Google added a feature to Webmaster Tools yesterday that I hope will find its way in to Business Listings and other services. Now, if you are verified owner of a website, you can simply add additional users to the Webmaster Tools account (through the verify link). This means site owners can add individuals that do development, marketing or optimization, without having to upload additional files or edit pages. This greatly simplifies things, giving owners a simple way to remove this access.

More on this from Google here

SEO SEO, webmaster tools

I am attending the search optimization and marketing conference SMX West in Santa Clara next week. If you will be at the conference and would like to get together, drop me a note. For my customers, this is one of the larger industry events. While I follow in the neighborhood of 20 blogs on marketing and optimization all year, this show does a lot to pull all the information together. Confirming trends and many times is the launching point for new techniques and information.

SEM SEM, SEO

I couldn’t resist posting this Dilbert cartoon strip from February 19. I am not sure if its the recognition that SEO has become mainstream enough to merit a Dilbert strip, or the fact that Scott Adams understands that sometimes sacrifices must be made to keep Google happy.

Enjoy:

SEM SEO

Duplicate Content has long been an issue with webmasters and is cause for concern because duplicating content dilutes your ranking in search results. Perhaps the most common cause of having duplicate content is in allowing both www. and non www versions of your site to exist. However, another place where I see duplicate content occur is when a customer has multiple domain names pointing to the same content. When you use multiple domain names, and there are good reasons to do this, you should pick a preferred URL and ensure that any secondary domains are 301 redirected to that URL.

In this video, Google’s Greg Grothaus does a great job explaining duplicate content problems and solutions ranging from 301 redirects to canonical tags.

I have previously blogged about how 301 redirects can prevent common problems from diluting the search engine ranking for your site. However, there are however a number of situations that create duplicate content concerns that are more difficult address. Webmasters now have additional tools to deal with duplicate content through Google’s Webmaster Tools panel. Through this addition to webmaster tools, Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore. This will a great help, especially for many large dynamic sites.

SEO 301 redirects, Canonical, duplicate content, Linking, SEO, spidering, www

It is often hard to tell what is a real penalty as there can be may causes for your content to drop in the search engine result pages (SERPs). There are things that should be obvious, like changes in SERPs that co-inside with changes you made to the site. However, often results don’t directly co-inside with changes and therefore it can be difficult to track back.

It can be challenging to discover if:

• You’ve got a true penalty
• You’ve been outranked according to the current algorithm
• It’s a Google bug (from algorithm tweaks)

Simple Checks Include:

1. Is your robots.text page restricting access?
2. Has an errant noindex or no-follow tag found its way to a section of your site?
3. Have you checked Google’s webmaster tools for error messages?
4. Have you checked WebmasterWorld to see if recent changes to the algorithm are effecting others?

Props to “tedster” on the webmaterworld thead, this list is an excerpt from an older posting of his:

Additional checks:

1. Do your pages show with a site:example.com search?
   If they did once and they do not now, this is most likely a ban – the most extreme kind of penalty. It’s becoming quite rare to be completely banned rather than penalized – usually those who are banned know what they’ve been doing. Technical problems with your site, or some times Google may be at fault.
2. Does your site still rank #1 for a search on your domain name example.com?
   If so, but your other important search rankings ALL slipped badly, this is often a sign of a penalty. Study up on the posts in our Hot Topics area for ideas.
3. Does a search for relatively unique phrases taken from your title tags return your URL relatively high?
   If so, but your principle search rankings have dropped out the bottom, you may have lost the power of a good number of your backlinks. This is not necessarily a true penalty, but if you have been a part of some backlink scheme, even unwittingly, you may have been penalized for it.

Also, check any outbound links on your pages to be sure that the site they point to is still what you intended. Other domains can change ownership (or just change their conduct) and become part of a “bad neighborhood”. If others also have access to your site, be sure that no hidden content has been added without your knowledge, especially hidden links.

Other good posts on the subject:

• Do I Have a Google Penalty?
• Am I penalized? What type of penalty do I have?
• Diagnosing a possible penalty

SEO google penalty, SEO, webmaster tools

Carrie Hill just published a summary of directories that should be on every one’s link building list. These are credible sources that the search engines use to help determine the relevancy of your site for things like products, services, or locality.

See Carrie’s list of  Must Have List of Directories

Related:

• Building Incoming Links
• Directories and Incoming Links

SEO directory listings, incoming links, Link Building, SEO

I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem.

I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page names, maintain legacy extensions, etc. But there are still pathing and page name changes that will need to be addressed, for these mod-rewrite is the tool.

Stephan Spencer has recently posted an excellent two-part article on the subject, see:

• URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 1)
• URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 2)

Past articles on the subject include:

• Launching a new Website / Changing an existing one
• Mod Rewrite Rules for Uniform Spidering
• Never delete or rename a page…
• To www or not to www, that is in the URL …

SEO 301 redirects, delete page, Joomla, rename page, SEO, sh404sef

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