ManSEO [Man of SEO]

(Affiliate marketing) – Rae Hoffman-Dolan, aka “Sugarrae” is an affiliate marketing veteran and an occasional SEO consultant. She is also the CEO of publishing company MFE Interactive and the co-owner and SVP of Marketing for Speedy Incorporation Service.

The post titled: Creating A Successful SEO Strategy For An Affiliate Website from MarketingLan.com (btw, good luck to Danny Sullivan & Third door Media for this new product, in addition to SearchEngineLand.com). I’d like to share this great post on SEO strategy on affiliate websites. Here it is:

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over a decade now. Back then, creating an SEO strategy for your affiliate-based website was pretty cut and dried. Pick a market and buy a keyword-laden domain name. Next you’d do a search on the Overture keyword tool (I’m completely dating myself here) and pick the top 50 keywords in your niche.

Then you’d create pages for each with about 400 words of content on each one and then start working on your link development with some reciprocal linking. And if you were really advanced in your link development strategies, you’d also work on some one-way linking — attempting to get links from bookmark lists run by college students.

More »

I follow Google’s CEO Larry Page and find that the big G is introducing a new Google bar.

Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of the page, you’ll now find links to your services in a new drop-down Google menu nested under the Google logo. We’ll show you a list of links and you can access additional services by hovering over the “More” link at the bottom of the list. Click on what you want, and you’re off.

That’s great. Looking forward for this redesign. I love Google!

“How to become a good SEO Manager?” was a good question that the author was often asked when he trained at SEOMOZ. While researching this post, he found it surprising that there’s a near total lack of content on the subject of SEO Management that he could find. Here’s to writing in an under-served niche, and hopefully creating a useful blog post. Below is the post by Richard Baxter from SEOMOZ training.

What makes for a good SEO manager?
Finding decent SEO Managers is no easy task. I’m recruiting SEO Managers in the US and the UK and I’m finding the same challenges exist on both sides of the pond. A candidate, who comes across exceptionally well in a telephone interview may fail when they attend their first face to face interview. Why is that? Being a brilliant SEO doesn’t qualify you to be a brilliant SEO Manager, but this doesn’t mean you can’t learn and develop the management skills you need.
More »

Are you a human link builder? If so, ask yourself this: “if a robot link builder existed, what would I still be able to do that it could not?”

Analyze a complex backlink profile and distinguish quality links from spammy ones? Check. Write a funny personal email that gets someone’s attention in the right way? Check. Decide when a phone call might be the best outreach method? Check.

And what could the robot do faster and better than you?

Find every link to a site? Check. Automatically search through SERPs and connect each result to external data? Check. Automatically search for contact information on three different pages and score how closely it matched a person’s name? Check. Automatically pre-populate data fields in a CRM? Check.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “build on your strengths,” the lesson for link building is this: that we need to automate as much of the routine, “robot work” as possible, and spend more time doing what we’re best at: being sentient human link builders.

In this post, we’ll look at tools that can help link builders shift their workload to computers as much as humanly possible.

Backlink Data

Let’s start with the most basic automation. You need tools to research sites’ backlink profiles. These tools crawl the web and build a database of raw data about backlinks. More »

Google introduces the Canonical relative in Feb 2009. But what is it, why, how and when to use them correctly? I just pick up some good articles from SEO Experts on this matter.

Specify your canonical

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Let’s take our old example of a site selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its content looks like this:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

However, users (and Googlebot) can access Swedish fish through multiple (not as simple) URLs. Even if the key information on these URLs is the same as your preferred version, they may show slight content variations due to things like sort parameters or category navigation:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

Or they have completely identical content, but with different URLs due to things such as a tracking parameters or a session ID:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL:http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

This standard can be adopted by any search engine when crawling and indexing your site.

Of course you may have more questions. Joachim Kupke, an engineer from our Indexing Team, is here to provide us with the answers:

Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.

Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a<base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.

What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.

What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.

Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.

What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
**Update on 12/17/2009: The answer is yes! We now support a cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element.**

Previous answer below:
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs.example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.

Sounds great—can I see a live example?
Yes, wikia.com helped us as a trusted tester. For example, you’ll notice that the source code on the URL http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nelvana_Limited specifies its rel=”canonical” as:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nelvana.

