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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

Google Algorithm Change Affects Long Tail Keywords

During the first week of May, Google's new look was released. This included a minor change to their homepage Google logo plus new links on the left menu bar on the SERPs (search engine results page).
Also, during this time, a lot of webmasters saw a drop in Google traffic for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords (3 to 4 words) are searches that may not individually produce significant volumes of searches but combined can make a very large portion of overall traffic and income. Before the changes, if your site had lots of lower quality pages but high relevance, they would rank well for long tail keywords. But now, relevancy is less important with more emphasis of high quality pages. Ecommerce sites were the ones most affected since most pages contain product description with few incoming links and less unique content. If you want to find out if your site was affected, login to Google Analytics and check late April to early May to see if you suffered any noticeable drops in traffic during the May Day algo update. Here's quote from Google employee Matt Cutts:

"This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn't going to be rolled back."

Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting

http://www.canadianwebhosting.com