Seo Quark

And the San Francisco International Airport

To start, Google has hit up some of the largest retailers, airports and other transit stations in both the United States and Japan. Google offers a list of indoor map locations in their help area. If you want add your floor plan to be mapped out too, Google even provides a simple four-step process to make it happen.

Google has also created an interactive tutorial and walkthrough of the new Google Maps features.

What are your thoughts on the new features? Will you submit your organization's blueprints to be indexed by Google for the world to see? Let us know and share your comments below.

Google Introduces Verbatim Searching

2011-11-19T19:52:00.002-08:00

In response to user requests, Google has added a tool that explicitly searches for exactly and onlyyour search term. This verbatim search removes personalized, corrected, suggested, related, and non-inclusive results.

The Verbatim Tool

After conducting any standard search, users can navigate to the left menu on the SERP and choose "More search options" > "Verbatim." This will direct the user to a new search results page that eliminates several types of results.

On the verbatim page, users will see only results that:

Include all their search terms.
Match their exact spelling.
Use the same tense (e.g., "is" and "was" will be seen as distinct).
Use the same verb form (e.g., "swimming" and "swim" will be seen as distinct).
Use the same plural vs singular form (e.g., "hat" and "hats" will be seen as distinct).

This means that pages that would normally be included simply won't appear. Some pages set for omission in this case would be those that: use alternate forms or tenses; use synonyms; auto-correct spelling; or are personalized based on the history and social connections of the user.

Verbatim search will replace the "+" functionality in search queries. While putting a phrase in quotes (e.g., "this is my query") will still pull a search for sites that use the exact phrase and spelling, the verbatim search – as noted above – strips down the results to a far greater degree.

Google also noted that they are "applying similar ideas directly to [their] algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger." This likely means that as users choose to use verbatim searches, Google will gain a better understanding of when their suggestions and corrections are effective and times when they should have been avoided.

Yahoo Adds Recipe, Shopping, Entertainment Search Features

2011-11-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

Yahoo, which recently rolled out redesigned search results, is adding some new search options just in time for the holidays. Users can now do advanced searches for recipes, use Yahoo for quick comparison shopping, and get richer updates for entertainment queries.

Advanced Recipe Search

When users enter a query that is clearly related to recipes, they will now see rich results at the top of the page. Those results provide mouth-watering images, the average star rating of dishes, the recipe source, and a quick link to details such as required ingredients and preparation time.

Users will also have the option to navigate to tabs that filter the recipes into popular categories, such as quick recipes or low-calorie options. They can then narrow the results even further by using the "filter by ingredient" option at the top-right. If they find something really amazing, they can also share the content to Facebook in just a few clicks.

Beyond the rich entry in the SERP, the "Recipes" tab allows users to sort and filter content based on ingredients, star rating, prep time, and more.

New Shopping Searches

As we near the buying frenzy that is post-Thanksgiving in the U.S., the search engines are all likely to launch new shopping features. Yahoo is no exception, and this year they are adding options to search "for a product or category, like watches or cameras, and then easily compare products, find coupons and deals, and check out helpful buying guides."

Users can also compare core information for up to five products, with Yahoo compiling product specs, reviews, warranty information, and more. Users can also post the content they search for on Facebook to ask for the feedback of friends.

The Improved Entertainment Widget

When users conduct searches for entertainment-related topics, such as the name of a celebrity, they will now get a top widget that features quick access to news stories, recent Twitter posts, and other relevant content; for musicians, album information and performances may be available, for example.

The entertainment improvements strengthen Yahoo's strongest position; the site is well-known for its entertainment news and continues to see high volumes of traffic on that topic despite a diminishing share of search.

Are these changes enough to make you want to use Yahoo this winter? What else could Yahoo provide to win you over? And what sort of changes do you expect Bing and Google to implement in the coming weeks?

Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World

2011-11-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

“No one saw the panda uprising coming. One day, they were frolicking in our zoos. The next, they were frolicking in our entrails. They came for the identical twins first, then the gingers, and then the rest of us. I finally trapped one and asked him the question burning in all of our souls – 'Why?!' He just smiled and said ‘You humans all look alike to me.’”

- Sgt. Jericho “Bamboo” Jackson

Ok, maybe we’re starting to get a bit melodramatic about this whole Panda thing. While it’s true that Panda didn’t change everything about SEO, I think it has been a wake-up call about SEO issues we’ve been ignoring for too long.

One of those issues is duplicate content. While duplicate content as an SEO problem has been around for years, the way Google handles it has evolved dramatically and seems to only get more complicated with every update. Panda has upped the ante even more.

So, I thought it was a good time to cover the topic of duplicate content, as it stands in 2011, in depth. This is designed to be a comprehensive resource – a complete discussion of what duplicate content is, how it happens, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it. Maybe we’ll even round up a few rogue pandas along the way.

I. What Is Duplicate Content?

Let’s start with the basics. Duplicate content exists when any two (or more) pages share the same content. If you’re a visual learner, here’s an illustration for you:

Easy enough, right? So, why does such a simple concept cause so much difficulty? One problem is that people often make the mistake of thinking that a “page” is a file or document sitting on their web server. To a crawler (like Googlebot), a page is any unique URL it happens to find, usually through internal or external links. Especially on large, dynamic sites, creating two URLs that land on the same content is surprisingly easy (and often unintentional).

II. Why Do Duplicates Matter?

Duplicate content as an SEO issue was around long before the Panda update, and has taken many forms as the algorithm has changed. Here’s a brief look at some major issues with duplicate content over the years…

The Supplemental Index

In the early days of Google, just indexing the web was a massive computational challenge. To deal with this challenge, some pages that were seen as duplicates or just very low quality were stored in a secondary index called the “supplemental” index. These pages automatically became 2nd-class citizens, from an SEO perspective, and lost any competitive ranking ability.

Around late 2006, Google integrated supplemental results back into the main index, but those results were still often filtered out. You know you’ve hit filtered results anytime you see this warning at the bottom of a Google SERP:

Even though the index was unified, results were still “omitted”, with obvious consequences for SEO. Of course, in many cases, these pages really were duplicates or had very little search value, and the practical SEO impact was negligible, but not always.

The Crawl “Budget”

It’s always tough to talk limits when it comes to Google, because people want to hear an absolute number. There is no absolute crawl budget or fixed number of pages that Google will crawl on a site. There is, however, a point at which Google may give up crawling your site for a while, especially if you keep sending spiders down winding paths.

Although the “budget” isn’t absolute, even for a given site, you can get a sense of Google’s crawl allocation for your site in Google Webmaster Tools (under “Diagnostics” > “Crawl Stats”):

So, what happens when Google hits so many duplicate paths and pages that it gives up for the day? Practically, the pages you want indexed may not get crawled. At best, they probably won’t be crawled as often.

The Indexation “Cap”

Similarly, there’s no set “cap” to how many pages of a site Google will index. There does seem to be adynamic limit, though, and that limit is relative to the authority of the site. If you fill up your index with useless, duplicate pages, you may push out more important, deeper pages. For example, if you load up on 1000s of internal search results, Google may not index all of your product pages. Many people make the mistake of thinking that more indexed pages is better. I’ve seen too many situations where the opposite was true. All else being equal, bloated indexes dilute your ranking ability.

The Penalty Debate

Long before Panda, a debate would erupt every few months over whether or not there was a duplicate content penalty. While these debates raised valid points, they often focused on semantics – whether or not duplicate content caused a Capital-P Penalty. While I think the conceptual difference between penalties and filters is important, the upshot for a site owner is often the same. If a page isn’t ranking (or even indexed) because of duplicate content, then you’ve got a problem, no matter what you call it.

The Panda Update

Since Panda (starting in February 2011), the impact of duplicate content has become much more severe in some cases. It used to be that duplicate content could only harm that content itself. If you had a duplicate, it might go supplemental or get filtered out. Usually, that was ok. In extreme cases, a large number of duplicates could bloat your index or cause crawl problems and start impacting other pages.

Panda made duplicate content part of a broader quality equation – now, a duplicate content problem can impact your entire site. If you’re hit by Panda, non-duplicate pages may lose ranking power, stop ranking altogether, or even fall out of the index. Duplicate content is no longer an isolated problem.

III. Three Kinds of Duplicates

Before we dive into examples of duplicate content and the tools for dealing with them, I’d like to cover 3 broad categories of duplicates. They are: (1) True Duplicates, (2) Near Duplicates, and (3) Cross-domain Duplicates. I’ll be referencing these 3 main types in the examples later in the post.

(1) True Duplicates

A true duplicate is any page that is 100% identical (in content) to another page. These pages only differ by the URL:

(2) Near Duplicates

A near duplicate differs from another page (or pages) by a very small amount – it could be a block of text, an image, or even the order of the content:

An exact definition of “near” is tough to pin down, but I’ll discuss some examples in detail later.

(3) Cross-domain Duplicates

A cross-domain duplicate occurs when two websites share the same piece of content:

These duplicates could be either “true” or “near” duplicates. Contrary to what some people believe, cross-domain duplicates can be a problem even for legitimate, syndicated content.

IV. Tools for Fixing Duplicates

This may seem out of order, but I want to discuss the tools for dealing with duplicates before I dive into specific examples. That way, I can recommend the appropriate tools to fix each example without confusing anyone.

(1) 404 (Not Found)

Of course, the simplest way to deal with duplicate content is to just remove it and return a 404 error. If the content really has no value to visitors or search, and if it has no significant inbound links or traffic, then total removal is a perfectly valid option.

