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Google announced the Canonical Link Element tag and Ask! is supporting it too.
To help webmasters deal with duplicate content within their own site Google has developed a canonical link element. The new element allows webmasters to tell Google which version of a page of content is the master page. Google can then easily ignore the others.
For more on this new announcement have a look Matt Cutts post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:
While reading my feeds this morning I came across a simple but concise blog post at SearchLight Digital on the subject of cloacking and how to do it. For those of you don’t know what cloaking is, it’s the practice of detecting by IP or User-Agent “who” is visiting your site and then showing them different content from everyone else. You may wish to do this for example to show different languages of your site based on where the visitors IP Address is. Or you may be trying to fool GoogleBot for SEO purposes. I found the article interesting for a couple of reasons. First it’s simple to do and second it can be very dangerous if your relying on the search engines for your business.
Let me explain my point - and then if you want to know how to cloak you can follow the link to Teifions post at SearchLight Digital.
Why is Cloaking so dangerous?
Cloaking is dangerous because as Teifion wrote, it’s easy to do and Google can’t determine your intent. If you’re cloaking and Google Bot figures that you can suffer a penalty which will hurt your rankings.
What can you do instead?
Keep it simple! First - don’t cloak to try and fool Google Bot. Second, build websites that are intuitive for end users. If you have sites that are meant to serve residents of different countries than you should build websites in their language on that countries top level domain (TLD) and preferably host in that country. Then you don’t have to do any fancy and dangerous cloaking to get visitors into the right website.
More importantly, people are smart. More often than not they can get themselves into the right place if you give them an opportunity to do that. For example - I may be in Germany but that does not mean I speak German and want to go the German version of your site - your cloaking may in fact hurt my user experience!
Conclusion
If you care about getting traffic from search engines and want to provide a good user experience for your visitors don’t cloak. Use traditional methods and strategies to allow visitors to get where they want to go and let the search engines determine what the best place is based on the visitors search. Everyone wins in this case!
Now if you still want to cloak go to the SearchLight Digital post “Cloaking: All You Ever Wanted to Know (But Were too Afraid of Google to Ask)”
If you’re a non profit looking to improve your marketing than you need to review The Non-Profit’s Guide to SEM.
As a Non-Profit or Charity organization marketing is a crucial component of your organization. You’re also faced with the challenges of a limited budget. In comes The Non-Profit’s Guide to SEM. This document comes from the writers of the SEO Book - a well crafted documented which lays out the basics of search engine optimization, and has trained quite a few SEO’s out there.
I’ve read this new release for non-profit’s and I have to admit the content is very good and will likely become as popular as the original SEO Book.
If you’re a non-profit or charity I recommend you read this new book. It will definitely help you reach more of that lucrative “free” traffic online!
Google recently updated it’s webmaster guidelines to suggest that webmasters no longer re write their dynamic URLs to appear static.
This is a significant shift in SEO strategies going forward as compared to the past. The key question on every ones mind at this time is what about all my old URLs that I’ve re written? Well – don’t change them. If Google already has them indexed there is no need.
The difference lies in what you do going forward with new sites and work. According tot he search engine land post it only makes sense to leave static those URLs that you feel Google should know are not static – such as color choices for products in a database.
Also – lets not for the other search engines. While Google still has the lions share of search volume many sites still do better in Yahoo!
For more on this topic see Google Says, Don’t Rewrite Dynamic URLs To Static URLs.
I was popping by Google’s Inside Adwords Blog today and read a post about a new tool called “Insights for Search.” I tested it out and was impressed at what I saw so here is a review and some notes on how to utilize Insights for Search
The idea of this tool is to give the end user a glimpse into some search history, compare peaks and valley’s to news articles (much the same way Google Trends did) but also give a user the ability to understand search behaviour. It has some really powerful features, especially for an Internet Marketing agency like ours
Some very cool features include a “heat map” of the world or any geographic region you want to target and the corresponding rising search terms for a particular keyword you are examining. Additionally, you can compare up to 5 search terms and see how a users search habits differ across geographic areas. For example, if you are in the market for Laisk surgery - the west coast of the U.S. might be more inclined to use the search phrase “lasik eye surgery” while the east coast might use the phrase “laser eye surgery” more often. As an advertiser, it is important to segment these keywords and phrases depending on the target market you are focused on.
Furthermore, you can filter your queries by various categories. One example might be “java” which will have a different meaning depending on if you are looking for a programming language or a hot cup of coffee. Using the category drop down will allow you to segment the data accordingly.
You can also look at search trends by a particular date range. The default is set to 2004 - present but opening the drop down allows you to select some set ranges as well as a custom range.
Comparing your data by “location” and “time ranges” is also an option which can present some very powerful data but only for the top searches for the day, not custom keywords you select.
The tool also has a handy export feature to excel.
I was puzzled by the numbers that appear in the graph and upon further investigation found that these aren’t actual search numbers but rather “normalized” numbers that Google is displaying. You can read more about this here.
