Steps to Get Verified Google+ Pages

Is your Google+ Page verified? Google+ verification is important as a verified Google plus page confirms there are real people with real identities behind the Google plus page which gives confidence to people who interact with your Google+ business/brand page.
Probably you have noticed verified Google+ Pages with the verified page logo (tick mark) beside them. Here are examples of verified Google plus profiles and verified Google plus pages. This is similar to Twitter verified accounts which were seen earlier.


Google verifies Google+ profiles of celebrities and other prominent Web personalities to enhance trust among people interacting with them, as it confirms that the profile actually belongs to the person. Google takes impersonation very seriously and in fact there is a form to report false profiles.
While Google has its secret ways to verify people, it does give businesses an opportunity to get verified Google+ pages

Link Website to Google+ Page

The best way to get the check mark box on your Google+ Page is to create a bi-directional link between the page and your website. The Google plus page should link to the official website (About section), and the website should link back to the Google plus page in the HEAD of  the HTML code
<link href="https://plus.google.com/PageID" rel="publisher" />
with further links on the home page
<a href="https://plus.google.com/PageID" rel="publisher">Google+</a>
This will help Google understand that both your website and the Google plus page presents the same business organisation.

Google+ page verification request form

Google provides businesses and organisations an official form by which they can represent their organisation and request to get verified Google+ Pages.
Of course, there are a few essential requirements – it must be authorised by your organisation or brand, the bidirectional link between your Google+ page and your website must exist, and your Google plus page must be popular enough that people add it to their circles.

They may also ask you for further business verification documents like business license, bank statements, credit card statements etc. to further confirm your business identity.
Get your verified Google+ page today and increase your brand repetition on Google+ now.
Update: Getting your Google+ page verified also increases your chances of getting your own short Google+ URL like google.com/+Name

Source: http://www.quickonlinetips.com/

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5 SMS Per Day Limit For The Next 15 Days By Indian Government

In a very insane move by the Indian Government, a limit of 5 sms per day has been imposed on GSM and CDMA mobile users of India. From August 18, 2012, mobile users can send only 5 sms per day to the maximum after which the messages don’t get delivered with a prompt indication from the mobile operator.

The move was made by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) to curb the spread of rumors which was meant to spread fear and to vacate North Eastern Indian’s from certain states. Home Ministry said that the rumors led to the flee of North East Indian’s from states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra and hence the move was necessary. The rumor SMSs contained misleading information related to Assam Violence.

The restriction does not apply on the transaction SMS related to Banking, Financial Institutions and Railway alerts.

Moreover, one cannot send more than 20 KB of data, not more than 5 MMS per day as well. According to some reports, the rule has not yet been implemented by Airtel, in some parts of the country.

When the 6th message was tried from Aircel, the following message was sent by the operator.

“Due to Govt. directives, More than 5 SMS per day are blocked. Please retry tomorrow. Anticipate your co-operation.”

Other operators will come up with a similar message ” Hi! You have sent 5 SMS today. As per Govt. guidelines, you can’t send more than 5 SMS today. Your SMS services will be resumed post Midnight.”

No inputs about what the existing users will do about their SMS Booster Packs which allows them to send 100 or 200 SMS per day depending on the pack. The money won’t be refunded and the validity of the pack can’t be extended either!

It’s a very disappointing news for Indian Youngsters! There seems to be no point in curbing the SMS limit to 5 per when already there has been a limit of 200 per day.

There are plenty of Alternatives available. If you are an Android or iPhone User, you can install WhatsApp, Viber Apps for free unlimited texting over the Internet, provided the receiving user also has that App installed on their mobile with proper access to the Internet.

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Tips to penalised by Penguin

On April 24^th 2012 Google rolled out its latest algorithmic update. Penguin as it is so affectionately known has hardly been as cute and fluffy as its feathered namesake. In fact, Google’s Penguin is pretty vicious.

Webmasters all over the world saw their rankings slashed overnight, and their pages disappear from the SERPs. Some small companies were affected that badly they were forced to close. Since then, SEOs and website owners have been fighting a seemingly losing battle with Google. Every time we think we’re back on track, the next wave strikes and Penguin wipes you out once more.

Google Penguin the Website Killer?

How to Get Penalised By Penguin

The Internet is littered with articles about how to recover from Penguin. Which is fine, if you know what it is you’ve been doing wrong in the first place. But if you don’t know how to get penalised by the algorithm in the first place, how can you fight back?

