Yahoo announced at the SMX East conference yesterday that they were no longer using meta keywords. In the report Yahoo stated that they had announced this earlier in the year - but apparently no one outside Yahoo got the memo. While none of the major engines now support meta keywords, I still recommend using topic and category specific keywords in all your pages. There are a lot of spiders crawling the web that still use this information to categorize your content and can result in back-links to your site.

SEM Huntsville key phrases, keywords, Yahoo

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/search-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/author-allen/search-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/search-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 relevancy 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/search-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/search-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 Huntsville Canonical, google, incoming links, microsoft, SEO Huntsville, Yahoo

I had a meeting at Yahoo this week. The meeting was targeted at companies heavy into affiliate programs. We heard from a number of program managers, but because I am under NDA, can’t disclose all the great stuff they are working on. However, I will say these guys are not sitting around worrying about Microsoft. They are firmly focused on the future and presented an impressive list of products and upgrades. Most  interesting was some of the stuff going on with PPC management and while I can’t be specific, I think I can say that managing PPC on Yahoo is about to get a lot easier.

I know Yahoo isn’t the shinning star of the industry they once were, but these guys get a lot of stuff right. Google has the search traffic and therefore the money and therefore the clout, but judging by Microsoft’s track record, they don’t have the stuff to make Yahoo better.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Microsoft ‘hater.’ In fact I was a liaison to Microsoft when I was at Intergraph and spent a fair amount of time on the Redmond campus, they get a lot right. Tons of R&D and top people, but their leadership in office applications doesn’t currently translate to search or internet services.

So did Yahoo make the right decision? If I were a shareholder, I would probably wouldn’t think so. As a Internet marketing guy, I am glad to they didn’t merge this into Microsoft’s AdCenter mess. Yahoo had a business before the MS deal and it still does.

Yahoo has great people, product, and heart.

SEM Huntsville adcenter, ppc, Yahoo