SEO

The on-going debate regarding too many “black hat” content at SMX Seattle still hasn’t ended. As I wrote a few days ago the initial post was made by Bruce Clays Lisa Barone.

In addition to that “SEO Chick” Lisa D. wrote a great post which a completely agree with, definitely wort reading. Also be sure to check the comments over there, where Danny Sullivan clarified some of his statements (he also apologized for his reaction on “blaming” some of the speakers for their conference content) – pretty interesting what’s going on there.

Also be sure not to miss reactions on Sphinn and the “No, Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming” post on SearchEngineLand.

Just a short note on Google Trends, which is quite popular since its launch sometime in 2006. Google finally added a numeric scale which – of course – does not show exact search volume figures; instead “Trends scales the first entered term so that its average search traffic in the chosen time period is 1.00. Then, each additional term is scaled relative to the first.”

JoJo did some more research on that (and has some nice pictures available), also be sure to check out the Google blog on this.

Just some quick links defenitely worth reading:

• Lisa Barone over at Bruce Clay asserts that SMX Advanced goes to the dark site – it’s not just black and white folks… However it’s a very interesting discussion going on there, be sure to check it out! A nice reply on that can be found here, even though I do not completely agree with all points Eric made it’s pretty simple in case of “corporate SEO”: Black is simply not an option but you absolutely should now what the enemy does so you have to know about black hat SEO!
• At SMX Advanced there was a session called “International SEO” which I could not attend because of a meeting, there is an interesing recap over at searchmarketingstandard.com.
• And again some coverage from SMX, again a session I did not attend to (because of another parallel session): Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues – check it out.

That’s it for now

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