Basically anybody can add anything as an parameter to your URL and make it appear as if it’s part of your blog or site.

Just try adding

• “?gay-porn”
• “?obama=muslim”
• “?you-suck”

to any of your URLs or other sites’ URLs. Most sites accept that without even showing an error “not found”.

In case you link such an URL Google would even index it. So you can make Google show up fake URLs on other people’s websites this way.

Also unwanted parameters break a lot of things SEO-wise. You get unlimited duplicate content this way. People bookmark the wrong (polluted) URLs on Delicious and elsewhere and thus you lose juice on social media.

Who adds utm_source to your URLs and why?

utm_source is added by multiple services in order to get tracked in Google Analytics. You get inflated numbers on Google Analytics though. That’s why I do not recommend adding such parameters to your URLs in the first place. For instance when I click an URL on Delicious which is tagged utm_source=feedburner it gets wrongly counted as stemming from Feedburner and not Delicious as the Delicious bookmark is still tagged as Feedburner and not Delicious.

Also as I said before the bookmarks on Delicious do not add up. It means that maybe 30 people bookmark the Feedburner tagged URL. 30 others bookmark a Twitter tagged URL for the same post and a few dozens others bookmark the original URL. Thus your post doesn’t show up in popular lists.

You can prevent Feedburner from adding the utm_source crap but that’s not enough to remove all other unwanted parameters from your URL. Thus I wrote this tiny script in JavaScript you can add to your WordPress blog anywhere in the header:


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
var url = self.location.href;
var p = url.indexOf("?");
var str = url;
var parameter = str.slice(p);
if (p >= 1 && parameter.indexOf("p") != 1 && parameter.indexOf("s") != 1)
{
url = str.slice(0,p);
self.location.replace(url);
}
//-->
</script>


I know it’s quite redundant and not very elegant but my JavaScript skills haven’t been used much in the last decade so you are welcome to customize it.

The script basically checks where the parameter starts and removes everything from the URL including the question mark “?”

which signifies the start of the parameters. It then redirects visitors on the client-side to the accurate URL without parameter crap in the address.

So in the end your visitor ends up on the actual URL s/he should end up from the beginning but someone else prevented them due polluting the URL with parameter spam.

The only acceptable parameters are the “p” so that you can still use the post preview function in your WordPress and “s” for the search function.

I’ve added the script to SEO 2.0 already so a link like this one should get redirected: http://seo2.0.onreact.com/?you-suck

Related posts:

1. User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps
2. How to Create a Dynamic Blogroll in 5 Minutes
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

1. User and Search Friendly URL Design for Multi-Language Websites in 4 Easy Steps
2. How to Create a Dynamic Blogroll in 5 Minutes
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

Image: Node by Uqbar.

As both business blogger and SEO am I aware of both sides of “link building”. I get lots of spammy comments from Asian “blog commenting services” but

I also appreciate blog comments by fellow SEO practicioners, I mean real people with a name in the SEO industry. I blog for clients about other topics as well, topics not related to SEO and I’ve been blogging privately since 2003.

While SEO 2.0 has been around for years, many people still practice low quality link building techniques like worthless blog commenting for the sheer number of anchor-text rich links.

In SEO 2.0 we don’t build links, we get links.

That means that you don’t have to force your link upon others. Others give you a link out of their own accord. In fact they are often glad to link to you. That’s one of the most important differences between SEO 2.0 and conventional SEO.

You may call it social SEO, SMSEO, findability, inbound marketing or SEO 2.0 – the long term strategy these days is the same: Make people link to you.

You can’t make people link to you by being an ass or just ass kissing. You can, but that only works sporadically.

Getting links SEO 2.0 style is convincing other people that you are worth it.

Once you have convinced them they will link to you again and again. That’s the whole secret.

I have covered the basics of getting links a few times already. This time I want to focus on how to get links from blogs. I will use an example close to home, this blog here, SEO 2.0

Blog Commenting

Just add a meaningful comment here, saying something more than “thank you, great post”. Do it three times and your link will be “dofollow”. Add a link to an additional resource (not necessarily your own) and you get credited in the post itself with an extra link to your site. That’s not that difficult. It doesn’t work of course if you offer services like “200 links for 10$”. Then just f*#k off. Many bloggers are grateful when you add value in the comments. Some will even credit a whole post to you.

