Trust Rank Not Part of the Google Algo

Unfortunately I don't have time to blog much this week because I have 200 pages of Title Tags and Meta Tags due on Monday (I won't tell you where I am currently at..lol). But suffice to say I have a lot of work to do. So today I thought I would share a video from Matt Cutts about Trust Rank and the lack thereof at Google. I think there is a lot of confusion in the industry in thinking that Trust Rank is a Google concept (probably because it sounds like Page Rank). It's actually a Yahoo concept as Matt explains. So next time an SEO tells you something about Google Trust Rank, you might want to look closely at that advice..lol. Hope everyone is having a great holiday. I will try to get to that usability article asap. It's just one of those ones that is going to take a couple hours that I don't have this week :)

In Christmas news, as promised, my Chargers delivered a Christmas eve thumping of the Denver Broncos. Fortunately for Denver, we put our second string in in the third quarter to save them the embarrassment of what could have been another 40 point loss. Maybe next year they will score a touchdown against us. And what did Santa bring Catfish you ask besides a Charger victory? New shoes :) Note the Charger colors on a black shoe. Perfect! Thanks Santa!

Have a great day!

Merry Chirstmas

Merry Christmas. If you don't celebrate Christmas, then I wish you a very happy holiday season. I'll be blogging about the Top 5 intersections of SEO and Usability after Christmas. But today I am staring at 200 pages of my client's site that need work. So, I am gonna go do that today instead of blog..lol. Be safe today and tomorrow! Tonight, I recommend staying inside, getting some hot chocolate and watching my San Diego Chargers DESTROY the Broncos on national TV! It's a perfect family activity, unless you're from Denver. Have a great holiday.

Google Page Rank is Still Important, Rel=NoFollow Can Help

It never ceases to amaze me as I read forums and listen to "experts" in SEO talk about how Page Rank isn't important anymore. Yeah I know the standard line about "there are 100 different elements to the algo and PR is just one of em". It makes me laugh a little I have to admit. And the reason is that Page Rank is still an important concept for any SEO to understand. And not because you should only chase links from high Page Rank sites. That's the kind of old school thinking that gave Page Rank a bad name to begin with. But for those that think Page Rank is irrelevant. Let me clue you in on one simple fact. Google built a multi billion dollar search business on the basis of Page Rank. They have exclusive license to it until 2011. It's the primary differentiator in the public view (think Wall Street) that separates there search engine from all the others. Yeah I know Google does a thousands and one things and that their technology and server clusters are state of the art and yada yada yada. But the biggest thing in search that Google is associated with is Page Rank. And it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

That's why I was very interested in seeing this article about sculpting Page Rank which in my opinion, makes a ton of sense. Using the rel=nofollow tags to prevent page rank from flowing to unimportant pages that happen to be linked from your homepage (ie, privacy policy, hacker safe links, shopping cart pages, etc) can really make a difference in the way you rank. Back before I was a white hat kinda guy (think Grey Hat with some chimney dust), I discovered a guy named Leslie Rohde and his SEO techniques. Now I am not advocating his products, I am just letting you know what I used a few years ago. You're milage at this point may vary. Basically he was (and still is to my knowledge) using this same concept of Page Rank sculpting (although a little more aggressively than what I would recommend) to optimize Web site structure to funnel the majority of PR to his most important pages. Back then, there was no rel=nofollow tag and therefore he used Java based links to create the same effect (links in java script were not indexed by search engines at that time, nowadays there is some evidence to suggest that the engines see some links that are hidden in java script). Anyway, I was very successful using those techniques and at one point, one of the sites I controlled was ranked #3 for "las vegas hotels" for over 6 months. Nowadays, I am not a proponent of designing Web sites strictly to funnel Page Rank. I believe more in designing your site for users so that they can find what they are looking for on your site as quickly and as easily as possible. But, that doesn't mean that you can't be smart about the way that you link and maximize your Page Rank potential. And that's really what this Sculpting Page Rank article is all about. Its about taking advantage of mechanisms that allow you to give Google a better picture of the content on your site that you feel is important.

