Penguin 4.0: What the Google update accomplishes
When webpage operators hear the term “Penguin” they do not associate it with the cute, black-tailed creatures of the Antarctic. They link it to a Google update that has driven one or two webmasters to desperation by making their perfectly search engine optimized webpage suddenly disappear from the Google ranking. The webmasters had to put a lot of effort into winning back the former rank. But what exactly does Penguin do? And which changes does the version Penguin 4.0 bring? What we can reveal is that Penguin 4.0 will make it simpler to undo penalties by Google.
What is Penguin?
Penguin is the name of an update that combines various changes of the Google ranking algorithms. Penguin’s goal is to suppress so-called web spam in the search results. “Web spam” is a term used to describe webpages that use unauthorized methods to achieve a better ranking in Google. Webpages with a better ranking are supposed to provide the searcher with enhanced value. This is not the case with web spam. These pages are written for search engines and their goal is to produce a large number of clicks.
The first Penguin update was released in 2012. Its effect was immediately perceptible. Many top ranking pages suddenly disappeared from the ranking. In English speaking countries, 3.1 percent of all search queries were affected. In Germany three percent of the search queries were impacted, and in Poland as many as five percent.
The new API Explorer
For the past eight years we have provided our customers with a service option that enables them to integrate our services via an API into their IT infrastructure and company workflows. Our customers can use the API for example to place new orders, or submit order data and get the results directly back into their system. This service is popular and is being increasingly used. We have now further optimized the API for our customers.
Define Your Own Crowd with the Building of Teams
In our marketplace you can build any number of Clickworker teams for yourself, which can then either be chosen or excluded during the job creation process.
Usage of Expert Teams
Logically a team of Clickworkers can be put together whose previous work you have been especially pleased with. This allows you to direct the work upcoming jobs specifically to the Clickworkers on your expert team. In this way you can better guide the results and help align them with your expectations.
Usage of Blocklists
On the other hand a team of Clickworkers can be assembled that you wish to exclude from future tasks, and thereby define as a blocklist. This is especially useful when you personally weren’t as pleased with the results, for example their text style, produced by these Clickworkers. But it also makes sense to create a blocklist of Clickworkers for subsequent jobs like online surveys, to prevent the same workers from taking part in the survey again.
In the following, we explain step by step to you how the building of teams works.
Typical Mistakes in Content Marketing
Content Marketing is becoming more and more popular with businesses and organizations. They want to convince customers about the quality of their services with valuable content and exciting information. But to be successful with content marketing you should absolutely avoid certain common mistakes.
In the modern media world content marketing represents a popular strategy to enter into a productive communication process with customers. With selective information and valuable know-how on websites, blogs and social media, companies attempt to excite users indirectly about their services, to convey a positive image about their business or brand by delivering professional knowledge, and so bind customers to themselves long-term. More and more often they use content marketing to increase their name recognition and achieve more “traffic” (number of visitors to their website) and a better search engine ranking. However to ensure that the content marketing actually generates the desired effect and favorably boosts the conversion rate, it is imperative to avoid some commonly made mistakes.
clickworker Survey Service – New Features and Integrated Survey Tool
At the beginning of the year we developed a new self-service “Surveys” offering for you. Since then we have received a lot of positive responses, and are pleased with the high usage rate of the service. We also received some customer requests regarding an even faster, as well as more individual execution of your surveys. We took these to heart and now, together with some ideas of our own, have implemented an advanced version of the “Surveys” service.
Read moreHeadlines and Headings for Online Articles
Actually it’s just a couple of words, but they can certainly be a defining factor: it’s all about the heading of a text. Besides the colorful images, it’s the first thing to catch the eye and often determines whether the user reads the text or not. And yet it should be distinguished here between texts in a daily newspaper, for example, and articles on the internet. A person who buys a newspaper will most probably also read the sports and culture sections, even when local news and politics are more his sphere of interest. It will be read because it was paid for. On the internet texts are available at no charge and in great abundance, so the user may have a hard time deciding what to read. Based on experience, an internet article is only given a rough scan by the reader where he notices the headlines first, and based on those decides if he will read on or not.
Artificial Intelligence – Algorithms on the Rise
Well-known innovations concerning computers and the internet have captured the market, define everyday life and delight users. With artificial intelligence ambitious researchers want to add a new dimension to technical development. Crowdsourcing helps computer systems with self-regulated machine learning.
Watson is an intelligent, semantic computer program, which as a complicated question answering system, can process natural speech. To the question from Todd Spaletto, president of a well-known manufacturer of mountaineering gear, about what the most practical clothing for mountain hiking in rainy pre-summer weather would be, the computer answers: “There is just a three percent chance that it will rain,” and recommends that the outdoor specialist wear a “breathable fleece jacket” of a durable make.
Use of images and videos on websites
Photos, graphics and videos make up an integral component of today’s successful websites. Whether a company’s internet presence, an online store, or a portal for a gallery, museum or travel agency, the use of images and videos on websites effectively support the provided content and significantly enhance these websites for both users and search engines.
Utilizing media on internet portals is a trend that can be observed all over the web. Companies want to improve their image on their website with photos and videos, and make their brand more well-known, online shops want to market their products, and organizations want to disseminate important information. But galleries, museums and archives also want to make their photos, images of objects or videos available to the largest number of visitors possible. Photos and videos arouse curiosity in the viewer, and create an incentive to engage more closely with the products or services.
Creating Online Lexica and Online Glossaries
Corporate identity, crossmedia and workflow, resilience and synergy – the language of the modern world teems with Anglicisms, buzzwords and special terms whose meaning is not immediately clear to everyone. Online lexica and online glossary texts can provide relief where internet surfers or media users are in danger of getting lost in the jungle of foreign words and digital tech jargon.
Online lexica and glossaries simply and concisely explain a subject’s complicated terms and in this way make the issue being discussed understandable for a wider audience. Online lexica, as a separate electronic database, provide the user systematically organized, general or specialized information that is as comprehensive as possible. On the other hand, online glossary texts are attachments (so-called addendums) to a blog or website, that further define the central technical terms used in the article by providing synonyms, translations or explanatory sentences.
Today’s printed or digital glossaries consist of lists of terms and their explanations, usually arranged in alphabetical order. Their origin goes back to antiquity where it was common to use marginal notes (so-called glosses) to facilitate the reading of written works. The most well-known online lexicon, available in various language versions, is offered by the free-licensed encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is compiled by many co-authors.
Avoiding duplicate content
On the Internet, duplicate content is a problem that arises in many different forms. Web users are often faced with identical content when doing online research. Search engines react to identical content with negative rankings, and website operators are frustrated when Google & Co. suddenly stop listing their offers in the search results.
Duplicate content describes a many-faceted phenomenon that occurs on the Internet when identical or similar content appears on various websites. It can involve similar texts or text modules within the same domain (so-called internal duplicate content) or on various web domains (external duplicate content.) The duplicate content can soon become a make-or-break for the successful operation of websites. Similar texts give Internet users the impression that their online research has been pointlessly misrouted and at the same time, deliberate or non-deliberate duplicate content can have a negative influence on ranking given by relevant search engines.
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