By : Nidhi Gupta

Google bowling is pure evil and it deals with how to frame a competitor’s site as a spamming site to convince Google to drop its rankings. This type of negative SEO deals with links — and many links at once. These links are generated automatically, over a short period of time, using special software. They’ll mostly come from bad neighbors and they’ll all have the same anchor text, to make the spam picture complete. Google is just a machine, so there’s no real way for this machine to know who is behind the link spam. The “guilty” site might lose its position in the SERP or even get banned. Some sites never recover after a Google ban, others see their rankings vanishing and their pages landing into the supplemental results and they never learn why.

If something like this has happened to your site, all you can really do is to find out who hates you so much. Google bowling is not the only negative SEO technique that might hurt a competitor site.

Tattling, as correctly identified by Forbes, is something that even Google’s Matt Cutts encourages, by asking people to report sites that buy links. But its like a wonder how Google verifies such complaints.

Basically anyone can assume that a contextual link in one of the blog entries is a paid link.

There are many other questionable SEO strategies to demolish competition. But these may be a waste of time and energy. The Forbes article quoted above contains a pretty interesting statement: “Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult.”

If negative SEO is difficult, we are prone to believe that it seldom happens. In some niches, it happens quite often. But these are simple theories.

There are simpler ways to harm competition. Scrapper sites harm writers by copying their content. And it is not that difficult to understand where the “harm” lies.

For example, when a scrapper copies the content of your site, your rankings are harmed, especially if the scrapper site happens to have more authority than yours. There is not much you can do to protect your rankings and yours copyright. But if you decide to report the guilty site to the search engine (file a compliant) the search engine will remove the site from its index for 10 days, to give you (the copyright holder) the time to sue for infringement.

Many bloggers wake up one day to find their articles duplicated on obscure sites, MFA sites and so on. They are often frustrated and they ask in forums the classic: “What can I do if someone copies my content”. Well, now you have a possible answer: you don’t need to go to court to punish a site for copyright infringement. It is enough to file a complaint at Google and you’ve got the guilty site out of the Google SERPs for at least 10 days.

Careful though, a fraudulent copyright complaint can get you in trouble, and not just with the search engines. So don’t just go around filing complaints. The Google ban theoretically lasts for just 10 days, but the trust rank of the accused site will lower. Another similar complaint and the site’s integrity will be seriously questioned. Just remember: what goes around comes around.

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By : Admin

Getting your site to rank highly in the search engine results and getting searchers to click through to your site is one of the first objectives of B2B search engine optimization. In the B2C world, conversion can happen in a matter of minutes. In the business-to-business realm, however, conversion can take months or even years.

The goal of most B2B searchers is research. Your goal is to identify who the site visitors are and to develop a relationship with them. First of all, you should be analyzing your web traffic as it can be a rich source of leads.

While you likely won’t generate a B2B sale in a single visit, there are a number of strategies to help begin converting site visitors into customers. In business-to-business realm, your job is to increase the number and quality of those encounters by offering opportunities for them to engage with you.

The primary intent of business-to-business searchers is research and education. Your site should contain a generous amount of optimized educational content. This helps prospects both find you and get to know your firm and your approach in a non-invasive, largely anonymous environment. While much of your web content should be open to all, you should reserve a certain amount of valuable content available by registration only. That registration will give you valuable lead information.

There are a number of tools you can use to drive engagement, accelerate conversion, create leads, and measure the return on SEO. Here’s some of them.

Newsletter Sign-ups: Newsletters are a great way to stay in front of B2B prospects and develop an ongoing relationship with them. Keep newsletter registration simple. E-newsletters are ideal. Most importantly, make sure your newsletter has great content.

White Papers: White papers are a great way for prospects to see how you think, to evaluate your knowledge and perspectives. Be careful not to turn the white paper into a blatant promotional tool. Links should be limited to those whose destination provides other objective, educational material and information.

Podcasts: B2B podcasts are an easy way for people to assimilate what you have to say. Keep podcasts valuable and short, and use newsletters and blogs to promote them.

Webcasts. Business-to-business webcasts are non-invasive forums in which to share research, information, and product demonstrations. They’re much cheaper than on-site seminars, and you can use webcast registrations for leads.

Your Blog: A blog serves as another touchpoint for your brand. Business-to-business blogs are a great medium to further engage prospects. If you have a related blog, refer visitors and allow them to your main site to click through to it.

Site analytics will let you evaluate your conversion efforts in terms of depth of visits, length of visits, and whether time spent on specific pages and the number of repeat visitors is increasing. In addition to continuing to convert visitors into customers, the number and quality of leads from each of the conversion strategies above can be used to evaluate return on investment for B2B search engine optimization.

SEO’s ability to meet prospects exactly when they’re forming the intent to buy makes it one of the most attractive marketing strategies for B2B. Yet most business-to-business companies have not begun to implement search engine optimization. For many, it’s not even on their radar and that can represent a competitive advantage for your firm. If you understand B2B search engine optimization and how to engage visitors each time they find your site, you can create a rich pipeline of prospect relationships and sales leads.

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