Google has said that this update is targeting web-spam. But web-spam is an umbrella term for so much. Here we look at five of the main mistakes you’re making that are causing you to feel the wrath of Penguin, and how to recover:

1. Exact Match Keywords

The easiest way to see your rankings slashed is to focus solely on exact match keywords. This means on your site, in your other SEO efforts, everywhere. Google has decided to clamp down on what it views as unnatural back link profiles. If you’ve stuck to the same one for a long time, it is definitely time to diversify.

A healthy inbound link profile needs to be diverse. Instead of focusing on a few variations of your keywords, you need to include more natural anchor text links. This includes naked URLs, brand anchors, and universal anchors such as ‘click here’. Keeping your links as ‘samey’ as possible is the quickest way to see your website downgraded.

2. Duplicate Content

Filling your website with duplicate content is another sure fire way to get in trouble with the search engines. Posting the same article on multiple blogs, article marketing sites, and directories is bad news. If you’re guilty of duplicating – or even spinning – your content, now is the time to stop.

Google is moving towards rewarding sites with quality content. In depth, well researched posts that offer something insightful to the reader are the future of SEO. Having a solid content marketing plan is key in a post-Penguin world. You need to start thinking less about the search engines, and more about your readers.

3. Unnatural Linking

The aim of SEO is to get tonnes of inbound links from as many sites as possible, right? That’s why so many people participate in reciprocal linking, paying for links, article spinning, and posting on irrelevant sites. If this sounds like your marketing strategy, you’re practically welcoming Penguin with open arms.

If you’ve been hit by the latest algorithm update, it’s time to take a look at where your links are coming from. If you have any from questionable sources, irrelevant sites, and any paid links make sure to remove them. Move forward by only linking on relevant sites, in a natural way. Quality is now so much more important than quantity.

4. Webpage Cloaking

Web cloaking is the practice of creating on page for humans, and one for the search engine spiders. And why not? Everyone gets what they were looking for when they visit your site, and you get a webpage that ranks well. Today, it’s a one way ticket to page 100.

The only real solution to this problem is simple: don’t do it. If you’ve been cloaking your pages, remove them and focus on generating organic traffic. Each page on your site should be unique, and well written. Avoid being too heavy with your money keywords, and keep your meta tags clear of spam.

5. Comment Spam

A few years ago, SEOs would set up automatic commenting software with the view to creating as many links as possible. Today, that practice is hated by blog owner who have to wade through the spam to find their genuine comments. It is hated even more by the search engines, which is why this kind of behaviour will get you a hefty Penguin penalty.

The simple solution for this is to leave genuine comments that relate to blog posts. Spending all day commenting on posts will have the same effect, but leaving meaningful comments is a great way to build your influence. The link back to your site should just be seen as a useful by-product.

Where Does That Leave Me?

The important thing to remember is that Penguin is not a Google penalty; it’s an algorithm update. This means it is constantly being rolled out again and again, always affecting different pages in different ways. Making the relevant changes to your website may not propel you back to where you once were; but it’s a start.

And Penguin isn’t all bad news either. As well as ridding the Internet of spam (one web page at a time), it has had a positive impact for some. A number of webmasters will have actually benefited from the algorithm. As those around them fell due to their backhanded past, those who have slogged away and played by the rules have been rewarded with an increase in rankings.

Whichever camp you fall in to, it’s important to remember the SEO game is changing. And to stay ahead of the changes, we need to play by Google’s rules.

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How YouTube Will Escape Google’s New Pirate Penalty

Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn’t need to worry: Google’s own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty.

POSTSCRIPT: Please also be sure to read our follow-up article, Google: Many Popular Sites Will Escape Pirate Penalty, Not Just YouTube

The penalty — which we’ve dubbed the Emanuel Update — impacts Google’s web search results. If someone has reported a web search listing as being a copyright violation, using the DMCA takedown mechanism, that’s a strike against the entire site.

Accumulate enough strikes (how many, Google’s not saying), and a publisher may find their entire site hit with a penalty. Every page, whether it was reported for copyright infringement or not, will have less chance of ranking well.

Strike Count Against Publishers

If you’re trying to understand what sites might be at risk, Google has a page where it discloses which publishers have the most takedown strikes against them:

But many, if not all, the copyright strikes against YouTube won’t show up on this list. Google even tells you this:

Requests for products other than Google Search (e.g, requests directed at YouTube or Blogger) are not included.