Pinging

In case you use a WordPress blog you can easily notify me that you have published a post that links to me. It works automatically unless you have switched it off. I consider to make all pingbacks dofollow. Some other blogs already do. Their comments are nofollow but their pingbacks (and trackbacks) are real links. Of course, like above, you can end up linked as an additional resource in the editorial part of the post itself. Moreover I will check out your blog and know about you. This might be a beginning of a link love relationship.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is highly popular these days. Some friends of mine even offer services for guest bloggers. I’ve written down my guest blogging guidelines just a while ago. Most bloggers either actively seek out guest postings or are open minded enough to publish them when approached.

Make sure to read the blog first and find out what favorite topics the blogger has, what kind of audience s/he attracts and how their writing style sounds. For instance some people want to publish posts o SEO 2.0 that explain SEO basics in an article directory style of writing. I can’t publish that.

People reading SEO 2.0 expect advanced SEO and a juicy language. They don’t want to get bored with another “content is king”, “what is SEO” or “on page optimization basics” posts.

Interviews

Sometimes an interview is the best way to deal with a certain type of news. I publish interviews whenever I can and I can more often than I am able to write a post myself. After all, for interviews I only need to write the questions. Just look at the people I’ve interviewed in the past: Patrick Gavin of DIYSEO, Steven Snell of Vandelay Design, Frances Mary Krug of Search Marketing Standard. They may not be the superstars of search, social media and blogging but they have dome something important and they are around for a while.

Be around for a while as well and when the time comes to launch something or a newsworthy event will happen I will be glad to interview you instead of rehashing the news everybody else has covered already.

Many bloggers do interviews. In the SEO industry SEO Book and Search Engine People do for instance. These are some of the best authority links you can get. Don’t approach me wanting to get interviewed when I have never before heard of you.

Doing Something Linkable

Do something linkable aka remarkable. Just think about architecture and green blogs. Architecture blogs write about new buildings built by architects mostly. Green blogs mention seemingly each and every project that is a hope for a more environmentally friendly future. Even the most obscure endeavor get publicity there. Te more bizarre the more attention it gets on social media.

I will feature more of such news aboout the growing SEO industry. In other niches it’s already common place as my examples show. Also doing somthing remarkable makes you a more interesting interview partner.

Creating A WordPress Plugin

Do you know the LinkWithin related posts plugin? It’s not even a plugin, it’s more of a widget. It has PageRank 7 so speak in old school SEO terms and an incredible amount of link. Just check it with your favorite tool like Open Site Explorer, Majectic SEO or Blekko. It’s not even good at finding related posts, they barely match the topic of each post. Still myriads of blogs use it. This is probably the best case study of how the SEO 2.0 way of getting links overtrumps the tedious “link building”.

Create a better one and you’ll get even more links. Many attempted this with social media buttons but this is already a crowded market. I’d use a good related posts plugin with image preview but haven’t found a perfect one yet.

Directory Inclusion

Some of the most important blogs out there, think TechCrunch e.g. have their own directories. You have probably noticed, I have added a directory section on SEO 2.0 as well. You can’t submit your site to it. It’s a very high quality niche SEO directory. I will only add SEO service providers I already know, trust and can recommend. Be it SEO companies, SEO bloggers, SEO software vendors or whomever fits in. I have added some of my favorite SEO companies to it already, many more will follow. There is a paid option as well for those who are eligible in the first place.

In case I know you already you may get a paid directory entry with highly optimized title, headline, description and contact info. It includes up to 5 meaningful links for users ans search engines alike no “click here” crap. Search for [Relentless Technology] to see their entry on #3 for their name. The basic entry is free but as I said I don’t accept submissions.

How do you know that I know you? Well, have I linked to you in the past here or on SEOptimise? Are you on this Twitter list or tagged best SEO website design here on Delicious? Do I follow you on LinkedIn?

Other search marketing blogs offer directories as well: just check out the SEOmoz, Econsultancy and Blogstorm directories.

What else can you do? Focus on getting links instead of building links. Getting links means you get them almost as a side effect. You don’t submit somewhere.

The best links are those you deserve not those you build manually.

Change your approach. As a die hard old school you won’t get links. It’s not 2004 anymore.

Offsite SEO is similar to having sex, either you do it yourself (link building), you pay for it (paid links) or you invest in relationships so that you’ll get it forever for free (getting links as in SEO 2.0)!

