Today, Google announced the Knowledge Graph, which Google is saying makes it smarter at determining what people mean when they’re searching for things. More on the Knowledge Graph here. It also comes in mobile.

Google is indicating that this is a step away from keywords. In the official announcement, SVP, Engineering, Amit Singhal, says:

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, tweeted about the feature:

!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

On Google+, Cutts said, “Google just announced its Knowledge Graph. It’s another step away from raw keywords (without knowing what those words really mean) toward understanding things in the real-world and how they relate to each other. The knowledge graph improves our ability to understand the intent of a query so we can give better answers and search results.”

Keywords have, of course, been a major point of spam, which Google is working hard to eliminate (see Penguin update). The less Google can rely on keywords to deliver relevant results, the less susceptible to spam it should be.

I don’t think the Knowledge Graph has done anything to diminish the value of using relevant keywords in your content, and it doesn’t seem to affect the regular, organic web results, but who knows if this will change somewhere down the line.

It is interesting to see Google continue to clutter up its search results pages, given that its clean design was one of the big differentiators of the search engine in its early days.

WebProNews » SEO

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Have you built an HTML5 site? Or do you know of one that does a great job with HTML5? Submit HTML5 site designs to be featured on this site.

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We were hoping to get a some in depth discussion about Google’s recent Penguin update, but apparently that wasn’t a major point of conversation. Daniel Waisberg liveblogged the discussion at Search Engine Land, and Penguin only came up briefly. Here’s the relevant snippet of the liveblog:

Danny talks about Penguin and asks how it is going from Google standpoint, are search results better? Amit says that in the end of the day, users will stay with the search engine that provides the most relevant results. Google’s objective was to reward high quality sites and that was a success with Penguin. One of the beauties of running a search engine is that the search engines that can measure best what the users feel is the one that will succeed more.

From Google’s perspective they use any signal that is available for them, more than 200 of them. They have to make sure they are accurate and good. They will use any signal, whether it is organic or not.

Google’s Matt Cutts also recently said that Google has considered Penguin a success, though plenty out there disagree.

If you want Google’s advice on Penguin recovery, check out these videos Matt Cutts says to watch, these tips he endorsed on Twitter, and of course Google’s quality guidelines.

WebProNews » SEO

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Singhal spoke at SMX London this morning, in an on-stage interview with Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. While he didn’t delve into Penguin too much, other than to indicate that it has been a success, he did talk a little bit about dealing with flawed search results. Daniel Waisberg liveblogged the discussion at SMX’s sister site Search Engine Land. Here’s the relevant snippet:

Chris asks Amit how is the evolution process at Google with so many updates; how does Google decide about which update goes live? Google has an internal system where every flawed search result is sent to Amit’s team. Based on that engineers are assigned to problems and solutions are tested on a sandbox. Then the engineer will show how the results will show after and before the update and the update is tested using an A/B test. They discuss the results and this loop runs several times until they find a change that is better in all aspects. After this process the change is send to a production environment for a very low percentage of real user traffic and see how the CTR is changed. Based on this, an independent analyst (that works for Google) will generate a report. Based on that report the group discuss and decides if the change is going to be launched or not. That’s how scientific the process is.

As Waisberg notes, Google has recently shared several videos discussing how Google makes changes. You can watch these if you’re interested:

This one has Cutts talking about Google’s experimentation process (among other things):

According to Sullivan, who tweeted since the keynote discussion, Singhal wants user feedback:

On Twitter, he’s @theamitsinghal. Here’s his Google+ profile.

Don’t forget, Google has a feedback link at the bottom of every search results page. Of course, there are always spam reports as well.

Image: Amit’s Google+ Profile Pic

WebProNews » SEO

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The thread begins with a post from user Sunnyujjawal, who says:

While checking some sites links I found 50% free submission directories are out of G now. Will Google count such links in negative SEO or unnatural linking?

Schwartz concurs that about 50% of the ones he searched for did not have listings.

He points to one example: global-web-directory.org. Indeed, I’m getting no results for that site:

I’m not sure about the 50% thing though. I’ve looked at a number of others, and haven’t come across many that were not showing listings (though I have no doubt that there are more out there). Either way, there are still a lot of these sites that are still in Google’s index. We do know, however, that quite a few of them recently received PageRank reductions with the recent update.

