Do AdWords Customers get Special Treatment in Search Results?

Do AdWords Customers get special treatment in organic search results? This is a question that's become quite common now among webmasters, especially those advertising their website with Google AdWords. And that's understandable, considering the money they spend in doing so. A lot of people also think that if someone buys that ad spot on the right side of the page, then his website gets some sort of an algorithmic boost, and gets an advantage over others and thus ranks higher. Is there any truth to it? And if so, is it any fair to the other webmasters? Google answers this important question in a latest video uploaded by Matt Cutts.

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Eid-ul-Adha 2012 Mubarak To Everyone!

Let us take the pleasure of wishing all beloved readers of MBT and SEM a Happy Eid-ul-Adha Mubarak! Wishing you a peaceful Eid on behalf of Qasim and Nida. May this Holy Occasion of EID brings Peace and joy to you and your family and may shower on you the best of Allah's blessings. Eid-ul-adha is the second biggest joyous occasion for Muslims after Eid-ul Fitr where they share these splendid three holy days with their friends and family and forget all their past worries, and grievances.

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An Exciting Experience at PACC with Reviving Youth & Anima

When work and study stress exceeds a limit, I often try refreshing myself amongst young teenagers and enthusiastic tech-savvy audience. Last Sunday on 21st October 2012, the team of Reviving Youth and Anima(Towards Light) organized an event tagged as "Scene On Hai" which means Plugged in or to be more appropriate Scene is On in English. It was organized at PACC's auditorium i.e Pakistan American culture Center in Karachi. The event included some interesting guest speakers and was spiced up with Magic, Illusion, Drama and Singing performance which literally turned my mood on. Ayesha Gull, President of Anima invited us for a Guest speaking session which proved no less than a great honor. Following are some highlights that we could capture so far during our one and a half hour presentation, the longest so far.

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If I quote another source, will I be penalized for duplicate content?

As you all know, Google is pretty hard-up about duplicate content, now more than ever, because an awful lot of blogs and websites have started making money by blatantly copying material from other sources. This not only is unfair to the original source, it also jeopardizes the integrity of search results returned by Google. Hence the stringent TOS (Terms of Service). But what about adding quotations, or sentences/paragraphs quoted from other websites? It does classify as content copied directly from another website. So how does Google treat such content and is it safe to include it on your website? Well, Google just released a video explaining how Google treats such content.

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Basic Tips to know before Starting a WordPress Blog

WordPress is a well-known platform for Blogging and it is being used by millions of webmasters and bloggers. It is a self-hosted blogging platform. MBT is hosted on Blogger.com but, there are hundreds of other popular blogs which are hosted on WordPress. So therefore, WordPress can�t be ignored for Blogging. It is also called WP in short words by webmasters. It is a CMS (content management System) which provides you the opportunity to set up your blog easily. And it is totally developed in PHP, a popular web programming language. In this post I will give you some basic tips before establishing a blog with WP. My tips will be for securing WP, optimizing WP and designing WP. But before going straight to my tips I would like to give you some information about WordPress features and benefits.

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Top 5 Free Online Meme Generators

It's a fun weekend, this, and we have been sharing some useful and fun tools while at it! So here's our chance to go a little bit further! We know you all use Facebook, and must have seen those rage comics and fun memes circulating around faster than wildfire. Funny, comic images on Facebook, in simple words. The word 'meme' comes from a Greek word meaning to copy something. A meme is usually viral, and spreads around from person to person, much like a virus. On social media, these fun memes are much like viral videos, only, much more viral, because they're easier to watch, and people like them.



So you've got an idea for a funny comic or meme? Here' we will share the top 5 sites where you can create your very own memes and trolls for free, share them on social media and see them go viral all over the world!

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How To Create an EBook of your Blog Posts?

Writing is one of the most important part of blogging. A blog is nothing but a sequential order of your writings online, available to all who have internet access. But wouldn't it be great if you could create your very own eBook, say from your own blog posts? You could then boast to your friends about authoring a book! Here is a great web app that will create an eBook from your WordPress or Blogger blog, and will then allow you to download it in PDF form so you and others can read it offline!

