Mediaboss Marketing

Google has announced that you can now see up to 90 days of historical data in your Webmaster Tools Search Queries reports instead of the previous 35 days. Additional changes have been made to the Webmaster tools interface

As Google explains:

In addition to the updates in historical data, now you can view search query data as soon as you verify ownership of a site. You can also data for the top 2,000 queries from which your site gets clicks.

If you see less than 2,000 it means that they haven't seen that many clicks or those clicks aren't getting tracked. It could also mean that your data is spread out among different countries. For example, a search query for flowers in Google Canada is counted separately from a query for flowers in the U.S. Nevertheless, with this change, 98 percent of sites on the web will have complete coverage.

Now the bad news, Google announced today that they are removing three key functions in the back end of Google Webmaster tools to give budget to newer innovations.

These three features will all be removed within the next two weeks.

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

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Google Webmaster Tools Adds 90 Days of Search Query Data, Drops 3 Features

BANGKOK A Thai judge postponed a verdict that had been expected Monday for a webmaster accused of failing to act quickly enough to remove Internet posts deemed insulting to Thailand's royalty.

Judge Nittaya Yaemsri said more time was need to process documents in the case, which has drawn global criticism because many see it as an assault on freedom of speech. A new court date was set for May 30.

Chiranuch Premchaiporn widely known by her nickname, Jiew is facing up to 20 years in jail for 10 comments posted on her paper's now-defunct web board by readers she says she does not know.

She is being tried under Thailand's computer-crime laws, which were enacted in 2007 under an interim, unelected government that came to power after a coup a year earlier. The laws address hacking and other online offenses, but also bar the circulation of material deemed detrimental to national security, which includes defaming the monarchy.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said last week that the prosecution of Chiranuch "sends a chilling message to webmasters and Internet companies."

Prachatai was founded by several respected journalists, senators and press freedom activists to serve as an independent, nonprofit, daily Internet newspaper. It has attracted an audience of critics of the status quo, especially on the web board where the comments at issue in the court case were posted between April and November 2008.

Most of the comments were removed within one or two days, but one remained online for 20 days and another for 11.

Prosecutors say Chiranuch was guilty of "intentionally supporting or consenting" to post unlawful content by failing to delete the offending comments quickly enough. Her lawyers point out, among other arguments, that there are no guidelines on the matter.

Chiranuch is the first webmaster prosecuted under the law and her case could set a precedent for other media companies here.

The prosecution of Chiranuch has become a cause celebre. Last year she was one of three winners of the Courage in Journalism award given by the International Women's Media Foundation, and also one of 48 global writers given grants under a Human Rights Watch program for their commitment to free expression.

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Verdict delayed for Thai webmaster accused of not deleting anti-royal comments quickly enough

Many who are eager to "get ahead" with their search engine optimization (SEO) program are typically consumed with the latest and greatest SEO techniques, how they are sure to work as well as fantasizing over their list of targeted keyword terms.

Competitive analysis should also take a position of high importance. Dont get me wrong, proper keyword research, the predecessor to competitive analysis, is important. We know where we want to rank and we know who is ranking there, but how will we get there?

At the onset of your dive into SEO competitive analysis, it's important you segment your analysis into three areas: content, authority, and opportunity.

Content is king, right? You betcha, and the more you or a competitor have the more likely it is to have enhanced visibility in search engines.

The starting point is your keyword target list. Find the most important terms to your company/site theme and review the search results.

Who comes up consistently in organic results? You may find that your online competition may be quite different than your brick-and-mortar competitors.

Once you've found the top 3-5 regularly appearing sites, review their results to identify if they have a keen grasp on title tags, meta description, and URL naming convention best practices. Are they obviously targeting the terms they are showing up for?

Utilize a tool such as SEMRush or Spyfu Kombat to assess what other terms they rank for and that drive traffic. Are these terms also on your targeted keyword list?

Next, take a deeper look at their online presence as there is much more than just the organic SERP. Are they supplementing their SERP presence with PPC? Perform site:www.competitorname.com queries in Google Images, Video, News, Places.

Content isnt just text. Have they optimized these digital/local/press contextual elements to take advantage of universal search?

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3 Pillars of SEO Competitive Analysis

Recent events such as unnatural link warnings from Google, over optimization filters andblog networks being deindexed by Google, the concern of links being able to harm a website has risen again.

The biggest concern is the issue of negative SEO, which is sabotaging your competitors rankings to help you move past them on the search engine result pages.

Some webmasters are very concerned about what negative SEO is and how they can protect themselves. This post will tell you what to do about negative SEO.

under certain conditions.

First, lets imagine that the search engines tolerate a certain threshold of optimization for a site before they penalize it for being over optimized.

Lets call this the over optimization cup.

To visualize this, just imagine that every site starts with an empty cup. Once the cup gets overfilled, a site is at risk for getting penalized.

A larger, more authoritative site such as Amazon has a much larger cup; that means they can tolerate more dirt in their site buildup. Dirt can be defined as spammy links, blatant keyword stuffing, duplicate content or anything that isnt considered squeaky clean white hat SEO.

In contrast, a smaller, newer site has many forces working against it. For example, it might not have much content or links pointing to it. So right off the bat, we can see a few reasons why the search engines wouldnt rank this site in the same category as Amazon:

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Negative SEO What it Is & How to Protect Yourself

Talking to the Global SEO manager of a large organization with offices around the world, he was bemoaning the high turnover of staff and the difficulty of keeping people in SEO posts around the world with the right level of SEO knowledge and expertise to achieve their goals.

Its a challenge many organizations face. Thats not to say that these businesses are bad at retaining staff the very fact that they are global often means that they offer something special to the world. Their staff are often not moving onto other organziations either but simply are being promoted to a different position, team or department. Some, of course, are leaving the company too.

Another issue is that SEO responsibilities around the world arent often held by people who are dedicated to the cause of SEO. Mostly, they have other marketing tasks to handle too and have a relatively limited bandwidth for SEO.

Before going further, I have to declare two areas of personal interest. My company runs the International Search Summit with SMX and training programs. Im also a long standing fan of SMX and SearchEngineLand and first attended conferences by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US. So this gives me something of a bias, but also I think a unique insight into the industry were all in.

In many sectors there have been studies into the value of training. I dont propose to labour this point I think were all aware of the rapidly changing nature of the business.

The value of keeping abreast of search engine and social media developments pays for itself many times over Im sure we all agree. You would think that investing in training would be a no-brainer but its still a cost and its value isnt always recognized. (My staff at this point are also nodding.)

We also have to recognize at this point that for those working in international SEO the challenges are particularly tough. No one speaks 20 or even 10 languages well. If you see someone who claims that, I suggest you challenge it. So how can a normal human being SEO working internationally actually cope? Lets look at some strategies.

If you think Im about to say its a good idea to go to conferences, youd only be half right. There are conferences all over the world so you could quite easily send staff to the most local conference for them. I think there is a better strategy which Ive seen a few companies deploy.

A good strategy is to choose a big and wide ranging conference somewhere in the world and then to fly in the relevant staff from all over the world. Yes I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know theres a little more cost involved with that, but the value is clear.

With all of the global SEO team in one place, they can discuss not just what theyve seen and heard but also their own issues. In effect you can organise a parallel conference for you own organisation alongside the main conference with the inspiration of the main conference in the teams minds.

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5 Tips For Maintaining International SEO Knowledge With Training