feed hat blog

In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

In 2009 some of the big advances we’ve had the major search engines announce support for are things like the “rel=canonical” tag which allows you to tell a search engine this content at this URL may exist in more than one place, but you should credit it to one URL. Another new item is the ability to tell the search engines to ignore certain URL parameters. So if you’re using tracking parameters, session ID’s or other items you can now tell the search engines to ignore them entirely. There are many people who are happy to have these new tools, as it allows them to fix “issues” they have had for years. However I think these tools are crutches for lazy and incompetent programmers and developers, and should be avoided like the plague … and I’ll tell you why …

In the dawn of the public internet there where dozens of search engines that webmasters and publishers had to deal with, combine this with a lack of standards and the online publishing community had a lot of growing pains. When the dot-com bubble burst and the market consolidated we where really left with four big search engines. As Google pursued it’s relentless market domination, under the guise of a garage start-up bathed in the light of primary colored lava lamps, they stole the thunder of everyone else (coincidentally of course) and, established themselves as the ruling organization and defacto standards setting body, the rest of the world be dammed.

This is bad, as sloppy publishers and slip shod developers, now use google’s band-aid solutions, instead of developing websites and applications that don’t introduce problems that don’t need to exist in the first place. Case and point look at this URL from Forbes Magazine:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html?feed=rss_news

Notice the [feed=rss_news] part at the end, that enables Forbes to track where visitors came from, in this case RSS, most likely a feed reader. But now there’s the problem of that same content existing at two URL’s, remove the feed parameter and it still works:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html

Not to worry we can use the “rel=canonical” to point to the URL without the parameter, we can also use webmaster tools to tell it to ignore the “feed” parameter and we’re good to go right … wrong junior that’s two band-aids you needed to use instead of solving the problem properly. What you should have done is issue a 301 redirect at the server level to the correct URL, and not rely on the client or bot to figure things out. Need that parameter for tracking drop it in a cookie.

Why does this matter … as publishers we want to foster and build an environment that’s friendly for more than one search engine. Here’s an experiment, go try and append a meaningless imaginary parameter or two to a URL and submit it to a social site like Digg or Stumbleupon and see what happens. The simple fact is they aren’t sophisticated enough to parse it out as tracking parameter. Lots of other social sites are trying to gain access to your content as well, and by using substandard architecture you aren’t helping yourself. Your story will get votes in two places, decreasing its ability to go “go hot” or “popular” as its votes are spread over two URL’s.

While social search may be in it’s infancy, and may never overtake traditional search, the easier you make your content to crawl and understand for everyone and not just google, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Get out of the habit of relying on the crawling and indexing band-aids of search engines for your survival, learn to write clean code that makes you self reliant for your long term lively hood and success.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

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Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

SEOs talk a lot about the link economy these days. Web-based businesses should pay attention to links in order to rank.

Then again, we hear a lot about community building, too. Social media is a necessary element of customer engagement.

So which is it?

Alright, you got me. It was a trick question.

There’s no single silver bullet to online marketing success. Links and social media are both critical ingredients of a well-rounded Internet marketing strategy. But if you’re hungry for rankings and community, you’ll find common ground in the engagement object™.

Engagement objects include the whole family of Web applications that cause a visitor to become actively involved with your site. Text content makes up the vast majority of the Web, but engagement objects make up the other piece of the pie — the enhanced features that draw in users looking for more than just reading material.

Now that you’re acquainted with the terminology, let’s hear what Bruce has to say on the importance of engagement objects.

The interview took place at this month’s Search Engine Strategies San Jose. Bruce talked to ReelSEO, an online video marketing guide, about his predictions for the coming age of blended search, and he makes the bold claim that by this time next year, video will be a must on your Web site.

Blended search, otherwise known as Universal Search, has been around a while, but it’s not always present in our day-to-day searches. This is mostly because blended search results aren’t always relevant or available for some queries.

When blended results are returned in SERPs, they pose an additional opportunity to attain top rankings because they are served in addition to the traditional 10 blue links. Many Web sites don’t utilize video, podcasts, maps, etc., to enrich interactivity. Little competition of engagement objects means an open opportunity for forward-thinking SEOs.

But as more and more site owners realize the power of engaging visitors with interesting and interactive content — fun, entertaining, educational or otherwise — the more blended results we’ll see. If you believe Bruce (and I would!), competition to get ranked in those blended results will be heating up fast over the next year.

The SEO ranking benefit that Bruce speaks of in the video isn’t all that engagement objects are good for. A platform for interaction also gives your customers or visitors an exciting hub to gather around, share with friends and identify with.

They offer one of the greatest opportunities for visitors to understand the face behind the name and the spirit behind your organization. They entertain, illuminate, and sometimes even provide the common ground needed for community building.

