I need not delve into the technical details of percent-encoding to make my point regarding keeping your URLs clean as part of your on-site search optimization, but some basic coaching is in order. I see a couple repeat offenses that bother me and I would like to discuss them here briefly in hopes of raising some awareness of the situation. [Click to Continue...]

Posted 17 August 2010 in seo | 23 Comments

I mentioned previously that I was speaking at the Local Search Summit in NYC during Search Engine Strategies. New York was great, met (in person) great people in the industry that I’ve only previously talked to online and more importantly was able to present on something I’m very passionate about – local search. My talk and accompanying slide deck focuses on Foursquare and using Foursquare for local search marketing. [Click to Continue...]

Posted 2 April 2010 in seo | 25 Comments

Yesterday, Feb 12 2009, the big 3 announced the adoption of a new relationship attribute for the header link tag in order to specify a preferred version of a page where there may be different ways to access it and to help avoid issues with duplicate content.  It’s nice to have an option for when you take over a badly built site where there isn’t a budget to rewrite a lot of code and do a million 301 redirects but this is just a band-aid on a larger problem.

This is why architecture of a project is important and if you build it right the first time, you don’t have to worry about this being an issue.  There are always times however that a bot will surprise you with some weird entry URL so as a guideline, it’s good to monitor your analytics and do simple 301 rewrites as they happen, if they happen.  Also just for kicks, there’s already a WordPress plugin from Joost de Valk (thanks man) to handle it on your blog, and an extension for Magento too!

Read More:
- Google, Specify Your Cononical
- Yahoo, Fighting Duplication
- Live, Partnering to Solve Duplicate Content issues
- SEOmoz has a really detailed write-up too

December 2009 Update:
WordPress 2.9 is adding this function into core so no more plugins will be needed to accomplish this if you’re running wordpress.

Posted 13 February 2009 in seo | 1 Comment