Related posts:

1. Guest Blogging Guidelines
2. Commenting on Dofollow-Blogs as a Link Building Strategy
3. 7 Stealth Publish for WordPress Uses to Consider

1. Guest Blogging Guidelines
2. Commenting on Dofollow-Blogs as a Link Building Strategy
3. 7 Stealth Publish for WordPress Uses to Consider

Love by jimscottIMD.

I hate ads. I’m not the only one. Most people hate annoying ads. People hate ads on the Web and block them using a plethora of tools. They also hate outdoor ads and TV ads. They hate them

• for the interruption
• for the blatant lies
  
• for the selling of fake lifestyles
  

we are meant to aspire to and we can never reach in most cases.

They hate ads for shouting at them.

People hate ads for selling them something they don’t want when they don’t want to be sold to.

That’s also the reason why people love SEO.

People love SEO? This guy must be joking you think. Isn’t SEO the most detested pariah on the Internet? No.

People don’t hate web hosting or web design. Likewise people don’t hate SEO. People hate bad web hosting, bad web design and they hate bad SEO.

People hate servers that go down and sites they can’t access. People hate awful user experience on cluttered portal like sites. That’s why Google succeeded with a clean interface. Also people hate spammy low-quality SEO implemented by webmasters who have barely an understanding of search and user experience.

I’ve said it before:

Good SEO is invisible.

People only hate SEO they can see and recognize as such. People hate SEO that looks like advertising. People hate ads. When people see SEO that appears to be advertising they hate it.

When people read the NYT or the Chicago Tribune they don’t hate these publications inspite of them having dedicated inhouse SEO teams.

People love SEO because we, the SEO practicioners provide them what they want when they want it.

Nobody ever complains about finding the exact product, service or resource he has been searching for on top of Google. You want to buy an iPad? I will sell you an iPad. I don’t tell you to search for it.

That’s exactly what SEO specialists do: They make the most relevant pages show up on top. Now you’d say: No, it’s the holy Google that does it! Evil SEOs only meddle with it! Well, no. Google has so many requirements a site has to fulfill to rank above others that it’s not Google that makes relevant websites appear on top.

It’s the SEO experts who make the pages as relevant and Google friendly as the search giant needs them to appear on top.

No site matches Google’s expectations by itself. It takes people who work hard to make it relevant.

That’s why people love SEO. SEO ensures quality of search results in order to fulfill people’s wishes. The people get what they want when they want it because of SEO. Google only responds to what webmasters and SEOs do.

Some people argue that SEO is bad because any website can get optimized to rank on top. What about the other webmasters? Isn’t that unfair? Well, who forbids them to practice SEO or hire an SEO company themselves? Why would you want a website owner who spends lots of time and/or money to provide a valuable resource via SEO not to rank on top?

Most people won’t admit it but they love SEO. They hate ads. So don’t make your SEO look like ads. Btw. that’s one of the main reasons why I don’t do PPC.

Related posts:

1. DoFollow: Spread Link Love
2. Bing FAIL
3. The Best SEO Strategy: Don’t Do SEO!

1. DoFollow: Spread Link Love
2. Bing FAIL
3. The Best SEO Strategy: Don’t Do SEO!

Photographers and other visual artists have a magnificent tool to show off their work these days, the Internet. Everybody loves great photos and artworks so they spread basically by themselves.

Still there is a big difference between being successful on the Web as a photographer or visual artist and having your images scattered randomly over the Web. Image SEO is a great tool to decide yourself which way your work gets on the Web.

Most good images get stolen and used without your permission

to generate ad revenue for the content thieves while you not only earn nothing financially but don’t getting any publicity either due to lack of proper credits.

The best way to become successful is to

use your images as free advertising

for your name while earning money with professional services or premium products, selling your images for print purposes for instance. Today I want to focus on the ways of promoting your work over the Web to get links and publicity while at the same time curbing image theft of your works.

Add your email address to your Flickr profile, the same applies to Deviant Art. I often want to seek permission for use of images but do not find a way to contact the photographer or artist. Where there is no way to ask or buy people will just take images without permission or ignore you. I do the latter and search for other images instead. Also add “more at youraddress.com” links below each of your images on Flickr.

Do not use LinkedIn as the only way to contact you, only premium members can send you images. So people relying solely on LinkedIn to get messages will get just get a tiny part of them. Unless you don’t care provide an email address or at least some form address like formspring.me

Use Behance and similar portfolio community sites and make sure to use you real name plus, again, add your email and homepage address there.

