Hello everyone. Really sorry I have been gone from the blog for so long. The last four months have been absolutely crazy around here and to be honest I have been a little overwhelmed keeping up with everything that has been going on. The good news is that the chaos is a direct result of all the increased business that BusinessOnLine has gotten this year and the incredible growth that is happening around the company. We have doubled our SEO team this year and we are getting ready to start hiring SEO analysts again here in San Diego! Look for those job listings to be available soon in the careers section of the site. Additionally, we have been hard at work growing our process based on all the new advancements in search that have happened this year. Whether it’s the advent of the rel=canonical tag, the inclusion of view through data to our analytics offering which completely changes how we look at search attribution, or our new tool FirstLinkChecker.com which revolutionizes the way we look at internal link structure, there have been a ton of new developments. So that coupled with my SES presentation for San Jose in August as well as my upcoming presentation at SES Chicago in December and my Pubcon presentation in November, it has been impossible to find blogging time. The good news is that I finally have a better handle on all changes and I am once again in a position from a time standpoint to be more consistent. So thanks for everyone’s patience and hopefully I can share some things with you today which can give you a head start for your 2010 SEO initiatives.
Avoid duplicate content with the link rel canonical tag.
The REL=canonical tag is definitely something that should be included on every page of your site. This tag solves a lot of potential duplicate content problems and there is no reason it shouldn’t be a standard part of your code. Another recent advancement in duplicate content prevention is Google’s new dynamic parameter tool. Actually we should give the credit to Yahoo Site Explorer for coming up with the dynamic parameter handling idea first. These new tools significantly alter the approach to addressing duplicate content issues although a healthy 301 redirect strategy is also still part of a good duplicate content prevention plan.
If you didn’t see my webinar about View Through Data and how it dramatically changes the way we look at search and social media, you should really check it out. This data allows you to ask the question, of all the people that I am seeing as bookmark traffic, or alternatively, of all the people who typed my company name into Google, how many were exposed to a specific social media site, video, press release, Website mention, web page with a static advertisement, or any other digital asset. And the amazing part is, no link needs to exist between the asset in question and your site. It’s not voodoo and we didn’t make a pact with the devil, but it is amazing. If you want more information about how you and your company can leverage view through data to give you insight into your analytics that was previously impossible, contact me at catfish@businessol.com and I will set you up with someone who can answer questions specific to your application and analytics platform. But seriously, this stuff is incredible, its brand new and it can really help you understand what is causing your brand related searches as well as paint a much clearer picture of your social media ROI.
First Link Check - FirstLinkChecker.com
One of the most exciting things we are doing right now is the official public launch of our new tool “First Link Checker” at www.firstlinkchecker.com. We did some testing and found out that what SEOmoz reported a while back was true. Only the anchor text found in first link between two pages is counted in Google’s scoring. So this tool highlights the first links found in source so that you can see which links are being counted and which ones are not. Benj will be releasing a blog post on the subject this Friday to coincide with our initial public launch of the tool this weekend at DMA (the tool is in Beta right now). We hope this is the first of many tools we hope to develop that will be useful to the SEO community.
WebmasterWorld's Pubcon
And with all this going on, I am really excited to be headed to Pubcon next month to talk about SEO for Mega sites, meaning very, very large sites. This topic is very dear to me as many of my clients have absolutely huge sites. It’s one of the reasons we built our in house SEO tool called SEO Explorer. It’s been going on for a couple years now. Hopefully in 2010 we will be able to extend it to people outside of BusinessOnLine. We will see! But in the meantime, I have a lot of cool things to share about SEO for really large companies. So join me in Vegas next month for Pubcon!
Search Engine Strategies
I will also be speaking at SES Chicago in December. Ill be back on the Beyond the Numbers session where I will look at some ways to augment your analytics data and how that should be driving your ongoing SEO Strategy.
Also look for a new blog post from me next week where I will give everyone a cool excel trick that allows you to measure your long tail keyword performance. Thanks again for everyone’s patience with my blogging schedule! Have a great week in search and hopefully I will see you next month in Las Vegas!
Related SEO Blog Post
Tags: Canonical, Conference, PubCon, SES
I saw many SEO experts blogging about duplication problem. Thank you very much.
Is there 2010 for Off Page? hehehe
welcome back! I agree, rel canonical should be a part of the standard coding.
Welcome back Calfish. Canonical tag I think is a good solution. Keep ACTION!