HelpTheNewBlogger-Teach How To Blogging

It’s all too easy to head on over to Google Images and search for your target key phase, then poof! There we go, a brand new image for your site or latest blog post. Unfortunately, using these images will more than likely result in infringing upon someone else’s copyright. Not only that, but the artist or photographer will have worked hard to create that image and deserves attribution for their creation.

We’ve all been there; someone decides to copy your blog layout or latest post, removes your attribution and claims it for their own. So why is copying someone else’s image any different?

Fear not though friends, there are ways to get your hands on high quality images which are fit for most purposes without having to spend a penny!

Be aware, some authors still require attribution but a simple e-mail is usually all it takes to legally use an image.

Kozzi.com

Kozzi is a relatively small, unknown but high quality stock image site. They have a decent selection of free to use stock images some of which require attribution.

Users that sign-up via referral can take advantage of the 10 premium credits that they provide. It may not sound like much, but it’s the equivalent of $10 in free credits and it means you’ll be able to use legal images on your website.

In an economy where the purse strings are being pulled tight Kozzi offer a good balance of affordability and legality!

Cost Per Credit: $0.80-$1.00

Referral Link / Link without Referral

Stock.Xchng

Sxc.hu is the self-proclaimed largest leading free stock photo site. Owned by Getty Images they offer users the opportunity to download a variety of free and attribution required images.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be an overly active community anymore, but the quality of images available more than makes up for it. The only down-side seems to be the relatively heavy push of their more popular platform iStockPhoto.

OpenPhoto.net

OpenPhoto is a slightly dated (1998) and more rustic platform than any of the other one’s I’m analysing today, but the volume of content available is superior to similar projects. With over 14k images available you should be able to find something usable for your task.

Thanks to the large user base OpenPhoto has grown year on year. This is in part due sheer number of images that are available without attribution. This means you can use these works commercially without fear of legal action.

FreeRangeStock

http://freerangestock.com/ - A popular image sharing platform that offers contributors a revenue sharing platform for any images they contribute. They actively encourage contributors be incentivisng them and users that wish to download attribution free images can do so simply by posting a comment.

Alright so it’s not 100% free, but follows the same principles as paywithatweet and other social incentives. Highly recommended due to the sheer volume of images available!

Flickr – Creative Commons Attribution

http://www.flickr.com/ - If you haven’t heard of Flickr then odds are you’ve been living under a rock. One of the largest free photo sharing sites on the net! Sure not all the images are available for use, but there are separate sections within the site that allow you to filter by attribution and Creative Commons license.

There’s also a fantastic free for use section that is frequently updated with fresh content. If you’re desperate to use an image, then get in touch with the author! Most authors will quite happily allow publication of their image after being contacted.

SEO techniques to recover from Google penalties

Google is a great source of vast information. In fact, all search engines are indeed most efficient and cheapest way to reach masses. So it is obvious for any business to rely on them for promoting themselves and gaining more and more traffic. But for the past few months, all those websites who were top rankers on Google are now suffering from major drops in Google ranking.

What is Google penalty- Google penalty can be defined as the manual actions which are taken by Google against various websites who seem to use such techniques which add to the violation of Google webmaster’s guidelines.

Possible reasons for getting penalized-

Keyword stuffing- keyword stuffing occurs when we use the same keyword more than requirement. Such repetition is considered as spamming in Google guidelines.

Cloaking- cloaking is a technique in which the content presented to search engine crawler is different from that of what is delivered to users.

Duplicate or copied content- Google always prefers the best and genuine content. Hence, duplicate or copied content is rejected.

Paid back links- paid back linking is a process in which we pay to other sites in return for getting a link from them to our site.

Hidden text- hidden text is what is not easily visible to users. Such text is considered as spam by Google webmaster and hence always rejected.

How to identify whether penalized or not-

Unnatural link warning- whenever Google find any website violating its quality guidelines. It immediately intimates the concerned site by sending messages or unnatural link warnings.

De-indexation- a major drop in ranking is surely the result of de-indexation of your site by Google. In case to check this out, type your site domain on Google and search for it. If it is not shown on the same rank as it was before it should be understood that your site has been penalized.

Google ranking- as said above a major drop in ranking indicates Google penalty.

Types of Google penalties-

Manual penalty- in this type of penalty any Google analyst can review your site manually and can penalize you if found to be violating Google guidelines. This can kill 90% of your traffic.

Panda penalty- this type of penalty occurs when Google changes its algorithm in order to penalize those sites which have poor or duplicate content.

Penguin penalty- this penalty hits those sites which have lots of unwanted links.

EMD penalty- EMD stands for Exact Match Domain penalty. In this type of penalty, Google penalize those sites who ranks higher in SERPs just because they have keywords in their domain name even if they do not contain quality content.

The above fold penalty- this type of penalty targets those sites which contain too many ads in the above fold area while the content is below. -30 to -950 penalties- such type of penalty includes acts like stuffing. Cloaking, doorway pages etc.

Ways to recover from Google penalties-

When penguin penalize you- Once you are sure that you have been penalized with penguin penalty. It’s high time to re-evaluate your site and remove all those links which are suspicious. Harmful backlinks may include-

Side wide links (generally in footers, headers etc.)
Low value directory links
Paid back links etc.

Use various link analysis tools like webmasters tool, link detox, Majestic SEO etc. to evaluate your link profile and remove all those unnatural and unwanted links as soon as possible.

When Panda penalty hits you- when you are hit by panda penalty you need to assess the whole content of your site. Make sure that the content on your site is genuine and not a duplicate one. It should not be copied. You should also check the whole content for keyword stuffing. You can use various tools like Copyscape for checking out whether your site’s content is also available on any other site over the web. All such activities will surely help you to recover from panda penalty and your site will automatically get better ranking and high organic traffic.

Facing EMD penalty- when your site is hit by EMD penalty, it’s high time you start concentrating on improvement of your brand identity. Create high quality backlinks and engage yourself on other social networks too. You can invest in good quality content and link building opportunities. Try to secure your brand name with all top ranking forums of your relevant industry. Last but not the least you can opt for little changes in your domain name.

Manual penalties are most difficult to recover but still one can try to recover from it by sending a reconsideration requests to Google Quality Analysts. The above fold penalty can be recovered by removing all excessive ads from your site and posting the content first instead of ads. Other penalties like cloaking, keyword stuffing can be dealt by revising the whole content on site and making proper changes to it.

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5 Free Image Sites To Keep Your Site Legal

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