More than two weeks after the Penguin update (targeted at ‘unnatural links’), it is believed that the top way to stay ahead is to indulge in smart and somewhat technical link building. Nearly 70% of Webmasters have been hit by the Penguin as the links they had built over the years are now pulling them down.

But you can move ahead after the Penguin too. Here are the Post Penguin link building practices we suggest:

1. Check if domain is cached in Google. Google “cache:domain.com” to see the date of the last crawl and cache.
2. Check the websites the domain is linking out to. If it is linking to an overwhelming number, then the link is not juicy enough for you. Also, it is important to see the types of site they are linking to. If they link to relevant and quality sites, then you are good to go.
3. Check the site’s ranking in Google. What does it rank in Google for? You can use tools to check the domain’s ranking history too. The idea is to go ahead only if the site has a decent position in Google, and ranks for a high number of keywords.
4. Check the rankings of the site linked with the domain. If you plan to link with the domain, you need to know how the websites with outgoing links rank. This is an important quality check of the link that you must see.
5. Check the content of the domain. You have to get links from quality sites with relevant, quality content. So you must do a random check of 2 or 3 articles for duplicity and quality writing. You do not want links from poor quality- keyword stuffed content. The Penguin hates that. You can check for duplicate content by using Copyscape and Google.
6. Check if the site falls among dropped domains. Before approaching a site, check for “domain.com + expired” and see the results if the domain is expired. There are link builders who snatch these domains and start their paid links business. Do not go ahead with such a domain.
7. Check the location of the links. You must look for links passed from the content and not footer or sitewide links. The Penguin may penalize you for this. So, stick to domains with links from within the content.

These are some of the link building practices that can save you from showing up in the Penguin’s radar. What do you think of these practices? Do share your views.

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The Create robots.txt tool (used to generate robots.txt files) has been used very less by the webmasters. The robots.txt files served the purpose of blocking specific parts of a site from being crawled by Googlebot. With the tool being removed, webmasters can create the files in a text editor.

Site performance feature that told the average load time of a site’s pages is also being removed by Google due to low usage. Webmaster can use analyze their site’s performance using the Site Speed feature in Google Analytics or using Google’s PageSpeed online.

Recently Google Webmaster Tools has seen many new features and functionalities being added like Crawl errors and new User Administration feature. What do you think of these features being made to retire? Did you use them often? Do share your views.

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Matt Thompson, communications director for Mozilla, announced on the Mozilla blog that the Open Badges Infrastructure has entered into public beta. Badge issuers and developers now have access to the software that will allow them to build badges. The point is that people will build badges to recognize achievements made “online or out of school” according to the Open Badges Web site.

The Open Badges program has already been around in some form for the past year with major players like NASA, Disney-Pixar and 4H developing for the program. To make the deal even sweeter, you can also link up Open Badges with Mozilla Persona that adds a “reputation layer” to your online ID.

The new features coming with the Open Badges public beta today are as follows:

New tools for badge issuers. A new and improved badge issuer API makes it easier for any organization to award their own digital badges for learning, skills or achievements.

New ways for users to manage their badges. Improvements to Mozilla’s “Badge Backpack” make it easier for users to store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites through a single location.

New tools for badge displayers. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms.

New documentation and privacy features. Including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers.

Erin Knight, Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning, provided some more clarification on the launch of the beta. She says that Mozilla is going to start speeding up the new releases for Open Badges to every two weeks. The hope is that they can get from beta to version 1.0 by the end of the year.

If you want to start working with Open Badges right now, check out the developer documentation and source code. You can also learn more about Open Badges and maybe even earn your first badge.

I’ll be the first to say that Open Badges is a really unique concept that gamifies how we display our real world accomplishments. By turning our accomplishments and skills into a digital achievement, more people might be pushed to achieve something greater. We already have people spending ungodly amounts of time to earn achievements in video games so the same should be true for a person spending a lot of time to learn astrophysics.

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Matt Cutts posted a new webmaster help video, but this time, instead of responding to a user-submitted question like he usually does, he provides what he refers to as a public service announcement.

“If you block Googlebot from crawling javascript or CSS, please take a few minutes and take that out of the robots.txt and let us craw the javascript,” says Cutts. “Let us crawl the CSS, and get a better idea of what’s going on on the page.”

