I’m a big fan of the new canonical tag (er, element, to be more technically correct). It’s a powerful tool for dealing with duplicate content. But it’s not exactly reliable yet. Google wants us use it as if it were. Unquestionably, it’s a signal. But it can be ignored, even when it should clearly by […]

I mentioned towards the end of my Search Engine Land article about redirects how you can use the hash or pound symbol (#) in a URL to append tracking information. Why do this? Because it would prevent duplicate content (ie. the same page at multiple URLs that look unique to the engines), and it would […]

Although it isn’t a primary “signal” like the title tag or anchor text, keywords in your URLs can help with your Google rankings. But ONLY if Google can see the actual words in the URL. Turns out that separating the words in a URL with hyphens allowed Google to see the individual words, but using […]

In my Search Engine Land column last week, I describe a powerful SEO tactic that we at Netconcepts call “thin slicing”. The term originally comes from Malcolm Gladwell (as used in his best seller Blink) and has no origins in the online world. Gladwell uses the term in the context of “rapid cognition”; where one […]

On my first visit to EMC.com last week, I thought to myself “Uh oh, that’s not going to be good for their SEO”. It was a country selector. The only content on the page was a long list of countries. No keyword-rich copy. No keyword-rich links. But then I took a deeper look. I did […]

Yes, you “heard” right! Two FULL days of SEO training from yours truly, coming soon to a city near you — or not, if you don’t live near Las Vegas, Chicago or Washington DC ;). This is truly a first. In my 14 years since founding Netconcepts, I have yet to run this long of, […]

Google engineer Matt Cutts presented at WordCamp 2007 last weekend. (Session notes available from Stephanie Booth, Lisa Barone, and P Havens.). Matt’s session was recorded… when the video is posted, I’ll let you all know. Matt will hopefully be posting his Powerpoint to his blog, if he gets approval from the PR department. Matt Cutts […]

If I had the time I’d prepare a professionally produced training video on search engine optimizing your WordPress blog/site, but I don’t, so instead I’ll just direct you to the video that John Pozadzides recorded of my 30 minute long presentation at WordCamp San Francisco from several months ago here, or simply watch the embedded […]

I spoke today at the Startonomics conference on the topic of SEO. I only had a half hour to speak, so I had to cram a lot of critical info into a small amount of time. Here’s the video of my session: Some folks came up afterwards to ask for clarification on several of the […]

You may have already seen my article on Search Engine Land “Making Sense of Google’s New Dynamic URL Recommendations“, but if you haven’t, I’ll recap some key points about Google’s new recommendations on dynamic URLs and URL rewriting and why I don’t advise you follow these recommendations. As much as I’d love to believe that […]