To those who think that this is some sort of below the board tactic, consider what Matt Cutts, Google Spam Engineer said in his interview with Rankd Fishkin:

"(Matt's precise words were: 'The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.')"

The fact that Page Rank continues to be talked about by Google engineers and continues to appear in Google Webmaster guidelines should indicate to most people that it still carries some weight within the algorithm. Ask yourself, if Page Rank isn't important, why is Google going to such lengths to discourage the buying and selling of it? Is Google Page Rank the end all be all Holy Grail of SEO? no, of coarse not. Is it still an important thing to think about and use effectively for SEO, yes.

Google Page Rank is important for SEOs to understand as a concept. Because its a recursive algorithm, it might take a little more than a basic understanding of algebra to comprehend. But once you understand the formula and the intention behind the formula, it gives you greater insight into constructing an Internet Architecture that is effective for search. It also serves as a great tool for understanding potential indexing problems and linking problems. Where it is not important is when you use it to gauge the value of a link. Variables link anchor text, page theme, page content and trust are just a few of the other variable that one has to look at when evaluating links. And using Page Rank as some form of currency as it has been used and continues to be used is a slippery slope at best. But that doesn't take away from the fact that Page Rank is still an important concept in search engine optimization and that using it effectively can make a big difference in your rankings.

Top 5 Lessons from the Death of Google Supplemental Results

Google Webmaster Blog announced yesterday that Google will soon eliminate the differences between how they search the main index and the supplemental index (results) for queries. Google maintains two separate indexes, the main index and the supplemental index. Until now, pages in the supplemental index had less opportunity to rank well for competitive phrases and usually only ranked well for long tail keyword searches. Thanks to new Google technology innovations, they appear to have overcome some of the limitations of their system. Which sounds like it will have a positive impact on overall search relevancy which is great. Personally I was a little disappointed to see the supplemental tag eliminated in search results. Only because it was a great indicator of potential problems for a new client. According to Google, the number one reason that pages go into supplemental results is because of low Page Rank. Which by the way underscores that Page Rank is not always as irrelevant as some people would have you believe. But that's a conversation for a different day. I think the main thing to take away from the new development is, there is no longer a need to worry about supplemental results. But, some of the SEO related issues that used to trigger pages into supplemental results are still good things to avoid. Here is the list:

1) Always have a unique Page Title and Meta Description for EVERY page of the Web site.

2) Try to limit the number of dynamic parameters in your URL strings to three or less. I know Google will index more than that, but Google is not the only search engine and the others are less consistent. Additionally, the longer the URL, the less likely Google will always get it right.

3) ***IMPORTANT. LOL. Make sure you only have ONE distinct URL path to any page of content and your site and that you are consistent in the way you link to that page (file name versus folder name). Don't use capital letters in your URL string. Often Webmasters will link to you with only lowercase letters because of their coding standards and you will have both the URL with the capital letters and the one without indexed in the engines. They are seen as separate pages by the search engines which can cause duplicate content issues and at best case will split your Page Rank.

4) Make sure you have your pages crossed linked in such a way that all relevant pages link to each other. Not only does this increase the usability of your site, but it increases the opportunity for deep level pages to get Page Rank. A page that is 8 levels deep in your site with only one inbound link is not likely to be seen as being very important.

5) Make sure the content on all your pages is unique. Pages with similar or the same content, whether they appear on your own site or a different Web site are actively filtered by Google. Google doesn't want to show the same content 10 times for a specific keyword phrase. So in the past, the document they considered to be the original was included in the main index and the copies were indexed in the supplemental results. Thus the phrase "duplicate content penalty". I am sure that a similar mechanism still exists because nothing has changed in Google not wanting to show similar results for the same query. So to make a long story short, make sure all your content is unique.

These 5 recommendations should be standard practice for anyone who wants to consistently rank well in Google.

Have a great Wednesday.

Google Has a New Patent About Links and New Social Media Opportunities

I haven't had a chance to read it today, but Google has a new patent about links, specifically anchor text. Guess I know what I am doing for the next couple days..lol.

I lost my flag football playoff game 7 - 6. That's a tough one to lose. Especially when I had receivers drop 7 of my passes. You can't drop 7 passes in a playoff game and expect to win.

