I was happy. I was joyful. I thought the meta keywords tag had finally died last year. But Bing recently said that it does use it. After some back-and-forth, I can confirm further that it does, but as a signal for finding spammers, not for improving rank. Meta Keywords Tag 101 If you want the history of the meta keywords tag, how it emerged, how it declined, how to use it if you stupidly decide you still want to, see my detailed post from the past, Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines. Surprise! Bing Says Meta Keywords Is A Signal But rea [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Spamming | SEO: Tagging | Top News

One of the hot topics at SMX Advanced in Seattle this June was the best way to handle paginated sites. It seemed like the topic that would not go away, as it came up in panel after panel. The reason this happened is that it is a complicated topic. There are two major scenarios that we will examine, including a look at the potential solutions and the choices that publishers can make. No Place For Rel=Canonical The "The Really Complicated Technical SEO Infrastructure Issues" panel at SMX Advanced started with controversy when REI's Jonathan Colman said that REI.com benefitted from using rel [...]

Related Topics: Enterprise SEO | SEO: General | SEO: Tagging

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 [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Tagging

Oh, that this weren't true. Last week, Yahoo made news by disclosing that it had quietly dropped support for the meta keywords tag. As a long time hater of that tag and the insane questions it has produced, I was thrilled! But today, I see conclusively that Yahoo still supports the tag. The test was simple. I placed a unique word in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. This word -- xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk -- generated no results on Yahoo when I looked earlier this week. Today, when I searched, it brought back the Search Engine Land home page. Thus, Yahoo indeed ind [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Tagging | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | SEO: Writing & Body Copy | Top News | Yahoo: SEO

And then there were none. Yahoo has long been the only major search engine that supported the meta keywords tag. However, the search engine revealed today that like the other majors, it no longer supports it. The news came during the Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York today. The search engines were all asked about their support of the tag. Moderator Danny Sullivan noted that only Yahoo provided support of the tag -- prompting Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced "several" months ago. Bing doesn't [...]

Related Topics: SEO: General | SEO: Tagging | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | SEO: Writing & Body Copy | Top News | Yahoo: SEO