The YouTube Escape Hatch

See, people who are upset with alleged infringement on YouTube are directed to a completely separate DMCA form to use. Try it yourself. Use the form Google talked about in its blog posttoday. The form warns you away from using it to report YouTube violations right at the top, and if you still try to pick the YouTube option, you get a further warning to go elsewhere:

When you do go elsewhere, YouTube jumps you through more hoops before you can just report. You go the YouTube Copyright Center:

From there, if you follow the “Content Owners” option, you get to a new page with several further options:

There, YouTube will let those who want to do a removal do so, but it also pitches a way to submit multiple notices more easily through a special Content Verification Program (a sign that YouTube gets lots of takedown requests), as well as the pretty cool Content ID system, which lets those who have infringement allegations decide to be mellow, let those videos stay up with ads and collect some income off of it.

Content ID is very nice, but if copyright owners aren’t convinced, they can still go the takedown route and get a video removed. The page at YouTube hosting the video itself remains up. The page also remains potentially listed in Google. The request definitely doesn’t count against YouTube in the tallies that will be used in the new pirate penalty, since these aren’t considered web page removals.

If Google had a common DMCA takedown system, YouTube would face a threat with the forthcoming penalty. How much is uncertain. Since Google doesn’t seem to disclose the number of YouTube takedown requests it has acted upon (I have asked for a figure), there’s no way to assess YouTube against the other sites on the strikeout list above.

YouTube In Search Results

Now let’s see how this works in action. You might recall earlier this year, Saturday Night Live did an absolutely hilarious parody of how Downton Abbey might be promoted if it ran on Bravo.

Unfortunately, for reasons that have never been made clear (but likely a rights dispute between NBCUniversal & the makers of Downton Abbey), it was never aired outside the East Coast of the US nor posted online officially.

That didn’t stop people posting it unofficially, without explicit permission. Here’s how the results currently look at Google, if someone were seeking that video in a common way right now:

The first result leads to the Perez Hilton site, where you can still watch the video hosted on that site just as you might watch it hosted on YouTube. If NBCUniversal filed a DMCA request, chances are, that page would get removed (assuming there’s not some licensing agreement, and I doubt there is). Perez Hilton’s entire site would have accumulated a strike against it.

Next, Styleite also self hosts the video, it seems, so it’s the same situation as with Perez Hilton. The same is true for Gawker, as best I can tell.

Several other pages listing in the top results above show the video, but because they embed from YouTube, they’re not really at risk for a DMCA takedown. These include known pirate sites like Time and Entertainment Weekly.

NBCUniversal’s own Today site was cheerfully embedding a pirated version of the video on YouTube until that got taken down, but it’s still promising to assist with second-hand infringement as soon as the clip turns up elsewhere:

Sorry! NBC Universal has blocked the YouTube clip that showed the “SNL” skit. If it shows up anywhere else online, we’ll get it back up here.

How The Google Search Umpire Doesn’t See YouTube’s Strike

Now let’s talk YouTube. In the screenshot above, I’ve pointed to where YouTube is listed, with a “Safe!” caption. It’s not that the video is safe. NBCUniversal could file a DMCA request to get the clip removed. But as I said, doing this just removes the clip as what we could call a “YouTube takedown,” not a “Search takedown.” YouTube, in the eyes of Google Search, has not suffered a copyright strike against it.

Technically, the YouTube listing appearing in the screenshot above isn’t a web search result but a Google Video result, inserted by Google Universal Search. That’s also true for the other video under it, a different listing from the Perez Hilton site. But that Perez Hilton video listing would get removed via the web search takedown system, as there is no Google Video removal. The YouTube one, as I’ve explained, would fall under the YouTube removal system.

Google: “We’re Treating YouTube Like Any Other Site”

I did ask Google about all this and was told

We’re treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings. That said, we don’t expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites.

I just don’t see that. There’s no way to treat YouTube — or Blogger — like any other site in the search rankings, when those sites have special takedown forms that don’t allow their alleged infringing activity to measured up against other sites.

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3 Ways To Advance Maturity In Your SEO Metrics

The sophistication with which companies analyze their natural search visibility and the metrics they use to do so can vary widely up and down the spectrum. There is often little correlation between how sophisticated a company is in other areas of their online business and their level of sophistication when it comes to their natural search metrics.

There are, however, definite benefits to becoming more savvy in how you look at your natural search programs. Visibility trends can inform strategy, competitive insight can impact a tactical approach, and gradual increases in your sophistication can start you down a road of looking at your SEO from a holistic perspective rather than a limited one-off view.