However, my Chargers look pretty good in completely destroying the Lions 51 - 14. If we win the next two games, we get the three seed which seems WAY more favorable.

In more SEO news, Google is going crazy with social media. First they announced the creation of Open Social recently which promises to open up all kinds of new marketing opportunities. And then they announced today that they will be consolidating Google profiles into the other services they provide. Greg Sterling in his SearchEngineLand article about Google and profiles notes that "it potentially turns Google itself into something of a social network, assuming widespread adoption". I really think that is the direction Google is going. Web 2.0 really is all about building a community. And the more community based Google becomes, the more opportunity they have to make money.

That's why I believe that social media optimization is just as exciting as search engine optimization. The two are very different really. Social media can have a positive effect on your search engine listings and therefore it's important that any social media campaign take advantage of SEO principles whenever possible. But social media by itself can return a great ROI outside of its effect on search and can also generate a huge brand lift. And therefore, it deserves be recognized as a separate discipline unto itself and not considered a subset of SEO. I think SMO is one of the most fascinating and exciting opportunities on the Web today. And I think Google's profiles are going to be a major player in that space within a short period of time.

More Tips About Making AJAX SEO Friendly with the No Script Tag

Yesterday Benj wrote a great article about making AJAX SEO friendly. One of the recommendations he made was to "Solution 1: Serve Alternative Content" and he suggested that providing an alternative navigation to "actual pages on their own URLs that would load the same content as what would load in the AJAX links." This SEO solution will work fine for some folks, but others may need a solution that allows the alternative content to exist on the same page as the AJAX application. That solution is the no script tag.

The content inside the no script tag (which looks like <"noscript"> <"/noscript"> but without the quotes) is invisible to browser users who have Java script enabled. Those users will be able to use the AJAX application as intended. But for users for do not have Java script turned on (like search engine spiders), the content that exists in the no script tag is visible. You should format it the same way you would normal html.

It's really important to understand that this tool has the capacity to get you in trouble for spamming. Don't use this tool for that purpose. The only content that should ever be contained in no script tag, is content that users with Java script turned on would be able to see. Don't ever put anything in the no script tag that doesn't exist on the page for all users. In other words, don't cram a bunch of spam links in the noscript tag that are not representative of the links found in your AJAX.

Incidentally, the no script tag works great for old school pull down java script jump menus that search engines can't normally see. This will really help you if your primary navigation is a jump menu (I don't recommend that but I see it all the time). Navigation links in general have a big effect on your search listings if your links are keyword focused. So implementing this tag on all your Java navigation links will open those links to the search engines for the first time.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, using a noscript tag makes a lot of sense also because it keeps your content aligned with your link popularity and Page Rank metrics (versus creating an alternative set of Web pages that won't have the same link connectivity).

Stay tuned because Benj will have another great article soon about SEO friendly Flash.

Have a great weekend.

Google Experiement with Right Hand Column Results and Universal Search

Today on Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen illustrates a new Google experiment in which Google takes some of the universal search results that would normally be displayed in the main serps column and instead displays them on the right where you might normally see PPC ads. He makes a couple of interesting observations concerning the reasons that Google might have for doing this, most of which would economically benefit Google including increased interaction in the right column where PPC ads are typically shown and increasing Google's opportunity to hand pick results based on economic considerations. I believe he refers to it as "allowing Google to try get away with more aggressive product pimping". For what's it worth, I don't think that either of these is really a motivation for Google as much as improving their user interface is the goal.

Google isn't stupid and if they see someone else doing something that gives them an idea on how to improve their product, they are going to capitalize. Now I think there is a happy coincidence for them in terms of retraining users to pay more attention to the right column if they stick universal search items there. But I don't believe that's as big a motivation as some people might think. I don't think it really has much of an effect on SEO process as much as it, once again, underscores that Universal search can be optimized for in terms of videos and images.

I think it will be interesting to see if this experiment becomes a standard part of the Google user interface. In the meantime, I gotta get back to optimizing some Meta tags. Have a great day.

