Dear Kalena…

I just read your article on SEM careers at Pandia and I have a strong feeling that you probably are the right person that I can air my career-question to.

I am Raj from Hyderabad, India and I am an engineering graduate. I worked as a Software Developer and am planning to shift my career to SEM/SEO. I have been reading as many article as I possibly could on SEO/SEM but unable to get that first break. Could you please answer the following questions for me?

1. Is it possible for a newbie on SEM/SEO to work remotely (from home)?

2. Where does a newbie make a beginning and how?

Regards

Raj

Hi Raj

There’s no reason why you can’t start a successful career in SEO and/or SEM working from home. As you’ve already read my “11 Reasons” article, you’ll know the benefits of gaining employment in the search industry.

If you need SEO / SEM training, there are plenty of options available these days, (including *cough* Search Engine College *cough*) but you should also start practising on your own sites and others as soon as possible. Hands-on experience is essential to competency in the field.

Once you feel confident with your newly acquired skills, offer to SEO sites pro-bono or for very little compensation, to help expand your experience. Charity or Not-For-Profit sites often need SEO services but don’t have the budget to hire experts.

Monitor industry job sites such as our SEM Jobs Board and join sites like Elance to bid for projects to gain freelance SEM work. If there is an appropriate opportunity in your location, offer to be an unpaid intern for a SEM agency for a month. The knowledge you will gain will be invaluable. Likewise, you could offer to do some voluntary freelance SEO or SEM work online from home for an agency you respect that is not necessarily in your region.

Review all the posts here in the Jobs and Salaries categories for more inspiration.

Best of luck!

Twitter began rolling out their controversial new Retweet functionality last week to quite a large number of beta testers, me included.

Old Skool Retweeting

In the past, when Twitter users wanted to repeat the tweet of somebody they followed, they would simply use the *RT* or *via* syntax in front of the twitter handle of the person whose tweet they were repeating, to signify attribution.

For example:

@kalena: wondering why monosyllabic isn’t.

@bob: RT @kalena wondering why monosyllabic isn’t.

@jane: wondering why monosyllabic isn’t. (via @kalena)

Some Twitter clients have built-in functionality to enable people to retweet other’s tweets automatically this way and add the RT syntax with one click.

Now, Twitter has introduced functionality that streamlines the process of retweeting and makes it more intuitive for the user.

New School Retweeting

If you’ve been granted access to Retweet beta, when you login to Twitter.com, you’ll see the following message about it at the top of your timeline:

“Hi there, you’re part of a beta group receiving this feature, which means you may start seeing retweets in a new way. People who don’t have this yet will see your retweets prefaced by *RT*”

Once Retweet is active in your account, you’ll see a new Retweets section in the side bar where you can see “Retweets by others”, “Retweets by you”, and “Your tweets, retweeted”:

Users that you follow will have a new retweet icon appear under their profile picture when you view their timelines. Hover your mouse over the icon and it says “Retweets from this user will appear in your timeline”.

Next to each tweet in your home timeline, you’ll now see the “Retweet” option as well as the “Reply” and “Favorite” options.

When you see a tweet you’d like to tell your followers about, click on the “Retweet” link and a popup will ask “Retweet to your followers?” and provide you with a Yes button to proceed or a X to cancel. Once you click Yes, the tweet will be sent out and appear ONLY to your followers. You also have the ability to permanently *undo* your retweet at any point.

Retweets sent this way by those you follow will be identifiable by a special Retweet icon next to them in your timeline. (Except, it seems, any retweets of YOUR tweets. A tweet that already exists in your timeline won’t reappear at the top if someone you follow retweets it, but it will be added to your RT list).

Retweets will also have extra attribution underneath them stating “Retweeted by [user] and [#] others” where “user” indicates the person who retweeted it and “#” represents the number of others who have retweeted the same tweet.

Retweets sent via the new system will only display the RT icon when you’re logged in to Twitter. When you’re viewing a timeline with new Retweets in it while logged out of Twitter, those tweets will just have “RT” in front of them and no attribution underneath.

You can see a visual breakdown of new retweeting in action here.

The Tweeps Are Revolting

Although I’d read about the new feature, I’ve been finding it hard to get my head around. Now that I’ve got beta access, I’m even more confused.

Judging by some of the Twitter commentary taking place between beta users, it seems I’m not the only one who is initially unimpressed.

A major sticking point for some users is the loss of the ability to edit or append comments to the tweet you are retweeting. This is a big change from old skool retweeting and has some users in knots.

Another major irritant for some beta testers is that Retweets by persons you follow will appear in your timeline in pure context – so even if you don’t follow the person who made the original tweet, you’ll see their Twitter avatar and tweet in your timeline with the “retweeted by” attribution underneath. Complaints about this have started already.