If you’ve been considering becoming more advanced in how you approach your natural search metrics, here are three ways you can dip a toe in the water and ramp up your sophistication.

In each example, we’ll describe ‘how’ to advance your SEO metrics and we’ll also elaborate on the insight you might gain from your newfound prowess. We’ll use ‘Ann’, the SEO Manager for Acme Co., a medium-sized online clothing retailer, as an example with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ to highlight the changes. For visualization purposes, I have accelerated the rate at which some of the trends may have occurred.

1.  Group Keywords Into Visibility Zones & Track Trends Over Time

Ann currently tracks the rankings for a group of high-value keywords on a monthly basis. She does not track visibility trends from one period to the next.

By grouping keyword ranks into visibility zones, natural search trends can start to emerge that may help inform strategic or tactical approaches to her SEO.

For example, the illustration below shows how grouping keywords by visibility zone reveals anincrease in striking distance keywords (page 2) from June to July which means she can focus on tactics to move keywords from page two to page one of the search results.

2.  Analyze Search Visibility By Keyword Segment

Now that Ann has become comfortable grouping her keywords into visibility zones, she is ready to take it to the next level and start segmenting her keywords by business line. Before, she was limited to seeing her keyword’s visibility on an aggregate basis.

By segmenting her keywords by business lines she can discover trends that would otherwise be missed such as the stark differences in visibility in keywords for women’s vs. men’s clothing in the example below.

3.  Track & Discover Competitors

Ann then turns her attention to competitive discovery. Before, she scanned the search results for her core keywords to get a rough sense of the competitive landscape, and did not track trends over time.

Now, she aggregates and plots the top ten appearances for competitor domains of her keywords month over month. Doing so exposes shifts in the competitive landscape and allows for actionable response to positive or negative changes.

For example, in the illustration below, Ann calculates the number of times competitors appear in the top 10 search results across her keyword set and tracks it over time. She is then able to determine that the Gap has been taking share from Acme from July to August. With that knowledge, Ann can analyze the tactics Gap utilized and develop a strategic response.

Conclusion: Embrace Advanced SEO Metrics for Better Insight

While it may initially seem like a daunting task, advancing the sophistication of your SEO metrics can lead to insight that can have real, measurable traffic and revenue benefits. Tools and technology that can help run up and down the cost and functionality spectrum, ranging from the basic rank tracker/Excel combination to the fully automated enterprise SEO platform.

Whatever your technology choice, if you are still in the early stages of how you look at your natural search visibility, consider adding some sophistication to how you look at your natural search metrics.

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Publish the Same Blog Post to Multiple Blogging Sites at Once

Problem: You got multiple blogs hosted on different blogging platforms and are looking for simple ways to cross-post or publish the same blog post on all these blogs at once.

Solution: There are several options / workarounds but my favorite is Blog It! – this blogging editor is available as a Facebook application and lets you send the same article to multiple blogs in one go.

You first associate all your different blog accounts with Blog It! and then check the ones where you want to publish that particle post. The blog editor supports only plain text but it can correctly parse all the included HTML tags.

And though Blog It! is a product of TypePad, it works will all popular blog platforms like Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, Movable Type and LiveJournal.

The next good option is Ping.fm – It supports almost every blogging / micro-blogging platform and lets you publish blog posts from almost anywhere including instant messengers, mobile phone, FaceBook, email or the standard web based editor.

The Ping.fm service is more suitable for micro-blogs that publish short posts with a link or two as Ping.fm includes no formatting options and all links included in the post get auto-converted into tiny URLs. Ping.fm supports Flickr and MySpace.

Write To My Blog is a web based blog editor that lets you compose and simultaneously post the same blog entry on to three different blog services. It supports Blogger, WordPress and all other engines that implement the MetaWeblog API.

You may use the service without registration though in that case you’ll have to add the blog details each time you publish a new blog post.

My next recommendation is either Windows Live Writer or ScribeFire for Firefox. Now these are full-featured blog editors with image uploading capabilities and a WYSIWYG interface and support all blogging platforms but won’t let you publish the same article on multiple blogs at once.

The workaround in that case is that you compose a post, publish it on Blog A, change the current blog from A to B, republish the same post again and so on. This is slightly tedious but you get a more user-friendly blog editor and there’s support for more platforms including Drupal, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, etc.

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