Making AJAX SEO Friendly

On many blogs, SEO professionals say AJAX is evil in SEO, just in the same way Flash is. But ask a Web2.0 designer/developer, AJAX is so cool that people will love it and stay on your site seeing the quick interactive visual feedback without any page reloading. Let's look deeper into the possibility of making SEO and AJAX BFF.

What is AJAX?

AJAX is a term coined publicly by Jesse James Garrett of AdaptivePath meaning: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. As posted on Wikipedia:

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or Ajax, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The main intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.


AJAX is asynchronous in that extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. JavaScript is the scripting language in which AJAX function calls are usually made. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object that is available to scripting languages run in modern browsers. There is, however, no requirement that the asynchronous content be formatted in XML.


AJAX is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.

Keeping the technical language to a minimum, the main observable benefit you have in running AJAX is having dynamic content load on your page without having the whole page to reload on a new URL. This gives you the benefit to only reload certain parts of a page making the resources load to a minimum aside from having it visually appealing to the user.

Problem 1: SEO Issues with Dynamic Content of AJAX

Search engines crawl websites using bots that are also called crawlers or spiders. These are nothing but programs that visit webpages on the Internet looking at all links and further visiting every valid link found crawlable. And content on the page is read and associated to the URL crawled.
Having that behavior, search engines will only be able to read the initially loaded content when the URL of the page is loaded. Any other content that loads by AJAX requiring a user click or some other event may not be read by the search engines.
Probably a good example of an AJAX site would be the Instant Domain Search. For every letter you type, new content is loaded. It loads fast and is appealing to people as they do not need to wait for a full page reload. Although all generated new content cannot be read by search engines.

Problem 2: Search Engine Crawling Problems of AJAX

Since search engines crawl websites looking at every link found on a page, search engines may not be able to check links going to other pages of an AJAX webpage. First of all, AJAX content does not need to reside on a different URL, it will have the same URL as how it loaded.
Normally a link going to a normal webpage may look like this:

• <a href="path/page.html">text to click on</a>

And AJAX powered sites may have links in various forms like:

• <a href="javascript: functioname(content-parameter);">text to click on</a>


• <a href="#content-parameter">text to click on</a>


• <a href="javascript: void();" onclick=" functioname(content-parameter);">text to click on</a>


• <a href=" #" onclick=" functioname(content-parameter);">text to click on</a>

Having your href value not a valid webpage will just be disregarded by search engines, even if you do have a way to let search engines see the dynamically loaded content, this will still be on the same URL where it has to really be separated.
For my example of this, let me show you the AJAX Powered Agile Photo Gallery. Their demo page shows one URL and that URL will never change when you view the other photos or check the other pages. Their link format uses a JavaScript function right in the href value of the link.

Problem 3: Placing All Content On One Page Dilutes Keyword Focus

Instead of dynamically loading all content from a server-side scripting language or XML file, some people just place all content upfront and use JavaScript tricks to hide and display text. This may solve the problem of problem 1 issue mentioned above since there is no other content to crawl. And, in a way, solves the issue of problem 2 since there are no other links needed to be crawled. But, even if it solves these issues, the new problem of keyword focus arises.
Check the site of the popular Moofx All their main pages are all on one page and if you click on the bars, the content gracefully slides and, in reality, all content is already there and is not loading for every click on the page links. The content is just hidden using CSS and/or JavaScript techniques. In the case of Moofx it is not much of a big issue, but on other corporate sites with pages of various topics that should stand alone on their own page, this technique may not be ideal as the various keywords get all mixed up and loses keyword focus on a page.

Problem 4: Search Engines Spiders Do Not Read JavaScript Code

Depending on how your AJAX developer makes your web pages, they can make content being written by JavaScript or not. And, while it would be ideal to keep JavaScript to dynamically changing visual components of a page, it is not ideal to have JavaScript write the content itself using a document.write function. As much as possible, content and links of a webpage should be plain HTML text as much as possible. Search engines simply disregard the content written within the JavaScript code.

The SEO Solution to the AJAX Problems

Solution 1: Serve Alternative Content

On a single page, if a navigational element is written by AJAX on every page load and is wrapped up in JavaScript, a solution can be having some alternative navigation on the page. Using footer links on a page for instance will work.
And for these alternative links, these should lead to actual pages on their own URLs that would load the same content as what would load in the AJAX links.
This way you please users with the visual appeal of AJAX and you still give alternative navigation and content that search engines can read and index. Where, if people get to visit these URLs, they will still be drawn to the AJAX pages.

