SMarT Marketing

National Search Engine Optimizers Day is coming so mark your calenders! I first came across it on Dana Larson’s Twitter page. All I know thus far is it will be acknowledged on August 8, 2008 and will be the first of hopefully many of celebrations to come. Do search engine optimizers get the day off for this holiday? Probably not, but if it grows legs we can cross our fingers for a lunch to honor us.

I just noticed today that Google is incoporating blog posts into their Universal Search results. Now I know Google has been including blog posts into the search results, but they are grouping related blog posts below the 10 organic listings by matching the keyword search to related blog postings. The “Blog posts about…” is grouped just like their Shopping results. I have only noticed this at the bottom of the search results. This is a great example of why companies should be blogging on a regular basis.

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Search engines can see variations of the same domain as different pages and this can cause confusion and possible ranking reductions. For instance, domain.com, domain.com/default.asp, www.domain.com/default.asp, and www.domain.com can all be seen as different pages, even though they are actually the same page. Typically a server-side redirect can be implemented to point all of these domain variations to one main domain. You may, do search engines care which domain variation I should use. The short answer is no. As a standard, we typically redirect all of our client’s websites to the www.domain.com.

Definition of canonicalization - The process of converting data that has more than one posiible representation into a “standard” representation

The nofollow is a HTML attribute for links. The nofollow attribute supposedly excludes links from search engine ranking calculations. This attribute was first introduced by Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger.com’s Jason Shellen.

 Example:

< a href=http://www.your domain.com rel="nofollow">Ancor Text < /a>

It has been found that Google still follows these links, but if the page was not in the index previously they will not index the page, will not show the link as a back link , and will not associate any keyword relevancy from the anchor text of the link.

Yahoo will follow the link and will index the page, show the link as a back link, and will use the keyword relevancy from the anchor text of the link. However they do exclude the link from their ranking calculations.

MSN has not been proven to follow the link. MSN does not count the nofollow links in their ranking calculations.

Sculpting Page Rank

Webmasters quickly found that they could use the nofollow attribute not only for external links, but internal links as well. Some people could control the flow of their Page Rank to pages on their own site that were deemed less important for search engines. Pages like your Shipping Information, Privacy Policy, Account Login really do not need to be indexed by the search engines.

How Can You Tell if a Site Uses Nofollow?

One way of seeing if a site uses the nofollow attribute is to view the web page’s source code. Then you need to comb through the HTML code to find a link. A faster way is to use the SEO for Firefox extension. This Firefox add-on provides a nice option to highlight the nofollow links right on the page.

If you MSN does get their hands on Yahoo this will definately open up the market for another player. Although MSN may try and keep the brand seperate, in the online world, this is very hard. It is a big move for both companies, but based on the huge shareholder incentive for Yahoo holders, this may just go through.