Google Analytics is updating their their system. To ensure AdWords continues to pass information to your Google Analytics account, a setting change may be needed. I have already taken care of this for my customers and in doing so found several cases where a change was required.

I wanted to alert other readers that you should check your AdWords account to be sure the information is correct.

For instructions see this Google Post Important change to AdWords/Analytics cost data importing

 Thanks to Rusty Brick at Search Engine Roundtable for the heads up and Brad Geddes for his coverage (here).

Analytics, SEM adwords, Analytics, google

There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc).

The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What’s that, you say they are the same?  Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There are some easy programmatic ways to address the www versus non www  issue, however the problem starts to get sticky in when you mix in the wide range of variables such as dates, tags, and categories that can be included in the URL structure.

The search engine spider may find variations like these all pointing to the same content:

• www.mywebsite.com/january 2009/search-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/seo-tag/serach-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/author-allen/serach-engine-optimization

 Worst still are session ids (used on larger sites) which can cause a single page of content to be indexed hundreds of times:

• www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization/sessionid=123

Add to this that you can’t control how others link to your content and you begin to understand why duplicate content is such a large issue.  

Why should you care? From and SEO perspective 1 page with 100 incoming links has far more relavency than 100 pages with identical content having one incoming link each. 

To address these concerns, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to take the content of the Canonical Link Tag as the preferred name for a page.

So adding a tag such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization, regardless of how the spider found the page.

Here’s a link to more information on this topic by Vanessa Fox  at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537 

Google’s Matt Cutts posted this video on the Canonical Link tag.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

The discussion begins hitting of some of the finer points of this topic starting in at about 12:05.

SEO Canonical, google, incoming links, microsoft, SEO, Yahoo

Google has a number of good resources for webmasters, but that have just released an Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. So, if you ever wondered if all that stuff you have heard about optimizing your website for Google is hooey or not… this is a great place to find out.

SEO google, SEO, webmaster tools

Google recently announced changes to its approach to Quality Score. Quality Score is the bane of my existence. It turns previous ‘best practices’ into bad practices and dooms the long-tail to obscurity.

Sure it makes sense to have the keywords relevant to the ad and the landing page relevant (duh!), but in practice Google weighs click thru rates (CTR) in the overall campaign to judge what you should be paying and if your CTR drops too low for the ad group, you’ll receive a Quality score minimum bid “penalty” of $5 or $10.  This means you need maintain only small campaigns grouped with only top performing keywords.

Unfortunately when you launch a new campaign you don’t know what your top performing phrases are going to be. Many times it the second tier phrases that provide the most cost-effective conversion for your clients and finding those takes time. The problem is during the time when you are trying to build effective campaigns you are getting soaked by Quality Score penalties.

I can only hope the upcoming changes to Quality Score will imrpove the current strangle hold.

Here are three articles on Quality Score you may find helpful:

• Ah-Oh…PPC Feeling A Lot Like SEO
• How to Raise Your Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score 

SEM google, ppc, quality score

This is a short video by Google’s Matt Cutts. In the video he offers tips on basic things you can do to optimize your website for Google:

SEO google, matt cutts, Search Optimization, SEO