If you have been affected I advice you to take the following measures.

1. Continue building links. If you stop building links then it will only hint to Google that your links are unnatural as your link velocity will drop suddenly.

2. Check your Google Webmaster Tools but there is no real need to them asking for a “reconsideration”. There is no need to tell them that you have not done any link building that violates their Terms and Conditions. This step can be done once you have reviewed your link profiles and if you don’t see your rankings bounce back.

3. Continue to add more unique and valuable content to your website. Feed new content consistently to your site at about 2 to 3 articles per week.

4. Do not just build links on your  homepage but build links across all you pages. This will makes things look more natural to search engines and if you are not doing this yet, I advice you to do this now.

5. Rotate and use multiple keywords  variations. Use words like “click here”, “read more” and “visit this site” in your site.

6. Check your site for duplicate content using SEOmoz (paid version) or Screaming Frog to check 500 pages of your site for free.

7. Check your site’s page loading speed and increase your site speed if needed.

I would like to hear from you what you think was the reason why you have been hit by the recent Google penguin update.

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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Project: SEO/Link Building

Power Tutoring is a premier tutoring company in Dubai offering a professional and personal service that encourages children to learn and excel. Located in the academic heartland of Dubai, Knowledge Village, Power Tutoring has been delivering excellent tutorial support to our students since 2006. Whether your child needs extra support to excel, or you are looking for an after-school activity that is academic and fun at the same time, we have them both.

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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Project: SEO/Link Building

InsureMe.ae is a wind of change that blows through the insurance market in the UAE. We aim to offer you a transparent one-stop shop for comparing and purchasing various insurance products online. InsureMe.ae provides a hassel free and easy-to-use online insurance portal where you can find the right products to suit your needs by comparing key benefits and prices side by side. InsureMe.ae, by its very nature promotes a more competitive market place for insurance products. This in turn encourages insurance companies in the UAE to continuously improve and develop their products and services to your benefit no matter if you are in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or any of the other Emirates.

Target keyphrases: insurance dubai, car insurance dubai, medical insurance and many more..

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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IMU is an educational program powered by HubSpot, a software company that helps marketers and small businesses grow their business online through inbound marketing. IMU is collaborating with colleges and MBA programs such as Harvard Business School, Northeastern University and UMass Dartmouth to offer college students tools and resources to become masters in inbound marketing.

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts announced last Friday the launch of a new algorithm that is intended to better detect and fight spam in Google’s search results. Google’s main objectives are those sites that copies content then republish them on another websites.

Cutts said the change was approved last Thursday and released earlier this week. Cutts announced its intention to combat spam in his blog post last Friday.

Matt also wrote on his blog:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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The search giant Google will no longer support properties or real estate listings uploaded to its site on Google Maps and they are taking it off the market on February 10, 2011.

In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

Real estate is a huge category and too big to ignore or to realize its full potential online and they will be back soon. Or maybe we can expect an acquisition by Google of one of the large real estate portals in the future.

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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And the winning belly flop move and winners.

Congratulations to all the winners. Shiv was the winner of AED10,000 from Speedo and an annual Wild Wadi Water Park pass. He told Virign Radio that his birthday is coming up soon and he’s going to spend the money on a great party for him and his friends!

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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Flickr site was blocked by UAE authorities in 2005 a year after the site was launched.

About Flickr

Flickr was created by former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake in February of 2004. Flickr, which began as a photo-sharing feature of their gaming project, has since then blossomed into one of the premiere photo-sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. Since then Flickr continues to compete with other photo-sharing giant Photobucket.

On September 19,  the photo-sharing site Flickr announced on its blog that they are now hosting 5 billion photos.

User named “yeoaaron” was the one who uploaded the site’s 5 billionth photo . The image shows the Woodwards Collage in Vancouver, B.C.

Traffic Stats

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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Here’s what you need to know about Google Instant:

Google Instant is a feature that predicts what you’re searching for and shows results as you type.

Both the predicted queries and the search results change as you continue to typing in search box.

Now with Google Instant, you may notice an increase in impressions because your site will appear in search results as users type in a key.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.

2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.

3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

If you don’t want to see results as you type, you can turn Google Instant off by clicking the link next to the search box on any search results page.

If you havn’t noticed. Google have dropped the second search box at the bottom of the result page. This means that if you are at the bottom of search results, you’ll now have to scroll all the way up to modify your search query.

Google won’t show results for searches it deems pornographic, violent, hateful unless you actually hit enter or click the search button like if you search for the word “naked”.

Benefits of Google Instant

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

What people are saying about Google Instant?

Matt Cutts’ answer to  “Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?”

I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time.

Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman – the world’s largest independent PR firm says that “Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant“.

No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.”

Stefan Spencer founder of Netconcepts says…

Google is in business to build shareholder value. That’s done by maximizing profits and operating cash, both short term and long term. It’s all fine and good for Google to say it [Instant] was done to provide searchers with a better user experience. (Google’s official position is that Instant can save 2 to 3 seconds per search, which I have trouble buying, incidentally.) But I believe financial incentives are at the heart of it.

The bottom line is that Google Instant drives growth in ad revenues. That’s because it displays more ads to more users (5 to 7 times the number of results are displayed now via Google Instant than before). And it motivates AdWords advertisers to compete more vigorously for the top predictions coming out of Google Suggest. These terms are already expensive, and now they’re more so, thanks to Google Instant.

Read more on SEO experts view of Google Instant.

Related articles

• How Will Google Instant Affect Search Marketing? (firstrate.co.nz)
• 10 Almost Instant Responses to Your Google Instant Questions (hubspot.com)
• Will Your SEO Efforts Change Due To Google Instant? (seroundtable.com)

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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Let’s say Dubaian is planning to put up a restaurant business and he wants it to be located inside a mall.

Then for him to get more people to eat at his restaurant, he needs to find out the top 10 most visited malls.

The simple reason why Dubaian needs to built his restaurant in the top 10 visited malls is simply because the more people going to that mall, the more chances many will try and eat at his restaurant. We all know that the above Dubai shopping malls like  Dubai Mall, Mall of the Emirates, Deira City Centre, Dubai Festival Centre are the busiest malls specially on weekends so these are a good location for Dubaian.

The same thing goes when you have a website. For you to be able to get more traffic, more leads and more sales, your website must appear on the 1st page or top 10 results of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. A website really needs to be on the first page of results to get any real chance of being seen for a variety of terms and one way of achieving that is by doing SEO.

Hope this example helps you understand why you need search engine optimization or SEO.

Allan Duncan

Allan Duncan is Co-Founder of seodubai.org, SEO consultant, Google Certified Individual and the sole author of this blog. You can follow him on Linkedin and on Google+

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