In a recent article , we looked at a debate over what is better between search engine optimization and pay-per-click. Of course both should be used typically, but on a recent panel at SES Chicago, participants were asked to pick a side to highlight the benefits of each compared to the other. It made for some pretty interesting conversation. Both SEO
As a follow up to a recent article we ran on how press releases can be great for search , a representative for PRWeb , a press release distribution company, contacted us with another interesting example. This one looks at the shelf-life press releases can have, with regards to search traffic. “A small business called Leatherup.com, which sells peripheral gear for motorcycle riders issued a news release on November 6, 2008, titled, ‘LeatherUp.com 2008 Sales Explode to over $20 Million,’” the representative tells WebProNews. “This year alone, this release has received more than 11,000 unique page views excluding advertising (I can see that Leatherup.com used this release as a landing page for some Doubleclick ads which boosted the total unique views to more than 20,000, so have excluded them).” “Once I had the 11,000 number, with the exclusion, I looked at the entrance sources,” he says. Among the top ten, these include (all numbers are unique views): Google:
Press releases are not only great ways to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines. This is not news, but it’s a commonly overlooked fact. Have press releases brought you significant search traffic?
Google announced that it now offering cross-domain support of the rel=”canonical” link element. If you are unfamiliar with this link element, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed it with us here . Basically, it’s a way to avoid duplicate content issues, but until now, you couldn’t use it across domains. “For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects,” says John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google Z
Remember when Microsoft’s Bing launched and one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the interface of its image search feature? It was unique in that you could simply scroll down on the results page infinitely. You didn’t have to go to multiple pages to find more images. You just kept scrolling. Google is now testing such a feature for its own image search results. In actuality, this feature was not exactly new to Bing. As Barry Schwartz notes at Search Engine Land, Microsoft had actually already been doing this with Live Search, which became Bing. It’s just that most people didn’t use Live Search, so when they checked out Bing, it might as well have been new. Microsoft has been using the feature since 2006 (and even used similar functionality on its web results at one time), but Google (not to mention the now defunct Amazon A9) also used it – just not in image search. Google’s SearchMash test site, which also launched in 2006 took advantage. That was a different time though. Now Bing has come out and stole a small, but significant amount of the search industry’s mindshare away from Google, and one feature that people like about it is the infinite scroll in image search. Maybe Google recognizes that people like that and wants to deliver a similar user experience. Keep in mind, the feature is only being tested with a small percentage of Google users though. There’s no guarantee that it will even become a feature. A spokesperson for Google told Schwartz that they are “continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience,” and that they didn’t have any additional details to share about it. So there’s only room for speculation at this point. One thing worth noting is that Google has been really geared up about making the web faster. If you go over to Bing’s image search and scroll through some results, I think you’ll quickly find that this method of browsing results is indeed faster than clicking over to multiple pages (although your own Internet connection could affect this). Will Google implement this kind of functionality eventually? It wouldn’t be the first instance of the search engine including Bing-like features . Related Articles: > Google Puts More Images (And One Big Pic) On Results Pages > Google Experiments with a New Image Search Feature > Google “Similar Images” Feature Goes From Labs to Actual Feature
The rest is here:
Viewing Google Image Search Results All on One Page
Google may have busted the “duplicate content myth” a while back, saying that you don’t technically get “penalized” for it, but that doesn’t mean it is a good thing. Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive says you should care about it so that your better pages are available to rank. Search engines don’t always get it right, so you have to be proactive. She says, “Being proactive is crucial.” Make sure search engines are indexing the right thing. We’ve discussed tips for this in the past, based on advice from Google, Yahoo, and Bing . Things to consider include: – Consistency – Site navigation/url structure – canonicalization – robots.txt file – robots exclusion tag – sitemap submission Come up with clear URL structure and architecture so that it is easier to not deliver duplicate content. Use Web analytics software and webmaster tools. If you have duplicate content, your competitors can outrank you, but Thurow says, “The number 1 reason you should care about duplicate content is the user experience.” Here’s a helpful video from Google on the duplicate content subject in case you have not seen it before: According to Ask.com, duplicate content can mean: 2 pages that contain exact text content 2 pages contain similar text content 2 pages are visually similar Article Syndication and Duplicate Content Article syndication has often brought up concerns of duplicate content. According to Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, there is a good side to syndication, which is that it is a great way to get links and visibility. “Syndicating content is one of the primary tactics used for link building,” he notes. When exact copies are syndicated, problems can arise. Search engines only want to show one copy of a piece of content, and they usually show the original author. You can syndicate a synopsis and not the whole article, but this only works if you content is authoritative, Enge says. If you must syndicate exact article to other site MUST link back to original article engines may interpret, but it may fail, he says. Abby Johnson contributed to this report from Search Engine Strategies Chicago. Related Articles: > Duplicate Content on Google, Bing & Yahoo > Google Busts the Duplicate Content Myth > Internationalizing Without Duplicate Content Worries
See the rest here:
Be Proactive to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues
Early this year, Burger King made waves with a “Whopper Sacrifice” Facebook app.