Solution 2: Using Hijax - Graceful Degredation of AJAX

A concept first mentioned by Jeremy Keith of Clear:Left has an excellent presentation on this. His technique goes into the specific details of how AJAX should be written so that it degrades well with less AJAX capable browsers. In the same way Search Engines behave, just like a less capable browser. Here are some examples of his unobtrusive JavaScript example from his presentation:

• JavaScript pseudo-protocol - Awful!
  <a href="javascript:window.open('help.html')">contextual help</a>


• Pointless link - Bad!
  <a href="#" onclick="window.open('help.html'); return false;">contextual help</a>


• Using the DOM - Better.
  <a href="help.html" onclick="window.open(this.getAttribute('href')); return false;">contextual help</a>


• No inline JavaScript - Best!
  <a href="help.html" class="help">contextual help</a>

He also talks about externalizing JavaScript and CSS code. Another major advantage of having a gracefully degrading AJAX website is not having the need to create alternative content. It is simply having only one content source that degrades well when JavaScript is disabled which is mainly how search engine spider behaves, like browsers with JavaScript disabled. One of the perfect examples I have seen implementing SEO friendly AJAX using Hijax techniques is on AjaxOptimize.

Related Post: Making AJAX SEO Friendly with the noscript tag

One More Wednesday Thought

Signed up for www.Feedburner.com for the SEO blog today, so it should be available there now. For those that don't know about Feedburner, it allows you to get a much better idea of how many people are using your feed and where they are finding it. I highly recommend it.

The hard part is getting it so that your brand URL redirects through Feedburner so that you can promote your brand URL in the event that someday you ever leave Feedburner. Here are the instructions for that under the Feedburner Mybrand Section. It's a little hard to find because it's under the myaccount section and not the feeds section which seems a little odd to a first time user...lol.

I will try to get the MyBlogLog stuff going soon as well, as soon as they figure out how to get their code working to let me migrate to the new system, doh!

Random Wednesday SEO Thoughts

4:45am... baby crying
5:00am... wife's alarm goes off
6:30am... scrapping ice off my window in San Diego, WTF
7:30am... still hanging out in an hour long traffic jam

It started out pretty rough today I have to admit...lol. So I thought I would lose myself in the SEO world today to take my mind off how tired I am. Here are some of the things I found along the way:

More on sub domains versus folders and how it effects SEO.

The ongoing discussion about the evils of paid links in SEO.

A great article about the problems that CMS systems have with SEO. I'll blog more on this subject later myself. I have a number of observations to add..lol. That's why we invented our own CMS system that is SEO friendly ;)

Best Practice for Alt Tags and SEO

Matt Cutts has recently come out with a new video on ALT tags.



It's pretty basic but there are some important takeaways. ALT tags help Google understand what your image is. Additionally, file names and titles also convey information to Google. This information is used not only for Google image search, which is very popular, but now with the implementation of universal search, it's possible to capture front page real estate on the SERPs with your images. Therefore, from an SEO standpoint, short, keyword focused descriptive alt tags are important.

I think it's important to take to heart Matt's advice against stuffing your alt tags with keywords. There is a difference between using keywords responsibly to augment a descriptive phrase and mindlessly repeating keyword phrases for the purpose of SEO. Doing things for users will always get you the most traction in Google in the long run because they design their algorithms to reward that kind of thinking. Also, images used for spacing and html layout don't need alt tags. Remember that these tags are important for accessibility reasons as well. Spacer images have no relevance to users who are using screen readers.

Have a great Tuesday.

Subdomains vs Folders - Which is Best for SEO?