A poll launched by a Retweet beta user tells the story quite well. Asked “How do you feel about twitter’s new integrated retweet feature?”, 6% of poll takers claim to “love it”, while 43% “prefer the original method” of retweeting and the remaining respondents (51%) feel “It has potential but still needs work”.

Why Change?

So if the organic RT functionality was working so well, why did Twitter executives decide they needed to legitimize it? For a lot of reasons, as it turns out.

Organic retweeting had the following issues:

• attribution confusion
• too many identical retweets
• lost context due to editing original tweets
• faked RTs caused by persons falsely retweeting another user
• 140 character limitation making RT attribution challenging
• no trackability

But even though the new Retweet overcomes the disadvantages of the old skool retweet, users are clearly threatened by the changes.

I think it’s stirring people up mainly because the whole concept of retweeting was developed ad hoc by Twitter users. They began sharing tweets by people they followed with their own followers, adding “retweet” or “RT” in front of the tweet to indicate such.

The developers of Twitter apps caught on to the RT popularity and many of them added retweet functionality to their Twitter clients. Not surprisingly, Twitter users are protective of the function and have certain expectations when it comes to official integration of the functionality.

Rather than simply imitate 3rd party Twitter client developers and add a RT button on Twitter.com, Twitter executives wanted to build something with more scope.

According to his blog post this week, Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams (@Ev) fully expected the Retweet feature to be controversial. But, he says, the new feature resolves many of the technical issues that organic retweets were causing:

“The design is simple: There’s a retweet link by each tweet and, with two clicks, it will be sent on to your followers. This takes care of the mangled and messy problem because no one gets an opportunity to edit the tweet.”

“ The meta data (about who tweeted and who retweeted) is not in the tweet text itself, so they never have to be edited for length. Because they’re built natively into the system, they’re trackable. And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.”

Evan also has a response for people complaining about seeing the avatars of people they don’t follow in their timeline:

“The drawback is that it may be a little surprising (unpleasant even, for some) to discover avatars of people they don’t follow in their timeline. I ask those people to keep in mind the following: You’re already reading the content from these people via organic retweets. This is just giving you more context.”

Evan also says that retweet annotation, (where you can add a comment or hashtag to a retweet), may be added as a feature in a later version depending on demand.

A major factor that likely had a large influence on Retweet development but hasn’t really been touched upon is the impact of RTs on search.

Extensive retweeting can skew search queries both on Twitter Search and major search engines and the new Retweet functionality will filter out much of that redundancy. The new RT also adds meta data to each tweet you retweet, sending a clearer signal to search engines about what content users are finding popular and making it easier for users to search for specific tweets in full context.

Don’t Like It? Don’t Worry

If you’re not impressed by the new Retweet feature, don’t stress about it. From your Twitter dashboard, you can:

• Turn on and off retweets on a per-user basis. If you only want to see someone’s personally authored tweets, you can shut off their retweets altogether but still follow them.
• Permanently delete retweets from both your timeline and the timelines of persons who have retweeted you.
• Continue to use organic retweet and ignore the new functionality altogether. As Twitter staff keep stressing, the old skool method of retweeting will remain available to users.

Happy retweeting!

We’re not talking just puddles here. According to NASA, about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice were discovered, giving legitmacy to the idea that man could one day establish a lunar colony. Until this week, such theories of lunar living have been considered far-fetched.

The possibilities opened up by the discovery have captured the imagination of Google staff too. To pay special significance to the event, Google.com displayed a new Google Doodle (logo pictured) on Friday 13 celebrating the discovery. Clicking on the logo brought up search and news results featuring NASA’s announcement.

It’s not the first time Google’s gotten excited about the moon. In 2007 they announced a competition to the tune of USD 20 million for the first team to design a private robot that could land on the moon, roam for at least 500 metres and beam images back to earth. The competition is called the Google Lunar X Prize and runs until 2014.

Hi Kalena,

I just noticed that my company’s homepage has five meta description tags within the head tag. Will this have any negative ramifications? Thank you,

Heather

Hi Heather,

The Meta Description Tag in itself is not likely to have a significant effect on your rankings one way or another, but it is still important because more often than not, the snippet displayed in Google search results is taken from the description tag.

Using a description tag therefore gives you some control over the “message” you are providing to searchers about what your page is about.

Having multiple description tags on the same page, will not provide any SEO benefit – only the first one will be considered – the rest will probably be ignored. However, there is a chance that search engines could consider multiple tags as “spammy”.

There is NO good reason to have multiple description tags on your site – at best it is proof of lazy coding, which increases the size of you page and slows down page load times – at worst it could be considered spamming and may result in search penalties.
What about Keyword and Robots?