(2) 301 Redirect

Another way to remove a page is via a 301-redirect. Unlike a 404, the 301 tells visitors (humans and bots) that the page has permanently moved to another location. Human visitors seamlessly arrive at the new page. From an SEO perspective, most of the inbound link authority is also passed to the new page. If your duplicate content has a clear canonical URL, and the duplicate has traffic or inbound links, then a 301-redirect may be a good option.

(3) Robots.txt

Another option is to leave the duplicate content available for human visitors, but block it for search crawlers. The oldest and probably still easiest way to do this is with a robots.txt file (generally located in your root directory). It looks something like this:

One advantage of robots.txt is that it’s relatively easy to block entire folders or even URL parameters. The disadvantage is that it’s an extreme and sometimes unreliable solution. While robots.txt is effective for blocking uncrawled content, it’s not great for removing content already in the index. The major search engines also seem to frown on its overuse, and don’t generally recommend robots.txt for duplicate content.

(4) Meta Robots

You can also control the behavior of search bots at the page level, with a header-level directive known as the“Meta Robots” tag (or sometimes “Meta Noindex”). In its simplest form, the tag looks something like this:

This directive tells search bots not to index this particular page or follow links on it. Anecdotally, I find it a bit more SEO-friendly than Robots.txt, and because the tag can be created dynamically with code, it can often be more flexible.

The other common variant for Meta Robots is the content value “NOINDEX, FOLLOW”, which allows bots to crawl the paths on the page without adding the page to the search index. This can be useful for pages like internal search results, where you may want to block certain variations (I’ll discuss this more later) but still follow the paths to product pages.

One quick note: there is no need to ever add a Meta Robots tag with “INDEX, FOLLOW” to a page. All pages are indexed and followed by default (unless blocked by other means).

(5) Rel=Canonical

In 2009, the search engines banded together to create the Rel=Canonical directive, sometimes called just “Rel-canonical” or the “Canonical Tag”. This allows webmasters to specify a canonical version for any page. The tag goes in the page header (like Meta Robots), and a simple example looks like this:

When search engines arrive on a page with a canonical tag, they attribute the page to the canonical URL, regardless of the URL they used to reach the page. So, for example, if a bot reached the above page using the URL “www.example.com/index.html”, the search engine would not index the additional, non-canonical URL. Typically, it seems that inbound link-juice is also passed through the canonical tag.

It’s important to note that you need to clearly understand what the proper canonical page is for any given website template. Canonicalizing your entire site to just one page or the wrong pages can be catastrophic.

(6) Google URL Removal

In Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), you can request that an individual page (or directory) be manually removed from the index. Click on “Site configuration” > “Crawler access”, and you’ll see a series of 3 tabs. Click on the 3rd tab, “Remove URL”, to get this:

Since this tool only removes one URL or path at a time and is completely at Google’s discretion, it’s usually a last-ditch approach to duplicate content. I just want to be thorough, though, and cover all of your options. An important technical note: you need to 404, Robots.txt block or Meta Noindex the page before requesting removal. Removal via GWT is primarily a last defense when Google is being stubborn.

Update: In the comments, Taylor pointed out that Google lifted the requirement that you have to first block the page to request removal. Removal requests can be done without blocking via other means now, but the removals only last 90 days.

(7) Google Parameter Blocking

You can also use GWT to specify URL parameters that you want Google to ignore (which essentially blocks indexation of pages with those parameters). If you click on “Site Configuration” > “URL parameters”, you’ll get a list something like this:

This list shows URL parameters that Google has detected, as well as the settings for how those parameters should be crawled. Keep in mind that the “Let Googlebot decide” setting doesn’t reflect other blocking tactics, like Robots.txt or Meta Robots. If you click on “Edit”, you’ll get the following options:

Google changed these recently, and I find the new version a bit confusing, but essentially “Yes” means the parameter is important and should be indexed, while “No” means the parameter indicates a duplicate. The GWT tool seems to be effective (and can be fast), but I don’t usually recommend it as a first line of defense. It won’t impact other search engines, and it can’t be read by SEO tools and monitoring software. It could also be modified by Google at any time.

(8) Bing URL Removal

Bing Webmaster Center (BWC) has tools very similar to GWT’s options above. Actually, I think the Bing parameter blocking tool came before Google’s version. To request a URL removal in Bing, click on the “Index” tab and then “Block URLs” > “Block URL and Cache”. You’ll get a pop-up like this:

BWC actually gives you a wider range of options, including blocking a directory and your entire site. Obviously, that last one usually isn’t a good idea.

(9) Bing Parameter Blocking

In the same section of BWC (“Index”), there’s an option called “URL Normalization”. The name implies Bing treats this more like canonicalization, but there’s only one option – “ignore”. Like Google, you get a list of auto-detected parameters and can add or modify them:

As with the GWT tools, I’d consider the Bing versions to be a last resort. Generally, I’d only use these tools if other methods have failed, and one search engine is just giving you grief.

(10) Rel=Prev & Rel=Next

Just this year (September 2011), Google gave us a new tool for fighting a particular form of near-duplicate content – paginated search results. I’ll describe the problem in more detail in the next section, but essentially paginated results are any searches where the results are broken up into chunks, with each chunk (say, 10 results) having its own page/URL.

You can now tell Google how paginated content connects by using a pair of tags much like Rel-Canonical. They’re called Rel-Prev and Rel-Next. Implementation is a bit tricky, but here’s a simple example:

In this example, the search bot has landed on page 3 of search results, so you need two tags: (1) a Rel-Prev pointing to page 2, and (2) a Rel-Next pointing to page 4. Where it gets tricky is that you’re almost always going to have to generate these tags dynamically, as your search results are probably driven by one template.

While initial results suggest these tags do work, they’re not currently honored by Bing, and we really don’t have much data on their effectiveness. I’ll briefly discuss other methods for dealing with paginated content in the next section.

(11) Syndication-Source

In November of 2010, Google introduced a set of tags for publishers of syndicated content. The Meta Syndication-Source directive can be used to indicate the original source of a republished article, as follows:

Even Google’s own advice on when to use this tag and when to use a cross-domain canonical tag are a little bit unclear. Google launched this tag as “experimental”, and I’m not sure they’ve publicly announced a status change. It’s something to watch, but don’t rely on it.

(12) Internal Linking

It’s important to remember that your best tool for dealing with duplicate content is to not create it in the first place. Granted, that’s not always possible, but if you find yourself having to patch dozens of problems, you may need to re-examine your internal linking structure and site architecture.

When you do correct a duplication problem, such as with a 301-redirect or the canonical tag, it’s also important to make your other site cues reflect that change. It’s amazing how often I see someone set a 301 or canonical to one version of a page, and then continue to link internally to the non-canonical version and fill their XML sitemap with non-canonical URLs. Internal links are strong signals, and sending mixed signals will only cause you problems.

(13) Don’t Do Anything

Finally, you can let the search engines sort it out. This is what Google recommended you do for years, actually. Unfortunately, in my experience, especially for large sites, this is almost always a bad idea. It’s important to note, though, that not all duplicate content is a disaster, and Google certainly can filter some of it out without huge consequences. If you only have a few isolated duplicates floating around, leaving them alone is a perfectly valid option.

V. Examples of Duplicate Content

So, now that we’ve worked backwards and sorted out the tools for fixing duplicate content, what does it actually look like in the wild? I’m going to cover a wide range of examples that represent the issues you can expect on a real website. Throughout this section, I’ll reference the solutions listed in Section IV – for example, a reference to a 301-redirect will cite (IV-2).

(1) “www” vs. Non-www

For sitewide duplicate content, this is probably the biggest culprit. Whether you’ve got bad internal paths or have attracted links and social mentions to the wrong URL, you’ve got both the”www” version and non-www (root domain) version of your URLs indexed:

Most of the time, a 301-redirect (IV-2) is your best choice here. This is a common problem, and Google is good about honoring redirects for cases like these.

You may also want to set your preferred address in Google Webmaster Tools. Under “Site Configuration” > “Settings”, you should see a section called “Preferred domain”:

There’s a quirk in GWT where, to set a preferred domain, you may have to create GWT profiles for both your “www” and non-www versions of the site. While this is annoying, it won’t cause any harm. If you’re having major canonicalization issues, I’d recommend it. If you’re not, then you can leave well enough alone and let Google determine the preferred domain.

(2) Staging Servers

While much less common than (1), this problem is often also caused by subdomains. In a typical scenario, you’re working on a new site design for a relaunch, your dev team sets up a subdomain with the new site, and they accidentally leave it open to crawlers. What you end up with is two sets of indexed URLS that look something like this:

Your best bet is to prevent this problem before it happens, by blocking the staging site with Robots.txt (IV-3). If you find your staging site indexed, though, you’ll probably need to 301-redirect (IV-2) those pages or Meta Noindex them (IV-4).

(3) Trailing Slashes ("/")

This is a problem people often have questions about, although it's less of an SEO issue than it once was. Technically, in the original HTTP protocol, a URL with a trailing slash and one without it were different URLs. Here's a simple example:

These days, almost all browsers automatically add the trailing slash behind the scenes and resolve both versions the same way. Matt Cutts did a recent video suggesting that Google automatically canonicalizes these URLs in "the vast majority of cases".

(4) Secure (https) Pages

If your site has secure pages (designated by the “https:” protocol), you may find that both secure and non-secure versions are getting indexed. This most frequently happens when navigation links from secure pages – like shopping cart pages – also end up secured, usually due to relative paths, creating variants like this:

Ideally, these problems are solved by the site-architecture itself. In many cases, it’s best to Noindex (IV-4) secure pages – shopping cart and check-out pages have no place in the search index. After the fact, though, your best option is a 301-redirect (IV-2). Be cautious with any sitewide solutions – if you 301-redirect all “https:” pages to their “http:” versions, you could end up removing security entirely. This is a tricky problem to solve and should be handled carefully.

