead you into one unfortunate situation - getting banned from AdSense for good. Since you need AdSense to keep track of your website's performance, you should do anything possible to protect yourself against invalid clicks.

StatCounter can help you in this mission. This is a web traffic analysis tool that lets you track all clicks and exit links. Through it, you will know where a majority of your invalid clicks are coming from, and the corresponding IPs that you can then block to protect your AdSense account.

Getting started is as easy as signing up and creating an account. You can then create a new project for a website that you want to track. Like most analytics tools, StatCounter is fairly easy to use. Make sure to select a counter or Invisible tracking, and opt to receive reports in a weekly or monthly basis, so that you can keep an eye on invalid AdSense clicks.

After entering the appropriate information, press the "Add Project" button which will take you to the "Choose an installation Guide for your website" page - here click the "Default Installation Guide" link. Now, StatCounter will give you a code along with instructions on how to install this code on your website. After adding the code, press the "Check Installation" button on the right toward the bottom of the page in order to finish the installation process.

Tracking Exit Links

Once you have added StatCounter to your website, your reports will be available within minutes. Now let's see how to track invalid AdSense Clicks using StatCounter.

Click on Stats and click on the menu called "Exit Link Activity". This will show all the links that visitors clicked on to leave your website. Here, you can also find Date, Time, Exit Link Clicked and the page on which the exit link was clicked.

The exit link could be a advertisement or a link to other website. To display only the clicks on the AdSense ads, use the "Exit Link Match" filter to 'google adsense'. This way, you will be able to see how many clicks are there on advertisements and at what time the click was made.

To see even more information about a particular visitor who clicked on the link, click on the magnify icon. This will show you the Search Referral, IP Address of the visitor, Host Name, their Location, how many times they've visited your blog before, Visit Length, Browser, OS, Resolution, ISP, and the pages they viewed including the exit links.

So this is how you can track the invalid AdSense clicks using StatCounter. Although you may have to disable advertisements on your website temporarily to avoid a potentially disastrous situation, such as being click bombed, it is a better alternative than being kicked out of AdSense permanently. Through StatCounter, you will be able to detect invalid clicks or any suspicious activities that will inflate the number of clicks on an ad. Since you can't control an advertiser or publisher's desire to increase their earnings, you should monitor click through rates or the cost per clicks you are making. If there is a sudden increase of clicks but you make zero CPC, it's time to track down on these invalid Adsense clicks and put a stop to them.

4 Ways to Detect Invalid Activity in Google AdSense

Monitoring your website's performance shouldn't be a chore but a necessity. After all, how else will you know how to serve your audience better - and acquire new ones - if you don't know how they get to you, what they do on your site and who they are? Google Analytics is a tool that does all that, but despite its sophistication, your account can be suspended for invalid activity.

This is the one thing that you have to avoid because the process of reinstating your account may take a while. That said, how can you detect invalid activity?

Before answering the question, here are some terms that you need to familiarize yourself with as they will appear throughout the rest of this post:

DEFINITIONS

• Clicks - number of times a user has clicked on your advertisements
• CPC - cost per click; what you get whenever a user clicks on your ads
• Pageviews - refers to the action the user takes of viewing a page with an ad displayed
• CTR - click through rate; calculated as (clicks / pageviews) x 100 and is given in percentage
• Estimated Earnings - calculated as (clicks x CPC); the value goes up or gown while the earnings are still in verification process

WAYS TO DETECT INVALID ACTIVITY

1. You have a CTR above 20%. The normal range for CTR is 1% to 11%, but anything above these tells Google that there is something iffy and that may not bode well for you. So, if you notice this, make necessary changes so that you maintain a healthy CTR.

2. You have a lot of clicks but no CPC. As in, your assigned CPC is 0.00. For example, if you get about 50 clicks and don't have a CPC set, that tells Google that something funky is going on and they will not hesitate to take action. Keep in mind that they do take matters like this seriously, and which is why they employ both human and machine checking to analyze clicks and impressions.