Well our San Diego Chargers found a way to win in Tennessee this Sunday coming back in classic style that featured a 2:00 minute drill for the tie and an LT run in OT for the win. It doesn't get any better than that, but it sure does frazzle your nerves...lol. I hope we get another shot at the Patriots in the playoffs :)

Speaking of frazzled nerves, I was a little nervous Saturday night before singing for the first time ever at a bar with my band. Playing guitar and singing at the same time is hard enough by yourself, much less at a bar in front of people. But it went pretty well and no one ran out of the room, so from that standpoint, it was a success. For those that don't know, I play in a band called Dive Bomber ( http://www.heavymusic.com/ ).

I am in the process of writing a three part article series for http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ about how PPC and SEO can work together to produce greater results. I am almost done with the article and I have to say it has really been fun. I am getting an opportunity to share some of the SEO observations that we have had at BusinessOnLine that can really make a difference for some Web sites and I think that's exciting.

In SEO news, Matt Cutts today tried to add some logic behind the old subdomains versus subfolders debate. Google treats subdomains like separate sites in many ways. The bottom line with this debate is that you should do what's best for users. Any kind of SEO advantage that could or might be gained by manipulating sub domains is likely to be short lived and is obviously against the spirit of Google's best practices. If you're trying to build a solid search engine traffic foundation that is, or could become, a primary source of income for your Web site, it's best to build that foundation on solid ground. There are many legitimate reasons to use sub domains including technical considerations like load balancing and hosting issues. There are organization structures where sub domains make sense ( maps.google.com ). But I believe that a travel site that has a sub domain for each city where each city has one page of content is an unnecessary use of sub domains. The bottom line is, when making the decision to use sub domains versus sub folders, forget SEO and pick the one that works best for user experience. Then you know that you have also made the best decision for SEO best practices.

301 versus 302 redirects for SEO

I was having a conversation with a client yesterday that I think bears repeating. The question my client had was, why was I recommending changing their 302 redirects to 301 redirects? A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect whereas a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. My client had a number of pages that were being redirected within the site and had used 302 redirects to get the job done. Unfortunately for the client, 302 redirects are problematic in the major search engines. They have a very hard time indexing them correctly on a consistent basis. Google has been much better about it since the "Big Daddy" update last year but even so, the potential for problems remains high. The big difference between these two in the way they affect SEO is that a 301 redirect transfers link popularity and Page Rank scores to the new page it redirects to. And that can make a big difference in your rankings.

Here is how it works: Let's say you used to host a lot of content on a sub domain called cool.domain.com . A lot of people on the Web started linking to your site because of how cool it is. A year later, you do a redesign of the site. You convert the architecture to all folders and you want to move the subdomain. So you change the links on your site to www.domain.com/cool . Now you put a 302 redirect up to make sure that anyone who goes to the old page because it's bookmarked, will get to the right place. The only problem is, your rankings for all your cool keyword phrases die because now you have no link connectivity to let Google know how cool you are anymore. All your links point to a dead end. The 301 redirect changes that by telling the search engines that the page is permanently moved so assign all connectivity values here. If it were a temporary redirect, the engine wouldn't let go of cool.domain.com because it thinks it is coming back someday. So there is no need to transfer the link popularity.

The number of reasons for using redirects on Web sites is enormous. I have seen all kinds of redirect implementations from various clients for reasons like vanity domains, marketing urls, changed database (URL syntax changes), outdated content, duplicate content and lots and lots of others. The most common 301 redirect you should have on your site is from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com. The search engines treat each of these as separate URLs even though they resolve to the same content. By implementing the 301, you consolidate your link popularity to one version of the site and you avoid getting indexed under both conventions (especially if your site is coded in relative links) which can cause duplicate content issues.

If your interested in checking some of your redirects, type the URL that is being redirected into the box on this page. The resulting server headers will reveal if it is a 301 or 302 redirect.

Here are some other articles I have found for further reading:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359&query=301&topic=&type
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/indexing-08.html
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_webmasters (type 301 into the search box)
http://searchengineland.com/070716-122159.php
http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/477/index.php
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bacon-polenta/
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007233.html
http://www.gregboser.com/seo-friendly-affiliate-systems/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/ (illustrates how search engines are inconsistent in treating 301 redirects)
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2007/11/smx_london_day_2.html (2nd paragraph from the bottom)
http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0405/redirects.html
http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/301-redirects-seo.html

SearchEngineLand.com

One of my favorite sites for the latest news in SEO is www.searchengineland.com . The site is run by Danny Sullivan, formerly of SearchEngineStrategies.com (where incidentally I will be writing a column soon, stay tuned for details). But one of the things (or should I say some of the things) I have noticed about Search Engine Land lately is they don't exactly correspond to what I would define as best practices with their own SEO. So I thought I would take a few moments to give some unsolicited advice to my friends at SearchEngineLand.com as if they were a client.