This discussion happens to come at a time when we’ve been analyzing Google’s quality guidelines, and its treatment of a certain directory, Best Of The Web, which sells reviews for potential listings, which appear with links that pass PageRank.

Other directories that follow a similar model, may be experiencing similar treatment from Google. In that same WebmasterWorld thread, user Rasputin writes:

I have a paid directory that I haven’t touched for about 3 years, only gets about 25 submissions ($ 10) a year – strange thing is, I just looked and not only is it well indexed but all the internal pages are now showing page rank – for a very long time they were all ‘greyed out’ after the google clamp-down on directories a couple of years ago.

No idea when it came back, certainly nothing I’ve changed and pretty unlikely it’s attracted natural links.

That’s pretty interesting.

User Netmeg adds:

I don’t think free or paid makes anywhere near as much of a difference as to whether or not the directory is actually curated for quality. Because if it isn’t, what other reason is there for it to exist other than to create links?

That’s a very relevant point, and that seems to be Google’s reasoning, based on this video from Matt Cutts from several years ago:

“Standard directory listings remain in our editors complete editorial control, and as such do not need the nofollow tag,” Best Of The Web President Greg Hartnett told WebProNews. “An editor looked at those listings (pay for review or not) and decided that they meet editorial guidelines and as such merit a listing. We vouch for that listing, so why would we nofollow it?”

If you go to global-web-directory.org,’s submission page, it would appear that they violate Google’s quality guidelines. There is a pricing structure as follows:

Express Reviews – $ 2
Regular Reviews – Free
Regular Reviews with reciprocal – Free

While they advertise a paid review process, it’s clearly much different than how Best Of The Web operates. The only payment is for speeding up the review process, from the looks of it. Otherwise it’s free, and they’ll even throw in a reciprocal link for free. That could be the part that Google has a problem with. If sites are really being “reviewed” for quality, perhaps that is one thing, but if your’e saying flat out that you’ll give a link back, that might fall under Google’s “link schemes” criteria, discussed in the quality guidelines.

It does list “links intended to manipulate PageRank” as the first example, and it does look like the site attempts to show the listings’ PageRank right with the listings.:

If you really look around the site, however, you’ll find many category pages without listings, just displaying ads. It’s not hard to see why Google wouldn’t want this site in its index.

Update: There’s an interesting post about this issue at Search News Central, from Terry Van Horne. Terry writes:

Directories that would be candidates for this kind of “draconian” action were as good as de-indexed ages ago. We sent out our super staffer Mike, with our vetted list of directories to see what he could find. From that (top end list) we found 65 no change, 2 domains parked and 1 de-indexed site; roughly 1.3% were de-indexed.

Next we went to our friends at Steam Driven Media for the last 100 (based on TBPR) from a list of 1500. From this group we found 1 with low indexation and 9 deindexed/gone – roughly 10% affected. Keep in mind, we have no idea how long these sites were out of the Google index.

Van Horne questions whether directories are really “getting nuked or not”.

So far, we’ve not really seen anything indicating it’s as big a change as made out to be by the original poster in the WebmasterWorld thread.

Have you seen paid directories rising in Google? Free ones disappearing? Let us know what you’re seeing.

WebProNews » SEO

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Call it the anti-SEO help video of the decade, and if you’re a webmaster you can call it site suicide. You can laugh at this Matts Cutts parody video all you want, just don’t take any of its advice seriously.

“In addition to keyword stuffing, we look at links to porn sites. Not that many people tend to link that much to sites within the porn industry. That’s the sort of thing that’s going to be really rewarding for users, so link to porn sites. Could it be annoying? Yes, it could be annoying, but that’s perfectly fine.”

That’s one of the gems from this clever mashup from SEO guy Sam Applegate. He took (probably way to much) time to organize and analyze Cutt’s many videos and came up with this video on how to rank #1 in Google search. Except, as you may have derived from the last quote, this guide won’t have you ranking anywhere near #1.

“I do think that Bing or Blekko or Duck Duck Go are potentially doing illegal things like hacking sites,” says Cutts in fragments. Check it out below:

For his part, Cutts is aware of the video and his concern was with how much time it had to have taken its creator:

[h/t Search Engine Roundtable]

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I recently encountered problems with a client’s email list, some emails are not sent, so I’ve been looking for new ways to manage their newsletter. In the following article I share some of the popular options you get to technically manage your newsletter.

