Let’s understand what the penguin update is all about.

Google has been on a mission to make sure the websites that show up on searches give the best experience for the user, now I would say that is a pretty good mission.

The earlier Panda update did a lot in forcing websites to show user friendly content and tackling link farming practices.

Then Google decided to go after websites that were using spamming practices with their new update, and so came Penguin.

What are spamming practices?

If you have your own blog or forum you probably have run into this quite a bit; you will have comments posted on your articles that are not related to the article but just attempts to get links back to some website, in some cases these are so many you need a whole system just to filter them out.

Well, with the new Google update these spam links will no longer help the person or company who’s doing them, this forces website owners to create useful content if they want to build an audience and therefore links.

This gives us a better internet experience designed to give the user information they want to read and not fake links created for the sole purpose of search engines. I would say that is a pretty good update.

What if you have been penalized by the recent update?

I’ve heard some “SEO” people trying to come up with some “new ideas” since they were penalized by the recent update and to them I ask “will you ever learn?”

The reason someone would have been penalized is because they were already doing something not intended to give good user experience. So looking for “new ideas” is just trying to come up with a new way not to do the work, which is the wrong approach.

The right approach is very simple, make your website the place to go to get the information you want to show up for. This includes fresh informative articles that someone will want to read, helpful pictures and videos, tips, easy navigation, easy to find information.

Here are some steps you might want to take if you have been penalized:

1. Remove any spam links you have yourself posted and don’t post new ones.
2. If links are now out of your control write to websites that have them and ask for removal or no-follow, honestly if they are unnatural removal would be best. Keep copy of all the requests and responses.
3.  Build good content and concentrate on good customer experience natural links will come from it.
4. If you have been severely penalized after you get your house in order ask Google for reconsideration. If you haven’t been severely penalized you will see your ranking slowly going back up as you do the above.

Even heroes have flees, Google knows that, so if you concentrate on good useful content and keep the work on removing bad links (and keeping evidence) you’ll be fine.

If you are unwilling to do the work (or have someone do it) and just want the latest and greatest cheap money making idea then I recommend changing line of work.

This is a home inspection website for the Valencia, Santa Clarita area.

On this design we wanted to keep a simple look but still making it inviting and professional.

Feel free to comment on the look.

In the United States Google averages over 180 million people using it a month, Facebook averages 160 million people using it a month. Per Alexa as of yesterday (literally these are yesterday’s numbers) 50.1% of the internet users will go on Google at least once a month, 43.5% on Facebook.

Looking at these numbers it becomes evident that the place to be seen on in the internet is either Google or Facebook. So my question is why choose?

It is true statistically the more a business is likely to be talked about the better it will do on Facebook, so we can assume that a hairdresser will get a lot more result from Facebook than a garbage pickup company. But even then a great garbage pickup company, polite and friendly will get word of mouth too.

Based on these numbers if you only pick one of the two your marketing glass will only be half full (or half empty). So my recommendation is do both.  Don’t bother to figure out if your marketing glass is half full or empty; just fill it up all the way.

I’ve recently been sent multiple links to articles about the  world wide web being dead and Google falling so as usual I decided to look for  myself, partly because I’m curious and also because after all I build websites  for a living so it would have been good to know if it was time to look for a  new line of work (maybe get my chance at making donuts for a living).

First I looked at the rumor that the world wide web was  shrinking obviously the best way to check if it is true is look at the total  internet page numbers.

Best place to look is the Google total indexed pages, Google  basically copies every page they find on the internet, here are their pages for  the last few years.

…well I’m no expert but it doesn’t seem to be quite shrinking, does it? Let me put it more bluntly, if this graph represented my  weight on a scale I wouldn’t think I was shrinking, I would think I was getting  fat; now I do know someone out there will say something about being overweight and health risks and although I fully agree with you I don’t quite think that applies to the internet.

Now that we have put that rumor to rest let’s take a look at  the Google and search engines were dying rumor. Having been in the website  field for a long time I know the first number you look at to see how a company on the internet is doing is monthly unique visitors. In other words how many unique people go to a website a month. Here you will see the graph of the top websites of the internet and their monthly visitors:

Look Google just hit their highest number of monthly unique  visitors at over 1 billion a month. Huh… 1 bbbbiiilllion??? That sounds like a big number; if 1 billion people were to visit you and it took you 3 seconds to say hello to one it would take 100 years to say hello to all of them (and that’s without sleep). I guess you might be asking yourself why you would say hello to 1 billion people and that would probably be a good question but I think I’ve gone off the point again.