Add your URL or name to images. Add a text layer in Photoshop or using another tool saying something like youraddress.com or copyright by youraddress.com People who steal images tend to add their URLs so in the best case scenario you make sure that people understand the image is yours by saying something like your name, photography.

Submit your images to image bookmarking sites and socialize with like minded users there. In case you don’t submit them others will, without your permission and proper credits at worst. So make sure you are the first and foremost who submits them with the proper source.

Cut out the middleman e.g. Getty Images. Why? I’ve contacted Getty Images a week ago to seek permission to publish an image and I didn’t get a response beyond an automated “we get back to you” reply. Also their prices are so high that only mainstream media can afford them so by selling there you actually make sure that you don’t sell many images. Retain ownership of your images and decide on a case to case basis how much to charge.

Use TinEye to find out who uses and steals your images. TinEye is a “reverse image search engine” that allows you to search for an image just by uploading it or linking it. So you don’t use keywords but only the image itself.

Use StumbleUpon and Tumblr etc. to spread your images yourself, reprimand users who steal your images. StumbleUpon and Tumblr are notorious for wide spread image theft. Most people who submit your images don’t care for copyright on earn money by stealing them and showing them along their ads. Especially StumbleUpon is full of stolen images to rip off photographers and artists.

Use a CC license to control the use of your images. Creative Commons licenses are not about giving away your copyrights, they are about deciding yourself what copyrights you grant others. This is far better than letting people steal your images. Let the people use the images with your permission and you get plenty of links, especially with those licenses requiring attribution.

Build your own homepage and display your images there. While many photographers aren’t web designers or can not afford expensive web design there are many services where you can set up a homepage easily. Some of them are even specialized on image content. Without a homepage you will always depend on third parties like Flickr, Behance etc. Flickr might ban you or delete your images. Many images simply get censored because they show parts of the human body. So Flickr etc. are good to spread the word but not to represent you.

Don’t let Google Images steal your images. Use a so called frame breaker script to ensure Google Image search users are routed to your site and do no stay on the Google page that frames you.

Apply basic image SEO best practices on site to make people find your images on your website.

Update: Use image specific link building techniques.

These simple and often quite obvious measures will already provide you with plenty of links and publicity. It takes time to use all these tools. Even adding your URL to your images can be quite tedious but you also can automate it. Some people ma not call these techniques image SEO at all but at the end of the day it is.

In the age of social media SEO is about findability, digital asset optimization wherever your assets are and off site optimization does not mean only link building.

That’s SEO 2.0

Related posts:

1. Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration
2. Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday
3. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients

1. Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration
2. Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday
3. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients

Update December, 15th 2009: Try it with http://l.gog.is/hkcMjRm.

Moreover Google has launched it’s own official Google URL shortener yesterday: goo.gl
Thanks Brandon Diaz for the heads up in the comments.

Sadly goo.gl is only available to Google Toolbar and Feedburner users as of now. I don’t recommend the Google Toolbar for its spyware issues. I use Feedburner on this blog though.

Also many thanks to the man behind gog.is who introduced the “I’m feeling lucky” search results forwarding. This works like the “I’m feeling lucky” button on the actual Google search page. It redirects you to the first search result. This is still the best way to optimize for personal search. See below. Example: http://l.gog.is/seo+2.0

Post as originally published on December 9, 2009:

My first idea to deal with the new personal/ized Google search was: You have to make people click your search results, that is those you appear on in Google. We must do that in order to make Google save your URL as one that has been clicked by the user and thus will be found better next time.

Then there is the issue with unreliability of common URL shorteners. Just think of:

• tinyurl.com – often down for undisclosed reasons
• bit.ly – .ly stands for Libya, remember Lockerbie?
• tr.im – almost closed down, now often down for server issues
• poprl.com – disappeared altogether
• zi.ma – owner got imprisoned, hoster took it down for a while

Also I asked myself  “why does Google not offer an URL shortener?” It could easily. So I came up with the idea of feeding two birds with one crumb (I don’t kill birds with stones!) and to make Google work as an URL shortener.

How is that possible? Just think what the URL shorteners do. They create a random combination of letters like hkcMjRm add it as a new URL to their own domain and then redirect the traffic.

Thinks of what Google does. In case you’re too lazy to type in all that http-www stuff you just type in your keyword or website name and get redirected to the first result. We’ll do the same thing. [ Edit: After a few minutes this doesn't seem to work yet. You still have to click the search result manually.]

