Search Engine Optimization

Below are links to articles posted in Search Engine Optimization.

Help! My Website is Gone from Google!

I sometimes am amazed at how easy some articles can be to write. I was reading a forum thread about yet another webmaster being dropped from Google and as I started responding I thought to myself that there was so much information I could say, I might as well write an article. So I [...]

Doing Link Research

Researching links is an important activity that every webmaster must do. This encompasses not only researching who links to you, but also who links to your competitors, or where your competitors link, or even finding places where you can get new links.
Google was the first search engine to provide a link search [...]

Why a keyword rich domain helps

Keyword rich domains are often discussed.
Some people say go for branding and make it unique, some people say go for SEO and use keywords, on the SEO side some people say use hyphens, others say don’t.
It is a complicated issue.
However one of the main reasons I often recommend keyword rich domains is because the [...]

Google Webmaster Central

As of last Friday Google has renamed their sitemaps system to Google Webmaster Central. Matt Cutts did a video blog about it.
Google sitemaps had always been a great system, but there was a lot of confusion about it. Most people seemed to think that all it was was a tool to submit an XML [...]

A Google Myth Busted

The Internet is full of myths about how Google ranks pages. One of my oldest articles written, originally for SitePoint before being published here, was about Google Myths. In this article I dispel the myth about Google giving special bonuses to DMOZ or Yahoo listed sites, outside of the normal bonus the page [...]

Update on the NOODP Meta Tag

As I first reported here MSN launched a new meta tag for webmasters who did not want ODP (DMOZ.org) directory data to overwrite their normal abstract in the search results.
Yesterday Google announced they would now support this tag as well, for both DMOZ titles & descriptions.
Forum Discussion

DigitalPoint Co-op Ad Network adds Rel=”Nofollow”

As reported here DigitalPoint’s Co-op adnetwork has added the option for users to nofollow their link. The rel=”nofollow” link attribute was released by search engines to allow webmasters to indicate links that the search engines should not trust. Basically if you didn’t want to get banned or penalized for false link schemes you [...]

Search Engines Borrowing Page Titles from Directories

I’ve heard this complaint dozens of times. Someone has a pretty nice search engine ranking except instead of using the webmaster’s carefully selected title tag as the title for the listing the search engine pulls one from a directory that was done by an editor who might not be the most gifted copywriter. Now [...]

PageRank or Your Page’s Rank?

I’m sure most of my readers already know this, but I mean honestly I cannot visit a popular webmaster forum and not see this mistake being made. So I’m going to blog about it in hopes of making a central place people can be sent to when they get this wrong.
Your PageRank, or PR, and [...]

Amazon Switches from Google to MSN for Alexa, A9, and Amazon search.

CNET Reports that Amazon.com has dropped it’s Google partnership for it’s search features at it’s various web properties like A9.com and Alexa.com.
People have speculated that this is in response to Google supposedly encroaching on Amazon’s turf with book search. Personally I doubt it. Amazon may have started as a book store but books [...]

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