Posts on State of Search about ‘Technical SEO’

Cutts says: don’t use nofollow within your site

There is always a lot of discussion on using nofollow within your site for Pagerank Sculpting purposes. Matt Cutts now talked about it in his video responses. He says: let it flow naturally. He even thinks it doesn’t hurt to have the login page in the search results. I disagree with him on that one. Not for search purposes, but for conversion purposes. Check out what Matt said and tell me what you think.

Top 10 FREE SEO Tools & Plug-ins You (Literally) Couldn’t Live Without

You can find inspiration in the strangest of places.

I happened to find my ray of light whilst re-organising my SEO related bookmarks. Yes, they may have been messy and a clean out might have been overdue, but if I didn’t do it today, the day I happened to be thinking about what to blog about then we would have never arrived here, would we?

Trying to structure my bookmarks made me very aware of what was current and what was out of date. It made me realise what tools I could, and couldn’t live without. What blogs I could and couldn’t stop reading. And most importantly, what people I could and couldn’t stop listening too. The top blogs and people are another post altogether so you will just have settle for the most valuable tools and stay tuned for the rest of the series. So without further ado, here we go, the top ten SEO tools and plug-ins you literally couldn’t live without:

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Tonight: Joost de Valk, Bas van den Beld and Richard Baxter Talk Microformats

I’m super excited to be discussing Microformats with industry luminaries Joost De Valk and Bas van den Beld on Tuesday 15th June at 8pm in Europe, 7 in the UK, in the US at 2pm on the East Coast and 11am on the West Coast on the State of Search radio show on Webmasterradio.fm.

What are Microformats?

Microformats are an extension to xHTML to allow us to highlight (mark-up) items of data in a web page such as addresses, reviews, locations and even recipes! Think of them as a way of attaching extra meaning to the information published on a web page. Love them or hate them, Microformats are here to stay and the chances are you’re already using them. Rel=”nofollow” is an elemental Microformat, used (as we know) to show a search engine that you don’t editorially vouch for a source of information you’re citing as a link on a webpage. (more…)

AJAX and SEO, will they ever be united?

AJAX, along with Flash the ugly kid of web development for SEO, was introduced in 2005. The expectations were high but it never really got popular. A survey in October 2008 reported that 3.20% of the web pages tested used the XMLHttpRequest DOM object, an important part of AJAX.

The combination of AJAX and SEO has never been a good one. SEO has a strong fundamental basis in the document structure of the web. AJAX creates possibilities to discard the document structure of the web and offers a way to create single page websites. Gmail for example is a single page website.

AJAX and SEO seem like two worlds which cannot be united, or can they? While extensive use of AJAX should be a threat to SEO it doesn’t get that much attention. A search for ‘AJAX SEO’ in Google returns mainly articles dating from 2006, 2007 and 2008. Time for a little update. (more…)

SEO for Web Developers

I’m due to give a talk at one of those surprisingly fun crowdsourced unconferences – BarCamp Belfast. My talk will be about what web developers can do to ensure the websites they build are search engine friendly. Too often I’ve had to work with websites that seemed built to thwart search engines instead of welcome them, so it’s a topic dear to my heart.

I’ve had some great input from the members at the SEO Training Dojo and have a clear idea of what I want to discuss in this 30-minute talk I’ll be giving, but I figure it never hurts to get some extra input. I’m sure the the State of Search audience has their own horror stories about SEO-unfriendly websites to share.
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Need for Speed – Enable HTTP Compression

Since Google mentioned that site speed is now a factor, albeit a smaller one than relevance, SEOs need to look at ways of increasing site load speed. As web professionals we should already be obsessed with site speed as a quick loading site is a first positive impression and one that affects conversion and bounce rate.

One quick win is HTTP compression. Since the majority of the Google crawl is the underyling html, http compression allows significant improvements to be made for both googlebot and the user. Googlebot supports HTTP 1.1 compression. (more…)

301 redirects: not so good for SEO after all?

When you’re changing the structure of your website, changing your primary domain or creating better URLs for SEO purposes, you want to keep the values of your old URLs and move them to the new URLs. Luckily there’s an easy solution for that: 301 redirects. 301 redirects let your server tell the visitor (or search engine) that the page they are trying to visit has been moved permanently to another location. Visitors will be sent to the new location directly. Search engines will try to remove the old URL out of their index and move the value of that page to the new location. For some time now Google is telling us that 301 redirects are the proper way of redirecting your pages. However 301 redirects seem not so good for SEO after all.

301 redirects and PageRank

An import measure of the value of a page for Google is the PageRank. When you’re moving your pages you would want all of the PageRank from the original pages to be relocated to the new locations you specify in your 301 redirects. But in an interview in January with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts confirmed that with using a 301 redirect there might be some loss of PageRank. Too bad Matt didn’t really explain why. In my opinion moving a page, shouldn’t make that page of any less value. It’s still the same page with the same information people originally linked to. Imagine changing your company name or optimizing you URLs for SEO purposes. You would be forced to change all the URLs of your website and you would lose a little bit of PageRank for every redirect. But that means losing a little bit of PageRank for every page on your website and decreasing the authority of your whole site. (more…)

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