1. We create a random combination of letters, 7 of them, here it’s hkcMjRm. We can use a pasword creator for that task. I did that in Keepass but  you can do that online as well using a password generator like this.
2. Then we check Google results whether hkcMjRm already exists in search index. In case it doesn’t we can use it. Most 7 letters combinations don’t exist yet. I tried a few. 6 letters combinations often have one or a few results already.
3. Now we copy and paste hkcMjRm into the URL bar and voila: We get redirected to the right destination but Google remembers that we used search for it. Or test it yourself just searching for it: hkcMjRm

There are of course downsides to this: For instance people may outrank you for your id URL using the same one but it will take a while. There is also another pro to this approach: You quickly see who uses your content or where it appears.

To make sure it works I used the hkcMjRm id both in the headline as well as inside the text but I guess a line like “Google short URL: hkcMjRm.” will be enough for it to work long enough for people via Twitter using it.

Of course you don’t even have to use cryptic random letters. You can just take the headline or parts of it like I did yesterday with google.com? I got outranked by tweetmeme already a day later.

This is quick and dirty but I’m sure some people can make it work for them. I guess Google will sooner or later present their own URL shortening service anyways. Until then you might want to try this. At least this way it works for better ranking personal search until of course many people abuse this technique and Google stops it.

Related posts:

1. SEO Test: Default Personalized Search is a Myth – It Doesn’t Work
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. SEO Company, SEO and Search Engine Optimization Google Results Are a Disgrace

1. SEO Test: Default Personalized Search is a Myth – It Doesn’t Work
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. SEO Company, SEO and Search Engine Optimization Google Results Are a Disgrace

Image: Personal Preference by Kevin Dooley.

Google gets personal: Now everybody will get personalized search results based on their search habits in the past unless they opt out in a tedious process. So most people won’t opt out or even notice at all, at least at first.

1. The rich will get richer, that is the attention rich. Those sites that have a brand and/or audience already will profit from Google personal search results. The sites people already click most often will rank on top. Wikipedia will dominate even more.
2. People will get confused. “Yesterday it was there when I checked it at home!” might become a common exclamation in the near future. People switching computers (home/mobile/work) will face different results unless they use all of them in a highly similar manner.
3. SEOs will finally focus on conversions and ROI. Lazy SEOs still stick to rankings no matter how profitable they are. Checking rankings will become even more pointless from now on. Conversions and ROI are key to measuring success now more than ever.
4. John Doe bloggers will end up ghettoized. You have below 50 subscribers? These people will find you on Google. The others won’t anymore as Wikipedia, NYT, CNN, BBC and Yahoo Answers a well as Huntington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget etc. will push you further down.
5. Social Media sites will get more user generated content (UGC) as people will try to get some traffic from the few remaining behemoth sites lucky enough to get clicked in search results often enough to get a push.
6. The Web will become boring. People will visit more and more of the same sites. It will become more and more difficult to find new things, original sources and small time publishers.
7. SEO Noobs will try to convince you that SEO is dead. SEO is dead all the time. Even I said so, but I meant a different thing than the people who have no clue about SEO. I meant that SEO has changed in a way that you wouldn’t recognize it as the SEO we’re accustomed to. The “SEO is dead” bunch assumes that personal search results can’t get optimized. Of course they can.
8. More group blogs will emerge to make sure to get at least the same attention as some big name bloggers and news outlets.
9. Old and new social filters might re/appear. As people will want to rely on crowdsourcing rather than their own limited search habits they’ll look after ways to determine what’s good and what not with a little help of their friends.
10. Google will gain even more power and your privacy will become a thing of the past. Google knows what you are searching for but now it will tell your family, flat mates or coworkers. So make sure not to use Google for that xxx stuff in case you want to keep your deviations private.
11. The sheer number of people ranking a site on top will push it for others as well. Finally click through data will become the new Google PageRank. When 1000 people click your link repeatedly in the search results you can’t be wrong can you?
12. You will have to optimize your blog for returning visitors in order to get search traffic, even first timers. This contradiction will lead to some new hitherto unknown SEO tactics.

Btw. Danny Sullivan expected this to happen since 2001. In an article called “Google May get Personal” he also explains why one of the personal search results startups failed though:

People “were afraid to miss something”.

My head is already buzzing with ideas on how to optimize for Google personal search (even if it’s still just called Google). That’s the great thing about SEO. It never gets stale. You always have to come up with new things to please Google and search users. Also most people don’t get it and thus SEO will live forever.

