What’s #1 Spot on Google Worth?
Do you know the value of a #1 spot for your keyword on Google? Ever wonder if all that time you spent optimizing for the #1 spot on Google natural search is worth the effort?
Well, guess no more as a Chitika, a full service online advertising network has done the research. They used a sample of
over 8 million impressions to compare the numbers between earch ranking in the Google search results.
Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com
Google 404 Not Found Reporting
Google added a new feature in their Webmaster Tools section which helps you manage your crawl errors better specifically when you have soft 404 errors.
Soft 404s are when the webserver should have received a 404 response code because the page is not found or does not exist but instead receives a 200 response code, meaning the page was found successfully. This can happen when a webmaster creates a custom 404 error page but doesn't return a 404 response code to the search engine spider. So while there is a page, it's just an error page saying the actual page is not found.
Here's Google response to these:
Soft 404's can limit a site's crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content. Understanding that webmasters make this mistake often, Google hopes this new report in your Webmaster Tools will help you flesh these soft 404s out and take care of them. If you need any help, Google has provided some helpful tips:
1.Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools
2.For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:
- Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
- Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
- Doesn't exist and should return a 404 or 410 response
3.Confirm that you've configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
4.If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.
Making sure that Google can properly crawl your site and knowing where the 404 problems are will increase overall user satisfaction for you and for Google.
Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting
http://www.canadianwebhosting.com
Gift From a Customer
This is the first time I've ever received a gift from a hosting client.
Just a little background on his situation. He came over from another competitor who was having constant outages with his online store. He purchased a Canadian Web Hosting VPS plan which is between shared hosting and a dedicated server. The difference is that you are guaranteed resources (cpu and memory) to keep the website running efficiently. The advantage is that it's cheaper than a dedicated server.
When he moved to us, he was frustrated the initial move did not go as well. We offer free website transfer service which means we'll help our customers move their content (web, database and email) from their current hosting provider to our servers. There is a provision that it only applies to cPanel accounts. Since he really needed a quick resolution, we made an exception. If anyone is reading this and is hesitant to move because of the cPanel requirement and currently running another control panel, give us a call and we'll try our best effort to move it over. His previous host ran a proprietary control panel which made it a little difficult to export the data. Plus they had constant ftp downtimes when we tried to move the content over. Eventually we moved the content over by using the ftp client, Filezilla which will automatically reconnect to finish the queue.
Once the content was moved over, we worked on debugging his shopping cart. We edited his OSCommerce backend configuration files to reflect the different database structure naming that cPanel requires (username_databasename instead of his previous host which used databasename). Once we got the backend working, we found out his previous host provided a shared SSL certificate. Since we don't offer shared SSL certificates for VPS customers, we offered him a one year SSL certificate for free. It's a dedicated SSL certificate only for his website.
A week later, the move was completed and the customer tested it and everything was working and he started to process orders from around the world.
He was very appreciative of all the hard work we put into making his website run properly that he sent a quick email:
"So far I am very happy with the transfer of our website. I want to thank you guys for all your help. As a token of my appreciation I want to send you a gift but the problem is I don't know your address. Let me know so that I can get it ship my gift to you. "
A few days later, we received not one but two gifts. One for me and another for a co-worker who also helped.
Since his website is a hobby ecommerce site dedicated to radio controlled planes, he sent us two radio controlled helicopters! As a kid, I always wanted one of these but my parents were from a blue collar working class background so I never asked them for these luxuries. I'm reliving my childhood dreams of finally owning one of these.
If you are interested in radio controlled planes, check our his website at http://www.snhobbies.com
Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting
Paid Google Local Business
For only $25/mo, you can now stand out from the crowd with a yellow price tag that shows up on the map as well as the listing. This is unfortunately not available in Canada at the moment.
It is currently available for all US states on standard and mobile browsers.
From the screenshot below, Google released a feature called Posts which allows business owners to create a custom message with their results to let surfers know
what is happening with their business such as seasonal specials, limited time offers or other discounts or notices.
It is becoming more important to promote your website on local search as more people are accessing the internet via mobile cell phone and will look up restaurants in their vicinity by using the cell's internal gps.
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