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Get Extra DropBox Space With Space Race

Have you heard about the DropBox Space Race? No, it isn't the moon related thingy. Rather, it's perhaps more exciting to those of us who're more into the web and 'the cloud' and stuff. The Space Race is a new initiative by DropBox, encouraging students to use their school/college email addresses, and get more space out of their DropBox accounts! You can sign up, or connect your college email address with your current account, and instantly get 3 GB of space! So if you have an email address that ends in .edu (eg, yourname@domain.edu), then you might as well use it to earn more space!

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Use Google's Link Disavow Tool To Remove Bad Links

Yesterday, we talked about whether or not bad links on your site are worth deleting. The simple answer to the question was, you might as well do it, but it'll be better to adjust your website, rather than trying to bend it. If you've been manually penalized, then this step becomes more or less necessary. But what about the links to your website, which aren't in your control? Luckily, Google has now released a link Disavow tool, which will solve such problems. Quite simply, any unnatural links to your site can be disinherited, or 'disavowed', hence preventing Google from considering them.

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Should You Remove Backlinks to avoid Penguin Penalty?

Google Panda and Penguin have been some of the most infamous algorithmic updates Google has ever made. They have effected tonnes of websites and blogs, and are still working to devour any website with malpractice that comes their way. We have many times discussed about how to avoid penalty from such algorithm updates. And in them, we have talked a lot about Google's interest in you links, out bound and incoming both. It's common knowledge that Google is now concentrating a lot more on the quality of the links than on the quantity. So a common question easily arises: If you are hit by a penalty, does it help to remove your backlinks?

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Guest Blogging For Backlinks - What Does Google Think?

Guest blogging is a very popular way of getting backlinks for a site. It is an effective marketing strategy for a blog, and allows you to publicize you content to places beyond your reach. In short, guest blogging is when you write for another website, free of charge, in return for a backlink (or two). And we have already talked about how linking is important for your website. But doesn't it all look a bit convenient? As in, anyone can write (or spin) articles, and get them published on other websites and get more links to rank higher in Google? Here is Google's take on the subject, along with some best practices.

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Why Breadcrumbs are not SEO Friendly for your Blog?

No one knew that a simple Breadcrumb used in the fairyTale of "Hansel and Gretel" would become a website element one day. Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation system used in websites that offer more usability to the visitor. They appear horizontally above Post titles or below headers. They show user location and tells him what post and which section of the blog category he is on. Breadcrumb provides links back to the pages the user already visited in hierarchical order. Often a colon ( : )or slash ( / ) or even a greater-than sign ( > ) is used as hierarchy separator. These are now widely used by blog owners in both Wordpress and Blogger platforms. Unfortunately Breadcrumbs destroy the advantages of Permalinks which play great role in targeting rich keywords. Blogger Team has introduced permalinks on all blogspot blogs and we already discussed several ways of optimizing permalinks, now it's the right time to realize how Trailing links effect permalink display in SERPs.

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Share Your DropBox Files On Facebook

DropBox is one of the most popular cloud storage services available, and it has now teamed up with the most popular social networking website, Facebook, to bring its users one step closer to social integration. We had been hearing a lot about DropBox partnering with Facebook, but this has only now been implemented. As a result, DropBox and Facebook users will no longer have to upload files from their PC to share on their Facebook Groups. They can simply select the file(s) from their DropBox account, which will then be added to the Facebook Group. Easy, no? Let's see how this works out.

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Presentation at Greenwich University - The Social Affair 2012

Whenever I find an opportunity to convey the message to young talented students, I never miss jumping inside the public academic pool. On 6th October, 2012, the Media Marketing and Management Team at Greenwich University (located in defence Karachi) organized "The Social Affair 2012" event. The event aimed at celebrating the viral spread of social media websites locally and how it has helped individuals in different ways. Around six professionals from different IT fields were invited to share their precious experiences with the students. I was fortunately one of the invited Guest Speakers for the evening and the topic I chose was "Make Money Online From your Living Room". It turned out to be one of the most memorable events of my life with tons of warm feedback and appreciation from everywhere. The hospitality I received from the organizers, faculty members and enthusiastic young students can't simply be thanked enough. I would like to give some highlights of the great experience I had that day.