So let’s review what we have learned so far; the internet is not shrinking it is expanding, Google and search engines are not losing customers, they are getting more customers.

So what it really happening? Very simple, people are spending more time doing two activities on the internet; watching videos and networking with each other. Why are people spending more time watching videos and networking? Duh, because they can. Just a few years ago watching a video or movie online was not something anyone would do. For one the connection speed themselves made it impossible to provide any decent quality without the video constantly stopping.

So what we actually have happening is a shift on the amount of time spent doing actions online with movies and networking being preferred to still web pages.

This brings us to the final question; if the internet is not dying and Google is not shrinking then why is someone saying they are?
…that, my friend, is the right question.

The first concern we had to resolve is the customer wanted a look that was attractive to business owners and at the same time a look that was attractive to home owners.

We solved this by creating dynamically changing banners. The top banner of the website changes based on the type of page you are looking at:
commercial pages look commercial and residential pages are more family friendly.

Take a look and make any comments.

We wanted to give the owners the ability to change look during the different seasons. This store has skins that will change its motif during holydays
or special occasions.

Click on the picture or here to see it.

When building a website the main way to create the look and feel that you want the user to see is to write it in a style sheet, these are called a CSS (cascading style sheet).

CSS tells the user browser (such as Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) how all the parts of the website should look; the browser then converts this into the actual final image the user sees.
So how do fonts fit in?

When a browser doesn’t recognize any font you told it to use it goes back to the basic fonts, in other words if the browser doesn’t recognize that new and pretty font you have no idea what the final user will see.
So there are two options:

1. Include the text in a picture, this option works for elements such as banners but it’s very unworkable for the main text of the website or
2. Use the standard fonts that all browsers recognize.

Here is a sample of the fonts all browsers recognize:

Font family

Font families are groups of fonts that are similar to each other, these are very useful because if a browser doesn’t recognize the first font on the list it will pick the next one and the next one, this allows the outcome of what the viewer sees to be what the designer wanted even if his browser doesn’t have a specific font. These are the main font families:

I hope this helps.

This is for a Chiropractic clinic that has two locations in the Los Angeles area, one in West Hollywood (near Beverly Hills) and the other one in downtown Los Angeles.

For SEO purposes we’ve created a Blog (the Article tab) that is fully integrated with the website.  I highly recommend for any of you that are interested in optimizing your website to attach a Blog to it; it’s a simple way to boost your Google ranking. 

To view the website, click here.

(Note: this article contains some technical words, if you are unfamiliar with website design it might be confusing)

CSS Transparency

You can set transparency with CSS. In order to handle internet explorer and all the other browsers you have to set it in different ways, it is possible that with internet explorer 9 they will standardize CSS but for now this is how you have to do it. Here is an example of setting transparency to 70%:

ie:                          filter:alpha(opacity=70);

All the others:     opacity: 0.7;

Older Mozilla:     -moz-opacity:0.7;

The thing to know about CSS transparency is that internet explorer does not always do a good job of displaying it so look at it before you publish.

Png and Gif Transparency

Png and Gif are picture files that allow for transparency, gif allows only for 100% transparent, png allow for gradients of transparency. Gif are much smaller than png, so whenever possible use a gif

Unmoving Transparency

If you are dealing with a transparent picture on top of another that never changes then why don’t you just save them together as one picture. This will make the page smaller and easier to load.

At times I use different methods on the same website. For example http://gasmileagesolutions.com is done with png files, you can see when you scroll to the bottom there is an actual different picture behind. Their forum, http://gasmileagesolutions.com/forums, on the other hand needed to be smaller for loading reason, on that portion of the website the background, even if it looks like a transparency, is just one jpg file.

There are good links and bad links, good links actually help your website, bad links don’t and in many cases can actually injure your website.

Let’s look at real life and then it will make more sense. Let’s say you are looking for a plumber after a bit of looking you find two options:

1. Option (a) is referred to you by the plumber community, by two local contractors and by a local hardware store.
2. Option (b) you find under a local angel cake recipe, in the links of a shoe store, in three link exchange sites, in two multilevel marketing sites, in a local business directory under “general repair”.

Which one would you choose? The answer is obvious if you want your plumbing done right; option (a). But if you just count links, option (a) only had 4 links whereas option (b) had 8; true but option (a) links showed you that he was a professional since he specialized on one area whereas option (b) links showed the exact opposite.

How does it work on search engines? Exactly the same! There is nothing wrong with cross linking as long as you stay in your field and the links actually say something, like “recommended plumber”.

I hope this makes more sense.