After almost 3+ years of solid rankings and earnings, the sudden drop on the website was a surprise. The website in question was very genuine, with original content, optimized and valuable content for many keywords. Initially it was curiosity, to know why PANDA update caught my website in its filters and kicked it out of top spots.

After a lot of time spent talking to fellow friends in the industry and reading up as much as I could in the forums, I was even more confused than I ever was. I could not find a single reason why this has happened apart from the fact that the website has not been updated frequently.

Most SEO specialists I talked to are confused about the new ranking factors that has come up with the PANDA update of google and a select smart marketers are using this opportunities to use their own imagination to come up with new “ranking factors” (in finger quotes).

In short, something is changing with the way Google analyzes and ranks website. I am no longer sure about what works and what does not. Websites created in the same way for two different niches with the same quality standards, one ranks well and the other gets the boot. :-X

Today I was talking to one of my friends about his latest venture which was about selling tour and travel packages across India. He had dropped by to know how SEO and SEM can help his business. One led to another and I was soon able to help him out with a lot of marketing options on a low budget which was not rocket science and I was surprised at myself for finding so many ways to market his company without using Google at all!!

After the brainstorming, I was surprised about the world of traffic which exists without Google! Personally, over the last decade, I had been dead straight on with SEO alone so much that I did not bother about anything else other than Google to pull traffic to websites.

In this new marketing which I’d like to call “Marketing to the Islands” is about getting in touch with these small islands of targeted users and promoting your products/services to them. The reach will be much smaller in numbers, but conversions should work better than mass general marketing. It is nothing new, but if you are devastated about being given the boot or do not have enough budget for a SEO campaign here are your choices -

• Guest Blogging – There are many blogs which are maintained by travel bloggers and most of these blogs have a community of readers following updates from the blogger. I am not considering the SEO advantage here in anyway, I am talking about bloggers who have friends following them on facebook, subscribed through RSS, email and any other way. Contacting these bloggers and having a post on their website about destinations along with a link to your website or a phone number should instigate interested travelers to get in touch with you.
• Forums – There are a lot of travel related forums where frequent travellers hang out such as “India Mike” and others where there are frequently questions on planning itineraries and requests for help on choosing the right accommodation. By genuinely helping (not spamming) these travelers, there is a huge potential in revenue generation. Also, think about forums which are specific to your geography. For example, we own a forum called MyTechnopark which attracts over 100,000 pageviews a month and guess where the major traffic is from? Nope,  Not Google.
• Group Buying – I don’t know about you, but I keep a tab on almost all the major group buying sites around my location to spot and grab good deals. By giving away your best deal on these websites, you stand to gain a lot of new clients. You can use these websites in the off-season when the rates will be lower and use the collective power of recommendations to build your business.
• Social Networks – How much ever Google Plus tries to capture my time spent online, I am comfortable with Facebook for now.  I might soon be one of those people who stood out while everyone was busy building “authority” with Google Plus, but I am willing to take that chance for now.
• Video Networks – I am not referring to YouTube here. I am talking about networks like Tripfilms which many travellers frequent to see places they want to visit, shot by camera wielding travelers is truly a great place to decide your next trip.
• Other modes of Search – There is a lot of searching that goes on beyond Google, places like Just Dial have a huge number of  local lead generated every day and most of them are hot leads with genuine people looking to purchase your product or service. Thats’ valuable than a “click” from Google Adwords.

You do not really need Google to get your business off the ground. Think it is too much work? Yeah, it is, but with frequent changes in SEO these days and not everyone being sure about what works anymore, I would say “Marketing to the Islands” has a better chance of ROI than SEO at this point of time. Do let me know your thoughts on this regard and contact me if you want to share your experience with Google Algo changes.

As for me and my niche blogging, its another story blog post.

How to survive in a Post-Google World
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Google looks at many factors while ranking a website and some of these which I personally consider important are:

• Backlinks – The count and the quality
• Age of the domain and if its static or frequently updated.
• Relevancy of the backlinks on your website. (On-Page)

While optimizing your website for Search Engines, it is very important to measure your work versus results output. At ayruz, we usually take up a snapshot of the clients existing website and its metric before we begin the optimization process. This helps both the client and us to measure how the results are affected in each stage of work done.

Backlink Checker – Checking your backlinks is one of the most important steps while creating a strategy of your website. BlueBacklinks is the website I currently recommend to check your backlinks. It not only provides a list of backlinks your website currently has, but also analyses them and provides you with the Anchor Text, the external links found on the page which has your backlink and if its dofollow or no follow.

The is also a nifty tool which gets you a brief statistics of your website which contain pagerank, alexa rank, DMOZ listing and top anchor texts found on the backlinks. Another neat feature I liked about the website is its ability to export the backlinks as a excel file which you can use to document your SEO efforts. I usually visit the website once a week to update the page so that I can check how many backlinks have been indexed by website and accelerate or decelerate our backlink building process.

I hope to cover more tools in the weeks ahead to better measure your SEO efforts. Stay tuned!

Measuring your SEO Success – Backlinks
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

1. Loading time of your website/blog – This a fairly recent rumour if you ask me. Most webmasters work really hard on reducing load times on their websites. While it is NOT a SEO advantage to do so, it is a BIG user experience factor which is not only appreciated by Google, but by normal users like you and me also.

2. Top level domains do get better precedence in local search engines, but they are not really a factor if your other on page and off page factors are good. I have seen tlds like .me rank for many indian search terms. Plus, lets face it, its not really possible to get a good dotcom these days.

3. Server Location is NOT, was NEVER a factor with SEO. The bandwidth of servers in the US is always cheaper than most countries and almost all webmasters host their sites in the USA. It is not insanely possible to host a website in every country if you plan to target the whole world.