What tactics do you plan to employ to attract Google personal search visitors?

Suggestions in the comments might get used in my next blog post either here or on SEOptimise. That means a link to the source.

Related posts:

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 30 Hands On Google Search Plus SEO Techniques for Getting Personal
3. The ROI of Blogging and Social Media

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 30 Hands On Google Search Plus SEO Techniques for Getting Personal
3. The ROI of Blogging and Social Media

How to get Indexed by Google in 2009? Just use Twitter. This is no joke. I ran a test on Twitter to find out whether Google indexes Twitter links and surprise, surprise it does.

Of course Google can’t ignore Twitter, the fastest and most common social networking site out there. The problem is Twitter doesn’t want to get its links getting indexed by Google an prevents it by adding the nofollow attribute.

Google, along with other search engines introduced nofollow allegedly to combat spam and later to scare webmasters into submission (either they add nofollow to ads or they get penalized).

Now that’s a problem. They can’t ignore their own rules, can they? Twitter uses nofollow on all links doesn’t it? No, the mobile version which gets indexed as well does not use nofollow. See my profile in the mobile version. Ironically the Google cache version of it does.

Whatever the reasons may be: Google actually indexes Twitter links.

Whether it’s a bug or feature, I don’t know. I can imagine Twitter closing this “loophole” now that “evil SEOs” like me write about it. I’d certainly like to see how Google will justify indexation of Twitter links then. We all know that Google is black hat. They show different content to users than to spiders, especially in countries like China… The Google engineers will surely find a new way of gaming Twitter. As of now webmasters, SEOs and Google shareholders can rejoice: Google officially is tapping into the wisdom of crowds displayed on Twitter.

The Twitter Indexation Test Setup

How did I find out about Google indexing Twitter links? I set up a page on my onreact.com domain solely for the purpose of testing Twitter link indexation. It contained only text. It was a dead end page: No incoming or outgoing links. With one exception: I tweeted the link once and asked my followers to ignore it. Also I favorited it on Twitter.com

I checked a few hours later, a day later, two days later and nothing happened. So I forgot about the test. Now after 3 months I rediscovered my bookmarks and took a quick look in the Google index and what did I find? The test page.

Now at first I suspected some third party Twitter tool to display my link and thus Google indexing. No, as of now there is no other instance of the text on that page than my Twitter stream and the page on onreact.com itself:

Please note that the mobile version was not in the index in spite of my mobile page being even cached by Google.

So the most likely scenario is that Google indexes Twitter links directly from Twitter. Sadly I made one mistake when setting up the test. While adding a server based analytics script to the page to see Google spidering the page I used the wrong path to the analytics tool. So we don’t know when the Google bot actually hit the page. You might want to repeat the test with a better setup to make sure the result is valid.

It seems that there is a substantial delay to indexing links via Twitter.

Maybe sneaky Google doesn’t want to get caught in the act? Remember that Twitter is a Google competitor with its real time search capabilities. I’m quite sure Google is keen on catching up here, using Twitter data directly via the API for instance.

Btw.: Neither Yahoo nor Bing have indexed the page. Thus Yahoo also can’t find any links leading to it.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Index Your robots.txt?
2. Google Buys Links with Hidden Anchor Text
3. SEO Test: Default Personalized Search is a Myth – It Doesn’t Work

1. Does Google Index Your robots.txt?
2. Google Buys Links with Hidden Anchor Text
3. SEO Test: Default Personalized Search is a Myth – It Doesn’t Work

Bing FAIL: This will be a short post, like the headline already suggests. You know, after the disastrous performance of Wolfram Alpha which was falsely hailed as Google competition I’m not really in the mood to rant again. I will just show you one example.

Bing simply doesn’t work.

The first thing I do to test a new search engine is always some vanity searches as in these cases I simply know what the most relevant results are. So I searched for SEO 2.0 on Bing. Guess what?

SEO 2.0 was nowhere to be found on Bing using the phrase SEO 2.0

In Google this blog is at #1 and #2 for SEO 2.0 but on Bing it’s not in the top 50. You get a lot of crap results instead mixed with some good ones but the most important pages are nowhere to be found. It’s not just this blog: You won’t find the Mixx SEO 2.0 community (being active for almost 2 years now) in the Bing top 50 for SEO 2.0 either.