3. You're estimated earnings rise then fall suddenly. For example, you get estimated earnings of $1.00 but the next minute this drops to $0.0. Whether it drops to zero or half the original estimated earnings amount after you refreshed the page, you know that something is up.

4. You have many clicks from one country but less pageviews. Google operates on the belief that if a user clicked on an ad, they are interested in what it has to say. So, if the pageviews are really low, that sends a wrong signal to Google and causes them to think that something fishy is happening.

So, make sure to check your AdSense performance regularly so you can spot discrepancies and address them as soon as possible before Google decides to suspend your account.

How Snapchat Can Be Used To Grow Your Audience?

Snapchat is an exciting new social media platform through which people can send photos and short videos to each other. We recently talked about some of the ways you can market your brand on Snapchat. One problem for brands was, reaching out to their potential customers. Pulling contact numbers out of your marketing list was less than desirable. With a new update though, Snapchat has added the Discover feature for users to discover new content.

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Now Choose Who Manages Your Facebook Profile After You Die

Have you ever put some thought into what will happen to your online accounts once you're dead? Death is inevitable, and a lot of people tend to not think about it too much. But have you ever wondered what will become of your accounts then? Will they stay locked forever, because no one knows the passwords you took into the grave? Facebook has the answer - now you can decide who will manage your Facebook account once you're gone!

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How To Get Extra 2GB Of Free Google Drive Storage?

Google Drive is one of the most popular cloud services today, used by millions around the world. Every Google account holder has his own free cloud space, which integrates so well with other Google products. From simple file sharing to hosting a website, there's a lot you can do with Google Drive. Google is now giving away an extra 2GB of free space, which I am sure many of you will find welcome.

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How To Implement Google's Sitelinks Search Box On Your Website?

Sitelinks are Google's way of letting users know what links could possibly be most relevant to them. They help users find content more quickly. Google implemented search sitelinks to facilitate users and make it easier for them to search for and reach the desired content on your site directly from SERPs. A lot of webmasters miss out on this opportunity though. Compared to other types of markup, implementing search sitelinks is easy. Today, we'll show you how to easily set up yours.

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How To Get Great Content Ideas For Your Blog?

Brainstorming for content ideas can be tough. You easily get distracted and everything seems to have already been written! To make matters worse, requirements to content concepts and titles have become much more complicated. With the growing importance of referral traffic, we now have to rethink title strategies and how they appear on social sites. If you're feeling strapped for content ideas, here are a few that can help.

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Google To Show Tweets In Search Results Pages

Twitter has just confirmed today that it has signed a Firehose deal with Google, which will bring Twitter news to non-Twitter/logged out users. For the benefit of both the companies, this deal will make Twitter's feeds directly accessible to Google, meaning that Google can now display tweets in its Search Results pages in real-time.

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How Can Websites Rank Well Without Backlinks?

A large proportion of people out there seem to believe that backlinks form the backbone of a website's SEO strategy. Having high-quality and relevant backlinks has its advantages, but are they a necessity? We have talked about this topic many times in the past. Today, I'd like to share highlights from Googler John Mueller's recent hangout where he proved that backlinks, while important, are not a must for ranking well in Google!

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SEO Requirements To Remember When Implementing Infinite Scroll

Yesterday, we talked about infinitely scrolling homepages, and whether they're a good design decision when it comes to SEO. While tricky and often prone to mistakes, infinite scroll has its uses, especially where usability is concerned. So today, we'll talk about some SEO requirements you should keep in mind before you go ahead and implement an infinite scroll. These tips will help you design a better homepage for users as well as search engines.

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Are Infinite Scrolling Homepages SEO Friendly?

Infinitely scrolling homepages have become a part of many modern blogs and websites today (e.g. Mashable). The intent is to keep visitors on the website as more and more content is loaded. While it can be beneficial to adopt infinite scroll, it is important that its implementation takes into account the best SEO and usability principles. Today, we'll discuss the user friendliness of implementing this feature on your website.

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