Using multiple Keyword and Robot Meta Tags are also probably not a good idea. Google will aggregate the content for multiple Robots tags (but don’t advise using more than one). It is not clear how multiple keyword tags are treated – but these days their use is mostly irrelevant anyway.
Duplicate Descriptions?

While we are talking about Description Tags… You should also try not to have “duplicate” description tags – i.e. multiple pages with the same description tag.

The fact that Google webmaster tools goes to the trouble to flag duplicate descriptions as a “warning”, should provide an indication that Google doesn’t think this is a good idea either. Description tags should be unique, and provide a succinct (and keyword rich) description of the content of the page.

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

The email announced that the recipient had been granted a free upgrade to Velocity Gold, the Gold level membership of Virgin Blue’s frequent flyer programme for a period of one year. The email went on to describe perks available to Gold members when travelling including:

• Free Lounge membership, so you can catch up on work, relax and escape the airport crowds.
• Priority check-in.
• Up to 32kg of checked baggage at no cost.
• Two personalised baggage tags

No reason for the unexpected upgrade was given, apart from “you came so close to making it on your own”, suggesting that the recipient’s Velocity points for the past 12 months came close to the number required to qualify for Gold status. Except they didn’t. At least not in my case. Not even close. You normally need to reach 50,000 points to qualify.

My husband received the same email, as did many others, judging by the discussion on Twitter shortly thereafter.

Still, it was a delightful surprise. Feeling chuffed, I click on a link within the email to an explanation of Velocity Gold. ONOZ. It led to a bizarre error message stating that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake:

Friday the 13th strike
Oops! Due to an error, you may have received an email regarding a Gold upgrade by mistake. Please disregard the free upgrade communication. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Virgin Blue is yet to offer any explanation for the error, apart from a single tweet blaming the email screw up on Friday the 13th. The backlash on Twitter so far has been brutal. Result? Gold Standard Marketing FAIL.

What do you think? Should Virgin Blue honour their original offer? Or is their Friday 13th excuse enough? Please add your comments below.

UPDATE 1: According to @bengrubb, Virgin Blue is blaming an IT glitch for the problem.

UPDATE 2: I created a new hash tag on Twitter for the incident called #velocitygate and it seems to have taken off.

UPDATE 3: Not sure when it went up, but the Velocity Rewards site now features an apology front and center of their home page. It’s a step in the right direction:

UPDATE 4: According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today (17 November), the email glitch was human error, pure and simple and accompanied by tears of panic as it was posted out to over 1 million recipients by mistake. No action will be taken by Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over the glitch and if Velocity members still have an issue, they are being advised to contact the airline directly. Drama over, move along please, nothing to see here.

Similar to the Twitter / Facebook integration, now when you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, to alert your followers on both LinkedIn AND Twitter, as well as real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. Simply edit your settings on LinkedIn to include a Twitter account to synch with and you’re good to go. LinkedIn have integrated a checkbox under the status field so your updates are automatically tweeted if you check the box.

Twitter users can also update their LinkedIn status from Twitter and Twitter clients, via the addition of the #in hashtag in a tweet.

Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have likened the partnership to the “perfect combination” of peanut butter and chocolate. So I guess those of you who like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups should be thrilled.

On another site I ran into the use of noscript tag for SEO.

What do you think of the use of this if used to add keywords relevant to the site?

Thanks

Jena

Hi Jena,

For those who aren’t familiar with the noscript tag – despite great advancements in search technology over the years, search bots still have trouble reading content contained within scripted sections of web content (such as JavaScript, Flash etc.). To remedy this, the noscript tag was introduced so that web developers could display relevant content that the search bots and browsers that didn’t support scripting could see.

As you could imagine, it didn’t take long before the tag was exploited and used for keyword stuffing which resulted in penalties.

There are still a lot of positive ways to use this tag that will not result in penalties – such as embedding links if you have a script-based navigation structure and there’s certainly no harm in using it to include relevant content or keywords (as long as it matches the content contained within the scripted version of the page). But if you try and exploit this, you’ll end-up running into troubles.

However, if you’re looking to use this tag to improve the on-site SEO aspects of a website – my advice would be to create a script-free architecture (through the use of CSS) and work on creating content that will be visible to bots and users without the requirement of such tags. This will not only have a better impact on the SEO of your site, but also improve the functionality of your site across a wider variety of browsers and mobile devices (which commonly also have issues displaying scripted content).

Hope this helps

Peter Newsome
SiteMost Search Engine Optimisation

Google engineers have been busy ensuring the new search infrastructure improves Google’s indexing speed and ability to scale as the web grows exponentially. To help in this quest, they made a web developer preview of Caffeine available in August and asked for public feedback. What wasn’t made clear by Google was exactly when the rollout would take place.