Here are my top 5:

1) This isn't what I would recommend for my homepage keywords:

"< name=" keywords " content="qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad">" - spaces inserted so that it would show up in Blogger

Unless this is some kind of SEO test (which I don't recommend for high profile pages), I think you would get a lot more traction out of Yahoo by making this data meaningful.

2) I see that SearchEngineLand.com is not listed in the top 20 results for "search engine optimization". This seems like a no brainer to include in the Page Title. Not only does it increase your chances of getting listed for the specific phrase "search engine optimization", but it dramatically increases your chances of getting listed for the thousands of permutations that are associated with that phrase. I have a hard time believing that "search engine optimization" isn't a primary keyword for this site.

On a related note, for http://searchengineland.com/google.php, the Page Title, "Google Land" leaves a lot of valuable real estate on the tab. This is also ineffective from a usability standpoint. Anyone seeing this title in the SERPs, may or may not understand the value of the content that lives there as it relates to their interest in search engine optimization. If the Page Title were "Google Land: News and Articles About The Google Search Engine Including SEO and SEM", it would fare much better. Now I understand that they may be keeping the title general because of the amount of information on the page. But I have never felt this to be a wise strategy. It's always best to highlight the most important keywords in the title. In this example, their Google SEO page which is linked to from the Googleland page is a PR5. The Googleland is a PR6. It has a better chance, all things being equal, of ranking for more competitive keywords like
"google news" and "google articles".

3) The homepage logo only says Search Engine Land in its alt tag. Adding some keywords in this alt tag would significantly increase your propensity to rank for those keywords since Google sees this link pointing at your homepage from every page on the Web site. Maybe something like: "Search Engine Land - News and Articles about Search Engines". That is probably a little short for what I would normally recommend, but it seems more in line with the general style and theme of the site. Implementing this alt tag will significantly improve your opportunity to rank for "search engine news, search engine articles, news about search engines, articles about search engines".

I would keep this same idea in mind for the image links on the global navigation as well. The link connectivity of the Internet Architecture is not currently keyword focused and therefore leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

4) On article pages like this http://searchengineland.com/070821-221946.php I would recommend grabbing the first couple sentences of the page and use it for your Meta description. Unique meta descriptions are important for sites with thousands of pages based on templates. Before Google did away with the supplemental result tag, one of the observations we made was that by adding unique descriptions to some pages in the supplemental results, those pages broke out of the supplemental results and started to perform better in organic search. As a general rule until we can prove otherwise, we always recommend that every page has a unique description.

5) Keyword focused alt tags on the images that link to conferences from this page http://searchengineland.com/events.php would help those Web sites that Search Engine Land is associated with.

6 - Bonus...lol) I always recommend an html sitemap (sitemaps if more than 100 links and certainly in this case there is) that is linked from the homepage. I notice a lot of stuff on the site hasn't got any PR yet which could be expedited by a good sitemap structure. Not a huge deal but also helps with usability for those who prefer to navigate using the sitemap.

Another note, I bet you would save yourself from passing a lot of Page Rank out to useless links if you put rel=nofollow on all the social media buttons whose URLs don't get indexed anyway.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to give people an idea of the kinds of things we look at in our SEO Labs that we'll be doing at OMS in February and how those principles might apply to a popular Web site. In this case, it also illustrates that even for Web sites that understand the principles of SEO, it's hard to stay on top of it. I hope it gives everyone some ideas on how to improve their own sites. See ya next time.

