Today, we have an excellent guest post from Paddy Moogan. Paddy has worked online for about 5 years now, the last 2 have been as an Online Campaign Manager for Pin Digital, an Agency who are based in Warwickshire. He manages and runs SEO and PPC campaigns for a number of large Ecommerce clients as well as B2B websites in the UK. Paddy often talks about his experiences in SEO on his blog as well as talking about his other passion in life, travelling. Over to you, Paddy!
Photo by stevendepolo
Today we’ve been spending some time thinking about and implementing the X-Robots-Tag, a lesser known Robots Exclusion Protocol for “noarchive”, “noindex”, “nofollow”, and “nosnippet” supported by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Why lesser known? The X-Robots-Tag likes to hide in your server header responses rather than in the <head> element of a web page. Rather handy in some cases, and I’m about to tell you why.
Photo by: maxkiesler
Since talking to Dave at A4UExpo about using noarchive in your meta header, I’ve been interested in understanding if implementing an instruction to remove the cache link using the “noarchive” tag has any impact on your search engine traffic and rankings.
Photo by: acka47
As Dave puts it:
So the only reason I can see why I should leave the Google Cached link is so that other people can see what my website looks like in Googles eyes and why would I do that ?
Photo by: Macinate
Have you ever felt screwed because someone on the internet owns your beloved domain name? I can honestly say that I can sleep a little better tonight, since I acquired SEOgadget.com, the .com brethren of my beloved UK TLD, SEOgadget.co.uk.
How to buy a domain through using domain brokerage
I used SEDO, but there are a number of other recommended domain brokers to choose from. In the past, I’ve worked with services from Godaddy and Snapnames.com. I’d love to write about them all, but I only bought one domain this time so here’s how it worked with SEDO.
Photo by stevendepolo
Some SEO’s argue that irrelevant links have long been detected and discounted by search engines, making related links an important part of your link building strategy. Do you really need large numbers of “relevant” links to get a site to rank for your top keyword?
No. As long you’ve built links on reasonably trusted, authoritative domains, and you’ve thrown in some (sometimes over) optimised anchor text for good measure, you can still rank. That’s not to say relevance plays an important role, but not as much as one as I had been hoping for.
In case you haven’t noticed, SEOmoz have just published their Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2009:
Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. This year features contributors from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and many more.
I’m particulary glad to see the work live – the original ranking factors contributed significantly to my own development as an SEO, which is why I’m proud to be on the contributors list, amongst the people I have looked up to most in our industry for several years.
Getting traffic to a site through a vast portfolio of traffic driving, high value keywords is at the top of every search engine marketer’s priority list. That said, what if all that traffic is going to the wrong pages on your site?
While researching laptops this afternoon I decided to take a look at the IBM / Lenovo Thinkpads and compare them to some other machines I’d been looking at from HP.
Using the search term “IBM Thinkpad”, I blindly selected the first organic result:
It’s been almost exactly a month since Google’s Vince Update hit UK shores. Quite a few UK SEO blogs covered the update, and submitted their own hypotheses as to what ranking factors could be driving the change.
Matt Cutts answered a webmaster question regarding the Vince update on Youtube and tried to be as clear as possible that there had been a change, but that he wouldn’t nessecarily consider it an “update”, more of a “simple change”. Matt mentioned that it only affected a small number of queries, and told us in the video that Google doesn’t really think of websites in terms of “brands”. Instead, they were looking at factors such as:
Living made easy is a website developed by UK non-profit organisation the Disabled Living Foundation (DLF), a charity offering free, impartial advice and information from their website about daily living equipment and other aspects of independent living for people with disabilities.
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