SEO

Archive of blog posts on search engine optimization covering SEO tips, tactics and tools for publishers.

Does Google Freshness Update Make Online Reputation Management More Difficult?

November 14, 2011

Google’s recent algorithm change that favors the most recent content for certain types of queries offers good opportunities for news and content sites. But for individuals and organizations, does the freshness update make online reputation management more difficult? If you cover breaking news, hot topics or regularly occurring events the freshness update will create more [...]

Google News Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources

September 1, 2011

News publishers are all too familiar with the fact that Google News doesn’t always do such a great job of favoring original sources in its story clusters. It is not usual to see a syndicated, aggregated or simply re-covered version of an article gain prominent visibility over the original. Today I noticed an example that [...]

Google Expanded Sitelinks: Optimize Opening Text in META Description Tag

August 22, 2011

Google’s expanded sitelinks give sites greater exposure for branded searches and the ability to dominate the page one results above the fold. User reactions have been mixed so far (some find them overwhelming or borderline obnoxious) but Google is touting the user benefits and the expanded sitelinks appear to be here to stay. That means [...]

Which News Sites Have the Most Keywords in Common with eHow?

April 19, 2011
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eHow is back in the news after claims it was hit hard by latest expansion of Google’s Panda update and subsequent denials from Demand Media. Articles like “How to Pour Water Into a Glass Cup” make it difficult to dispute eHow’s reputation as the poster child of content farms. But in terms of keyword targeting, [...]

Google Page Speed Ratings One Year Later: News Sites Range from Up 27% to Down 73%

April 4, 2011
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The launch of Google’s Page Speed Online (which allows users to get Page Speed scores without installing a browser extension) reminded me that it has been a year since I looked at the page load times of major news sites. So I thought I’d go back and see if there have been any performance changes [...]

eHow and Mahalo: How Many Keyword Variations is Too Many?

February 9, 2011
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In reading a Search Engine Land article about Jason Calacanis’ remarks during “Ending the Content Arms Race” at Signal LA this passage caught my eye: Calacanis shows a “How to cook a turkey” page on Mahalo which he says has tons of good video content, then decries it has to compete against 17 different articles [...]

Google Trends Graphs No Longer Embedded in Search Results?

January 20, 2011

For the past couple years Google has been embedding a Hot Trends graph in the regular search results for the top 100 fastest rising terms. I referenced this in my post on tools for monitoring search and social trends because it was a useful way to check for trending terms beyond the top 20 shown [...]

Editorial SEO Tactics for the Newsroom

January 12, 2011

By now most editorial sites are employing basic SEO best practices in the newsroom but how many are taking full advantage of every opportunity? To be successful an editorial staff needs to do more do more than just optimize headlines and title tags; there are a wide range of editorial SEO tactics that need to [...]

Should Browsers Display Only Canonical URLs to Users?

November 23, 2010
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Sites have been using the rel=canonical link element for a while now to help offset duplicate content issues that cannot be eliminated through URL consolidation. While not a perfect solution it is often the best option available in cases like duplicate content caused by appending tracking codes to URLs (e.g. ?source=rss, ?xid=newsletter, ?nav=home). Marketing teams [...]

The Top News Sites on Blekko

November 2, 2010
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With Blekko officially launching this week the new search engine is getting a lot of attention particularly in the search marketing community because of SEO data it provides. There is a good overview of Blekko’s SEO Tools on Search Engine Land so I won’t go into detail on that here. But I was curious to [...]

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