Silk Icon Set CSS: Using CSS Clipping and Optimized Silk Icon Image

First off, I have to start by saying I absolutely love FamFamFam.com’s free “Silk” icon set. It is unequivocally the most valuable set of free images I have ever used and I recommend if you use it you donate accordingly. With 1000 icons, each roughly 1KB in size, it is understandable how eventually it would get cumbersome for a web application interface using 20 to 30 of these icons at a time to continue to try to handle each of these images individually. Moreover, as often as these icons are used across the web, it made sense to me that the popular image-clipping CSS method might be valuable not just for my own web application development but others as well. What is the CSS Clipping Method and Why While I’m not the best at explaining...

The New Canonical Link Tag: What to do…

First off, kudos to the search engines for working together to come up with a reasonable standard for solving what had previously been an intractable issue. I will restrain myself from saying “it’s about damn time”, or maybe I just didn’t, but regardless this is a fantastic new tool that far more webmasters can implement. Here are some initial thoughts. What it really changes…The burden has shifted from knowing all the false URLs (in order to create URL rewrites to address them) to simply knowing the correct URLs. Who it really helps….The New Canonical Link Tag is most useful to webmasters and site-authors who do not have access to redirecting languages. Since 301 redirects are initiated server-side, users of CMS or hosted-app...

PageRank vs. MozRank

Please Note: LinkScape and MozRank have been updated since this publishing. The graphs and data below are no longer accurate, albeit still interesting IMHO.With the announcing and opening of the fantastic SEOMoz MozRank API for Linkscape, I thought it would be worth taking a bit of time to compare MozRank to PageRank using existing and fresh PageRank data. Essentially, we wanted to determine if there were any patterns of dispersion between the MozRank and PageRank for random pages across the internet. Using the API, we were able to collect data on 1000 various pages. We selected only pages above PR0 to discourage the likelihood of identifying pages with no MozRank data. We also, as expected, have a skew in the representation of higher PR data, as they are just...

Rand’s Questions Get More Difficult

A year or two back, Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz posted a list of questions he still had not answered in the world of SEO. As a matter of sheer luck, we had just finished up a bit of experimentation that answered quite a few of them. Well, Rand is at it again with 8 more questions, this time with far more difficult questions to answer – many of which may be unknowable without a leak from Google. However, one question in particular, #8, Will Anchor Text Value Pass Through Terribly Low Quality Links?. It is fairly understood that high quality links will boost the PageRank variable in the ranking equation, and low quality links will not. It is also understood that high quality links with good anchor text will boost the Relevancy variable in the ranking...

Second Page Poaching Part 2: Data Collection Code Snippets

Below is a basic beacon-receiver method for collecting the Second Page Poaching data. You could, of course, simply include the PHP directly on your page and handle the entire thing internally. This method, while a little more exposed, would allow you to develop one system to crunch numbers and do the rank-checking remotely, so as not to disturb the machines dedicated to page-serving. The Javascript Include The simple Javascript Include determines whether or not the visitor to your page has come from the 2nd page of a Google search result and, if so, generates a 1px by 1px image that is actually a beacon calling a piece of PHP. The PHP Receiver The beacon code is quite simple. It strips out the query from the Google search result in the original page referrer. It...