Office Hours

August 26, 2010 Office Hours

August 26, 2010

Vanessa talks about best practices for pagination URL structure and duplicate content issues with printer versions of said paginated articles.
She also dives in to backlinks and Pagerank before talking about Glee.
Links mentioned:
preventing duplicate content issues with print versions of content
Somebody added 120k backlinks to my site…and my PR went from 6 to 1 that month
6 [...]

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August 19th 2010 Office Hours

August 19, 2010

Vanessa talks about the Google algo change and how it affects brand names in search.
Then, Vanessa takes lots of questions from the chat room on TLDs, blocking bad links and if “>>>>” in your title tags hurts your rankings.
Articles Mentioned:
Google Treating Brand Names in Search Terms
Google Search Results Dominated by One Domain
Could this change to [...]

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August 5, 2010 Office Hours

August 5, 2010

Vanessa is super stoked because she got a tweet from the bridge here in Seattle. This launches her into a lecture about how important social media is and how quickly it can raise awareness. In this case, the government owns the twitter account, and so there is no monetary value in tweeting, but instead they [...]

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July 22 2010 Office Hours

July 22, 2010

Yahoo says 25% of their results are now powered by Bing, so Vanessa digs into some questions she has. She talks about how time sensitive, spam and movie queries are handled in Bing as opposed to Yahoo, and then of course, comparing those to Google. Yahoo has said they plan on controlling the UI of the search results and [...]

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July 15, 2010 Office Hours

July 15, 2010

Vanessa’s book Marketing in the Age of Google is being translated into Portuguese and will be available in Brazil soon!
Vanessa talks about Googles changing algorithms and how they are impacting search results- in reply to the recent uproar inspired by a New York Times article.
She then talks about the testing of Bing results showing up [...]

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July 8, 2010 Office Hours

July 12, 2010

Vanessa finds her way back to Seattle to host this week’s office hours.
She dives in to everything that’s happened in the last month- SEO implications with the new Google sitemaps- which lets you submit sitemaps for images, video, news and more. Since Google is the only search engine doing this, does that mean the alliance [...]

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May 26th, 2010 Office Hours

May 27, 2010

Vanessa talks about her newest article on the Mayday update and how it impacts log tail traffic.
Next, Vanessa also talks about an article by Maile Oyhe about -9999px which had caused some controversy on Twitter. Vanessa clears up the discussion and provides alternatives that people have been asking for, and references a past show that [...]

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May 21, 2010 Office Hours

May 25, 2010

Vanessa is joined by Chris Dibona who is the public sector programs manager at Google, at the Google I/O conference.
The two of them discuss what’s new at Google- including integration with wave, buzz, Gmail and more. Chris shares with us what we can expect in the near future as well.
Listen to the entire episode at [...]

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May 13, 2010 Office Hours

May 13, 2010

Vanessa’s book is now officially out! Buy a copy today at Amazon, or Barnes and Nobile. Tune in Next week for a book give away on Office Hours!
Vanessa talks about her upcoming events: Personal Democracy Forum, SMX Advanced and more!
She then launched into her first topic: Microsites aren’t very good. Some people think it’s [...]

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April 29, 2010 Office Hours

May 3, 2010

Vanessa talks about her upcoming shows: You can find her in San Fransisco this coming weekend and next week at Wordcamp and Web 2.0 Expo.
If you can’t make those, pick up a copy of her book, Marketing in the Age of Google.
Vanessa talks about Google Local business listings, now called Google Places? and why it [...]

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April 1 2010 Office Hours

April 8, 2010

Maile Ohye joins Vanessa for Office Hours for April Fools day. The two discuss their adoration for irony and sarcasm, but their disinterest in April Fools.
Maile talks about how RDFA, rich snippets and other micro formats impact a SERP (doesn’t effect ranking, just display). Rich snippets are also now being used automatically, sites no longer [...]

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March 25, 2010 Office Hours

April 8, 2010

Vanessa does her show from Sao Paulo, Brazil at the WebExpo Forum. She takes questions about the URL Removal feature in Google Webmaster Tools, and Canonical Tags not taking effect.
From twitter, Vanessa answers discusses 301 redirects with multi-language sites, TLDs, Google sites search results, and qualified vs unqualified traffic.
Articles Mentioned:
Kill Useless Web Metrics: Apply “So [...]

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February 25, 2010 Office Hours

February 25, 2010

Vanessa does the show from Atlanta this week, and dives into microformatting and rich snippets. These may be lowering your click through, but depending on your business goal, maybe that doesn’t matter.
She then talks about Social Search and real time results, and a Vanity Fair article: Ringside at the Web Fight
Articles Mentioned:
Google Search Now Supports [...]

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February 18, 2010 Office Hours

February 18, 2010

Where in the world is Vanessa Fox? Vanessa tells us her busy itinerary for the next few months so that hopefully you can catch up with her!
This week, Vanessa talks about international SEO regarding recommendations for local sites on different TLDs, and canonical URLs. She answers questions about canonical tag usage and different versions of articles [...]

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February 11, 2010 Office Hours

February 11, 2010

Vanessa talks about how the Superbowl ads did at a search level, then launches into Google Buzz. Afterwards, Vanessa takes questions about outsourcing Social Media, PDFs and other chatroom questions.
Articles Mentioned:
Searching for the Superbowl Start Time: How are the Engines, the NFL and CBS Doing?
Scoring Superbowl 2010 Advertising: How’s the Search Visibility?
Listen to the entire [...]

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February 4, 2010 Office Hours

February 4, 2010

Recovering from an exciting Elton John concert, Vanessa discusses changes with Google News – how you may qualify, how to submit and how to be picked up.
Vanessa also talks twitter, link shortening services, and google dictionary!
Articles Mentioned:
New face to Google News Sitemaps
The Latest on Google News Sitemaps
Google proposes to make AJAX Crawlable
Google’s Proposal for Crawling [...]

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January 21, 2010 Office Hours

January 21, 2010

A guest host from Carnegie Mellon interviews Vanessa about what’s important to learn about search with regards to how it may be changing the future of business.
They also touch on the fact that students may be taking shortcuts by no longer doing research on the Internet, and instead turning to the Internet.
Vanessa and the chat [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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July 16, 2009 Office Hours

July 16, 2009

Vanessa and George remind us that everything with the subscriptions will be up and ready to go soon. The IRC chat will also be up and working well.
Vanessa talks about how to investigate a competitor makes a sudden rise as number two on the SERP.
Links mentioned:
Yahoo Site Explore
SEOMoz Linkscape Tool
WeBuildPages.com/tools
If they got there through manipulative [...]

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July 9, 2009 Office Hours

July 9, 2009

Vanessa talks about the Google webmaster Forum. The forums can be used for opinions, experiences and perspectives of webmasters and the occasional Googler.
Case Scenario: http://diydoctor.org.uk used to rank number one for certain terms relevant to their brand, but now only rank number 4 for “DIY” and it’s not on the home page. Vanessa takes the [...]

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June 18, 2009 Office Hours

June 18, 2009

Geraldine joins Vanessa to talk about her new website Everywhereist.com which gives us an inside look at start-ups that she gets to visit on her travels with her husband, as well provides travel tips.
Susan from Two Piece Set also joins the show to answer questions about internal nofollow links and page rank evaporation (not worth [...]

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  • Office Hours

    Half hour. Every week. Any question you have.

    Thursdays at 1pm Pacific on Webmaster Radio. Listen live or check back here each week for the podcast.

    You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

    Office Hours With Vanessa Fox on Webmaster Radio