(5) Home-page Duplicates

While problems (1)-(3) can all create home-page duplicates, the home-page has a couple unique problems of its own. The most typical problem is that both the root domain and the actual home-page document name get indexed. For example:

Although this problem can be solved with a 301-redirect (IV-2), it’s often a good idea to put a canonical tag on your home-page (IV-5). Home pages are uniquely afflicted by duplicates, and a proactive canonical tag can prevent a lot of problems.

Of course, it’s important to also be consistent with your internal paths (IV-12). If you want the root version of the URL to be canonical, but then link to “/index.htm” in your navigation, you’re sending mixed signals to Google every time the crawlers visit.

(6) Session IDs

Some websites (especially e-commerce platforms) tag each new visitor with a tracking parameter. On occasion, that parameter ends up in the URL and gets indexed, creating something like this:

That image really doesn’t do the problem justice, because in reality you can end up with a duplicate for every single session ID and page combination that gets indexed. Session IDs in the URL can easily add 1000s of duplicate pages to your index.

The best option, if possible on your site/platform, is to remove the session ID from the URL altogether and store it in a cookie. There are very few good reasons to create these URLs, and no reason to let bots crawl them. If that’s not feasible, implementing the canonical tag (IV-5) sitewide is a good bet. If you really get stuck, you can block the parameter in Google Webmaster Tools (IV-7) and Bing Webmaster Central (IV-9).

(7) Affiliate Tracking

This problem looks a lot like (6) and happens when sites provide a tracking variable to their affiliates. This variable is typically appended to landing page URLs, like so:

The damage is usually a bit less extreme than (5), but it can still cause large-scale duplication. The solutions are similar to session IDs. Ideally, you can capture the affiliate ID in a cookie and 301-redirect (IV-3) to the canonical version of the page. Otherwise, you’ll probably either need to use canonical tags (IV-5) or block the affiliate URL parameter.

(8) Duplicate Paths

Having duplicate paths to a page is perfectly fine, but when duplicate paths generate duplicate URLs, then you’ve got a problem. Let’s say a product page can be reached one of 3 ways:

Here, the iPad2 product page can be reached by 2 categories and a user-generated tag. User-generated tags are especially problematic, because they can theoretically spawn unlimited versions of a page.

Ideally, these path-based URLs shouldn’t be created at all. However a page is navigated to, it should only have one URL for SEO purposes. Some will argue that including navigation paths in the URL is a positive cue for site visitors, but even as someone with a usability background, I think the cons almost always outweigh the pros here.

If you already have variations indexed, then a 301-redirect (IV-2) or canonical tag (IV-5) are probably your best options. In many cases, implementing the canonical tag will be easier, since there may be too many variations to easily redirect. Long-term, though, you’ll need to re-evaluate your site architecture.

(9) Functional Parameters

Functional parameters are URL parameters that change a page slightly but have no value for search and are essentially duplicates. For example, let’s say that all of your product pages have a printable version, and that version has its own URL:

Here, the “print=1” URL variable indicates a printable version, which normally would have the same content but a modified template. Your best bet is to not index these at all, with something like a Meta Noindex (IV-4), but you could also use a canonical tag (IV-5) to consolidate these pages.

(10) International Duplicates

These duplicates occur when you have content for different countries which share the same language, all hosted on the same root domain (it could be subfolders or subdomains). For example, you may have an English version of your product pages for the US, UK, and Australia:

Unfortunately, this one’s a bit tough – in some cases, Google will handle it perfectly well and rank the appropriate content in the appropriate countries. In other cases, even with proper geo-targeting, they won’t. It’s often better to target the language itself than the country, but there are legitimate reasons to split off country-specific content, such as pricing.

If your international content does get treated as duplicate content, there’s no easy answer. If you 301-redirect, you lose the page for visitors. If you use the canonical tag, then Google will only rank one version of the page. The “right” solution can be highly situational and really depends on the risk-reward tradeoff (and the scope of the filter/penalty).

(11) Search Sorts

So far, all of the examples I’ve given have been true duplicates. I’d like to dive into a few examples of “near” duplicates, since that concept is a bit fuzzy. A few common examples pop up with internal search engines, which tend to spin off many variants – sortable results, filters, and paginated results being the most frequent problems.

Search sort duplicates pop up whenever a sort (ascending/descending) creates a separate URL. While the two sorted results are technically different pages, they add no additional value to the search index and contain the same content, just in a different order. URLs might look like:

In most cases, it’s best just to block the sortable versions completely, usually by adding a Meta Noindex (IV-4) selectively to pages called with that parameter. In a pinch, you could block the sort parameter in Google Webmaster Tools (IV-7) and Bing Webmaster Central (IV-9).

(12) Search Filters

Search filters are used to narrow an internal search – it could be price, color, features, etc. Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:

The solution here is similar to (11) – don’t index the filters. As long as Google has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good.

(13) Search Pagination

Pagination is an easy problem to describe and an incredibly difficult one to solve. Any time you split internal search results into separate pages, you have paginated content. The URLs are easy enough to visualize:

Of course, over 100s of results, one search can easily spin out dozens of near duplicates. While the results themselves differ, many important features of the pages (Titles, Meta Descriptions, Headers, copy, template, etc.) are identical. Add to that the problem that Google isn’t a big fan of “search within search” (having their search pages land on yours).

In the past, Google has said to let them sort pagination out – problem is, they haven’t done it very well. Recently, Google introduced Rel=Prev and Rel=Next (IV-10). Initial data suggests these tags work, but we don’t have much data, they’re difficult to implement, and Bing doesn’t currently support them.

You have 3 other, viable options (in my opinion), although how and when they’re viable depends a lot on the situation:

You can Meta Noindex,Follow pages 2+ of search results. Let Google crawl the paginated content but don’t let them index it.
You can create a “View All” page that links to all search results at one URL, and let Google auto-detect it. This seems to be Google’s other preferred option.
You can create a “View All” page and set the canonical tag of paginated results back to that page. This is unofficially endorsed, but the pages aren’t really duplicates in the traditional sense, so some claim it violates the intent of Rel-canonical.

Adam Audette has a recent, in-depth discussion of search pagination that I highly recommend. Pagination for SEO is a very difficult topic and well beyond the scope of this post.

(14) Product Variations

Product variant pages are pages that branch off from the main product page and only differ by one feature or option. For example, you might have a page for each color a product comes in:

It can be tempting to want to index every color variation, hoping it pops up in search results, but in most cases I think the cons outweigh the pros. If you have a handful of product variations and are talking about dozens of pages, fine. If product variations spin out into 100s or 1000s, though, it’s best to consolidate. Although these pages aren’t technically true duplicates, I think it’s ok to Rel-canonical (IV-5) the options back up to the main product page.

One site note: I purposely used “static” URLs in this example to demonstrate a point. Just because a URL doesn’t have parameters, that doesn’t make it immune to duplication. Static URLs (parameter-free) may look prettier, but they can be duplicates just as easily as dynamic URLs.

(15) Geo-keyword Variations

Once upon a time, “local SEO” meant just copying all of your pages 100s of times, adding a city name to the URL, and swapping out that city in the page copy. It created URLs like these:

In 2011, not only is local SEO a lot more sophisticated, but these pages are almost always going to look like near-duplicates. If you have any chance of ranking, you’re going to need to invest in legitimate, unique content for every geographic region you spin out. If you aren’t willing to make that investment, then don’t create the pages. They’ll probably backfire.

(16) Other “Thin” Content

This isn’t really an example, but I wanted to stop and explain a word we throw around a lot when it comes to content: “thin”. While thin content can mean a variety of things, I think many examples of thin content are near-duplicates like (14) above. Whenever you have pages that vary by only a tiny percentage of content, you risk those pages looking low-value to Google. If those pages are heavy on ads (with more ads than unique content), you’re at even more risk. When too much of your site is thin, it’s time to revisit your content strategy.

(17) Syndicated Content

These last 3 examples all relate to cross-domain content. Here, the URLs don’t really matter – they could be wildly different. Examples (17) and (18) only differ by intent. Syndicated content is any content you use with permission from another site. However you retrieve and integrate it, that content is available on another site (and, often, many sites).

While syndication is legitimate, it’s still likely that one or more copies will get filtered out of search results. You could roll the dice and see what happens (IV-13), but conventional SEO wisdom says that you should link back to the source and probably set up a cross-domain canonical tag (IV-5). A cross-domain canonical looks just like a regular canonical, but with a reference to someone else’s domain.

Of course, a cross-domain canonical tag means that, assuming Google honors the tag, your page won’t get indexed or rank. In some cases, that’s fine – you’re using the content for its value to visitors. Practically, I think it depends on the scope. If you occasionally syndicate content to beef up your own offerings but also have plenty of unique material, then link back and leave it alone. If a larger part of your site is syndicated content, then you could find yourself running into trouble. Unfortunately, using the canonical tag (IV-5) means you'll lose the ranking ability of that content, but it could keep you from getting penalized or having Panda-related problems.

(18) Scraped Content

Scraped content is just like syndicated content, except that you didn’t ask permission (and might even be breaking the law). The best solution: QUIT BREAKING THE LAW!

Seriously, no de-duping solution is going to satisfy the scrapers among you, because most solutions will knock your content out of ranking contention. The best you can do is pad the scraped content with as much of your own, unique content as possible.