So with the future of Web search and social communities at the top of mind, think about incorporating engagement objects on your site. It sometimes takes a pioneering mind to think outside the confines of text on a page and to develop an engagement object that will attract interest among your audience. But it’s definitely worth the challenge — for both ranking benefits and community building.

As you ponder that, I’ll give you a challenge that just might help you generate that winning idea. All you have to do is click here…

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Engagement Objects: More than Just Cool to Look At

Today’s topic is one that gets asked about pretty regularly, should I cloak my affiliate links to search engines, why or why not, and what are some of the best ways to do it.

First of all we need a little clarification, a good working definition of cloaking is, serving one set of content to the search engine spiders, and then serving different content to “human” visitors. There are lots of subtleties to this process such as serving different content based on IP, Geo-location, or logged in user status, while these may be related to cloaking they aren’t cloaking per say, as long as a spider from an specific geo-location gets the same content as human from that location, that’s generally OK . Cloaking however has the implied intent of trying to hide something from or deceive a search engine, and is usually a violation of guidelines.

When most people talk about cloaking affiliate links, what they really mean is masking links, or passing them through a non spiderable redirects or bounce pages.  Normally a link from an affiliate company looks something like this:

http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-1234567-10292291

In this case the domain is owned by Commission Junction, the first number lets them know who to credit the sale/link to, the second tell them where to redirect. Over time search engines, see enough of these types of links and they “figure out” (with a little help from some humans) that these are affiliate links. In some cases Anti-Virus and spyware software will recognize these links as well, and overwrite or block them out.

So why would you want to hide that you are using affiliate links from search engines? Over the years I’ve seen a lot of people try and prove that google has it out for affiliates, and they want to remove affiliate websites from the web. I’ve never seen that conclusively proven, and there are still plenty of affiliate websites that currently rank. That said, Google doesn’t like too much affiliate marketing, and they especially hate thin affiliate websites. So there is something to be said for doing as much as you can to leave as few obvious affiliate markers as possible.

Originally one of the more popular ways to implement affiliate links was through Javascript redirects. However in recent months Google has gotten much better at crawling Javascript, and at this point I’d say that’s an implementation that I’d strongly recommend you stay away from. The second most common method is to pass the links through a redirection script. For maximum effectiveness you want to block the page/directory with the redirection script from the search engines in robots.txt. I’d also recommend using a meta noindex,nofollow as well … let’s just say I like to be extra careful.

Since I’m a big fan of wordpress, a plugin with an ACID management screen is a good thing, I’ve used the Go Codes Plugin for a number of years with no complaints. The reason you want to use a separate script and not the same one you are using for any URL Shortner functions is crawling. You want to spiders to crawl the shortened URL’s and correctly attribute any link juice, you don’t want them to crawl your affiliate links. When you use the go code plugin you link to the “go” directory under your main domain and then any set of characters you put in the shortcut, here’s an example:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/go/thesis

Even if you aren’t concerned about masking things from search engines, there’s a maintenance factor, that makes this technique attractive. Let’s say I run a cell phone website and I have a link to a merchant who gives me a commission for every cell phone I sell. Every time I mention the word cell phone I could link to the merchant’s site like this:

http://merchant.com/cell-phone/?affid=1234

Over the years I could easily have several hundred or thousand of these links on the site. What happens if that merchant goes out of business … or starts shaving sales off the backend, and I want to send my traffic somewhere else. What if a competing merchant comes along and offers me a private label deal with significantly higher commissions. Even if I use a “search and replace” and put a link to the new merchant in, chances are I’ll miss a few, and I’ll be cheating myself out of some commissions. However if instead of linking to directly to the merchant I linked to a redirection page like this I’d be in better shape:

http://www.mydomain.com/go/cellphone

Instead of changing hundreds or thousands of links, I don’t have to change any, I only have to change the redirection target, and everything falls into place.

Some merchants won’t like this technique, especially if they are using their affiliate program as a link building scheme (yeah I went there). Those merchants require you to link directly to them without using a redirection script. Some merchants also require a tracking image/bug. These solutions defeat the purpose of masking affiliate links so if you get a merchant who won’t budge, decide how important the affiliate program is, how big a fish you are in the pond, and decide if you want to play hardball of not.

Of course sometimes this implementation can work against you as it says you are “hiding” your links. If you play in a space that has a distrusting user base, you’ll want to put up a custom solution. You’ll want to pass all your links through a redirect and redirect conditionally based on parameters. So if you wanted to link to Macy’s it would look like this:

http://mydomain/redirect.php?url=www.macys.com

if you wanted to link to macys using an affiliate link it would look like this:

http://mydomain/redirect.php?url=www.macys.com&lid=12345467

Your redirect page would have to have some programing that checked for the “lid” (link id) parameter first and if so redirected using the aff link, only if no “lid” parameter was present it would use the URL parameter. Most users aren’t sophisticated and will assume you are just tracking outlinks when they see “www.macys.com” in the URL string, especially if it’s first (wink).