“A lot of people block it because they think, ‘Oh, this is going to be resources that I don’t want to have the bandwidth or something,” but Googlebot is pretty smart about not crawling stuff too fast, and a lot of people will do things like, they’ll check for Flash, but then they’re including some javascript, and they don’t realize that including that javascript – the javascript is blocked, and so we’re not able to crawl the site as effectively as we would like,” he says.

“In addition, Google is getting better at processing javascript,” he continues. “It’s getting better at things like looking at CSS [to] figure out what’s important on the page, so if you do block Googlebot, I would ask: please take a little time, go ahead and remove those blocks from the robots.txt so you can let Googlebot in, get a better idea of what’s going on with your site, get a better idea of what’s going on with your page, and then that just helps everybody in terms of if we can find the best search results, we can return them higher to users.”

“So thanks if you can take the chance. I know it’s kind of a common idiom for people to just say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna block javascript and CSS, but you don’t need to do that now, so please, in fact, actively let Googlebot crawl things like javascript and CSS, if you can.”

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Errors have been classified as site errors and URL errors.

Site Errors

Site errors include- DNS resolution failures, connectivity issues with web server, and complications with the robots.txt file. Earlier they were reported by the URL, even though site errors are not specific to the individual URLs. Now these errors will be tracked for each type of site-wide error. As Google says, “We’ll also try to send you alerts when these errors become frequent enough that they warrant attention. Furthermore, if you don’t have (and haven’t recently had) any problems in these areas, as is the case for many sites, we won’t bother you with this section. Instead, we’ll just show you some friendly check marks to let you know everything is hunky-dory.”

URL errors

Google has broken the page specific URL errors further into various categories defined by the cause of the error. Google says, “If your site serves up Google News or mobile (CHTML/XHTML) data, we’ll show separate categories for those errors.”

More Important Errors upfront

Less is more for the revamped crawl errors as Google will now tell you first about the important errors. Webmaster will not have to sort thru 100,000 errors of each type and decide which errors are the important ones and which are less important. Making progress thru errors is now easy as Google says, “In the new version of this feature, we’ve focused on trying to give you only the most important errors up front. For each category, we’ll give you what we think are the 1000 most important and actionable errors. Some sites have more than 1000 errors of a given type, so you’ll still be able to see the total number of errors you have of each type, as well as a graph showing historical data going back 90 days. For those who worry that 1000 error details plus a total aggregate count will not be enough, we’re considering adding programmatic access (an API) to allow you to download every last error you have, so please give us feedback if you need more.”

The list of pages blocked by robots.txt has been removed as Google wanted to focus on errors. Webmasters can find roboted URLs information in the “Crawler access” feature under “Site configuration”.

Getting the Error Details

Webmasters can click on the link for the error URL and see a brief explanation about the error and when Google noted it. Users can mark fixed errors, list Sitemaps that contain the URL, see links and also view help content for the error type.

Fix those Errors!

Webmasters can now fix the errors easily as they will get the errors ranked in order of their importance. So users can mend their links, fix bugs in their server software and update Sitemaps and see to other errors at the earliest.

As Google says, “We determine this based on a multitude of factors, including whether or not you included the URL in a Sitemap, how many places it’s linked from (and if any of those are also on your site), and whether the URL has gotten any traffic recently from search. Once you think you’ve fixed the issue (you can test your fix by fetching the URL as Googlebot), you can let us know by marking the error as “fixed” if you are a user with full access permissions”

What do you think of this face lift? Do share your views.

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• Bing Webmaster Tools API- With this new feature, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools data in other locations quite easily. The prominent exceptions to this are the messaging and keyword research data. Bing adds, “You will need to either login to your account to use the keyword research tool presently, or set up email alerts to see any messages we post to your account.”
• Keyword research tool- Now webmasters can do a keyword research on any word or phrase they choose to enter. They can also research on related phrases, across many different countries and languages. Once you click on the keyword, you can further explore query volumes on keywords too. Bing will provide you with a history of 6 months for all the phrases. Bing adds about cpc data, “adCenter CPC data is shown to help you understand associated costs if you choose to buy paid ads on the phrase. Hover over any phrase to see more data appear in a box to the left of the list. We also provide a small graph which details the query trend for the previous 6 months. This graph gives you an idea, at a glance, of query volume fluctuations.”
• Markup Validation Tool. This feature allows webmasters to enter any URL and see what the markup looks like on the page, within the code.

You can access API below the Preferences option in the left hand navigation of the Bing Webmaster Tools API main page. The support documentation of API is a useful resource for developers to review.