(19) Cross-ccTLD Duplicates

Finally, it’s possible to run into trouble when you copy same-language content across countries – see example (9) above – even with separate Top-Level Domains (TLDs). Fortunately, this problem is fairly rare, but we see it with English-language content and even with some European languages. For example, I frequently see questions about Dutch content on Dutch and Belgian domains ranking improperly.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer here, and most of the solutions aren’t traditional duplicate-content approaches. In most cases, you need to work on your targeting factors and clearly show Google that the domain is tied to the country in question.

VI. Which URL Is Canonical?

I’d like to take a quick detour to discuss an important question – whether you use a 301-redirect or a canonical tag, how do you know which URL is actually canonical? I often see people making a mistake like this:

The problem is that “product.php” is just a template – you’ve now collapsed all of your products down to a single page (that probably doesn’t even display a product). In this case, the canonical version probably includes a parameter, like “id=1234”.

The canonical page isn’t always the simplest version of the URL – it’s the simplest version of the URL that generates UNIQUE content. Let’s say you have these 3 URLs that all generate the same product page:

Two of these versions are essentially duplicates, and the “print” and “session” parameters represent variations on the main product page that should be de-duped. The “id” parameter is essential to the content, though – it determines which product is actually being displayed.

So, consider yourself warned. As much trouble as rampant duplicates can be, bad canonicalization can cause even more damage in some cases. Plan carefully, and make absolutely sure you select the correct canonical versions of your pages before consolidating them.

VII. Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates

So, now that you recognize what duplicate content looks like, how do you go about finding it on your own site? Here are a few tools to get you started – I won’t claim it’s a complete list, but it covers the bases:

(1) Google Webmaster Tools

In Google Webmaster Tools, you can pull up a list of duplicate TITLE tags and Meta Descriptions Google has crawled. While these don’t tell the whole story, they’re a good starting point. Many URL-based duplicates will naturally generate identical Meta data. In your GWT account, go to “Diagnostics” > “HTML Suggestions”, and you’ll see a table like this:

You can click on “Duplicate meta descriptions” and “Duplicate title tags” to pull up a list of the duplicates. This is a great first stop for finding your trouble-spots.

(2) Google’s Site: Command

When you already have a sense of where you might be running into trouble and need to take a deeper dive, Google’s “site:” command is a very powerful and flexible tool. What really makes “site:” powerful is that you can use it in conjunction with other search operators.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re worried about home-page duplicates. To find out if Google has indexed any copies of your home-page, you could use the “site:” command with the “intitle:” operator, like this:

Put the title in quotes to capture the full phrase, and always use the root domain (leave off “www”) when making a wide sweep for duplicate content. This will detect both “www” and non-www versions.

Another powerful combination is “site:” plus the “inurl:” operator. You could use this to detect parameters, such as the search-sort problem mentioned above:

The “inurl:” operator can also detect the protocol used, which is handy for finding out whether any secure (https:) copies of your pages have been indexed:

You can also combine the “site:” operator with regular search text, to find near-duplicates (such as blocks of repeated content). To search for a block of content across your site, just include it in quotes:

I should also mention that searching for a unique block of content in quotes is a cheap and easy way to find out if people have been scraping your site. Just leave off the “site:” operator and search for a long or unique block entirely in quotes.

Of course, these are just a few examples, but if you really need to dig deep, these simple tools can be used in powerful ways. Ultimately, the best way to tell if you have a duplicate content problem is to see what Google sees.

(3) SEOmoz Campaign Manager

If you’re an SEOmoz PRO member, you have access to some additional tools for spotting duplicates in your Campaigns. In addition to duplicate page titles, the Campaign manager will detect duplicate content on the pages themselves. You can see duplicate pages we’ve detected from the Campaign Overview screen:

Click on the “Duplicate Page Content” link and you’ll not only see a list of potential duplicates, but you’ll get a graph of how your duplicate count has changed over time:

The historical graph can be very useful for determining if any recent changes you’ve made have created (or resolved) duplicate content issues.

Just a technical note, since it comes up a lot in Q&A – Our system currently uses a threshold of 95% to determine whether content is duplicated. This is based on the source code (not the text copy), so the amount of actual duplicate content may vary depending on the code/content ratio.

(4) Your Own Brain

Finally, it’s important to remember to use your own brain. Finding duplicate content often requires some detective work, and over-relying on tools can leave some gaps in what you find. One critical step is to systematically navigate your site to find where duplicates are being created. For example, does your internal search have sorts and filters? Do those sorts and filters get translated into URL variables, and are they crawlable? If they are, you can use the “site:” command to dig deeper. Even finding a handful of trouble spots using your own sleuthing skills can end up revealing 1000s of duplicate pages, in my experience.

I Hope That Covers It

If you’ve made it this far: congratulations – you’re probably as exhausted as I am. I hope that covers everything you’d want to know about the state of duplicate content in 2011, but if not, I’d be happy to answer questions in the comments. Dissenting opinions are welcome, too. Some of these topics, like pagination, are extremely tricky in practice, and there’s often not one “right” answer. Finally, if you liked my panda mini-poster, here’s a link to a larger version of Pandas Take No Prisoners.

Quantifying the Impact of Google's Keyword Referral Data Shutdown

2011-11-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, October 18th, Google announced they'd be hiding search referral data for logged-in Google searchers. When questioned by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, Google provided the following estimate on the impact to search referral data:

"Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com"

Tragically, it appears that Cutts was either misinformed or gave misleading information, as "(not provided)" became a major referrer for many websites, climbing into double digits in early November. Now, that percentage has risen even higher, into the 20%+ range on many sites. Hubspot's Brian Whalley reported that the average website using their analytics lost 11.36% of keyword referral data and 423 sites lost more than 20% (15 unlucky souls lost 50%+, which seems almost crazy).

In an attempt to better quantify the impact, we ran a small survey last week, asking fellow marketers to supply information about the impact to their sites.

Here's a visualization of 60 sites' analytics data, showing the self-reported percent of their Google search traffic that used keyword "(not provided)":

Our average in the 6 days from Nov. 4-10 almost exactly matches the average of the several thousand Hubspot customers (11.36% vs. 12.02%), and thus makes me feel pretty good about that data from the survey-takers.

A little more about these 60 respondents:

We collected 66 finished surveys, but scrubbed 6 that had missing, suspicious or improperly filled-out information
The types of sites reporting data included a wide variety, as illustrated below:
The sites included in the survey also included a solid variety of traffic numbers. The distribution below reports visits from Google organic search recorded in October, 2011:
We asked the respondents what level of impact this change had on their content and marketing efforts, and received the following distribution of replies:

Approximately 1/5th of those surveyed reported no impact on their content/marketing efforts, which likely suggests those folks don't typically use keyword-level data to help them improve OR the change hasn't cost them enough data to have a negative impact. Another 1/5th claimed a strong impact, which is likely how I'd describe this change for our internal efforts. Granted, we don't actively use this data every week, but we've relied on it heavily for reporting and in the past for audits around content optimization and the generation of new content (or updating/refreshing of old material).

Here's numbers and a visualization of the referrer encryption data specifically for SEOmoz.org:

From Oct. 19th - 30th, Google sent 163,909 visits from organic search to our website. 3,762 of those visits, or 2.3%, were via keyword "(not provided)". We didn't sweat this too much. As per Matt Cutts' promise, it was in single digits and, while frustrating, had a very tiny impact on our analytics, marketing and content optimization efforts.

But from Oct. 31st to November 13th, Google sent 191,726 visits and 35,168 of these came via keyword "(not provided)," 18.34%. This has a serious impact on our ability to make our website better for visitors (in particular, identifying keywords that are sending traffic but potentially not having a great experience that we should be making new blog posts, videos, updates, etc. to help).

To me, that's the most tragic part of this change. The underselling of the change as being "single digits" was lame. The hypocrisy around keyword privacy sucks. And their motivations are questionable at best. But the crummiest part is the impact the change will have. It won't put any black hats out of business, won't stop any malware or hacking, and won't add a shred of value to the Internet. But it will make it harder for marketers and site builders to measure, understand and improve for their audience. The net impact will be a slightly worse web, and Google's claim of privacy will only protect them from criticism because it's a far easier explanation than the truth.

Sometimes, it sucks living in an ecosystem with an 800-pound gorilla.

p.s. Google's Matt Cutts responded to this post on Twitter today. I've included his comments and my replies below:

I remain somewhat skeptical that all the sites in Hubspot's data and ours would be outliers, but perhaps, at the least, this suggest the referral data disappearance won't get massively worse. Here's to hoping.

Google+ Expands Search Options, Adds Trending Topics To Search Results

2011-11-19T19:49:00.001-08:00

Google+ has made a few tweaks to how its search function operates, and has added the obligatory trending topics its search results pages.

The first change begins right in the search box itself: As you type a search query, Google+ now separates possible matches in a pop-up window with People or Pages that may match your query.

There are more changes if you follow through on the search itself. When Google finally added search to Google+, the search results page had four tabs: Everything, People, Google+ Posts and Sparks.

Now, the search results have two tabs with different options. The first tab has those original four options, while a second tab adds filtering options for what content sources you might want to search: “From everyone,” “From your circles” and “From you.” (I’ve slightly doctored the image below to show both drop downs at once.)

And as you see on the far right, trending topics is now part of the search results page, too. This is pretty much an obligatory feature for any social networking site, and could help increase engagement on Google+ if users decide to see what other users — often total strangers outside of their circles — are saying about the day’s hot topics.

Yahoo Site Explorer Closing Down Monday, November 21st

2011-11-19T19:48:00.000-08:00

As expected Yahoo will be closing down Yahoo Site Explorer this year. Yahoo has just announced the date for the closure. This coming Monday, November 21, 2011, Site Explorer will cease to exist.