The two URLs are nearly identical to each other, except that Nelvana_Limited, the first URL, contains a brief message near its heading. It’s a good example of using this feature. With rel=”canonical”, properties of the two URLs are consolidated in our index and search results display wikia.com’s intended version.

Feel free to ask additional questions in our comments below. And if you’re unable to implement a canonical designation link, no worries; we’ll still do our best to select a preferred version of your duplicate content URLs, and transfer linking properties, just as we did before.

Updated: This link-tag is currently also supported by Ask.com, Microsoft Live Search andYahoo!.

Written by Joachim Kupke, Senior Software Engineer, and Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

More »

Recommended SEO Approach For Panda
While most of what works now, has always worked, there is at least one important change.
The SEO model has changed with Panda in that, rather than getting as many URLs as you can indexed, you now want only your highest-quality, most important URLs indexed. Consistent signals should be sent as to which pages are most important:

1. Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical, robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
2. Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed and well optimized
3. Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary URLs from the index
4. Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages (strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links, are example metrics)
5. Build high-quality external links via social media efforts

Pay special attention to number 3 above. If your properties have low-quality or significantly duplicative content, it is best to remove those URLs from the indexes. Even a site with some high-quality content and lots of thin or low-quality content could see traffic deterioration because of Panda.
The new SEO, at least as far as Panda is concerned, is about pushing your best quality stuff and the complete removal of low-quality or overhead pages from the indexes. Which means it’s not as easy anymore to compete by simply producing pages at scale, unless they’re created with quality in mind. Which means for some sites, SEO just got a whole lot harder.
More: http://searchengineland.com/5-new-tactics-for-seo-post-panda-73982

If you are a blogger or an Internet columnist, Advanced Web Rankings’s team rewards your efforts. If you have written an article about Advanced Web Ranking we will reward you with a full Enterprise license.

All the articles that will meet the following conditions will be rewarded with a free license:

• Original content: The content of the article must be original and written as a review.
• 500 words: The article should contain at least 500 words, with a link to www.advancedwebranking.com and a screenshot.
• Industry related blog: The website/blog needs to be industry related with Advanced Web Ranking (SEO, Internet Marketing, IT etc).
• Share your article: Following the publication of the article you need to use at least one of the content sharing services, like Facebook, Twitter, Digg.com, StumbleUpon or Reddit, to share your opinion about Advanced Web Ranking.

More info here: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/special-offers.html

As part of that effort, Google just launched a new web-based tool in Google Labs, named Page Speed Online. Now webmasters have a great tool to check if their sites’ speeds are improved or not.

Terribly, this wordpress based Man SEO site just gets 61/100! (

Wired.com: What was the purpose?

Singhal: So we did Caffeine [a major update that improved Google’s indexing process] in late 2009.  Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.

Matt Cutts: It was like, “What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?”  It sort of fell between our respective groups. And then we decided, okay, we’ve got to come together and figure out how to address this.

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?

Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality. In addition, we launched the Chrome Site Blocker [allowing users to specify sites they wanted blocked from their search results] earlier , and we didn’t use that data in this change. However, we compared and it was 84 percent overlap [between sites downloaded by the Chrome blocker and downgraded by the update]. So that said that we were in the right direction.
More »

A very good post from George Aspland of SearchEngineLand.com.

Following these simple steps could help improve the immediate impact on search results for a new website, and help avoid the often significant reduction in search traffic after a website is re-launched.

Website owners often wait until after their site is redesigned and launched before getting a SEO expert involved. Unfortunately, this can lead to expensive site design changes that could have been easily implemented during the design process.

Sometimes, it’s difficult or impossible to correct issues after a website is launched without essentially rebuilding the site again.

In addition, traffic from search engines can be severely reduced for months after a site is redesigned and launched. This impact can be minimized by taking the proper steps during the redesign process.

Here are 8 search engine optimization steps you should consider during a website redesign.

1. SEO Site Audit

Having a search engine friendly website  means designing a site with no barriers to the search engines. This is critical for success with “organic” search engine results. The best time to ensure a search engine friendly site is during a site design.

If you have an existing website, consider performing some level of a site review or more extensive audit on it. In a site audit, a SEO consultant or agency examines the current website to look for problems with the site design or other limitations that might impede organic search engine results, so that the issues can be addressed during the design of the new site.
More »