Search engines continue to go old school, encouraging people to "tag" content in a way that makes it feel like it's 1999 all over again. Today, Bing makes another push in that direction, making content you tag with "Bing Tags" more visibile. Honestly, I feel like this tagging crazy is simply Google and Bing falling down on the job. It used to be that we praised search engines for moving away from the tagging that was popular with them in the mid-to-late 1990s. That's because they were getting smart enough to know that every word on a page was effectively a tag rather than forcing human bein [...]

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The movement toward structured data markup (i.e., increasing use of standards like Open Graph, Schema.org, RDFa, etc.) has bothered me for awhile, but I could not exactly put my finger on the issues. A few weeks ago at SMX East, there were some great presentations on these topics, and I finally realized that I have many major reservations about the proliferation and use of these standards, on many levels (mostly from a publisher perspective; for end-users they are generally a very positive development). What Are These Standards? They sound complicated, but in layman's terms, I would say: [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | Schema.org | SEO: Tagging

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 really, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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A month ago, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced they will be supporting a new canonical tag that allows you to tell search engines that page X is a duplicate page to page Z. In a way, it is a 301 redirect, without the physical redirect. The tag is incredibly powerful, as are 301 redirects and using this tag should be done with caution and slowly. Matt Cutts posted a new video explaining how one should go about using this tag, being that it is so new. Here is the video: [...]

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In this era of Web 2.0, it seems that blogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, and wikis have been the buzzwords occupying most of the limelight. But personally, tagging is the Web 2.0 technology that excites me the most, because of its versatility and wide applicability. A tag, according to Wikipedia, is "a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information." More simply put (with due credit to Flickr.com): tags are like keyword or category labels, an [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | SEO: Tagging

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 [...]

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