The short Yahoo blog post reads:

With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.

Bing Webmaster Tools has much of this information, with the big exception of competitive linkage data, which is a huge exception.

How To Analyze Your Content Performance In Google Analytics

2011-11-19T19:46:00.000-08:00

Google Analytics is divided in five main categories:

Visitors
Advertising
Traffic Sources
Content
Conversions

In this post, I want to talk about the Content category. I will not discuss all the reports available, but the ones I use most frequently.

If you click on Content it will expand to the sections below:

Overview

The overview gives a quick overall view of your content. You can see metrics such as pageviews, unique pageviews, avg. time on page and bounce rate. By using the date range option on the top right corner, you can select your date range and also easily compare to past dates.

In the overview you have the option to click on page, page title, search term, event category or Adsense page. You will get a summary of the report and with one click you go to the full report.

Site Content

Site content reports consist of:

Pages
Content Drilldown
Landing Pages
Exit Pages

Pages

If you want to know which pages are visited the most on your website, this is the report for you. Below a screenshot of the top bar in Google Analytics when you click on Pages. These metrics you get for every page.

You can easily change the appearance of your data by using the view option.

There are five different views. Data (this is the standard view), Percentage, Performance, Comparison and Pivot.

I really like the Comparison view, because it’s easy to compare page performance against the site average. It’s great to get quick insights about which pages are performing well above or below site average regarding metrics such as Avg. Time on page, bounce rate and % of exits.

Landing Pages

In the landing pages option, you can see which pages are the most popular landing pages for your website and their performance. You can click on every page and by choosing secondary dimension you have many options to filter.

If you e.g. want to know which traffic sources are bringing the most traffic to your homepage, just click on the homepage and select source. (see screenshot)

Great thing about this report is that E-commerce data is included, so you see which pages bring you transactions and revenue.

Site Speed

In May 2011, Google announced the site speed option in the new Google Analytics interface. You can measure this by adding the line _trackPageLoadTime(); to your tracking code. Click herefor the detailed instructions.

In this report, the average page load time of your pages is shown. Google has officially announced that site speed is a signal in their search ranking algorithms, so I definitely recommend to start measuring the speed of your pages. After all, nobody likes slow loading pages.

Site Search

If you have a search engine on your website which visitors can use to search the site, you can measure the usage of this feature. The results you can find under the Site Search category in Google Analytics.

Site Search consists of:

Overview
Usage
Search Terms
Pages

Overview

In the overview, you see the percentage of visits with and without site search. Also some other metrics such as % search exits, % search refinements, time after search and search depth.

Usage

Usage also provides you with the percentage of visits with and without site search, but you have more options to filter your data through secondary dimension. Also, you have the view option to change the appearance of your data which I mentioned earlier in this post. And there is an E-commerce tab that gives you transactions, revenue and conversion rate data.

Search Terms

This report gives you the search terms people use to search your website. It’s a great way to find out what people are searching for. This report also provides you with the metrics % search exits, % search refinements, time after search and search depth for every search term.

With this information you can analyze the top search terms. For example, you can compare the % search exits for a particular search term to site average. If it’s very high, maybe your search engine is not giving the best results for the query.

Events

If you have event tracking enabled, you will use this report to see the results of your events.

The events category consists of:

Overview
Top Events
Pages

With event tracking, you can measure all kinds of activity on your website such as PDF downloads, printing pages, interaction with a slidehow, watching videos and much more.

If you want to implement Event Tracking you can click here for all the details. I recommend first to decide all the things you want to track on your site using event tracking. This will help to create a clear report in Google Analytics after Event Tracking is implemented.

The Content category provides so many information about the performance of your website to keep you busy analyzing it for a long time. It’s a great place to find new insights and take action on it.

How To Build An Effective Content Section For Your Website

2011-11-15T06:33:00.000-08:00

The heart of any decent website is the content that it produces and while great content will attract users that content must be displayed in a manner that allows users to enjoy and ultimately absorb it.
By properly formatting the content area of your web property you can build a website that users find enjoyable to browse on a regular basis.
Here are several tips that will help your content area stand out from the rest of your websites design, placing the focus on the most important part of your website, the content.

1. Content Area Should Dominate The Website

The content area on your website should be larger than the other combined areas of the site. For example if you feature a left sidebar that is 200px and a right sidebar that is 250px you have already capitalized on 450px of space, at which point your content area should be larger than 450px.

2. Don’t Over Enlarge Your Content Title

A popular mistake found on many websites occurs when the title for each post is over enlarged. While you want to provide your readers with a quick understanding of your article an overly large font means taking up more space which in turn pushes your actual content further down the page. I typically make a general rule of thumb that titles are highlighted with the <h1> tag and are no more than 4px-6px larger than the main content font.

3. Properly Highlighting Links

When a website owner realizes you have linked to their content they may visit your website to see how you have chosen to link into their content, for that reason it’s important that you don’t hide your external links. Some website users use light highlighting to make links hard to see, therefore making it less likely that visitors will leave their website. When optimizing links I think of them as relationship building with other webmasters, the more they see clearly defined links to their web properties the more likely they will be to link back into my own unique content. If you use Kontera, Infolinks or other contextual link programs I suggest using a different link highlight color than those advertising programs to define your own links compared to adverts.

4. Padding The Margins On Your Content

While your content area should dominate the landscape of each page on your website in terms of space occupied it’s also important that you clearly define the content area. The easiest way to define your content is to provide at least some margin space around your content and other areas. When using padding I make sure my left and right side areas are evenly spaced to create a consistent content area. For example if a left and right sidebar setup is used I will implement 5px of padding for the left side and 5 px of padding for the right side. It’s also a smart idea to pad your top and bottom areas equally. By defining your padding the user receives a consistent viewing experience.

5. Avoid crowding The Content Area With Ads and Related Links

Some well known entertainment and “how-to” websites love to crowd their content with block ads and even “related links” in the middle of paragraphs. While those sites are able to crowd their content because of reader trust it’s not a good idea when attempting to build an audience. The content area should be free of obtrusive ads and feature only the content you are attempting to deliver. If you want to use ads place them directly before or directly after your content to avoid distracting new viewers who are receiving a first impression.
Building an effective content section is simply about isolating your content, keeping it free of “ad and related links” debris and understanding that the content must always come first, if you make a clean content area that users enjoy reading you’ll be one step closer to building an effective and successful website.

New on Google Analytics Landing Pages Report – Measuring Success

2011-11-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

At some point last week Google Analytics quietly released an apparently small change to its Landing Pages report (Content tab => Site Content => Landing Pages). This report was almost useless before this change and now it joins the list of the most useful reports on the tool. In a few words the change was simple: we can now link landing pages to goals, i.e. we can see the value of each landing page out of the box.
Up till now, the landing pages report was very limited, having only three metrics available on the report:

Entrances: the absolute number of visits landing on this page
Bounces:the absolute number of visits that bounced when landing on this page
Bounce Rate: the percentage of bounces from entrances in this page

This is all we got. We could not drill down into landing page performance even when it came to simple actions like understanding time on page (for non-bounces), not to mention goal conversion and ecommerce transactions that were completed during a visit that was initiated on this page (there were some work arounds, but they required many clicks). As of this week we see the following on the same report:

As we can see in the screenshot above, we now have other metrics available in this report, such as Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits. This would already be a great improvement, as it allows us to instantly see engagement metrics for visits started from a specific landing page. However, if we look at the top of the pages, we see that, besides site usage, we can now view this report by goals and ecommerce. This means that we can now have an instant picture of landing page performance from this report.
This knowledge is very important in order to understand where to focus the optimization efforts. Once the landing pages can be analyzed, we are more free to segment landing pages, in a way that each audience receives the most matching landing page.

SEO for Google+ Profiles and Pages

2011-11-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

One thing I've been particularly obsessed with recently is the SEO elements of social profiles. It began with checking out the SEO for Facebook fan pages and then onto social content. Now, it's time to take a look at the differences between the optimization of your Google+ personal profile and the new Google+ Pages.

SEO Elements of the Google+ Personal Profile

We’ll start by looking at the parts of the Google+ personal profile that you can customize based on the data you enter in specific fields.

SEO Title: Your Name – Google+
Google+ is all about the personal branding, and they insist that you use your real name for your profile. If you want to use a business name, blog name, or keywords, save it for your Google+ Page.
Meta Description: Your Name – Your Headline + Your Occupation
The meta description for your Google+ profile is a combination of different pieces of your profile information including:

Your name followed by your headline.
Your occupation.
Your current employer.

Those items are followed by your introduction text, but by this point you're usually well beyond the 160 character mark. Make sure that the first 160 characters count by writing a great headline and occupation title. Also make sure those areas are set to be seen by anyone on the web.
Dofollow Links: Everywhere
From what I can tell, the links within the introduction content as well as the ones under other profiles, contributor to, and recommended links are all dofollow. So don’t shy away from anchor text as this is a premier Google property. Just make sure the profile still sounds good and doesn't look like a big link farm.

SEO Elements of the Google+ Page

When it comes to the customizable SEO elements of the Google+ pages, they are about the same as the personal profiles. One exception is that there isn't an occupation or current employer field in the pages (or at least not for products or brands). Hence your meta description will be your page's name, headline, and then the introduction text.

