Does Your Site Count (to Google)?

By Janet Dodrill

In attendance at The Web Association’s “What is up at Google? Panda? Google + ?” November 4, 2011 meeting, industry-knowlegeable speakers brought up thought-provoking issues like Google’s May 2011 blog post “More guidance on building high-quality sites” which, in addition to discussing the Panda algorithm search rankings release, lists questions for criteria for, according to Google, what counts as a high-quality site . Can the material be considered trusted, and is the material the sort of thing you would bookmark or share with a friend? Is the content original or does it offer insight on the topic? Would you expect to see the information printed in a publication? These rules may be in attempt to help to reduce ranking importance put on web content farms (sites with redundant article topics and content) created by web scrapers who repurpose article content and create links from web pages and sites not their own. Also discussed at the presentation was, when you write an article it is helpful to target your keywords on each given web page (instead of loading it with too many unrelated keywords), and then to post it to the web and submit it to one article site (a few include: Ezine Articles, Ski Doo, A1 Article, HubPages, etc.).

Are you utilizing the Google “+ 1” button feature on your sites and in your profiles when available?

Do you use the Google Chrome browser (now more popular than Firefox), or Google Analytics for web stats? They are both evolving with added social sharing tools.

Are you sharing all you can across all your sites? Today’s web is fed by user visibility. Google is ever-improving its search engine speed, as it increases its awareness of its users, and strives to define users on the web to better improve their web products.

On Google +? This may be the next large social platform to encompass our multiple lines of web communications, according to one speaker.

Want a fun break-up to your day? Mashable recently posted 10 hidden Google tricks which are revealed in their article Beyond Barrel Roll: 10 Hidden Google Tricks and include some entertaining surprises.