So is all of this really neccesary, because this can all turn out to be huge PIA to keep up with and increases the amount of time you spend maintaining your website. Like I said, I haven’t seen it proven google tries to remove affilaite sites, but you do come across some odd things now and then in google. IMHO a little extra time spent being extra prepared in case google does decide to change is a good thing. Think of it as a bit of insurance and like carrying an umbrella when it looks cloudy but isn’t raining yet. You may have carried it for nothing, but if it does start to rain, or google changes the algo, you’ll be glad you did.

Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Cloaking Affiliate Links, How and Why

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Cloaking Affiliate Links, How and Why

Recently I’ve been experimenting with a plugin for checking broken links, on several of my blogs, and I’m fascinated by what I’ve discovered.The plugin is called, obviosly enough, Broken Link checker, what it does is periodically run through all of your posts and blogroll and checks for broken links. You can put a widget on your wordpress dashboard page so that you can see what the status is everytime you login.

Having over 8000 outbound links, and over 6500 unique outbound links, I fully expected the first time I ran the plugin, it would discover several hundred broken links, which it did. What I didn’t expect was to find anywhere from 20 to 50 broken links every week!

When you click thru on the broken link report you’re presented with a screen similar to what’s shown below (click to enlarge)

Now it’s important to remeber that websites go down temporarily, and if that happens to be when your link checker was running, you are going to get a false positive, so I suggest you actually check the broken link. You’ve got several choices you can hit the Discard link (which removes it from the report but doesn’t do anything else). Hitting Details gives you more info about the broken link, Unlink removes the link, Exclude removes it from all future reports (in case you hit a site that blocks the checking), and Edit URL lets you change the URL to point somewhere else.

There are a lot of times when I run the job and check the results, and I find that site owners have removed, changed, or relocated the content, without properly handling the 301 redirect. It’s not just small sites who may not be tech savvy, it’s sites of all sizes, in some cases even military, government sites, and heaven forbid OLD GOOGLE HELP FILES (queue dramtic soap opera music).

In most cases I will try to relocate the correct URL, but if I can’t find it after a few tries, unless I really like you, or it’s really important for the user experience, I’m just going to kill the link. As an SEO everytime a link gets killed, it’s sad. That’s why as an SEO it’s important to understand good site architecture.

• The number one rule of site architecture is getting it right the first time, if you can, set up a site architecture so you can grow and expand in the future, without needing to radically change your URL’s. Keep file extensions like .html, .php, .jsp and other out of your URL’s so you don’t have to change them if you change the underlying programming technology (or maintain them using htaccess overrides). This can be especially hard if you change CMS’s or use shopping carts, but in the end it’s really worth the effort, so you don’t lose the links.
• Manage your redirects. You want to use a 301 and avoid chaining them together. I’ve worked on site’s where I’ve seen one URL request pass through 4 or more 301 redirects. It may work from a user experience, but I’m not convinced it works from a search engine, link equity standpoint. However if you follow rule number one and get it right the first time, you really will avoid most of this problem.
• Consolidate dead pages. A lot of times for marketing efforts pages need to be created that have a very short lifespan. Ideally you would want to keep the page up and put up a note that says the page info has expired, however CEO’s, Marketing managers, and legal departments don’t agree. if that’s the case, redirect the URL up one level to the root, to a more appropriate page, or to the homepage. The worse thing you can do is let it 404 and lose the link equity you gained.

Advertisement: Need SEO help with your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Checking for Broken Links and Link Rot and the Importance of Good Site Architecture

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Checking for Broken Links and Link Rot and the Importance of Good Site Architecture

Imagine for a moment you’re John Wayne. You know, a gun-toting, horse-whipping, tobacco-chewing kinda guy. A real cowboy.

Then imagine you have a blog (weird, I know). In this story though, your blog isn’t on the Internet. It has nothing to do with social media. Comments don’t exist. No, for the purposes of this post, your blog is something much simpler:

It’s your horse. And he’s dying.

You don’t want him to die. No cowboy wants that.

Fast or slow, he’s served you as best he could, carrying you around the world. You might’ve wished he’d move faster, and you might’ve hated him for all of the time it took to feed and care for the darn thing, but you still love him.

Not because he’s the best horse in the world, not because he isn’t a pain in the ass, but simply because he’s your horse, and that’s all that matters.

But now he’s suffering. Not loudly, thankfully, but you can tell he’s nearing the end. You keep hoping he’ll recover, but he just keeps getting slower and harder to care for.

