Nine By Blue » Search Engine Land

Implementing Pagination Attributes Correctly For Google

Vanessa Fox — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:06:28 +0000

Google’s latest blog post provides details and a video from Maile Ohye about how they handle the pagination attributes within a page’s source code. You can use these attributes to indicate pages in a series (such as a multi-page article or set of product listings), which enables Google to cluster the pages into a single entity and combine their indexing and other properties (such as incoming link value). Using these attributes is trickier than it may seem at first glance, so below, a few tips from the blog post, video, and the recent SMX West session I moderated, which featured Maile. (Keep in mind that currently, only Google supports these attributes.)

Google Webmaster Tools Revamps Crawl Errors, But Is It For The Better?

Vanessa Fox — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:59:45 +0000

Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff!

I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. But now that I’ve gone through the changes, I unfortunately need to revise my summary. This update is mostly about removing super useful data, masked by a few user interface changes. (And I hate to write that, because webmaster tools is near and dear to my heart.)

Is SEO Killing America?

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:07:36 +0000

Last week at the Tools of Change conference, Clay Johnson, author of the new book The Information Diet gave a keynote talk titled “Is SEO Killing America“. Sigh. If you’ve been involved in search for any length of time, your first reaction may be, this again? Haven’t wedone this before? Once or twice?

Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:35:43 +0000

On around September 27th, Google launched what’s being called 2.5 of its Panda algorithm. On October 5th, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted:

“Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).”

Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related changes on at least October 3rd and October 13th. In several cases, I saw sites with Google organic traffic declines on 9/27, recovery on 10/3, and decline again on 10/13.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Land

The Clickthrough Rate Equation In Organic Search

Todd Nemet — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:59:29 +0000

When I was in middle school, my favorite book and my favorite TV show were both Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I must have read the book at least 10 times, and I watched the series every time it was on the local PBS station.

One of the most interesting parts of Cosmos that has stuck with me is the Drake equation:

The Drake equation is an attempt to estimate the current number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way by breaking it down into component parts (such as “f(p), the fraction of stars that have planets” and “f(l), the fraction of planets capable of sustaining life”) and then multiplying them all together.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Land.

Pew Internet: Diving Into How We Access Local News

Vanessa Fox — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:37:49 +0000

In studies of the evolution in how Americans seek out news, the trends tend to be that we use search and other online methods for staying informed. The consistent exception is how we access local news. Despite the proliferation of hyperlocal blogging (my own neighborhood’s West Seattle Blog being an excellent example of how hyperlocal blogs can provide both high-quality journalism and to-the-minute breaking news about every local happening), we turn to TV and print far more often than online news sources and search for local news.

Google Provides New Options for Paginated Content

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:47:41 +0000

At SMX Advanced earlier this year, a hot topic was the use of the rel=”canonical” attribute in conjunction with pagination. Maile Ohye of Google noted that the rel=”canonical” attribute was not intended to cluster multiple pages (articles, product lists, etc.) to page one of that series (although it can be used to cluster multiple pages to a “view all” page).

The discussion was fast and furious and we dove into the various pagination issues that content owners encounter. Maile took the feedback to Google and they got to work on some options. The goal? To present some new solutions at SMX East at a panel set up just to talk through pagination issues. Today, be impressed with my multitasking skills as I write this article that describes these new solutions while I moderate the session!

Tricks For Taming Keywords With Regular Expressions

Todd Nemet — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:31:26 +0000

So far my articles about technical SEO have focused on how to adjust a site’s configuration or architecture to make it more crawlable and indexable. In this post, I’m writing about the other end of the technical SEO process: using analytics data to analyze traffic and user behavior by keywords.

When looking at keyword data, it’s important to group them by type. Looking at individual keywords is not only inefficient, but it will generally lead to information that is either misleading or worse, can’t be acted on.

The most precise way to group keywords is by using regular expressions. Regular Expressions are strings containing letters, numbers, and special characters that match a specific word or group of words.

Read the article at Search Engine Land.

Google’s Panda Update Launches Internationally in Most Languages

Vanessa Fox — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:45:23 +0000

Google has just announced that their “Panda” rankings changes, first launched in the United States in late February and rolled out toEnglish language indices internationally in April, have now launched internationally in all languages other than Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Read the article at Search Engine Land

How To Improve Crawl Efficiency With Cache Control Headers

Todd Nemet — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:40:29 +0000

Way back at the end of the last century, I worked for a company called Inktomi. Most people remember Inktomi as a search engine, but it had several other divisions. One of these divisions (the one I worked for) sold networking software, including a proxy-cache called Traffic Server.

It seems weird now, but Inktomi made more money from Traffic Server than it did from the search engine. Such were the economics of the pre-Google Internet. It was a great business until 1) bandwidth got really, really cheap and 2) almost all of the customers went out of business in late 2000/early 2001. (Most of Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002, and Traffic Server was released as an open source project in 2009.)

Read the entire article on Search Engine Land.