The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization
I have long speculated that on-page optimization was trivial. It meshed with my understanding of how a suspicious Google engineer may treat the content of a page in relationship to its rankings. Why trust anything a webmaster says about his or her content (keywords stuffed into H1, meta, or bold tags)? Why trust anything on a page that a user won’t get to preview before visiting (anything outside the Title and Meta-Description, by-and-large)? However, despite my speculations, I lacked the data to truly start making conclusions about the usage of keywords in specific tags. Until now. First, I am pleased to say that our micro-experimentation has found similar results to SEOMoz’s macro-experimentation. In particular, their finding that the H1 tag was no...
XML Sitemap Assisted Redirects: Advanced White Hat SEO
One of the most critical times for a site’s rankings occur when there is a massive shift in URL structure across the site. Unfortunately, this is a common prescription for sites with unruly URLs with multiple parameters. Creating pretty, canonical URLs is easy enough, as is mapping old URLs to new with 301 redirects, but preventing duplicate content issues can be problematic. Each page on the web represents a destination that can be reached by links. Theoretically, without XML Sitemaps (or similar forms of direct page submission), there would be no way for Googlebot to find pages that are not connected by links. In our first example image, this site has a homepage and 4 subpages, connected by links, all of which have been cached by Google. Let’s...
NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting Roundup: Changes and Implications
Matt Cutts has decided to reveal a little more about Google’s internal changes that brought upon debate regarding the use of the NoFollow tag and PageRank Sculpting. While there has been quite a bit of discussion, I wanted to take a moment to wrap up what has happened and what the implications of these are for white and black-hat techniques. What Has Changed Think of your webpage as a water tower and links as pipes from that water tower to other smaller water towers. Historically, a “nofollow” tag was like capping the one of the pipes so that no water would flow to the terminating water tower. Google has changed this, though. Instead of capping the pipe, they merely divert it into the abyss. The link still impacts your page’s ability to...
Simple PageRank User Script
This is a RePost after we lost some stories from our db. As an avid user of the Opera browser, one of my long time difficulties has been the lack of a Google Toolbar. Frankly, the only thing I am interested in on that toolbar is to see the TBPR (toolbar PR). So, without further adieu, here is a simple UserScript for seeing the PageRank. This will drop a little image in the upper left of each page you visit with the PageRank. When you mouse over the image, it disappears so you can get to any of the navigation that might be blocked by the image. // ==UserScript==<br /> // @name PR for Opera<br /> // @description Shows PageRank for Opera in Right Hand Corner. Disappears when you mouse over it.<br /> // ==/UserScript==<br />...
PageRank Sculpting is Dead, Long Live PageRank Sculpting
Update: This is a RePost after our Database Lost Some Recent Posts. Our suspicions have been verified. PageRank Sculpting still works, just not with nofollow. This is in accordance with the original intent of nofollow, which was to tag untrustworthy links. The links you create and control on your own site to pages you create yourself are inherently trustworthy. The search marketing world is all abuzz with the latest from Matt Cutts that PageRank sculpting no longer works via the SMX Advanced conference. What Has Changed I think what is actually occurring is a far more simple, straightforward and, frankly, obvious update on behalf of the Google search team. This is the question I immediately asked myself upon hearing the news: why should the NUMBER of internal...
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