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• Fresher results. [launch codename “nftc”] The freshness algorithm released back in November got a series or minor updates this January to make sure you continue to receive the freshest and most relevant results.
• Faster autocomplete. [launch codename “Snappy Suggest”, project codename “Suggest”] Improvements in the autocomplete system to deliver your predicted queries much faster.
• Autocomplete spelling corrections. [launch codename “Trivial”, project codename “Suggest”] Improvements to the spelling corrections used in autocomplete were made to make the autocomplete corrections more consistent with the spelling corrections used in search.
• Better spelling full-page replacement. [launch codenames “Oooni”, “sgap”, project codename “Full-Page Replacement”] With this improvement Google will now show you the results as soon as it understands what you are exactly searching for. For example “Showing results for [cheetah]” (rather than, say, “cheettah”).
• Better spelling corrections for rare queries. This improvement in one of the models used to make spelling corrections in a number of rare search queries.
• Improve detection of recurrent event pages. [launch codename “neseda”] Changes in how Google determines the date of a document to get you fresh and the latest results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events.
• High-quality sites algorithm improvements. [launch codenames “PPtl” and “Stitch”, project codename “Panda”] This January the Panda algorithm went through a few changes on how the algorithm interacts with the Google indexing and ranking systems to get you more integrated search results. Also the Panda 3.2 update to refresh the data for Panda.
• Cross-language refinements. [launch codename Xiangfan] With this change users will see language specific search results based on the display language used by the searcher. For example now if a user types a query in French, he might see French query refinements, even if his language is set to English.
• English on Google Saudi Arabia. Users in Saudi Arabia can now more easily choose an English interface to search on google.com.sa.
• Improved scrolling for Image Search. Changes in the scrolling behavior when you do an image search will now make it consistent with the scrolling pattern of the main search result page.
• Improved image search quality. [launch codename “endearo”, project codename “Image Search”] Minor change in the image search ranking algorithm that helps images with high-quality landing pages rank higher in the Google image search results.
• More relevant related searches. The section “Searches related to” that comes up at the bottom of your search result page giving you some related queries you may want to try just got an update to generate related searches, resulting in more useful query refinements.
• Blending of news results. [launch codename “final-destination”, project codename “Universal Search”] The new improved search algorithm that will now decide which search query should show news results, making it more responsive to real time trends and how the news is blended into your overall search will ensure that related news articles appear in your search results when they are relevant.
• Automatically disable Google Instant based on computer speed. [project codename “Psychic Search”] Google Instant has long had the ability to automatically turn itself off if you’re on a slow internet connection. Now Instant can also turn itself off if your computer is slow. If Instant gets automatically disabled, we continue to check your computer speed and will re-enable Instant if your performance improves. We’ve also tweaked search preferences so you can always have Instant on or off, or have it change automatically.

Most of these changes are not so much about rankings as they are about search results tweaks – which can indirectly impact rankings.

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New Content Navigation & Site Search Features

Now you can access your site search report for Goals, eCommerce and AdSense- Webmasters can connect searches on their sites with their KPIs through goals, eCommerce and AdSense revenue.

Improved usability with better Breadcrumbs

Google has introduced improvements in breadcrumbs, as they said, “To make navigation more intuitive and easier we’ve added the ability to change a dimension along the breadcrumb path. In addition to navigating back in one direction, you can now navigate sideways on all reports.”

Pages Report now has the In-Page Analytics tab

Webmasters now do not need to navigate to the In-Page reports as they can directly launch In-Page on the selected page in focus. With better movement between the Pages, Navigation Summary, and In-Page tabs on the selected drill-down; it is really much more convenient for webmasters to gather insights now.

Better Mobile App Tracking Tools

Now developers can collect more reliable and accurate data post the enhancements made by Google Analytics. With accurate data, businesses can get more insight from their mobile app initiatives.

There is also a whole new forum for Webmasters to go to as well and an updated Google Analytics IQ course and exam. What do you think of these changes? Do share your views.

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Once upon a time, a kid would get bored and build a lemonade stand. For 12-year-old Harry Moran of Ireland, however, that wasn’t good enough. He recently became the world’s youngest Mac app developer, publishing his game PizzaBot. Was the game successful? You could say that. Before long it easily bested Angry Birds and Call of Duty. Also from Ireland, 11-year-old Shane Curran has already developed a new phone book system called Peoplez.info using MySQL to search and store user information. Since completing his first Linux install at 6 and learning Visual Basic at 7 he has learned PHP, C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl and Bash.

