KDye
It’s the penalty word which is a problem :-) There is certainly a "similar content" filter, and Patricia even says it herself in the comments "if you have less unique content on your pages than those template words, you will pay a price" it is the uniqueness of the rest of the page that is important.
I have one comment about this article, which refers to the paragraph "I am told that a 301 redirect should not drop page rank (PR), but somehow it has happened with me. In my case, these changes were made almost 4 weeks ago, and individual page ranks have still not gotten caught back up. A few of my most popular pages that had a Google Toolbar PR of 4 or 5, are currently showing a PR of 0. This may be normal, or it may be that I have done other things that are making it take longer for the PR to catch up"As Bruce mentions the PR has now updated, which is what I would expect, as there has been a change in visible Toolbar Page Rank. Although the underlying page rank will update with a 301, the Toolbar Page Rank WILL NOT show up until the next Page Rank rollout. So if you change your URLs just after a PR update, you won’t see the change for up to three months. The same applies to a 301 redirect for a domain.
Universal search results matter - if you get knocked off a SERP by a news or video result and you’ll care that it is 10 and you are 11! I’m interested in where the result is on the page. Plus, this could be the death of ranking software :-)
LOL at "when working with an IT team on a client project, handing them a 10 page error report usually puts them in their place, and shows them that you’re serious about your technical SEO" that is so true.
This didn’t quite fit what I expected from the title. I was thinking that actually, a lot of authority sites rank *despite* their SEO problems, not because of them. I started work on a site recently that had nearly every duplicate content issue going, and it was still page 1 for very competitive terms. These things would kill a new site, but the authority of this one pushed it up despite the problems.
As an SEO with a scientific background who is constantly amused by all the "assumptions" and "multiple factors" and "maybes" that I have to work with on a daily basis, I thought the slant on "it depends" was great, and the title was therefore appropriate.
This wasn’t quite the article I was expecting from my skim read of the title and the comments :-) I enjoyed it though, it was quite constructive given the provocation!
I have wondered before how much some particular rankings are worth. Certainly there are a lot of first page rankings that are worth a lot to the business who has them, but how do you put a value on that? None of the domain name reselling guides talk about rankings at all.
There’s an interesting counter argument here: http://searchengineland.com/080306-083414.phpThere are definitely sites I’ve worked on where the Privacy Policy is one of the highest weighted pages on the site because of the number of links to it! It’s right to have the link there for human & usability reasons, but it isn’t important for the search engines to give that page the weighting this gives, hence the using of nofollow internally.
This thread/story brings two things to mind; one is the fact that there are SEO company sales people out there (big ones) who use the "we rank better for ’seo term’ than ’other company we are pitching against’" argument to potential clients.And it is about traffic and conversion, but it is amazing how many clients find that difficult to grasp.
Have noticed this a lot, and in fact for several months (I’m in the UK). Sometimes you get an interesting blend of ads for the second search with a combo of the two queries.What does my head in is trying to figure out what term Google reports that you clicked on the search for, if I do click an ad for e.g. perfume when my second search is actually for lawyers. My guess is it gets billed back to the first term.
When I read the intro to this I assumed it was going to mean they were searching Facebook et al to choose him a name that no-one else had :-) Go register that .com domain name for myname.com now!
Wow, this one takes me back a long way. There was some speculation years ago (I’m talking the 90s here) that if you searched for a domain on one particular ISPs website that they would register it and try to sell it to you to stop you doing it elsewhere. I believe it turned out to be groundless, but this appears to be Network Solutions doing something similar even if their intentions are good.
I’ve seen this before, but the seeing it every time is new, which is an interesting thing. I think previously, if you signed up you would just see them more often than average.
Oh, erFatal error: Call to undefined function: the_author_image() in /home/viperchi/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/digg/single.php on line 21Oops
Before I became a full time SEO I assumed that all web designers at least took things into consideration when they built a site. Since - well, I’ve been shocked out of that assumption!
I enjoyed this comparative list. I’ve seen plenty of implementations of these on various blogs but never tried any myself, so it’s great to see a comparison.
Story: Why Blogging is like Sex
If you’ve got a .co.uk site that targets people out of the UK you are out of luck - there’s no option to say that you really want to target another country instead.
Web designers need to also learn the difference between "search engine friendly" and the ongoing process of SEO.
Story: 11 Sources of Duplicate Content You’re Probably Unaware of