You can tell he’s in pain. A part of you wants to just stop and take care of him, but you know you can’t.

You’re the hero of the story, remember? You have to keep moving.

So what do you do?

Simple. You do what cowboys always do for their beloved dying horse:

You shoot him in the head.

Should You Just Shoot Your Blog in the Head?

Cowboy Proverb: You can tell a true cowboy by the type of horse he rides.

Yes, it’s a graphic analogy, but it’s a useful one.

As bloggers, I think we sometimes romanticize what we do. We give our blogs names like our “platform,” “fan base,” or “following.” We talk about blogging as if we are a part of a revolution in the way information spreads. We fall in love with the very idea of calling ourselves a “blogger.”

But it’s a mistake.

Your blog is nothing more than a vehicle for your ideas. It’s a horse or a car or an airplane or a bicycle. Regardless of the metaphor you choose, the purpose of every vehicle is the same: to transport something. In the case of blogs, their purpose is to transport your ideas across the world.

The question is, what happens when that vehicle stops working? When your car quits, you take it to the junk yard. When your horse quits, you shoot it out of mercy. What are you supposed to do when your blog stops spreading your ideas?

Simple. You do what thousands of bloggers do every day:

You quit.

How to Know When It’s Time to Quit

Cowboy Proverb: There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, never was a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed.

You have to admit you’ve thought about it.

It’s not that you want to be a quitter. It’s just that, instead of feeling that wondrous sense of possibility when you pull up your blog, all you’re left with is a vague sense of impending doom. You’ve ridden the horse as far as it will go. No sense in kicking the poor thing, right?

At the same time, you worry about quitting too early. What if the post you write tomorrow takes off, and you get thousands of visitors? Everybody who’s successful talks about perseverance. Maybe you just need to stick it out a little longer.

How are you supposed to know when it’s the right time to quit?

Well, I’ll give you a few thoughts. I quit several unsuccessful blogs before finally hitting an idea that worked. Here are some of the telltale signs that you should consider:

1. You Don’t Get Any Comments, Tweets, or Emails from the People That Stop By

Cowboy Proverb: If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

Every blogger (including me) would like to receive more comments, tweets, and emails. It shows that people are engaged with what you’re saying. When you’re a beginning blogger though, you might be tempted to discount the importance of comments because you think you’re not getting enough traffic yet.

Don’t.

Even if you’re only getting 10-20 visitors per day, you should still be getting a comment every now and again. I’ve seen blogs with only 100 subscribers average 5-10 comments on every post. If you’re not getting any communication from your readers at all, then you’ve probably picked a topic that no one cares about but you.

Time to start over.

2. You Can’t Find Any Blogs to Link to You

Cowboy Proverb: If it don’t seem like it’s worth the effort, it probably ain’t.

You’ve heard that getting links from popular blogs is an important traffic strategy. Only, what if there aren’t any popular blogs in your niche? What if you’re the only person writing about your topic, and you can’t find any realistic intersection between your idea and what other popular blogs are writing about?

It’s a bad sign. Blogs are a conversational medium, and a conversation takes more than one person. If you can’t find any other blogs to link to you, then growing your blog is going to be exceptionally difficult. In most cases, it’s just not worth it.

Switch to another topic.

3. You Struggle for Intrinsic Motivation to Write

Cowboy Proverb: The biggest troublemaker you’ll ever meet watches you shave his face every morning.

I’ve never met a successful blogger who didn’t love their topic. Yes, they get burned out once in a while, and yes, they might struggle for new ideas, but they’re still addicted to studying their subject, talking to other leaders, and spreading the most captivating ideas. Even if they had to do it for free, they would continue writing for their blog forever.

Do you have this kind of intrinsic motivation?

I’m not talking about getting a little bummed when you don’t get enough traffic, someone leaves you a nasty comment, or you’re not making enough money. Every beginning blogger goes through that. The sign that you’re blogging about the right topic though is that you continue writing anyway. You’re motivated from within.

If you don’t feel this way about your blog, then you should probably quit now and find another topic. Life is too short to blog about something you don’t enjoy.

What Persistence Really Means

Cowboy Proverb: Real cowboys never run. They simply ride away.

All of us are taught the importance of persistence from an early age. We are led to believe that we should keep going, no matter what, and that anyone that quits is a loser.

So does that mean you’re a loser if you quit your blog?

No!

If you really and truly want to be a successful blogger, then persist in your profession, but don’t waste your talent on a blog that’s going nowhere. Start another one.

I mean, can you imagine John Wayne quitting when his horse died on him? Never!

He’d ride a dozen horses to death and crawl across the desert on his hands and knees, if need be.

So should you.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Cofounder of Partnering Profits. Get more from Jon on twitter.

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It’s Time to Shoot Your Blog