A couple of continents to the east, Raghav Sood has been proving that tech support isn’t India’s only technology role. He started programming at 9, spent 2 years doing web development before moving onto desktop applications. In 2010 he wrote his own operating system in x86 assembly. After getting his first smart phone in 2011 he decided it was time to start working on mobile apps. Since then he has published 15 apps, is writing a book, Pro Android Augmented Reality for Apress and has competed and won awards in the Hackathon-2012.

Now don’t read these examples and go buy your 2 year old a computer, the latest release of Fedora and some basic coding books. The common thread among these three exceptional youths is their drive and curiosity. This isn’t something they’re taught, it’s something they have a desire to learn for themselves. Although, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let your two year old play on your iphone a bit, just in case.

If you’re like many business owners, you’ve probably committed to improving your web presence in 2012 …and why wouldn’t you – it’s promising to be bigger and better online than ever before…

So to help you kick start your online resolutions – here’s a quick little check list to ensure your website’s more successful in 2012.

1. Content Review

When was the last time you updated the content on your website? Is it still telling the right story about your products and services?

It’s time to give your content a polish. Take down the old promos, add some new persuasive copy, converse with your audience and even make sure you have the current copyright at the bottom of your website (how many sites still have 1998 on them).

2. Image Makeover

Images tell a significant story about your business, products and services. Rather than keeping those grainy dark images from years ago or plastering your website with stock photos that every other website is using, invest in getting some clear bright and most importantly relevant image up.

3. There’s More to Media Than Pictures

It’s 2012 people. Yes images are great, but your audience expects to be wowed by other exciting interactive elements on your website.

Why not get started with a simple video about your business or products….or if you want to get tricky…there’s slideshows, podcasts, PDFs etc.

4. Get Social Already

It’s not new and and buzz isn’t dying anytime soon. Social media is here to stay whether you like it or not. More importantly, your customers are using it, so it’s now essential for your business.

At the very least you should have links to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin accounts on your website. But even better, use the tools available and integrate the conversations your having in social media on your website and encourage visitors to get involved.

5. Keep It Simple and Focused

As website’s evolve, they often expand and try to say too much. Bombarding visitors with a barrage of info irrespective of there they are in their journey through your site.

It’s important to give people the right information at the right time on your website. By removing the clutter and confusion you’ll do a better job of guiding them to where you need them to be.

6. Call for action

Visitors all too often they just need to be prodded. If you don’t ask them to do something, there’s a good chance they won’t.

Whether it’s buying your products, signing up for your newsletter or downloading your catalogue, make sure you make it obvious that action is required. Subtlety doesn’t work. Make your calls to action loud and proud.

7. Where’s the trust

There’s 100 billion trillion websites out there, and probably 100′s of competitors in your industry alone. So who should your visitors trust?

Unless you take the time to build trust, they’ll go elsewhere. Add trust builder like awards, certifications and safety/security affiliations to your website so they know straight away that you’re the people to trust.

8. Make it Snappy

Internet users are like fish…short attention spans. So they’re not forgiving of websites that take years to load. Almost everyone has access to fast internet, so the onus is on you to ensure your website loads fast and without errors.

Look at how your website is built, optimize the size of images/media and even reconsider your hosting. It often doesn’t take much to give your website a tune up.

9. No Rabbitholes

No one likes getting lost on a website, so your navigation is paramount. Make it obvious how to get to the bits of content your visitors want to find. And sometimes more importantly, how to get back to where they’ve been.

Some things to consider to improve useability include reviewing your main navigation menu, implementing breadcrumb navigation, sitemaps and even a website search function.

10. “Flash”iness??

Flash on website is soon going to be a thing of the past. Especially when we consider that more and more people are looking at your website from devices like iPhones and iPads.

There’s a range of new technology like HTML5 that does a great job of providing interactivity whilst still working on Apple devices. So if you site is covered in Flash…perhaps 2012 is time for a change.

11. Mobile is Now

Every man and his dog has a smartphone it seems. And they’re using them to view your website (well perhaps not the dogs).

So it’s important that you check your website renders properly on mobile devices. There’s many things you can do to improve the mobile readiness of your website without having to go down the path of creating mobile sites or apps.

And that’s a wrap. A short and sweet Website Success Checklist for 2012. My tip is to review your website with the checklist above and plan out the changes gradually over the coming months.

When you break the overhaul process into smaller pieces, you’re more likely to get it done.

And most importantly, don’t be one of those business owners that breaks their 2012 resolutions and neglects their website for another year.

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