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How To Do Blogging Using Your Voice Only?

Blogging is fun. Not only is it a great way to earn money, it also helps take your mind off things. But sometimes, when the burden becomes great, it is all a blogger thinks about. Juggling your blogging career between academic or professional, and family life can be tricky, because a blog requires some serious time and hard work. Maybe this is the reason why a lot of bloggers can't concentrate on the quality of their content. If only there was a way to reduce the time taken to write a post, so that bloggers could focus on more important issues. Well, luckily, there is! You can do blogging by voice only using voice recognition apps, so instead of writing long posts, you can simply dictate them!

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Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site [Latest 2012]

We have already talked about avoiding Panda Penalty for your website, and what to do if you get hit, because apparently, Google isn't very forgiving, and has impacted tonnes of websites. But that is about as far as we can go to avoid a penalty. The next step would be to facilitate Google, and help it find, crawl, and index your website. The easier it is for Google to find your site, the quicker it will be indexed. And the better it is, the faster it will be crawled on a regular basis, hence giving you more organic traffic each day. Here are some of the best practices recommended by Google that you should apply to your website in order to get the most out of it.

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AdSense For Feeds Service Shut Down

Google AdSense is one of the most popular ways to monetize blogs and websites. A lot of bloggers and webmasters monetize their sites in different ways to make money. One of the lesser used way to earn money is through tweaking your blog feed to include ads. This is particularly useful for people who have a large number of feed subscribers, so they might as well tap into, and harness the benefits. Ordinarily, Google AdSense for feeds would be a good option for such monetization. But now, Google has decided it's perhaps better off without AdSense for feeds, which might be cause for concern for some popular bloggers.

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5 Internet Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Should Avoid

When a new business opens up, it always has to start small. And usually, there's not much margin for error, because being the rookie or the under-dog means handling challenges better than what's expected. For any business, start-up or otherwise, the online presence part is very important, and usually involves a lot of work, from setting up social profiles to producing great content and then promotions, aka Internet Marketing. Such start-ups usually don't know much about the process, and hence end up making mistakes that should not be made. Some of these mistakes could hurt the initial phases of the business. Here are the 5 most inconvenient mistakes that should be avoided.

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Access Blogger Blogs and YouTube safely in Banned Countries

We have been receiving a lot of queries regarding some on-going problems with some Google services, especially by those residing in Pakistan, and some other countries where sites like YouTube have been banned. Besides YouTube, the PTA has even blocked Google services such as Chrome web store, and Picassa web albums. As a result, many bloggers, and internet users can't access many sites, and are experiencing issues with some blogger-based websites, and websites that have a lot of content that has been blocked (such as YouTube videos). Some people also have redirection issues. If you are experiencing these issues, here is a way you can safely access these websites, so you might want to give this a read.

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5 Tips To Note While Sending a Reconsideration Request To Google

Google has been pretty active lately, and has been releasing various updates to its algorithms such as the Panda algorithm. Tonnes of websites have been hit as a result, because Google clearly has defined some very strict rules with regards to what it classifies as 'spam' or 'low quality'. If your website has been hit by any of these updates, it might not appear in the search results, or it might perform poorer than it used to. In such a scenario, you might want to start creating original, quality content. And if you think you have been unjustly hit, and that it's all a mistake, then you can submit a reconsideration request to Google.

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Remove deactivated Profiles from your Facebook friend list

Facebook might be the largest social network in action today, but it isn't without its flaws. A lot of changes made by Facebook seem to cause problems for the users, especially the ones made in 2012. First, the Timeline, then the ticker and the ability of friends to add you to groups without permission. Then there's this problem regarding deactivated and deleted profiles in your friend list. Since the changes made, people started to notice old profiles (and new) that had been deactivated in their friends list. Now this isn't a problem, but it sure clutters up your list and inflates your number of friends. You can easily find and delete these profiles from your list and clear up things.

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