I got all excited when I read some blog posts showing new search volume numbers that had been released in Google’s Keyword tool. I hurried to my bookmark bar, opened up Adwords, clicked on the Google Keyword tool and…. wait for it… nothing. Booo. I was dissapointed like a kid who wanted a toy bb gun for Christmas and got a one piece pink bunny pj suit complete with fuzzy feet (2 points for those who got the Christmas movie reference there).
BUT
Today, I loged into my campaigns and say a message in my MCC saying that the tool was available and the keyword data was there!
“You can now see statistics on the approximate number of search queries
matching your keywords. This data allows you to better plan your budget
and pick keywords most likely to return quality leads, which in turn
can help improve your ROI. Learn more
|
Dismiss this message”
WHOOO HOOOO
Here’s an interesting question… what happens to tools like Wordze.com, Keyword Discovery and others?
Was it just a freak coincidence that I got this email today from Wordze with a special $4 promotion?
“I hope everyone is enjoying July. As I had talked
about to some of you, I have something really special for July that is going to
help you nock the socks off of your affiliate earnings.
Until July 14th you can send your readers to the
Url below, and they will be able to get access to Wordze for ALL of July for
only $4.
Sign Up Here
Other than that… Enjoy the rest of the month, and best of
luck!
Levi
Wordz
Google confirms Newsday.com received penalty for selling links!
Advertising, or selling links? It’s fine a fine line but when crossed can have some serious repercussions. Google position is that they don’t like it when you sell links only for PageRank. Instead sell banners and text ads that draw traffic to your site - if they pass a little PageRank, that’s OK!
So what happened to Newsday? Well, Google caught them selling links and penalized them for it. Perhaps overtime they’ll recover as most sites which receive a penalty do.
If you’re going to sell links from your site then you have to do it through back room. Don’t announce it on your site, don’t send the requests via email. Telephones are the only way to go in this regard.
Our opinion? Don’t buy or sell links for PageRank. Most business rely too heavily on Google for the traffic and it simply is not worth the risk.
Tags: buying links, paid links, search engine optimization, selling links, SEO What you should look for when hiring a search engine optimization firm.
A while ago we wrote about hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) firm. Since then Google has updated their page titled “What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?“. If you’re looking to hire an SEO I highly recommend you read Googles page on the topic. The more informed you are about the services you’re trying to buy the more likely you are to find a reputable company who truly has your best interests in mind.
One thing in particular stands out in this Google guideline - “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.” While there may be unknown “tricks” which may be producing organic ranking results which others have not yet caught on to - there really are no secrets in search engine optimization. Simply following best practices and standards for modern website development combined with a solid understanding of 1. Your keywords, 2. Linking and promoting and finally, 3. Conversion Principles, you will ranking for your terms and you will convert traffic.
Any SEO firm which is unwilling to fully explain their practices in language you can clearly understand is not someone you should seariously consider partnering with.
So before you make your decision, get informed about the search engine optimization and ask as many questions you can about the SEO firms you’re considering hiring - pick the one with the best answers and not necessarily the best price!
If you want to know more about SEO - feel free to contact me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know at no obligation. By informing consumers I’m improving our industry, and that’s good for everyone.
In a recent blog post Google announced it makes About 10 changes per week to their ranking Algorithms.
In reading my feeds today I came across the Google blog post “Introduction to Google Ranking” which is a great post introducing the topic of how Google ranks the search results. It’s apparently the first of many posts on the topic. While I found it quite informative what really stuck out is this statement
“We make about ten ranking changes every week. . . “
That’s quite amazing if you think about it. In the span of 7 days the algorithms used to rank the results for a search term can change as many as ten times. There are two things to consider about this fact. First, that Google takes search very seriously and they are constantly working to improve the process for end users. Second, it’s no wonder that rankings vary from day to day including parts of a single day! When evaluating your rankings you can’t just look at a single day and say today we’re successful with our results. It just does not work that way. You have to look at longer term trends to determine overall results for your search engine optimization efforts.
In fact, if the particular algorithm change was strongly focused on a particular search it’s likely that your rankings could be dropped significantly for a short period of time while the results of that change are being evaluated and further refined.
If you want to know a little more about the Google ranking process I recommend you read the blog post. It really is informative!
Google has announced it can now better index Flash content.
In the Webmaster Central Blog on June 30th Google announced it can better index Flash content with the aide of Adobe’s updates to the new Searchable SWF library. Our position on Flash does not change - use it sparingly. Don’t build an entire site in Flash.
I encourage you to read the entire press release as there are some really great questions answered. In particular - Google cannot index text within images that are embedded in your Flash Video, nor will they index external content loaded through seperate text, or html files. It does not mentioned databaes content though.
So for the time being - let’s wait and see what happens with Flash based sites and the Google Index. If this really does work then we’ll begin to see a bit of a shift in thinking around Flash for some people. In our opinion though it does not affect the usability issues associated with Flash - but it will mean that our banners can now have content that will be indexed!