Flickr Starts Nofollowing
A couple of my colleagues, Brian Brown and Jeff Muendel, identified that Flickr has begun NOFOLLOWing hyperlinks in their photo profile pages. I’ve confirmed this and have a few more details to add. (more…)
Popularity: 36% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/21/2008 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Image Optimization, Link Building, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimizationflickr, image SEO, Image-Search-Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Retailers Recession Proofing Through Optimizing Internet Retail Sites
Overall economic fears are causing many retailers and other businesses to step up their games in terms of promotion. While some retailers are cutting back on advertising or paring down on their inventory, there are compelling reasons to increase the intensity in marketing efforts in order to offset the expected reduction in average customer spending. If your competitors are cutting back on efforts, not only could you have a chance to dominate in your sector, but you could even increase profits at the expense of your competition’s market share.
The internet is a prime area to focus in this period, since the net reduces distance barriers and the difficulty of locating products for buyers, and efforts to increase sales through this medium can be accomplished at lower costs than many other options. One of the most cost-effective areas for internet promotion is via increasing your “natural” traffic referred to your site from search engines.
Many internet retailers haven’t connected the dots sufficiently (more…)
Popularity: 36% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/14/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Dynamic Sites, Marketing, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationEcommerce, GravityStream, Internet Retailers, Recession, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Mahalo Traffic Growth Vulnerable To Google Penalty
A couple of weeks ago, Heather Hopkins at Hitwise noted that the human-powered Mahalo search engine has been showing a very strong curve of increasing traffic:
They also noted that 76% of this traffic comes in as referrals from other search engines.
This is slightly ironic, since Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, has historically been very critical of the worth of search engine optimization. I’m not the only one who sees the irony in this, since Allen Stern also noted it, saying “Mahalo is an SEO Play“. As Allen notes, if Mahalo didn’t want this traffic it would be easy for them to block the spiders thru their robots.txt file.
Popularity: 54% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/24/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, News, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERPs
Organic Search Marketing in 2008: Predictions
If you’re even the slightest bit aware of what’s been going on in organic search marketing, you couldn’t help but know that Google made a number of changes during 2007 which impacted the natural search marketing programs for many webmasters. So here’s my little post predicting where I see the trends pointing and what we can expect in 2008 and beyond… (more…)
Popularity: 37% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/10/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Design, Google, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social-Media, usability, User-Centered-Design
GravityStream Does Local SEO: Now Fixes Store Locator Pages
I’m pleased to announce that GravityStream can now optimize store locator pages for those retailer sites which provide search utilities for their local outlets.
As you may recall, I’ve written before about how dealer locators are terribly optimized and how store locator pages can be optimized. A great many store locator sections of major corporate sites are not allowing search engine spiders to properly crawl through and index all the locations where they may have brick-and-mortar outlets.
Most large companies seem fairly unaware that their store locators are effectively blocking search engine spiders and are making it impossible for endusers to find their locations through simple keyword searches. I’ve also listed out a number of top store locator providers which produce locational services like this for many Internet Retailer 500 companies.
Read on for details on our results…
Popularity: 23% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 01/08/2008 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Content Optimization, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, ToolsAutomatic-SEO, dealer-locators, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, store-locators
Advice on Subdomains vs. Subdirectories for SEO
Matt Cutts recently revealed that Google is now treating subdomains much more like subdirectories of a domain — in the sense that they wish to limit how many results show up for a given keyword search from a single site. In the past, some search marketers attempted to use keyworded subdomains as a method for improving search referral traffic from search engines — deploying out many keyword subdomains for terms for which they hoped to rank well.
Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization. (more…)
Popularity: 29% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 12/12/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, Domain Names, Dynamic Sites, Google, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, URLs, Worst PracticesDomain Names, Google, host crowding, language seo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, seo subdirectories, subdomain seo, subdomains
Google Hiding Content Behind an Image on their SERPs
Tamar Weinberg at Search Engine Roundtable reports that in a Google Groups forum, a Webmaster Central team member stated that you could use something like the z-index attribute in DHTML styles to hide text or links behind an image, so long as the text/link being hidden is what’s represented in the image.