Google has ended speculation about that with their actions this week. Google has closed the Caffeine Sandbox from public viewing, replacing it with a message thanking testers for their feedback and announcing that Caffeine is *ready for a larger audience*.

Part of the message reads:

“Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

Seen any caffeinated Google SERPs yet? Let me know via comments below.

Dear Kalena…

I have been on the internet since 2006, I re-designed my site and for the past year it still has only indexed 16 pages out of 132.

Why doesn’t google index the entire site? I use a XML site map. I also wanted to know if leaving my old product pages up will harm my ratings. I have the site map setup to only index the new stuff and leave the old alone. I have also got the robots.txt file doing this as well. What should I do?

Jason

Hi Jason

I’ve taken a look at your site and I see a number of red flags:

• Google hasn’t stored a cache of your home page. That’s weird. But maybe not so weird if you’ve stopped Google indexing your *old* pages.
• I can’t find your robots.txt file. The location it should be in leads to a 404 page that contains WAY too many links to your product pages. The sheer number of links on that page and the excessive keyword repetition may have tripped a Googlebot filter. Google will be looking for your robots.txt file in the same location that I did.
• Your XML sitemap doesn’t seem to contain links to all your pages. It should.
• Your HTML code contains duplicate title tags. Not necessarily a problem for Google, but it’s still extraneous code.

Apart from those things, your comments above worry me. What do you mean by “old product pages”? Is the content still relevant? Do you still sell those products? If the answer is no to both, then remove them or 301 redirect them to replacement pages.

Why have you only set up your sitemap and robots.txt to index your new pages? No wonder Google hasn’t indexed your whole site. Googlebot was probably following links from your older pages and now it can’t. Your old pages contain links to your new ones right? So why would you deliberately sabotage the ability to have your new pages indexed? Assuming I’m understanding your actions correctly, any rankings and traffic you built up with your old pages have likely gone also.

Some general advice to fix the issues:

• Run your site through the Spider Test to see how search engines index it.
• Remove indexing restrictions in your robots-txt file and move it to the most logical place.
• Add all your pages to your XML sitemap and change all the priority tags from 1  (sheesh!).
• Open a Google Webmaster Tools account and verify your site. You’ll be able to see exactly how many pages of your site Google has indexed and when Googlebot last visited. If Google is having trouble indexing the site, you’ll learn about it and be given advice for how to fix it.
• You’ve got a serious case of code bloat on your home page. The more code you have, the more potential indexing problems you risk. Shift all that excess layout code to a CSS file for Pete’s sake.
• The number of outgoing links on your home page is extraordinary. Even Google says don’t put more than 100 links on a single page. You might want to heed that advice.

Googe Dashboard is basically an access point for all your Google logins and tools associated with your Google account, as well as a summary of your usage of those tools.

From the official blog post:

“In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.”

From the Dashboard, you can now manage your settings for and view usage of more than 20 products, including:

• Google Alerts
• Blogger accounts
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Google Docs
• Gmail
• iGoogle / Google Gadgets
• Orkut
• Latitude
• YouTube
• Picasa
• Web History
• Product Search
• Google Profile
• Google Reader
• GTalk

Google is planning to add even more products to the Dashboard, such as:

• Google Analytics
• Google AdSense
• Google AdWords
• Audio Ads
• Google Base
• Local Business Center
• Google Page Creator
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Subscribed Links
• Google Wave
• Website Optimizer

To find the Google Dashboard, sign in to your Google account, then click on the Settings link from the Google Home Page and choose Google Account Settings from the drop down menu. This will open your Google Accounts page. From there you’ll see a new link under Personal Settings called Dashboard – View Data Stored With This Account. Click on that link and you’ll be prompted to enter your password again before being taken to the Dashboard page.

If you’re already logged into your Google Account, you can access the Dashboard by typing in https://www.google.com/dashboard/. All data stored in your Dashboard is private unless indicated by the shared icon as visible to others.

Having viewed my own Dashboard and usage data, I can understand why privacy experts and bloggers are freaked out. It’s quite disconcerting to see exactly how much Google knows about you and your online history. People have been concerned enough about the search history tracking built into the Google Toolbar, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Dashboard proves that Google is collecting much, much more data about your online activities than you might think. In the wrong hands, this information could easily present opportunities for mass identity theft.

However, one of the major prompts for launching Dashboard was to give people back some element of control over how their data is stored by Google. This is a step towards transparency after all – and as their official blog post states – they are the first major Internet company to offer this degree of control.

So while it’s a little alarming to witness so much of your personal data stored by the Big G, you at least now have the ability to edit and/or permanently remove it. (Or so they say?)