Mark Cuban recently prognosticated that youtube would soon be “sued into oblivion.” User generated content is, of course, a legal liability that must be measured along with other business risks. Are the high flying days of youtube over? Hardly. Youtube is rumored to be in talks with major content license holders as we speak, offering up ways to share the advertising wealth – based on how many times the content is viewed.
An interesting sets of facts about Google PageRank, originally posted at netconcepts: “Each web page within a website has its own PageRank score. PageRank scores run from 0 to 10 on a logarithmic scale, meaning that the gaps between the integers increase logarithmically the closer you get to 10. So, for example, the gap between the 3 and a 4 is quite small, whereas the gap between 7 and 8 is huge in comparison. As such, boosting your PageRank from a 3 to 4 would be quite easy, and going from a 7 to 8 would be quite hard. Another logarithmic scale you might be familiar with is the Richter scale. As you probably know, a 5.5 on the Richter scale isn’t such a huge deal, whereas a 7.0 is a very big deal indeed.” I think going from a 4 or 5 PR is probably very similar to a 7 on the Richter scale – better have your server ready for the jolt!
MsDewey.com – The search results seem to be from msn / live, but the entertainment is priceless. Warning: Men find her entertaining, women tend to find her annoying. Whatever target market they are going for, it is odd that there are no advertisements shown. Is this yet another search engine without a profit strategy? Do a few searches for “gun”, and watch her performance change each time. She also had some choice words to say about my searches for “dating” and “how old are you?” Turn down your speakers when you see her with a power tool or loaded weapon. Our office hound thought we were under attack, and a barking fit ensued.
1. Hidden text in the name of accessibility Many web designers are using a CSS technique that hides text – allegedly for accessibility. The technique uses a background-image to replace text. It is a common CSS technique touted as a way to maintain accessibility while still displaying a graphic instead of the text header. Unfortunately, it fails in many screen readers (see above article), and it is considered by the search engines to be hidden text! 2. Unintentionally spamming keywords Many sites use words in their keywords, title and description that are not ever used on the page. Most webmasters insert keywords into these tags that aren’t used anywhere on the page. The problem occurs when keywords are brainstormed separately from content development. Good SEO involves doing the two techniques together. Don’t expect Google to just trust that you are relevant for these keywords. How relevant could you be for your keywords if you never use them, anyway?! 3. Excessive Links Webmasters have become obsessed with their Google Pagerank, and are trading links at an ever furious pace. Having too many outbound links on a single page makes your site look more like a “link farm” than a legitimate website. You should try not to place too many outbound links on a single page. If you do need to link to 100 or more sites, place the links on separate pages. Instead of focusing on an unhealthy amount of links, create quality content and allow the links to flow in NATURALLY. That is what Google wants to see anyway. For Google’s webmaster guidelines, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html What to do if you are banned? Google’s Matt Cutts has the answer: After you have fixed your site, file a reincluson request.
For all of the attention paid to “On-Page Relevance” and “[tag]Link Popularity[/tag]”, SEO begins with accessiblity. Are your websites [tag]search engine friendly[/tag]? Follow our checklist below to measure: A. Search Engine Point of View Surf your site from a search engine’s point of view. Download and Install Firefox and the Fangs Extension. By experiencing the web as a non-sighted user, you are also experiencing the web as a search engine would. Can you navigate your site easily? Experienced [tag]SEO[/tag]s already have the tools and knowledge to examine a site for the items below, but beginners may find our [tag]free[/tag] tool at the SEO Diagnostic website quite helpful. 1. [tag]HTTP codes[/tag] When any web page is accessed, the server hosting the page responds with a code. Most visitors are familiar with [tag]error 404[/tag], returned when a page is missing, but many users are not aware of the full range of HTTP codes that can be returned. Are your pages returning a code 200, indicating “OK”? Don’t know where to start? Test your site at http://www.seodiagnostic.com. 2. Page size The size of your HTML page – including all images, stylesheets, and external scripts – should never exceed 90k. A recent study shows only 63% of Americans are online – an even smaller number have a broadband connection. If your target market includes consumers, or impatient business users, it is imperative to keep the size of your pages(including images, scripts and stylesheets) under control. 3. Frames Frames have usability and accesibility challenges that are rarely overcome. If your site’s HTML code uses frames, you should have an experienced SEO see if they can make it navigable inside a NOFRAMES tag. You may also require a site redesign. 4. Flash [tag] Flash[/tag] navigation cannot be followed easily by search engines. While flash is becoming more friendly, it still poses challenges to search engine indexing. Where flash is used on a site, make sure that html text links also exist. 5. [tag]JavaScript[/tag] navigation [tag] JavaScript menus[/tag] and rollover images make for stunning visual elements, but be sure to include navigation for your visitors that are not capable of executing JavaScript! While a NOSCRIPT tag may be indexed by some search engines, not all are created equal. 