I think it’s a good thing that they do allow this sort of use, because it appears to me that they’re doing this very thing on their own search results pages! If you refresh a search page, you can see what they’re hiding under their own logo:
…a text link pointing to their homepage.
Now, the interesting question I’d have for the Google team about this would be: this is straightforward if the image itself contains text, but what would be allowable if the image doesn’t contain text, but say, an image of a lion? There’s many different ways to express what that lion is from “lion” to “tawny, golden-furred lion king”.
Or, should we be assuming that images that are written over text and links are only allowable when the image contains text?
The Google Webmaster Tools contributor states that you could be using image’s ALT and TITLE attributes to essentially do the same thing. This is sorta funny, because one could say the same thing of Google’s use of this on their own page — why are they doing it?
One immediately wonders how Google polices this, since they’re apparently not frowning upon pages drawing images over text/links in all cases. They can detect text written over images, but would they have every instance checked by a human? Or, are they using optical character recognition algos to automatically check the text within images against the text being hidden?
In any case, the fact that Google is doing this on their own site could be taken as more confirmation that they don’t consider the technique to be bad in of itself — as long as the practice is conservative and the text/link just describes the text content within the image.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 11/19/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Image Optimization, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationGoogle, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, z-index, zindex
Google’s Advice For Web 2.0 & AJAX Development
Yesterday, Google’s Webmaster Blog gave some great advice for Web 2.0 application developers in their post titled “A Spider’s View of Web 2.0“.
In that post, they recommend providing alternative navigation options on Ajaxified sites so that the Googlebot spider can index your site’s pages and also for users who may have certain dynamic functions disabled in their browsers. They also recommend designing sites with “Progressive Enhancement” — designing a site iteratively over time by beginning with the basics first. Start out with simple HTML linking navigation and then add on Javascript/Java/Flash/AJAX structures on top of that simple HTML structure.
Before the Google Webmaster team had posted those recommendations, I’d published a little article early this week on Search Engine Land on the subject of how Web 2.0 and Map Mashup Developers neglect SEO basics. A month back, my colleague Stephan Spencer also wrote an article on how Web 2.0 is often search-engine-unfriendly and how using Progressive Enhancement can help make Web 2.0 content findable in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search.
Way earlier than both of us even, our colleague, P.J. Fusco wrote an article for ClickZ on How Web 2.0 Affects SEO Strategy back in May.
We’re not just recycling each other’s work in all this — we’re each independently convinced of how problematic Web 2.o site design can limit a site’s performance traffic-wise. If your pages don’t get indexed by the search engines, there’s a far lower chance of users finding your site. With just a mild amount of additional care and work, Web 2.0 developers can optimize their applications, and the benefits are clear. Wouldn’t you like to make a little extra money every month on ad revenue? Better yet, how about if an investment firm or a Google or Yahoo were to offer you millions for your cool mashup concept?!?
But, don’t just listen to all the experts at Netconcepts — Google’s confirming what we’ve been preaching for some time now.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 11/07/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationAJAX, Google, Mashups, Progressive-Enhancement, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web-2.0
Double Your Trouble: Google Highlights Duplication Issues
Maile Ohye posted a great piece on Google Webmaster Central on the effects of duplicate content as caused by common URL parameters. There is great information in that post, not least of which it validates exactly what a few of us have stated for a while: duplication should be addressed because it can water down your PageRank.
Maile suggests a few ways of addressing dupe content, and she also reveals a few details of Google’s workings that are interesting, including: (more…)
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/12/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Best Practices, Dynamic Sites, Google, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure, URLsCanonicalization, duplicate-content, duplication, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Matt Cutts reveals underscores now treated as word separators in Google
After the recent WordCamp conference, Stephan Spencer reports here and here that Matt Cutts stated that Google now treats underscores as white-space characters or word separators when interpreting URLs. Read on for more details and my take on it…
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/26/2007 | Permalink | Email
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