Welcome to the 'Search Engine Marketing' section.
Search engine news, tips and marketing techniques for the affiliate marketer — focusing on ‘on page’ factors. See our Link Building section for more on search engine marketing and linking.
Due to a bug in the popular WordPress blogging platform, Matt Cutts is now officially publishing duplicate content on his WordPress blog. If you haven’t yet applied the fix, so are you! No, this isn’t the same tired old duplicate content vulnerability that’s due to bad theme design or poor permalink choices — it’s a a bona fide bug.
For many of us making a living online, Google is bread and butter. So who in their right might would believe that removing any revenue-generating site from Google could actually help you make more money? Read the rest of this article, and YOU will… In retrospect, this is so obvious that I’m sure many people have already thought of it; but if you haven’t, now is the time to consider it as part of your web marketing strategy.
Have you ever wanted to provide a link which, when clicked, would lead somewhere other than where the link XHTML itself is coded to point? For example, you might have been trying to track clicks through a given link but without actually cluttering up the link by appending tracking parameters. Or, you might have been trying to ensure that the Page Rank contribution of a given link wasn’t lost on some obscure page deep within a site. A little simple javascript can help you send clicks to one place and Page Rank to another.
Unconfirmed reports are surfacing of a bot with a known Google IP that is requesting CSS and Javascript files and which appears with a User-Agent of ‘Mozilla, Googlebot’. We evaluate two possible explanations and comment on the potential impact of a shift from purely text-based search engine bots to spatially aware bots.
While most of the discussion about the major November update of the Google index — popularly referred to as the ‘Jagger’ update — has focused on changes to the Google algorithms and resulting alterations to SERPs, we’ve noticed a change in something that matters a great deal more. Namely, we’re seeing that Jagger is apparently beginning to impact real world traffic, and we’re ecstatic to see the traffic figures plummeting at a selection of spam-supported sites across the web. Meanwhile, our sites that focus on adding real value with real content continue to enjoy growing visitor numbers and page views.
Is the job of a search engine to find content that is ‘optimized’ for a given key phrase? No! The job of a search engine is to find content that is semantically relevant to that key phrase. Assume that the two are the same thing, and you’ll find yourself chasing all kinds of irrelevancies when trying to decide how many key phrases you should include when ‘optimizing’ a page.
Recent discussions at Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Roundtable have wondered about the benefits — if any — of using Google’s new Sitemaps, and discussions elsewhere on the web suggest that many webmasters don’t yet know what to think of Google’s new way of gathering URLs for indexing. From our point of view, the benefits of Google’s Sitemaps are extremely clear. Is your site one of those for which we see clear benefits?
Google has today rolled out a beta test of Google Sitemaps, a facility for webmasters to submit lists of pages which they would like to crawl for inclusion in their index. This new feature promises to shed light on the ‘dark matter’ of the web — the billions of pages of content previously inaccessible to search engines — and in so doing to change the face of search forever.
Webmasters new to affiliate marketing may be drawn to Javascript-based ‘live pricing’, often used in free affiliate template sites provided by merchants. Here are my top 5 compelling reasons to steer clear of Javascript-based live pricing (sometimes called ‘Javascript datafeeds’) whenever possible.
As search engines become ever more clever at understanding how to serve up relevant search results, a Yahoo! Research Labs tool called Mindset tries to tailor search results for the general type of search you say you’re trying to conduct.