How do Google+ Profiles Rank vs. Pages

As of right now, I see that my personal Google+ profile ranks No. 9 for my name when I use Google Chrome (signed out of my Google account), but it's on the second page of results when I use Firefox (also signed out of my Google account). My Google+ page for my blog isn't ranking in the first 100 results for my blog's name Kikolani.
Pete Cashmore's personal Google+ profile, for example, ranks at No. 8 for his name in Google Chrome, but it's on the second page of results in Firefox. Mashable's Google+ Page, on the other hand, ranks on the second page of search results in both Google Chrome and Firefox.
As another example, Arianna Huffington's personal Google+ profile ranks at No. 8 in Google Chrome, but it's on the second page of results in Firefox. Huffington Post's Google+ Page ranks on the third page of results in both Google Chrome and Firefox.
How do your Google+ profiles and pages rank? Do you believe that links from these Google+ pages are helping your personal or business brand in search results?

Bing Webmaster Tools Adds More Data, More Controls

2011-11-05T21:50:00.002-07:00

Starting with a very open session at SES New York earlier this year, Bing has been asking webmasters all across the country to get the skinny on what they want in their toolkits. In June, Bing released what they had codenamed their Honey Badger update to Webmaster tools. A few months later, Bing integrated Yahoo! Site Explorer data into Webmaster tools. This week, Bing released their next major set of additions to Bing Webmaster Tools.

In an effort to help website owners improve their sites and do more on Bing, the Bing team announced a new set of expanded Webmaster Tools. Their goals are threefold: share more data with site owners, give site owners more useful tools and increase transparency in data to site owners.

Expanded Crawl Details

Errors and other information in the Crawl Details information now include all inbound link information and also includes information about malware. Any of your site's URLs that are listed under under the 400-, 500- or 300- HTTP codes detailed lists will now let you know what site linked to you that Bing followed to receive the error or redirect, including URLs listed under robots.txt and Malware headings. Previously, only the 400-level HTTP errors contained inbound link information.

URL Normalization

Bing has added URL normalization suggestions. URL normalization allows you to tell Bing which URLs in your site have query parameters. Bing also increased the number of parameters you can define from 25 to 50.

Malware Notifications

Bing will be expanding email alerts for issues your site may have like malware alerts. You can also choose to get email alerts for various crawl settings.

DNS Verification

To verify ownership of your site, Webmasters can now use CNAME DNS records. Previously, verification was performed by uploading an XML file or using an HTML tag in your site's index page.

Integrated adCenter data

Last, but certainly not least, adCenter data will be included in Traffic Data. Bing is releasing Average CPC (cost per click) as a column in the reports.

Speaking to Search Engine Watch, Bing's Duane Forrester pointed out these enhancements are valuable to webmasters and can help site owners find problems on their sites.

When faced with a laundry list of 400- or 500- errors in Bing Webmaster Tools, a site owner is now empowered with information to help them determine where to start. Providing inbound links that made Bing find the error is a starting point. If you have moved content someone else links to, you can now set up redirects or other courses of action. The point is, there's a starting point for taking positive action.

"We can see the obvious problems, [choose to] hit the red button and drop the site from the index, but that doesn't help a webmaster fix a compromise," Forrester said. "We look at this as a way to bring on the right conversation with Webmasters."

With recent hacks to WordPress installations and other CMS systems, site owners need to be constantly vigilant. Typically, a site owner can get removed from a search index, even temporarily.

Forrester suggests Bing sees the enhancements to Webmaster Tools as an opportunity to reach out to site owners and help them fix a compromised site. Through Webmaster Tools and email alerts, Bing helps site owners, their search index and the Web overall.

"We're quite happy to have that conversation," Forrester said.

Google Now Shows Ads Below Search Results

2011-11-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

Ads that were previously shown to the side of the results may in some cases appear below the search results, Google announced via Inside AdWords. Google reports that ad click-throughs are higher when the ads are integrated into the search results instead of being displayed on the side.

Google will now be classifying the ads as "Other" in your AdWords account. These are also known as experimental impressions, but should easily seen at the bottom of the page. Google should rename this from Top vs Side to "Top vs Other" in the coming weeks as not to confuse people.

Google has confirmed that ads will only be displayed on the side or at the bottom, at least for now. When ads appear on the right, no ads will appear on the bottom; when ads appear on the bottom, no ads will appear on the right.

Will this will work out for advertisers in the long run? I’ve found that 90 percent of clicks come the top three ad positions. The other 10 percent of all AdWords clicks come from rest of the ad positions. Now, 10 percent of the clicks can be a lot but when you're looking for the best clients and easiest to sell, those people are the ones that are clicking on the top of the page.

Over the past couple months Google has been updating many different features in AdWords,search, and the way they work with local advertisers. Google even now allows us to block ads from advertisers.

What do you think about the new changes to AdWords? Do you think these changes will help advertisers or hurt them in the long run?

Twitter Testing Top News & People in Search

2011-11-05T21:49:00.001-07:00

Some Twitter users may notice new highlighted people or news at the top of search results. The feature appears limited to a small test sample right now.

The new Top People results page shows one Twitter account highlighted above the rest of the results, with a View All link leading to more popular users for that term. It is unclear exactly how Top People are calculated, though there is some speculation that this could become advertising space.

Top News lacks the View All link, but does allow users to refine the results using Advanced Search, with parameters such as exact phrase, language, hashtags, and location. The Top News results shows a bold headline, a one line content excerpt, a picture pulled from the page, and a link to the article.

The default display setting for all search results remains “Top” rather than “All,” which is a point of contention with some users. Searchers must click and select All results to see a more complete list - if they notice the default. This leaves less popular users at a distinct disadvantage.

Other recent Twitter updates include the September launch of their analytics platform and expanded Promoted Tweets distribution. These new features are a nice surprise, given that CEO Dick Costolo said not to expect much in the way of improved Twitter Search when he spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago.

Google Gets Fresh with Algorithm Update Affecting 35% of Searches

2011-11-05T21:48:00.001-07:00

A new Google algorithm update designed to pick and choose which queries demand fresher results impacts about 35 percent of searches. Where their Caffeine architecture allows Google to quickly crawl the mass and complex contents of the Web, this latest update is meant to select which queries require the most recent results.

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Amit Singhal lists recent events, hot topics, recurring events, or topics with frequently updated information as the types of searches that will benefit from the freshness update. Queries on sports teams, for example, should bring back results on the latest scores, whereas recipes understandably have a longer shelf life in search.

Here's what a search for [groupon ipo] returned as of the time of this writing. Note that the oldest item is a day old:

Users looking for older information on topics Google may mark as requiring fresher results, like the Olympic games or annual conferences, can still set a custom date range to bring back results from previous years.

“Different searches have different freshness needs,” Singhal wrote. “This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.”

This may initially add a bit of fuel to the fire in the debate surrounding how often websites should be updated and whether Google penalizes those that don’t update on a regular basis. Many webmasters/publishers struggle to create new, engaging contenton a regular basis. Remember, though, that quality, evergreen content can hold its value for years; keep the topic and immediacy of searches in mind when creating new content.

A brewing equipment manufacturer, for example, probably doesn’t need to run out and generate new content as often as a camera retailer. The industry is slower to evolve; people searching for information on cameras most likely want to learn about the latest models in a rapidly changing niche.

Bing has also been working on Tiger, their improved back-end infrastructure, expected to be completed by the end of the year. Their plans include a cloud storage and computational engine called Cosmos that uses a high-level language called SCOPE. A job posting from October explained a bit about Bing’s mission with Tiger:

“We are chartered with complicated problems such as finding, crawling, processing and serving any interesting and emerging web page in a matter of seconds; It doesn’t matter if it’s a new New-York times article, an posting to Facebook or an update to someone’s personal blog, we want that page in the index the moment it’s available.”

It sounds like Google’s plan to differentiate between searches requiring immediacy and those with less urgency may keep them one step ahead of Bing once again. What do you think of Google’s latest update?

Google Improves Author Info in SERPs for Signed-in Users, Simplifies Markup

2011-11-05T21:47:00.001-07:00

Google has been diligently working on testing and rolling out new authorship features over the past several weeks. The newest additions give content creators the ability to claim authorship through a simple email verification process and offer more author information in search results - if they’re using Google+.

Also, Google News is also planning to include more information about journalists in coming weeks.

Once you claim authorship, your picture and Google+ information appear in search results. In addition to this basic information, searchers can see how many Circles you are in. Logged in users can click through to see comments on the piece, or instantly add you to Circles.

Claim Authorship with Verified Email - But What About rel="author"?

The rel="author" tag hasn’t been around all that long, but it seems the new email verification process of claiming authorship is intended to replace it. An updated Webmaster Tools Help article on claiming authorship offers two methods: adding your name and email to your content and verifying it, or linking your content to your Google Profile and vice versa.

Advanced Google Analytics - Tips and Tricks

2011-11-05T21:46:00.001-07:00

Google Analytics affects everyone in search engine marketing (unless you use another analytics package!) but not everyone knows how to take full advantage of it. To take full advantage of it we have to share knowledge and that's what I'm here to do. I'll be sharing some great advanced segments, how to do multiple goal conversion tracking and the secret success behind cross domain tracking.

1. Advanced Segments

Advanced segments provide you with the ability to take your reporting up a gear. So many people mention it, but how and what should I be doing? Asking that question in a mirror won't provide any answers but here's something that will....

Social media segment

If you are paying for social media traffic then it's imperative that you check the value it yields to sales i.e. does it even generate any direct sales? Here's how to find out:

Click on the My Site tab > Advanced Segments > Then click on +New Custom Segment > Choose a name for it > Then click on +Add a dimension or metric > then add "Source" as a dimension > have it as "include" and "matching regular expression" then using a bit of regex, type the following in the field.

