Month: September 2012

  • Avoiding Duplicate Content with Canonical Links.

    Avoiding Duplicate Content with Canonical Links.

    Duplicate content is a problem for search engines, and that makes it a problem for SEOs. Google  strongly dislikes including the same content more than once in search results, and if content exists in more than one place on a site, search engine algorithms have trouble determining which version they should include or exclude.

    They also have difficulty knowing where to assign link juice and authority. This confusion can lead to sites experiencing a loss of traffic and reduced SERP rankings. Therefore, the “rel=canonical” element intends to help search engines. It does this by telling them which page is “the page” for specific content.

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  • Resource Round-up: The SEO Stories You Need to Read in September

    Resource Round-up: The SEO Stories You Need to Read in September

    Keeping abreast of everything that’s happening in a vibrant and dynamic industries like SEO and inbound marketing is no easy task. So, this week, we’re pleased to offer our visitors the first of our monthly roundups of what you need to be reading in SEO, social media, hosting and web design.

    We hope you learn as much from reading it as we did when we compiled it.

    SEO and Inbound Marketing

    •  I see so many SEO guides floating around that advocate manually collecting all kinds of information, from contact information to broken links, and they almost always consist of digging around the internet for the information and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting…and copying and pasting.
    •  If you take some time to decode some of these fancy looking SEO acronyms, you may find that understanding internet marketing lingo isn’t as difficult as you think.
    • Author Rank: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dominating Search with Content Marketing – If you are a content marketer, blogger or writer, you’ll be happy to hear that there have been five recent SEO changes that will play to your strengths.
    • Blog Headline Writing Lessons from Mega-traffic Sites – What’s one of the most simple traffic building tools that even most top bloggers don’t use? Surprisingly, few bloggers take advantage of the ability to target a separate headline for people browsing the site and people searching via Google, Bing, etc.
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  • Will the Go Daddy Outage Affect Your SEO?

    Will the Go Daddy Outage Affect Your SEO?

    Light with 501 number
    HTTP 501

    Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.

    The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google generally isn’t happy when they find a site has disappeared from their index. However, they know problems happen. As long as these problems aren’t regular, a site’s SERP ranking likely won’t drop. Reliability is important. Therefore, a site that is often down will be ranked lower. But a short period of unavailability is unusual. It’s not a useful signal of a negative trend. (more…)

  • Nofollow Links Explained: The Good, The Bad & The SEO Truth

    Nofollow Links Explained: The Good, The Bad & The SEO Truth

    There’s been a fair bit of chatter in recent months about the value of nofollow links for SEO. Google considers nofollow links a naturalness signal when evaluating backlink profiles. Truth aside, every SEO should understand nofollow links. The key question: Are nofollow backlinks actually worth pursuing? (more…)