A Quick January 2009 SEO Update

Jan 21, 2009 at 8:43am ET by Barry Schwartz

Many SEOs and SEMs have been noticing updates at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com this past week. I thought I catch you up on what has been noticed at each engine. On the Google front, as reported at the Search Engine Roundtable, many webmasters noticed their PageRank scores drop. After a lot of discussion, concern and debate, Matt Cutts of Google commented explaining that the PageRank scores are fluctuating due to the canonicalization updates Google is pushing through. He said, as long as you are not selling links, "Don't Panic." These things will work themselves out and your rankings should [...]

Filed in: Ask: SEO, Google: SEO, SEO: General, Yahoo: SEO

The 2007 Paid Links War, In Review

Dec 31, 2007 at 10:18am ET by Vanessa Fox

The paid links debate is back, this time about whether Google wants all links in a paid post to have a nofollow attribute. Below, a look at the latest round, plus a recap of this year's "War On Paid Links" by Google and where the other search engines stand on the subject. The current round was sparked by an IZEA (previously Pay Per Post) post inviting the major search engines to clarify their stances on links in paid posts. Ted Murphy blogged that he talked to Matt Cutts at Pubcon, who told him that all links in a paid post should have the nofollow attribute, not just links to the [...]

Filed in: Ask: SEO, Google: SEO, Link Building: Paid Links, Microsoft: Bing SEO, Yahoo: SEO

Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines

Sep 5, 2007 at 7:42pm ET by Danny Sullivan

If there's anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it's the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It's practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I'll explain more about why you shouldn't worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it. The meta keywords tag is one of several of meta tags that you can insert into your web pages to provide search engines with information about your pages that isn't visible on the page itself. For example, my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages [...]

Filed in: Ask: SEO, Features: General, Google: SEO, How To: SEO, Microsoft: Bing SEO, SEO: Flash, SEO: General, SEO: Writing & Body Copy, Yahoo: SEO

Goodbye Teoma Algorithm, Hello Edison, Says Ask.com

Apr 12, 2007 at 3:48pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, has confirmed with me that Ask.com is working on Edison. Edison is the code name behind merging of Ask.com's two different search technologies they own, Teoma and Direct Hit. The name comes from inventor Thomas Edison, who worked out of New Jersey where's Ask's Teoma technology came from and where it still maintains a research base. Jim would not give me more information beyond that. I did speak with Apostolos Gerasoulis who leaked this information this morning, where he explained that they will be using Direct Hit's click popularity technology with Teoma's "sub [...]

Filed in: Ask: SEO, Ask: Web Search

Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery

Apr 11, 2007 at 8:07am ET by Danny Sullivan

Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file. Announcements are up from Google and Ask now Yahoo and Microsoft. Information on how to create sitemaps files can be found at the Sitemaps.org site. Aside from the sitemaps XML formal, you can al [...]

Filed in: Ask: SEO, Google: SEO, Google: Webmaster Central, Microsoft: Bing SEO, SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps, Yahoo: SEO, Yahoo: Site Explorer

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