Click on test segment (check that it works!). Obviously find out the most relevant ones to your site and build up an accurate social media segment. Apply this to your reports and you can now segment your social media channel. Try cross tabbing by goal conversions to find out which channel is bringing in the beans.

Long tail keywords segment

Another useful advanced segment is to understand the long tail demand. Follow the same methodology to get into the advanced segment dashboard but follow this:

Click on +Add a dimension or metric > then add "Keyword" as a dimension > have it as "include" and "matching regular expression" then type the following in the field.

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$

Applying this segment to your reports will show you keywords with greater than two words. To filter more or less keywords simply change the number, for example if I wanted searches with greater than four keywords then I would modify it as follows:

^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3}\s*$

When applied to your reports it will show you keywords with greater than three words.

Non Branded keywords segment

This is useful if you want to understand search without any branded terms. Follow the same methodology to get into the advanced segment dashboard but follow this:

For this to make sense, imagine my company is called John Lewis.

Click on +Add a dimension or metric > then add "Keyword" as a dimension > have it as "exclude" and "matching regular expression" then type the following regex in the field.

Exclude these terms and the misspellings of the brand terms. Applying this segment will allow you to differentiate between non branded keywords. I wonder how relevant this will be to SEOs with the introduction of SSL Search by Google?

2. Multiple Goal Conversion Tracking

Goal tracking is simple, name your goal, add your goal URL i.e. /thank-you, setup a funnel etc. That's all great but let's say we have two paths to get people to register on our site as follows:

Path 1 - www.fabian.com/my_work = they registered from my home page and landed on my dashboard page.

Path 2 - www.fabian.com/download = they registered in order to access my free carpet samples.

Both destinations lead to a registration, so how do you create a goal with multiple URLs? Here's what to do:

Get to the goal dashboard > name your goal > select goal type as "URL Destination"> then enter some regex into the Goal URL as shown below > on the "Match Type" field, select Regular Expression Match and save it.

/(my_work|download)$

You can remove the dollar ($) symbol at the end of it, if you want to capture dynamic elements.

To see a breakdown of the goal and to check that it is recording the correct pages, use the Goal Verification Report or Goal URLs (new analytics). I've tested this and it works 100%.

3. Cross Domain Tracking

The GA tracking cookies are first party cookies, which mean they can be used only by the website that sets them. If a visitor decided to leave the site to a different domain, the tracking cookies won't work. For example if your site accepts third party payments on another site then you will need use cross domain tracking to preserve the referral.

For cross domain tracking to work you need to have the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) on both domains and the third party site must not prohibit query string parameters.

Step 1 – Modify the GATC

Go to Analytics Settings > Tracking Code > Select "Multiple top-level domains" radio button > Google Analytics will provide you with two new lines of code as shown below.

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

It's possible to get a cookie with a domain of www.seogadget.co.uk and .seogadget.co.uk which would mean getting more than one set of cookies per visitor. According to Justin Cutroni, it's usually best practice to use the primary domain of your website instead of the 'none'. For example I would use '.seogadget.co.uk' to avoid multiple instances of the Google Analytics tracking cookies.

Step 2 – Transferring the cookies

Analytics has two methods to transfer the tracking cookies between the two domains which are _link() and_linkByPost()

Both extract the cookie values from the cookies and place the data in the destination page URL as query string parameters. Imagine our primary domain is www.seogadget.co.uk and our 3rd party payment site is www.moneyforfabian.com then apply the following:

Example 1 = If your website transfers the visitor between domains using standard anchor tags, use _link()

<a href="http://www.moneyforfabian.com" onclick=

"_gaq.push(['_link', 'http://www.seogadget.com']);return false; ">Buy Now</a>']);

Example 2 = If your website uses a form to transfer visitors between domains then you need to use _linkbypost()

<form name="post_form" action="http://www.moneyforfabian.com" method="post"

onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkbypost', this]);">

Once you've applied either _link() or _linkByPost(), your site visitors will be tracked across the two domains.

Final thoughts

Everything discussed has been tested and works like a charm. If you come across any problems implementing these techniques drop me a line on twitter @panduuf or drop a comment below.

A New Way of Looking at Ranking Factors

2011-11-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

SEOmoz readers are no strangers to the concept of search engine ranking factors. In general, much of the community that comments seems to delight when some new factor is discovered that may provide a potential ranking boost. Who wouldn't, right? But in this post, I'd like to suggest that perhaps some refocusing on the "forest" of the ranking factors world, rather than the individual "trees" that populate it, might be in order.

I've been writing about SEO since 1996, from before we even called it SEO and from before Google existed. In those 15+ years, I've seen no end of attempts to "chase the algorithm." My goal, writing to a broad audience, has always been to highlight the important factors that stand the test of time.

It's not that I'm against testing. I love good discoveries as much as anyone, assuming they're real, backed by solid data or can be easily confirmed (too many don't meet these criteria). Understanding if the first use of anchor text overrides further uses or how variations of anchor text across the web might impact rankings is fascinating reading to me. It can help break new SEO ground.

What I am against is wasting time chasing things that might not be helpful for more than a day, week or month, versus time spent on the proven, time-tested factors that matter.

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

That was the genesis behind the Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors that I developed earlier this year, working with the talented folks at Column Five Media to illustrate:

It was a labor of love for me, combining my former profession -- that of being a newspaper graphics reporter -- with my current one as a journalist who writes about search engines and search marketing.

The table was designed to highlight what I considered to be the most important ranking factors, so that any experienced SEO could work with someone less knowledgeable and easily explain, in a visual manner, things that might help a site from an SEO perspective.

Want to rank well? It remains incredibly important to have quality content, or Cq. That's why it's the first factor listed on the chart.

Want to rank well? It remains incredibly important to have conducted proper keyword research, or Cr, a topic that sometimes feels forgotten in the quest for more exotic ranking factors.

Want to rank well? The locality of a searcher -- Pl -- has grown into a major ranking factor that can seem all-but-forgotten by some SEOs who assume that "normal" results still exist and can somehow be found by running proxies or using the pws=0 trick. Google personalizes results down to the metropolitan level in the US and elsewhere. Good luck "adjusting" for that to get your "normal" results.

The Ranking Elements

The table contains four major "element" groups:

On The Page Factors
Off The Page Factors
Blocking Factors
Violation Factors

Here are the individual elements, shown close up:

Each individual element is meant to keep people focused on the big picture issues relating to that factor, which I fear sometimes get lost as new SEOs enter the space, as intermediate SEOs try to build their skills and even experienced SEOs may lose track of.

The Bigger Picture

To better illustrate, I'll use some different examples below, contrasted against the SEOmoz Ranking Factors Survey. I enjoy reading this survey, when it's done every two years. But some of the questions can get way too granular for me.

For example, is a keyword being in the first word in an H1 tag important or not? That's something the SEOmoz survey tried to measure.

The SEO Periodic Table isn't that specific. When it comes to header tags -- element Hh -- it's trying to stress headers can have an overall impact and that people should be thinking about them generally:

Do headlines and subheads use header tags with relevant keywords?

Should you focus on "linking root domains with partial match anchor text," as the surveytried to measure?

For many people, I'm hoping the table emphasizes that they more generally need to be seeking out quality links, or the Lq factor:

Are links from trusted, quality or respected web sites?

Should you seek Facebook shares, as the survey found highly correlated? Even thoughGoogle's Matt Cutts said Facebook shares don't matter? Even though SEOmoz, after further research agreed with Cutts and wrote "Google is not using Facebook share data directly to rank?"

The table says yes, of course you should. And you should because both social shares (Ss) and social reputation (Sr) are generally having an impact on search rankings:

Do those respected on social networks share your content?

Do many share your content on social networks?

Maybe Google isn't using Facebook share data now. But those shares might leak out from Facebook into links that get counted in other ways. Meanwhile, Bing absolutely does use Facebook data as part of its ranking system. And tomorrow, Google might start using them, just as overnight in July, Google suddenly lost Twitter data that it had.

Social signals aren't just some fad that's going away. Social signals are the new link building. Exactly how those signals get counted, just as how exactly links get counted, is going to be subject to specific change over time and hard to assess. But generally, you want to do social.

If you stopped doing Facebook work solely because you decided "Google doesn't care," then potentially you're behind the curve if Google does care down the line -- not to mention for Bing now and from getting traffic from Facebook directly.

Again, it's not that I'm saying don't test, don't have an interest in specifics, don't try to learn. Rather, it's a reminder to focus on the big stuff that matters first. See the larger picture, before you chase down some alley such as whether LDA is real or not.

That's what the chart is about. For the SEOmoz fanatic, I hope it's a tool you'll use alongside the SEOmoz ranking survey and the material you read on SEOmoz itself. And for anyone, I hope it's a useful tool to make the complexity of SEO easier to begin with.

Bonus: Movie Time

For the real beginners, there's another labor of love I worked on earlier this year, a short search engine optimization video to explain SEO in plain language, to anyone. It's only 3 1/2 minutes long:

When so many still assume that SEO is a bad thing, to the degree that Google itself had to recently remind everyone that no, SEO isn't spam, I hope our video helps explain the concept in friendly terms, and that people can graduate from it to our Periodic Table framework or the more specific advice they'll find here on SEOmoz and elsewhere.

Mobile Traffic To Retail Sites To Hit 15% During Holiday ’11

2011-11-05T21:43:00.000-07:00

More evidence of the growing importance of mobile comes this time from IBM, which predicts that “an unprecedented 15 percent of people in the U.S. logging onto a retailer’s Web site are expected to do so through a mobile device.” This is based on data analyzed by IBM and collected from the 500 leading US retailers.