Open-source solutions

Whenever I start a new project or need some software to perform some tasks, I always take a look at what’s available in the open-source world. In our case, there are some good email list systems available, so you should check them out.

PHPlist

Website – Demo – Download

To be very honest, PHPlist is the software we are looking to replace for my client. Why recommending it on top of this article then? Because I still feel that this software is totally worth it.

In our case, the only issue is about email sending getting blocked at the end of the process. It might be a setup issue or some limitations due to our webhost (shared), I didn’t figure it out yet.

However, if you are willing to do a bit of setup, PHPlist will work fine most of the time. Its interface is not very user friendly, but it’s fairly easy to write messages and send them. It has a templating system and provides some insightful statistics about the emails you sent.

If you want to use PHPlist but don’t feel confident installing it and setting it up, you can take a look at their (paid) hosted version.

Pommo

Website – Demo – Download

Pommo is the other famous open source mailing list software. It is easy to install and the interface is much more intuitive than PHPlist’s interface.

I never tested it on big lists, but my short experience with Pommo was excellent. You can see a list of features here, one of the key features is the ability to send messages to a subset of subscribers.

WordPress plugins

If your site is powered by WordPress, you may want to have your newsletter system managed from the same place as your blog. There are some good plugins and systems to install to create a newsletter in WordPress.

Email newsletter using WordPress + Feedburner (not a plugin)

Not a plugin, but an excellent tutorial on how to create a simple newsletter by combining the flexibility of WordPress’ categories and feeds with the email feature of Feedburner. It is a quite simple tutorial to create a good newsletter with stats.

WP Autoresponder

Website

This is a good solution if you want to set up a free, quick newsletter system that is linked to your WordPress blog. The plugin is simple to install and performs most tasks that average users will want. However it doesn’t seem to provide statistics. The plugin is free, but you must give your email address in order to download it.

MeeNews

Website

Not free, but a professional solution if you are looking to integrate a newsletter to your WordPress blog. The setup is easy and requires no programming knowledge. A strong emphasis is put on the design of the interface that blends into WordPress, as well as the possibility to create nice looking templates easily.

MeeNews is priced according to a freemium model, with a Commercial version at €55 and a Premium version at €185.

Newsletter services (paid)

If you don’t want to bother with any of the technicalities of sending mass emails, the following services are for you. These newsletter apps will let you focus on the content and style of your newsletter without having to worry about how it works.

MailChimp

Website – Pricing – Features

With tons of features like RSS to email, advanced stats with Google Analytics integration, a wide selection of templates, and much more, MailChimp is a great tool that comes at a cheap monthly price.

AWeber

Website – Pricing – Features

AWeber is the weapon of choice of many famous bloggers and marketers. It offers autoresponders, subscribers segmentation, email tracking, and much more than what you’d expect from such a servic

Campaign Monitor

Website – Pricing – Features

Campaign Monitor gets pretty much the same features as its competitors, except for one that is very interesting for designers and freelancers in general: you can rebrand it and resell it as your own product.

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The search engine has responded to these queries of whether a Penguin refresh is being rolled out or not, by denying any Penguin update. In fact there has been no Panda refresh either by Google as well as other update from their end. This statement by Google has not made matters clear because the SERPs are fluctuating continually, as can be seen by the posts on the WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help forums.

While there have been no confirmed reports of recovery from the Apr 24 rollout, but certain recovery methods have been shared on WebmasterWorld forums. These include:

1. Removing pages with thin content and sticking to original content pages.
2. Do not get more links for the affected site after getting rid of the poor content pages. Try to find out the bad links coming from disrepute sites and then take up anchor text dilution on these sites.

Have you noticed the changes in SERPs too? We are monitoring the situation and it is quite possible that it is a flux. Keep watching this site for the latest. Meanwhile to catch up on the latest on the Penguin, here is how webmasters are contemplating on ways to beat the Penguin. And some ideas for Penguin recovery.

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Read the full article to learn how: CSS3 Buttons (Note: there are four pages to the article, and page two shows you how to create the above buttons.)

Other Fun Things to Do With CSS

• Glow Effects with CSS3
• CSS Transparency in Nearly All Browsers
• How Do you Stretch a Background Image in a Web Page

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