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I’m currently spending some time in the BA lounge at Tacoma airport doing some follow-ups on various SMX notes. I stumbled upon a note regarding robots.txt and the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) which I quickly want to share with all my fellow readers. weiterlesen

Some more search news published Feb 7, 2008:

The problem with pagination on CPM ad driven websites
CPM revenue is if course based on PVs (page views) because more page views also mean more ad views. But from a SEO perspective splitting up pages is not a very good idea because of various reasons: Link popularity (you’ll be only backlinked to the first page of the article) will only be build for one page, unique titles & metas will be very difficult to create, etc. This very interesting article is definitely worth reading.

Working conditions of people working in SEO
A very interesting German poll gathering some information on SEO working conditions (how long do you work, do you work freelance or as company employee, etc.). If you’re in SEO go vote.

I stumbled upon a few interesting articles definitely worth reading:

• Link title attribute vs. image alt tags: Which is better?
  Interesting article on ranking impacts of the two probably most known element attributes.
• How to avoid and elude Google’s Sandbox?
  A common problem especially when ranking new pages is the Google sandbox. Sandboxing can happen for example when the page can not be categorized or there are to few inbound and / or authoritative back links.
• Why storing URLs with truncated trailing slashes is an utterly idiocy
  Great summary on “invalid” URLs because of missing trailing slashes and why these URLs can damage page popularity.

That’s all for today…

I did some research for a client on how many links should be used per page or on a site-map because I only knew about Google saying not to use more then hundred links at once: weiterlesen

As I mentioned yesterday, there is a possibility to prevent Google from using the ODP description - and this also works for Yahoo! search results. But sometimes this is not the only source where Yahoo! gets it’s (editorial) SERP snippets from: In many cases they’re using their descriptions from the Yahoo! directory. So its kind of a consistent further development to support a tag (value) which prevents Yahoo! from doing so. weiterlesen

Do you sometimes ask yourself why Google displays a search result summary you neither have created (by using the meta description tag) nor can it be found on the page itself? This happens because Google then decides to use the description from it’s Open Directory Project (short: “ODP”) – most likely because in Google’s opinion this snippet is more relevant then the available meta data and / or the page content itself. weiterlesen