Don't Buy Paid Links for SEO

It really couldn't be any clearer and it really has been clear for a long time...LOL. Don't buy paid links for the purpose of ranking highly in Google. And for that matter, don't sell links either. I really don't get why this is such a big surprise for most Webmasters. It's pretty clear that ever since Page Rank has become the most powerful force in the SEO universe (and by that I mean the emergence of Google so please don't start the "is Page Rank important?" debate, we will save that for a later time) that a link has been equivalent to a vote in the Google system. It doesn't take a genius to understand why Google doesn't want the people with the most money or the people who can best reverse engineer their search results to be able to manipulate their index. If Google wants their search results to be a true reflection of what people think is the best resource for a particular topic, then it makes perfect sense for them to not want to include paid links into that ranking equation. And the article above certainly illustrates that they have been clear about that for a long time. So now that their systems are doing a better job of enforcing those principles, why are so many people upset? Well obviously because the old tricks that used to work don't work anymore..lol. I am truly sympathetic to anyone that unjustly suffers because of the unintended side effects which might be occurring because of Google's new filters. Anytime Google penalizes a group of sites, there are bound to be a couple inadvertent problems. With an index that big, how could there not be. But for the most part, there are a lot of people who are upset because they can't buy their way to listings anymore and now they have to get more creative with the way they present their content, market their site and promote viral linking. Anyway, I think it is obvious how I feel about the subject which is why none of my clients ever buy links for the purpose of SEO results.

One of the things I think is very interesting is the number of comments where Webmasters blame the stricter stance of Google towards paid links for a number of issues that have nothing to do with what's actually happening. Take for example the post in which the Webmaster from Joetech.com says "This STILL doesn't explain why JoeTech.com dropped from PR5 to PR0 over night. I didn't sell any paid links and nobody ever told me what I did wrong." Matt Cutts later goes on to explain "lottobymatch, bear in mind that Google also did a full PageRank update a few weeks ago, and PageRanks can fluctuate naturally as a result of that as well. For example, joetech.com doesn't have any sort of webspam penalty in Google. We do occasionally see PageRank variations for sites because of canonicalization issues. You might check this post for advice, for example: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/setting-preferred-domain.html". This is a common pattern, unfortunately, for many Webmasters who are quick to jump to conclusions about behavior patterns with search. A quick look at Joetech.com's analytics should have told that person that there was no penalty because traffic wasn't affected. If his site had really gone from a 5 to a 0, the loss of page rank would have been a secondary concern to the loss of traffic and revenue that certainly would have followed a penalty. It's important when you're trying to figure out why something has changed in SEO, not to jump to conclusions. And ESPECIALLY don't go changing a bunch of stuff until you are sure (or at least have a reasonable hypothesis) as to what the problem is.

Maybe next time we'll have that Page Rank conversation.

It's No Fun Being Sick

Being sick is the worst. I'll leave it that...lol. Having a sick Web site (a Web site without valid HTML code) is not such a good thing either. However, it probably isn't affecting your search rankings. In this post, Google Super Spam Fighter Matt Cutts confirms what many of us have believed for a long time, that Google doesn't penalize sites for invalid code. However, that isn't an excuse not to write valid code, lol. It just means it doesn't have that much potential to affect your search listings.

In other search news, the Online Marketing Summit is coming soon and I will be speaking there about various SEO themes. OMS was a great conference last year and I anticipate it will be even better this year (how can San Diego in February be bad?).

Also, if anyone is wondering about the power of links in Google, they need only do a search for "3 ring binders". The number 2 ranking site is http://www.3ringbinder.com/ . Now the reason its noteworthy is because if you look at the cache for the site, there is no content! Now obviously, if you look at the page itself, there is some actual content available to the end user and I am certainly not saying that this site doesn't deserve its ranking. I have never used their services..lol. But Google sees NO content on their homepage. And yet they are ranked #2 for a word that should be somewhat competitive given the propensity for that word to result in sales of 3 ring binders. So, it should be noted that this also illustrates the advantages of having a keyword focused domain name. The majority of Web masters use URLs and not keyword focused text links to link to Web pages. Therefore, having your keywords in your URL automatically means that most of your links will be keyword focused, thereby giving you an advantage over your competitors who do not. This doesn't justify changing a domain name in most cases, but it certainly adds to the merit of choosing a domain name that is keyword focused in the initial stages of a Web site.

That's all for today. I am going home to rest.