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The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Internal Linking Strategy

May 7, 2013 at 9:24am ET by Erin Everhart

It’s not the first thing you think of when you hear "link building." It’s definitely not the sexiest aspect of link building. But, I'd argue it’s among the most important components of a solid link building strategy. That’s right, folks: today we’re going to chat about internal linking. Cue the communal groan. It's okay! I'm not going to talk about anchor text. Instead, we'll dive into how to set up a logical internal linking strategy, as well as some of the more technical aspects to keep in mind when it comes to your internal linking. Why An Internal Linking Strategy Impor [...]

No, Microsoft Didn’t “Disappear” Kogan From Bing Over The “IE7 Tax”

Jul 11, 2012 at 5:11pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Shopping site Kogan imposes an "Internet Explorer 7" tax. Kogan then mysteriously disappears from Microsoft's Bing search engine. Revenge? No, just a technical goof, says Microsoft, one that it is correcting. Kogan grabbed headlines last month when it began adding an additional 6.8% charge to purchases for those using Internet Explorer 7. Calling it the "Internet Explorer 7" tax, the fee was designed to encourage people to upgrade. This week, Kogan was blogging again about Microsoft, this time to say that its Kogan.com site was dropped from Microsoft's Bing search engine. That's still t [...]

The Latest & Greatest On SEO Pagination

Mar 19, 2012 at 9:30am ET by Adam Audette

Technical SEO topics such as pagination are near and dear to my heart. This article will build upon and update my previous treatment of pagination and SEO. I've written and presented often on pagination for SEO. Why so much attention on this subject? The reason is simple: it can be a big, hairy deal for sites. It's right up there with faceted navigation as one of the most problematic crawling and indexing issues for large-scale SEO. It's a tactic (actually a set of tactics) that our teams are continually evolving, testing, and refining. So it was "double prizes" when Google announced [...]

Google’s Matt Cutts Offering More Detailed Video Search Tips

Aug 9, 2011 at 2:29pm ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Webmaster Blog announced a new format for Google's Matt Cutts video tutorials. Instead of the short minute or so videos, Matt will also be offering more detailed videos that are longer and more flushed out. Google explained, "instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which cover important webmaster-related topics." The first video answers a question on if there is a limit on the number of 301 redirects you can have. Matt explains that there is no limit in the number of 301 redirects from a site to another site. F [...]

Google Disables URL Removals After Bug Allows Anyone To Remove Any Site

Jul 19, 2011 at 3:10pm ET by Barry Schwartz

This morning, James Breckenridge discovered a loophole within Google's Webmaster Tools that allowed anyone to remove any site from Google. Both James and I sent this information to Google as soon as we heard of it. After several hours, Google has told us, "we're still investigating this report, and to be cautious we disabled all URL removals earlier this morning." So now, if you even own a site, you won't be able to remove the site or pages from the site using Google's URL removal tool. How did this loophole work? Pretty simple as James described. You use the following URL when logged [...]

Google: rel=”canonical” Now Supported In HTTP Headers

Jun 17, 2011 at 8:59am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced they are now supporting the rel="canonical" attribute within HTTP headers. This enables webmasters to set up a canonical for linking to or from PDF files or other non-HTML based files. One of the examples given by Google is that a "webmaster can signal to Google that the canonical URL for the PDF download is the HTML document by using a rel="canonical" HTTP header when the PDF file is requested." This also comes in handy when you use a CDN (content delivery network) and the content is being served from many different URLs. You can now use the rel="canonical" within t [...]

Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

Feb 22, 2011 at 9:57am ET by Barry Schwartz

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices. I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this [...]

According To Google, The BBC = AmirGabriel.com

May 19, 2010 at 5:12pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Here's a weird one. Try a search for the BBC TV series Doctor Who on Google. You'll find the official site, but look closely at the domain name. It's amirgabriel.com, as shown above -- not bbc.co.uk as it should be. What's up with that? Has the BBC undergone a transformation in the way Doctor Who himself undergoes? It's not a case of someone redirecting their domain over to the BBC and somehow "hijacking" the listing, a problem more common a few years ago. That's because the domain doesn't do a redirection, take you from one place over to the BBC. Instead, it "resolves" directly to t [...]

Getting The Credit Your Analytics Efforts Deserve

May 14, 2010 at 6:00am ET by Evan LaPointe

The population of search marketers out there (you're a lovely people) relies heavily on analytics tools to capture and report on success, and most of the time, there isn't a safety net with your analytics tool—you pretty much have to capture the data the right way the first time around. You have to measure paid search campaigns, keep that information separate from natural search data, figure out how to attribute valuable actions like newsletter signups and purchases to each effort, and of course try to keep track of all sorts of minutiae that will allow you to dig deeper and analyze on-s [...]

Why Mobile Searchers Need Mobile-Optimized Sites

May 4, 2010 at 5:33pm ET by Bryson Meunier

In mobile SEO I straddle two industries: mobile marketing and search marketing, both of which contain smart people with good questions about mobile search. I think there’s a widespread desire in both camps these days to handle mobile SEO in a way that is not only going to be beneficial to brands today, but will have positive ramifications for years to come. A common practice in mobile web site design today is to redirect a mobile user to another domain through user agent detection, rather than to optimize the site for mobile searchers. I often get asked, "Why would someone who is on the f [...]