4. Proper structure and Code – If you are a developer or a designer, you know how difficult it is to have a “proper” code working in all major browsers and without any CSS hitches. While not having any junk codes like cloaked text or spammy descriptions will be a good thing, having the perfect code will not get you above the rest.

5. Previous penalty on the site: My website was hit by a penalty within months of launch back in 2005 and I personally know that a lift of a ban set by Google will make the site stronger and more authoritative to Google.

6. Visitors from Search Engines: Wasn’t the idea of this post to get more visitors from search engines?

Posts like these make me think about the plight of those small businesses with the hope of a better visibility online paying dollars off to their developers making their code perfect, paying off more to host their websites in their own country and all that. Next time you see a post like this, I would suggest looking at the source of the news and how the author reached the conclusions he has put up. If that makes sense to you, that’s good advice.

My viewpoint:

SEO is not just about search engines anymore. It is about external non-search factors like Google Local, Twitter Results, Sidewiki, Google News and new site links which is all about user experience.

Usability and visibility (to Google Bots(Backlinks) and normal users(Social)) of your website is the number one ranking factor. Your thoughts?

Google Caffeine Search Engine Factors – Myths
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

I usually have a select of 10-20 themes which I use on most of my niche websites mostly because I have heavily modified them myself or find them to be perfectly coded for Search Engines. This is my list of 10 Search engine friendly wordpress themes.

1. Green Park 2 -

2. PlainTxt -

3. A Dream to Host -

4. Dateless Sniper 1.0

5. Free web 2.0 Theme

5 SEO Friendly WordPress Themes
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Recently I was helping my friends at CSharks, the Indian Game Developers about their sites indexing issues in Bing. Initially I thought it was a flash site based indexing issues which Google had sometime back. Then we found out that BingBot has recently visited the homepage of the site, but failed to see through the redirect they had setup.

Though I knew redirects was tricky, it never occurred it could confuse the BingBot too! To me, it looks like BingBot gets stuck at the page which throws a redirect error and cannot figure out a way to index the new page.

But it seems it is an issue with the redirects. Bing does not know redirects. It seems that a search for Moved Permanently gives out a lot of results. Concerning.

While it is an error which has been on MSN/Live Search for long, it is unlikely to give Bing any discredits as they are not a traditional Search Engine, but a “decision engine”.  But its a bad thing for most website owners as bing is currently the default “search engine” for the Internet Explorer, the most popular browser out there.

Dear Bing,

I know you are trying to do a darn good job, so please fix it asap! Stop the sleepless nights of millions of webmasters!

Bing and 301 Redirects – Moved Permanently Problems
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

But yes, the quality of the directories you submit to matters. I usually submit to those directories who are doing some sort of SEO for their sites and have decent authority backlinks to themselves. The list of directories will be soon attached to my RSS footer, so if you want a peice of my directory sheet, do subscribe to my RSS or get the updates by email.

I am sure that if you have complete the 5 days of easy backlinks exercises with me, then you will most probably have a ton of backlinks to your websites! Do let me know in the comments if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback on my methods.

Happy LinkBuilding!

Directory Submissions – Day 5 of Easy Link Building
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

A method of creating backlinks from 6 different web 2.0 properties with new accounts and syndicating their RSS is what linkwheel is all about. Personally, concentrating on top sites like WordPress.com, hubpages and squidoo will give you the results you want, but mix it with a bit of article marketing and you have a powerful way of linkbuilding! If you missed the previous methods, check out the pilot post with the index to the methods of easy link building.

Web2.0 Backlinks: Day 4 of Easy Link Building
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Google News syndication is definitely the icing on the cake as it will bypass the normal listings on Google for your keyword. My personal list of press release websites I use for my submission needs can be found here and here. The time spent on this activity involves the time spent on writing the article and the time spent on submitting to the lists out there.

So good luck link building!

Press Release: Day 3 of Easy Link Building
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Welcome to Day 2 of Easy Link Building! I am planning to cover 5 popular and insanely easy ways of building backlinks to your site in this 5 day post series. So kids, we are going to lesson 2, Day 2!All the lessons will be updated centrally on pilot post of easy link building here.

Social Bookmarking is a ongoing process. There are a lot of social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Jumptags, Digg and others which help you get backlinks to your site as well as some good traffic if you submit them to the right categories and participate in the community. This method explained here is also a sureshot way of getting banned from certain social bookmarking site if you are selfish enough not to participate in the community but want all the link love.

You can submit all your pages or those pages which you need backlinks for to various social bookmarking sites which have dofollow backlinks (though I don’t believe in their relevance anymore.) to them.

This is really a no-brainer. Social Networks and Social web 2.0 sites get the bulk of the online traffic these days. Being on the right network with the right group of friends is very important if your site has a long term potential/goals.

Being the “why-reinvent-the-wheel” (read:lazy) guy that I am, this weeks resource list can be found at Caroline Middlebrook who has this wonderful list of social bookmarking sites to spam submit on.

If you are looking to make this a part of your daily activity online, you might want to checkout this list of 10 awesome addons for firefox for Social Media.

So thats about it on social bookmarking and linkbuilding. Until tomorrow, the court/school is adjourned! You might want to subscribe to my updates on email alerts or on RSS readers to keep yourself updated on this series.

Social Bookmarking: Day 2 of Easy Link Building
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

	Site: EzineArticles This is a very impressive site with massive numbers of authors and articles. I use this very often on the lines of a wikipedia to know about a particular niche.
	GoArticles
	ArticlesBase
	ArticleDashboard
	ArticleCity
	Amazines
	ArticleAlley
	ArticleBiz
	ArticleCube
	SearchWrap

List of Article Marketing Directories
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.