Where’s that time machine? Bing is using the meta keywords tag in its ranking algorithm again.
Kinda.
Danny Sullivan’s The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing & Why Only Spammers Should Use It article offers awesome insight from Duane Forrester of MSN.
To summarize – the meta keyword tag won’t make a huge difference, but Bing may use it to identify spammers via tag stuffing.
If you’re like me, this doesn’t change a whole lot. Personally, I haven’t used the meta keywords tag in a long time; not worth the time and effort in my opinion.
Every group has one. In the SEO industry, there are far too many – the folks who call themselves SEOs but are neglecting the knowledge behind on major factor – Online Reputation Management.
Read the story of SEO Columbus by my SEO friend Mike Halvorsen. If you don’t read it (though you really should), here’s the coles notes version.
Mike is an SEO. He recently moved to Columbus so on his PERSONAL blog, he created a navigational link with the anchor text “SEO Columbus”. Apparently there’s another SEO in Columbus (Joe) who is insisting he “owns” the term and is insisting that Mike remove instances of that keyword that confuse him with Joe’s business.
Google made a significant shift with it’s organic search results in the past few weeks. Now, by default, you are served results based on your geographic location.
Signed in or not, if your search query qualifies, you’ll see that on the right a map appears over the paid listings. See my search below for office furniture:
This is pretty handy if you’re looking to shop somewhere in person and for brick and mortar businesses, this is a fantastic change. But what if you’re an online retailer? How can you possibly compete with this? This is an issue and needs to be answered. I’d love to hear how you think this problem can be solved.
Google Profiles are a new and, in my opinion, underused resource. Perhaps you didn’t like it because of the unfriendly URL, but you can now get your very own vanity URL with your Google username.
Example: http://www.google.com/profiles/lyndseo
And wait! What’s that? Adding links? And these links are crawlable?
Google Profile lets you add links with whatever anchor text you decide – and as of right now there is no rel=nofollow attached to those links. They do give you some guidances – “Examples: Online photo albums, social network profiles, personal websites” – as a fallback, I would assume, for those who may will try to manipulate it.
Today at SMX West, the three big search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) announced a new tag to help reduce duplicate content on the web.
This new tool is called the “canonical tag”. If you’ve spent some time learning about SEO before, I’m sure you’re familiar with the term. Canonical refers to a page that has more than one URL. For example, the www and non-www versions of your web site are considered different sites. Google has had a tool through Webmaster Tools for some time to help with this, but the announcement of this new tag comes from all three search engines meaning that they *should* all obey it.
It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that I’m not much of a writer, given the frequency of updates to this blog. In fact, I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m a numbers girl. Absolutely left-brained. Writing is not my strongest suit.
Does that mean I’m not as good at search engine optimization? Not at all. For all the time I could spend writing blog posts, I instead spend time reading up other people’s content, learning and absorbing as much as I can. I just don’t feel the need to repeat what’s already being said elsewhere.
A couple of weeks ago, I was featured on the digital marketing blog OneDegree.com. I discussed SEO Don’ts Myths and Scams, the panel I will be speaking on at Search Engine Strategies Toronto on June 17-18. Hope to see you there – here is the interview.
In the past, I haven’t done anything overly complicated with robots.txt, and I have a situation I need a little help with.
I have a directory I want to disallow, with the exception of a select few files in that directory. Is there a way I can say “disallow all but “?
Your help is appreciated!
Not three hours after I posted last month about the incorrect spelling of WestJet in Google’s flight tracking (supplied by www.flightstats.com) I received an email from Conducive Technology Corp’s CEO Jeff Kennedy. He stated that the spelling error had been corrected and would be updated within a few hours.
Actually for a few days the actual word “WestJet” didn’t show up at all, but now I am pleased to say that WestJet is spelled correctly in Google’s FlightStats results.
Thanks to Jeff and the FlightStats team for doing what more people should – watching the web and blogs for any mention of their company name, and going into action when something needs to be done.
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