6. Dynamic URLs Google’s webmaster guidelines advise against dynamic URLs. Humans don’t like ’em, and search engine spiders don’t either! Use [tag]Apache[/tag]’s [tag]modrewrite[/tag] – hire an expert if you need to – but get rid of those dynamic URLs! 7. Robot [tag]Metatags[/tag] /[tag]robots.txt[/tag] While it may not seem that robots.txt is always necessary, consider adding a very basic robots.txt file that welcomes all spiders to index the site. Consider the relatively “open arms” policy our site has, reflected in our robots.txt: # All robots will spider the domain User-agent: * Disallow: User-Agent: googlebot Disallow: # Disallow directory /cgi-bin/ User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ 8. Google [tag]Sitemap.xml[/tag] Google’s new sitemap features allow your site to specify page locations and how often to “check back”. For large sites, this can be a dream come true. For smaller sites, it can be an opportunity to see your site as [tag]Google[/tag] sees it. Once your Google sitemap is active, Google will disclose any problems it had with your website. Get started in the Google Webmaster Area. 9. [tag]Yahoo Site Explorer[/tag] Yahoo Site Explorer is another great tool to see your site as a search engine does. No sitemap creation necessary! 10. Pages Indexed The number of indexed pages is a telling measurement about your search engine accessibility. To view the number of pages any of the major engines have indexed on your site, do a search for your domain with the “site:” prefix. For example, for seomoz.com you could search for “site:seomoz.com” (no quotes) in msn, yahoo or google. You will see each of the engines has a different number of index pages! 11. [tag]Best Practices[/tag] HTML sitemap Include a HTML sitemap to help your search engine(and other) visitors get to any page fast. A HTML sitemap is simply a html page with links throughout your site. Keep the amount of links under 100, as [tag]Google’s Webmaster Guidelines[/tag] recommend. Structure the links in a categorized outline, well organized for human and search engine visitors. CSS and JavaScript relocated to external files CSS files can be cached, reducing your bandwidth bill and providing less code for the engines to wade through before they encounter content. For human visitors, we often think about what is “above the fold”. For search engines, try to get as much juicy content “above the fold” as possible, too. HTML Validation While search engines can navigate some of the worst HTML code, why make it any harder than it needs to be? Try to keep to valid HTML as much as possible. [tag]Search engine[/tag] accessibility is so very important. First the search engines come, then the human visitors come. It does not matter how pretty your site is, if important visitors like the [tag]Googlebot[/tag] cannot get through it. Take a good look at your site accessibility to determine improvements you might be able to make. And, of course, many of these [tag]accessibilty metrics[/tag] can be measured with our new tool SEO Diagnostic. If you aren’t sure where to start, start there!
Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo warned that ad sales were growing in two key sectors, but not growing as quickly as they had hoped. Semel’s warning was about the Auto and Financial services sectors. He added: “But Yahoo was careful to note that it cannot tell whether the current slowdown is a sign of broader trouble or is limited to ads from the auto and financial sectors.“
Yahoo has incorporated a new feature in it’s slurp bot to find how your website is handling missing pages. Yahoo occasionally may be requesting random gibberish URLs on your server – usually with slurpconfirm404 in them – to see how missing pages are being handled on your server. Understanding how Search Engine robots are crawling and responding to your site is vital in communicating the accessibility and relevancy of your content. What is a 404 error? A 404 error is a low level code that is supposed to be sent by a webserver when the page that has been requested is not found on the server. It communicates to the web browser (or search engine robot) that the content couldn’t be found. Even a missing graphic should return a 404 error. Don’t worry, your site correctly returns a 404 error unless you (or your “web guy”) has intentionally manipulated it to do otherwise. What should be returned when an item is missing? It makes sense to stick with predictable behaviors when dealing with both users and search engines alike. Some sites may have gotten away from sending 404 errors because that is ALL they were sending. It isn’t very user-friendly to send a page that simply says “404 error”, but with a little tweaking a sitemap and branded page can be sent to your user. This simple step will help you keep more visitors, and communicate to search engines when they have requested missing content. See more about Yahoo and slurpconfirm404.
Site Reference has a new article on Google’s new semantic indexing in it’s algorithm. While search engines have traditionally focused on keyword density and link popularity, the semantic web promises relevancy based on natural language. The article is a great introduction to the concepts of semantic indexing.
Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo warned that ad sales were growing in two key sectors, but not growing as quickly as they had hoped. Semel’s warning was about the Auto and Financial services sectors. He added: “But Yahoo was careful to note that it cannot tell whether the current slowdown is a sign of broader trouble or is limited to ads from the auto and financial sectors.“
Favicons are the small icons you might see for sites in your favorites / web bookmarks. While they have been around a while, some browsers show them to you more prominently than others. IE 7, due out any time now, uses the tabbed browsing features that have made Firefox, Flock and Safari such popular browsers. IE7’s tabs will show your favicon (if you have one), and give your site a boost in professionalism among your visitors. If your site was developed by Hyper Dog Media, rest assured your site already has a favicon: We make it standard issue of the sites we develop. If you need a favicon, you may find this free favicon generator tool to be helpful.
