Office Hours

January 7, 2010 Office Hours

January 7, 2010

Vanessa talks about how Google supports cross-domain canonical tag. She touches on whether you should 301 redirect or use the canonical tag in certain situations.

She dives into Google News and requirements and gives suggestions.

Last, Vanessa talks about the changing SERP landscape including Facebook opening up content to be searched, Google Books and Google Maps using wikipedia to weigh searcher intent.

References:
Google Webmaster Central Blog: Handling Legitimate Cross-domain Content Duplication
Search Engine Land: Google, Yahoo and MS unite on Canonical Tag to Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter
Search Engine Land: Bing Still Working on Canonical Tag Support

Listen to the entire episode.

December 10, 2009 Office Hours

December 10, 2009

Vanessa lauches into some Buffy questions from some listeners before diving into a discussion of Google’s launch of Real Time Search, and how spammy it may be.

Vanessa also brushes on Google’s page fade in and Google’s personalized results, the later of which will affect rankings reports.

Articles Mentioned:
Search Engine Land: Google Launches Real Time Search
Search Engine Land: Google Now Personalizes Everyones Search Results
Search Engine Land: Google’s Personalized Results The New Normal
Enquisite: Google Search Update Ranking Report Really is Dead Finally
Sebastians-pamphlets: How to Spam real Time Search Via Twitter
Outspoken Media: Google Real Time Spam

Listen to the entire episode

December 3, 2009 Office Hours

December 4, 2009

Vanessa talks about a new launch in Google Webmaster Tools in the Labs: Site Performance- How fast is your site? Which provides the average load time of pages and compares it to the rest of the web.

Vanessa also takes questions from Twitter and the chat room about the URL removal tool, Joomla, meta tags, and when she’s going back to europe.

Listen to the entire episode.

November 12, 2009 Office Hours

November 16, 2009

Office Hours Nov 12th 2009.

Richard Zwicky (@zwicky) of Enquisite joins Vanessa at Pubcon to talk about helping businesses drive more customers organically.

The two of them talk about what mistakes people make while analyzing data about their website, such as not installing tracking codes properly, or not at all.

The two dive into an interesting discussion about query length. People are getting smarter about search engines, and now 5 word queries are as popular as one word queries- as far as click-through, and people are getting more qualified traffic.

Todd Friesen (@oilman) tags in for Vanessa- who had to jet-set- and the conversation turns to black hat and the tricks that don’t work anymore. Todd admits that quality content is actually worth putting time into.

Finally, the two talk about one of the the largest controversies in the industry: buying links- is it evil? The two share a secret about where the business really is.

Listen to the entire episode.

October 22, 2009 Office Hours

October 22, 2009

Office Hours Oct 22, 2009

20% of those on the internet update their status on social networking sites? Vanessa discusses how more people are joining the “geeks” and doing the Facebook thing.

Vanessa talks about a case study where the ranking dropped off- Vanessa solves the case!

Last, Vanessa answers the steps to take when you think part of your site is not being indexed.

Listen to the entire Episode on Webmaster Radio

October 14, 2009 Office Hours

October 14, 2009

Having just returned from her European trip, Vanessa talks about her internet experiences internationally.

Vanessa also addresses the elimination of Page Rank on Google Webmaster Tools. Is Google trying to make a statement?
Articles:
Google Removes PageRank Data From Webmaster Tools
Google Quietly Drops PageRank From Webmaster Tools

New tool on Google Wesmaster Tools: Parameter Handleing. Vanessa refers to her article that explains how to use it.
Google lets your tell them which URL parameters to ignore

Lisen to the entire episode at Webmaster Radio.

Office Hours August 27, 2009

August 27, 2009

Vanessa answers questions about session IDs (Googlebot hates them very much), Google Product

Search, longevity with twitter links and Google Caffine. She also gives a case scenario about a site with bad backlinks!

Articles Mentioned:
Everything you Need to Know you can Learn from Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter

Don’t forget to check out the upcoming Jane and Robot Developer Summits and SMX East events in New York.

Listen to the Entire Episode on WebmasterRadio.

August 20, 2009 Office Hours

August 20, 2009

Greg Niland joins Vanessa at SES San Jose to talk about the next Jane and Robot event in NYC, SMX East and SES East.

Listen to the entire episode

August 6, 2009 Office Hours

August 6, 2009

Just back from the Jane and Robot meet-up in Sunnyvale, Vanessa talks about her frustration with the iPhone and her new love for the Android. (Don’t forget there will be another meet-up in Santa Monica in a couple of weeks.)

Vanessa also explains international SEO, geographic targeting, proper placement of keywords in domain names and how Google tries to pick relevant results.

Listen to the entire episode on WebmasterRadio.

July 30, 2009 Office Hours

July 30, 2009

What should site owners know about the Yahoo! and Microsoft deal? Vanessa explains the partnership and breaks it down.
You can also read her article about it on Search Engine Land: What Site Owners, Web Developers and SEO’s Should Know about the Yahoo!/Microsoft Deal

Also, how does this affect Google? Will Google lose any market share? Vanessa gives her two cents.

Listen to the episode on WebmasterRadio

  • Library

    A collection of writing and analysis broadly covering the space of online marketing, written for other publications.

    You can also check out the Vanessa Fox blog.