Local Newspapers Need To Embrace SEO To Survive

Nov 9, 2009 at 7:00am ET by Chris Silver Smith

It’s no secret that newspapers have been struggling with the disruptive innovations introduced by Google, and this has resulted in some level of resistance and a circling-of-the-wagons mentality by the industry. But, what if they were to go in the opposite direction, with full engagement? Search engine optimization could really help newspapers, and here’s one tactic for how to do it.

Calculating The True SEO Costs Of Major Site Changes

Nov 9, 2009 at 6:00am ET by Eric Enge

Your site will pay a penalty in search rankings when you make modifications to content, structure or domain name. Here’s how to estimate what kind of hit you can expect to take, and how to minimize the damage.

See What Googlebot Sees On Your Site

Oct 13, 2009 at 4:01pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Google Webmaster Tools has just launched a "labs" section, where you'll find new features that may be early in the development cycle and not quite as robust as the rest of the tools. The features available so far are Fetch as Googlebot, which lets you see exactly what Googlebot is served when it requests a URL from your server and Malware Details, which shows you malicious code snippets from your site if it's been flagged as containing malware. Fetch as Googlebot Of most interest to webmasters, SEOs, and web developers is likely the Fetch as Googlebot feature. You can specify any URL on [...]

FeedBurner Goes 301 All The Way

Sep 30, 2009 at 9:46am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google AdSense for Feeds (aka FeedBurner) blog announced that all of their links will be 301 redirected, as opposed to some that are 301 redirected. In summary, when you use FeedBurner to create and host your RSS feed, FeedBurner creates special links that are used to send the reader to your web site. Some users selected to use a 302 redirected link, as opposed to a 301 redirected link, to obtain better tracking. Google has made the decision to remove the 302 redirect option and make them all 301s. Why? The main reason is Google wants these URLs to become "more compatible with searc [...]

A Case Study In Changing URL Structure

Jun 5, 2009 at 12:41pm ET by Bruce Keener

In one of the SMX videos available in the member's area of Search Engine Land, several panelists noted that a shorter URL is more likely to be clicked in the SERPs than a longer one. That is, if you have a URL like http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/03/19/article-title/ it is less likely to get clicked than the following one, which is the same but without the dates: http://www.yourdomain.com/article-title/ As I researched this, I noticed that Search Engine Land does not use dates in its URLs, nor does Google spam expert Matt Cutts, nor does Aaron Wall. Since I have been usi [...]

New York Times To Restore Links To IHT Stories In Coming Weeks

May 13, 2009 at 3:13pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Over the weekend, the New York Times was once again ridiculed for how links to its former International Herald Tribune web site were not redirecting readers to new locations for IHT stories. The situation, which was first noticed at the end of March, seemed another example of a newspaper that didn't get the online world. Well, it's being fixed now. The whole thing had me scratching my head in puzzlement. As I explained to IHT journalist Thomas Crampton, who led this weekend's outrage with his Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career post, the New York Times has one of th [...]

Do Links From Expired Domains Count With Google?

Apr 20, 2009 at 1:10pm ET by Danny Sullivan

From time-to-time, issues about how domain names can impact Google rankings come up. Is it true that if you buy a name, all the "link equity" that name has gained is lost? Below, a look at this and some related questions. Several years ago, Google sparked some concerns when it said that buying an established domain name meant that links to that domain before the purchase were effectively lost. In other words, say someone bought a domain today that was registered in 2003 and which had built up hundreds of links over the years. All those links were effectively slapped with an invisible [...]

The DiggBar Compromise: Show Framebar Only To Logged In Digg Users

Apr 15, 2009 at 2:43pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Digg is promising a significant change to how its DiggBar framebar operates, one that should solve SEO concerns about how link credit is passed on but won't entirely remove misgivings about the framing of content. With the new implementation scheduled for next week, only those who are logged into Digg will see the DiggBar. So if you click on a DiggBar URL from Twitter, you won't see the DiggBar unless you've already been to Digg and have a logged in status. Just having a Digg cookie won't be enough, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose told me when we talked about the new implementation yesterd [...]

The Growth Of Framebars & Kevin Rose On The DiggBar

Apr 10, 2009 at 8:19pm ET by Danny Sullivan

The DiggBar has been out for about a week now. Since then, there continues to be concerns over twin issues of whether it robs sites of link love and frames their contents in a way that's unfair to publishers. I had a good conversation with Digg cofounder Kevin Rose today about these issues and how Digg is actively looking at ways to solve worries over the tool. For those unfamiliar with the DiggBar, it allows people to create a short URL that's useful in services like Twitter. Anyone clicking on a shortened URL made through Digg gets to a page with a DiggBar at the top. For example, [...]

URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?

Apr 4, 2009 at 12:20am ET by Danny Sullivan

URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these). The URL Shortener Mega Chart NOTE (March 2011): I'm hoping to update this article in the near future. Much of the basics are still valid. But you should also see Google URL Shortener Opened To T [...]

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