More and more site owners are concerned that they might be getting penalised accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content.
Do they have cause for worrying? Certainly, many in house or external SEOs have experienced duplicate content issues and 90% of them through natural means such as syndicating content or catalogue driven product pages that vary only in colour of product.
This session looks at various issues and explorers potential solutions.
RSS is a widely used format of web feeds used for content syndication. It is amongst others used to spread news and new posts on a blog. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to follow interesting information from all around the web. RSS feeds use a standardized XML file format to publish information. Users can subscribe to the feeds with many different RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines but Microsoft Outlook, for example, also supports RSS feeds. They can also add feeds to their browser home page. It is a very good way to spread your information to your audience and therefore a great tool for SEO.
An RSS feed consists of a part that describes the main information of the feed, like title, website and webmaster, followed by a list of items. An item can represent a news item, a blog post, a new vacancy, an upcoming event, basically everything you want. (more…)
Since Google officially introduced page speed as a ranking factor in 2010 I thought I’d put together some of the things we do when optimizing a website for better performance. As a starting point (besides of actually accessing the site and get a feeling on how fast it really is) I’d usually go with the Google Webmaster Tools > Labs > Site performance tab: (more…)
Apparently some SEOs believe that optimising a site for long tail traffic is not really SEO. I disagree, and below I will explain why.
First of all, let’s define what we mean by ‘long tail traffic’. It’s one of those often bandied phrases that tends to mean slightly different things for different people. Wikipedia isn’t much help here: “The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases.”
Not sure I agree with that entirely. Another popular definition of long tail traffic is any search engine traffic that arrives on your site using 4 or more keywords. That too doesn’t sit well with me, as many 4+ keyword phrases are actually very popular and can generate substantial volumes of traffic. (more…)
Yesterday I read an extremely useful and practical walk-thru on Page Level Search Engine Indexation, by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget. In the post Baxter looks at a variety of data sources from the simplest, such as Webmaster Tools, which will tell you how many URLs are in your sitemap and how many of those are indexed – (the difference therefore being of interest;) to more robust methods of actually identifying which of the total site pages are errant, in this case by building a Mozenda agent scraper. Definitely worth a read for anyone working on large websites (particularly ecommerce sites) with multiple instances of similar page- type e.g. product- level.
Setting aside issues of information architecture, internal and external linking; one of the most common issues we see at theMediaFlow when presented with sites that have page-level indexation issues, is one of duplicate content. Cross domain duplicate content carries related and additional challenges, however in this case I wanted to share some experiences of solving page indexation issues when duplicated content is present on product level pages. (more…)
Google has come in for a lot of criticism over the last year or so, some of it justified, some of it not so. Whilst it is unrealistic to expect and assume that Google is and potentially can be a perfect entity, I for one would certainly suggest there is some room for improvement within the current resultset both in terms of quality of results and support for existing products.
Sometimes struggles to focus
There isn’t a day that goes by where we don’t see something new in our search index, whether that change be algorithmic or increasingly structural within the search index. From the addition of comparison ads to new layout to cater for local searches to the integration of local – 2010 was certainly a bumper year for changes. (more…)
I would like to share a case with you. A case that got me thinking about the importance of good coding. Some time ago we made some changes to the website of a supplier of stoves and fireplaces. The website has a good amount of authority within their business and although the website ranked very well on the main product categories, individual products and product types didn’t come up in the search engines as often as we wanted.
The current website was mainly focused on company information with a separate part for the online product catalogue. We decided to create a structure with a major focus on the main product categories, a filter structure that would be optimized automatically for the product types and a better structure to increase indexation of all of the products within the online catalogue.
The goal of the changes was to drive more organic traffic from searches for specific products and types of products and of course to retain the current rankings on main categories. Together with the client we invested some valuable hours coming up with a perfect structure and tackled problems like optimizing pages where combinations of filters were used. (more…)
The other day I had to setup a new laptop and while doing so, obviously one of the installations I did was Firefox which I’m using heavily for some years now. So, the installation finished and I double-clicked the desktop-icon for the first time. Holy… that was fast (almost unbelievable that Firefox boots *that* fast!) but the second thought I had was something like “hmm… why does it look so naked and where are all the useful icons?” and all of a sudden I realized how much I got used to having plug-ins installed to perform the various online marketing tasks day in and day out.
Inspired by the post Top-10 FREE SEO Tools where Sam Murray mainly talks about the most useful tools out there and since I had to re-install and configure my setup anyways I compiled a top-10 list with the most useful SEO plug-ins – here we go: (more…)
The second session saw Kristjan Mar Hauksson from Nordic eMarketing present on IP addressing and GEOIP targeting.
Studies have shown 15% – 35% of people chose to search by targeted country (pages from). It is essential to make sure your regional based site appears in these results.
From what I heard, online marketers and especially SEOs might sometimes be interested in getting links pointing to a self-owned (or a client’s) website 
OK, fun aside. When building links one of the things that really annoys me, are people trying to cheat you – and I’m not talking a PR 4 vs. a PR 6 link but more stuff like removing a link after a striking a deal (which is more or less the easiest to detect), cloaking content based on user-agents/IPs or using methods like X-Robots headers or the robots Meta tag to prevent indexing pages.
This article is going to be a small check-list on things you’ll have to watch out for – or if possible – your link-building backend should have “an eye on” (and really make sure you run these tasks on a regular basis, say at least once a week): (more…)
This is a post describing the presentation done by Richard Baxter at A4U Expo London 2010
What is Information Architecture?
This can be explained by the ability to ensure users and crawlers can traverse to the lowest tier of content on your website. This is important because it gives you the ability to flow authority down into your pages.
This is because often the lowest level of content gets starved of link juice/page rank which restricts its ability to rank for a range of keywords. AND since longer tail keyphrases are more liekly to convert it is very valuable to look at this.
*LIVE BLOGGING can result in some mistakes, however there is no money back guarantee and the reason it is slightly late is my watch is slow.
It is always great seeing @davenaylor speak – every time I see him you can really see his passion for search. His approach is so analytical and precise, everything is thought out, analysed and push forward. Or as he says himself “Monitored, tracked and tweaked” Here he covers the 3 elements of SEO; Technical, On Page and Off Page.
Dave started by saying “sites always need improvement” which is great news for our jobs…
Stay up to date with the latest articles