Last month, according to “Big Blue,” 11 percent of people visited a retail website on a mobile device. In particular the iPad will play a significant role in “mobile” purchase behavior. IBM said that “shoppers using an iPad will lead to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices.” IBM added that iPad conversion rates were 6.8 percent in the iPad vs. 3.6 percent for mobile devices overall.

Other recently holiday related mobile predictions and estimates include:

Google saying that “44 percent of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices.”
Performics said that “Google search clicks from mobile devices are now 14.2 percent of all search clicks” and expects paid clicks coming from mobile to grow to 17.3 percent this December

Separately today comScore released its latest US smartphone share data:

Smartphones represent 37 percent of all US mobile handsets according to comScore. However Nielsen says they’ve now reached 43 percent (and more than 50 percent for those under age 45). The Pew Internet Project says 42 percent of mobile subscribers have smartphones.

According to a recent study from Acquity Group, 37 percent of the “Internet Retailer Top 500″ companies now have a mobile site. Those that don’t will find they’ve missed an opportunity this holiday shopping season. Earlier this year Google said that 79 percent of its top advertisers didn’t have a mobile-optimized site.

Official: Google Places Ads At Bottom & Bottom Search Box Missing

2011-11-05T21:39:00.001-07:00

Google announced the AdWords ads may now officially show at the bottom of the search results, if they are not shown on the right hand side.

Google has tested this in the past, most recently last month and also in 2010, 2008 and2005.

Google said:

We dynamically optimize each search page, including its ads, to provide the best experience for our users.
In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user's flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.

That being said, now many are noticing that the search box at the bottom of the page is missing. I believe it was missing since Google Instant launched years ago but maybe it came back since then?

A WebmasterWorld thread has one user explaining why he thinks the search box is missing, "Gonna be ads now on the bottom of the search! Can't distract people with search boxes on a search engine!"

Again, I think it was missing since Instant - not sure why people are taking notice of it now.

New Google AdWords Top Navigation Bar

2011-11-05T21:38:00.000-07:00

Alistair Dent spotted a new Google AdWords navigation bar within the AdWords campaign management interface.

The new bar looks like this:

The old (existing) bar looks like this:

This is a small change but something that many AdWords advertisers may find awkward on first login.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google Updates Search Algorithm: Impact More Like 17.5% Of Searches

2011-11-05T21:35:00.000-07:00

Google announced they have made a significant change to their search algorithm to help improve relevancy of the search results by showing fresher results more often.

When I reported this at Search Engine Land, I said this changed the search results by about 35% from what it was before. While the Panda update had an impact of 12%, Google said this impacted about 35% of searches.

Danny spoke to Google later and they said overall, 35% of searches will be impacted by this algorithm but already 17.5% were impacted prior. They doubled it, so the change from yesterday to today is more like a 17.5% change, which is still very significant.

Here is what has changed:

Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.
Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it's implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you're searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you'll see the latest information.
Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you're researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Google said this with the caffeine index makes for a much more relevant set of search results.

SEO butthead detection in 5 easy steps

2011-11-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

SEO is complicated, and it’s easy to fall for a ripoff artist, or someone who’s just clueless. But there are some easy ways to detect SEO buttheads. Here’s how you can tell if someone making big promises is utterly full of horse manure:

1: The spam e-mail

Butthead indicator #1: The unsolicited e-mail.
Strength: 2/5
In an effort to upgrade my karma, I’ve cut way back on outing of incompetent/dishonest SEO firms. But I got an e-mail this week that got my blood boiling:

A former Google optimization specialist! Wow!

Never, ever work with an SEO who sends you unsolicited e-mail or contacts you out of the blue.

2: The ‘former Google employee’ claim

Butthead indicator #2: The ‘We have a former Google employee’ claim.
Strength: Infinity times 10000000
This particular SEO crap artist informed me, in the e-mail and on their site, that their founder is a ‘former Google optimization specialist.’ A little digging revealed that yes, the founder is a former optimization specialist—a former Adwords optimization specialist.
Adwords is Google’s paid advertising platform. It has no relationship to the world of SEO. They worded their claim very carefully, but let’s call it what it is: A total lie.

Liar! You worked on Adwords, not SEO

The ‘Adwords optimization’ team at Google helps clients spend more money on Google Adwords. They sure as hell don’t help clients rank higher in the organic, unpaid rankings. If they did that, their clients would spend less on Adwords.
Never work with someone who tries to use their previous Google employment to say they have some secret knowledge of SEO. They’re almost certainly twisting their words. A Google massage therapist can’t help you rank any better than a Yahoo! massage therapist.

3: Incompetence

Butthead indicator #3: Total SEO incompetence.
Strength: 4/5
Go to the web site of your supposed SEO savior. Click ‘View >> Source’ and look at the HTML code. If you see this:

No title tag? Really?! Are you serious?!!!!

…then you’re about to be buried in SEO bullshit.
The title tag is the most important on-page ranking factor. A poorly-written one means the SEO firm in question is careless. A non-existent one means they’re either complete idiots, or they’re going to transfer your checks to the Cayman Islands and ignore you.

4: Links

Butthead indicator #4: No links. Zero. Zip. Nada.
Strength: 3/5
Links ain’t what they used to be, but I’d expect any SEO worth their salt to at least have a few sites pointing at them:

Uh oh. No more links.

Ooooops. They gots no linkage! Even their own site doesn’t show up as an incoming link.
Actually, that’s a remarkable technical achievement. I gotta give them a hat-tip. I’ve never seen anyone achieve 100% link stealth before.
But wait! Maybe Open Site Explorer shows a few links:

1 link!!!

One. Link.
If your SEO firm can’t scrounge up a few links for themselves, they won’t be able to do it for you.

5: Crap rankings

Butthead indicator #5: Rankings that look like word vomit.
Strength: 5/5
Finally, do a site:www.crapseosite.com search on Google and see how their rankings look (replace crapseosite.com with the crap SEO site in question). If they look like this:

It's rankings crap-o-mania!

These SEO ‘experts’ are morons. Avoid.

Be careful

Even if the firm you’re talking to passes all these tests, be sure to look carefully:

Talk to their clients.
Search on their brand name for reputation problems.
Talk to the people you’ll be working with. Make sure you can trust them.

But if they have any of the 5 Butthead Signals, don’t waste your time. Find someone who at least has the courtesy to lie creatively.

Gumby on the Google homepage

2011-10-29T22:02:00.001-07:00

Todays Google Doodle honors the late late clay-animation artist Art Clokey with an interactive Google Doodle of Gumby & Friends. Art Clokey was a early pioneer in stop motion clay animation. This Doodle is similar to the tribute that Google paid to Jim Henson recently which found favor from many fans of Henson’s work.

Here is the animated doodle:
Art Clokey Animated Doodle

Incoming search terms:

gumby google homepage
gumby google page
google gumby homepage
gumby google home page
doodle gumbis
gumby google pg
gumby google
gumby and friends interactive google doodles
google hompage gumby
google homepage with gumby

Seo Quark

Top Bing Searches in 2011: Bieber, Kardashian & Royal Wedding

Bing’s Most Searched People in 2011

Top News Events in 2011

Most Searched Destinations and Consumer Electronics in 2011

More Top Searches: Suri Cruise, Rebecca Black, the YMCA, Bankruptcy

Bing’s Top Searches of 2011 Video

Google Maps for Android Adds Indoor Mall, Airport, Store Maps

Google Introduces Verbatim Searching

The Verbatim Tool

Yahoo Adds Recipe, Shopping, Entertainment Search Features

Advanced Recipe Search

New Shopping Searches

The Improved Entertainment Widget

Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World

- Sgt. Jericho “Bamboo” Jackson

I. What Is Duplicate Content?

II. Why Do Duplicates Matter?

The Supplemental Index

The Crawl “Budget”

The Indexation “Cap”

The Penalty Debate

The Panda Update

III. Three Kinds of Duplicates

(1) True Duplicates

(2) Near Duplicates

(3) Cross-domain Duplicates

IV. Tools for Fixing Duplicates

(1) 404 (Not Found)

(2) 301 Redirect

(3) Robots.txt

(4) Meta Robots

(5) Rel=Canonical

(6) Google URL Removal

(7) Google Parameter Blocking

(8) Bing URL Removal

(9) Bing Parameter Blocking

(10) Rel=Prev & Rel=Next

(11) Syndication-Source

(12) Internal Linking

(13) Don’t Do Anything

V. Examples of Duplicate Content

(1) “www” vs. Non-www

(2) Staging Servers

(3) Trailing Slashes ("/")

(4) Secure (https) Pages

(5) Home-page Duplicates

(6) Session IDs

(7) Affiliate Tracking

(8) Duplicate Paths

(9) Functional Parameters

(10) International Duplicates

(11) Search Sorts

(12) Search Filters

(13) Search Pagination

(14) Product Variations

(15) Geo-keyword Variations

(16) Other “Thin” Content

(17) Syndicated Content

(18) Scraped Content

(19) Cross-ccTLD Duplicates

VI. Which URL Is Canonical?

VII. Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates

(1) Google Webmaster Tools

(2) Google’s Site: Command

(3) SEOmoz Campaign Manager

(4) Your Own Brain

I Hope That Covers It

Quantifying the Impact of Google's Keyword Referral Data Shutdown

Google+ Expands Search Options, Adds Trending Topics To Search Results

Yahoo Site Explorer Closing Down Monday, November 21st

How To Analyze Your Content Performance In Google Analytics

Overview

Site Content

Pages

Landing Pages

Site Speed

Site Search

Overview

Usage