So it’s not that I was banned on Bing or something. You have to search for “SEO 2.0″ using quotes to find the SEO 2.0 blog. So Bing knows that this page exists but assigns a completely wrong authority to it. In contrast you’ll find a page offering

Guaranteed seo 2.0 first page rank top ten placement and ranking in …

at #1 for SEO 2.0 – So not a two year old blog with regular postings about SEO 2.0 or in fact the resource that popularized SEO 2.0 ranks but a second rate static page which was optimized on page for a whole group of random SEO related keywords.

What more can I say? I’m not a Google fan boy but Bing is a huge FAIL. It’s as simple as that.

Related posts:

1. SEO Test: Default Personalized Search is a Myth – It Doesn’t Work
2. Bonsai Blogging: How to Fail with Social Media
3. SEO Speak Translated: The Real SEO Glossary

1. SEO Test: Default Personalized Search is a Myth – It Doesn’t Work
2. Bonsai Blogging: How to Fail with Social Media
3. SEO Speak Translated: The Real SEO Glossary

One of the basic best practices of SEO are user and search friendly URLs. URLs are simply Internet addresses like something.com/more/details

Step 1: Make URLs user and search friendly
My example is already both user and search friendly. It’s readable and understandable (you sometimes even call them speaking URLs). So you already know that we talk about “something”, “more” of it and some “details”. A better example would be

ford.com/cars/ford-focus

Here we quickly notice that the page deals with a Ford car by the name of Focus.
The actual Ford site is almost as good, but that would be the ideal URL structure. It’s also perfect for Google and other search engines as it already includes both keywords and a site structure with cars being a folder or rather directory and ford-focus a specific page out of similar ones in this directory.

Now consider an international site. Ford is a good example here as the Ford Focus gets sold in Europe too. In Europe people speak a few dozens of different languages. Just covering the more important ones like

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Polish
• Russian

is not an easy task. It starts with the URLs. Let’s assume Ford.com would be a multi-language site, that is a site that covers all those languages. In contrast there are plenty of companies who prefer separate domains for each country like

• ford.es
• ford.fr
• ford.de

etc. Maintaining so many sites is quite an effort though. So many companies of smaller scale won’t operate an extra site for each country. You should reserve a domain for each at least even if you plan just to use one.

Let’s assume though that Ford.com would develop a multi-language website including all those languages. We would encounter several problems as each of these languages has special characters other’s don’t and Google has some difficulties with. I don’t want to focus (what a pun! ;-) on those.

Let’s also assume that we don’t deal (yet) with the special characters. Let’s talk about the standard procedure for user and SEO friendly URL design for multi-language websites.

Step 2: Separate URLs
What’s most important: You need separate URLs for each language! No joke. There are sites that have several languages on the same page (using the same URL).
Depending on you browser language, IP or according to your choice the content language changes but the URL stays the same. This way you would view ford.com/cars/ford-focus from Spain and see the page in Spanish, from France in French ans so on while in the US it still would be displayed in English. This is the worst case scenario from a SEO perspective. Google will only index the English version. Your site won’t get found on local Google search at all. Plus the automatic setting of languages doesn’t work as desired in many cases. American expats in Spain get the Spanish version in spite of not speaking Spanish for instance.

A simple and SEO wise good solution would be adding a directory (or virtual one) for each specific language.
Thus we would end up having:

ford.com/es/cars/ford-focus
ford.com/fr/cars/ford-focus
ford.com/de/cars/ford-focus

Step 3: Translate URLs
That’s almost fine but there is one problem: You use the English word or keyword “cars” for the Spanish and French version. In France people even can get angry at you for doing that.
As I’m doing SEO in Germany I’ll use the German examples from now on. The next step is translating the URLs as well:

ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus

You see that the product name remains the same but the keyword describing it “cars” changes to the German “autos”. We would be happy here as users and website optimizers but in most cases the programmers behind the content management system will cry out and telly you that it does not work that way.

Step 4: Add URL numbers
You can’t create different pages with varying for each language without risking chaos.

So we need a small change in the URL structure and we will tell them that so called URL rewriting (in most cases using the so called mod_Rewrite module for Apache) will suffice.

The simplest way to deal with this issue is adding a unique number to each page. This number stays the same across the languages to allow handling the same pages across multiple pages with much hassle.

So we end having something like this:

ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234

take note that “1234″ is a random number here, it could apply to the data set number or page number or whatever you choose to count. It has to be assign just once for a single URL and stay permanent. It’s not a session ID or something like that. Also take note that I added the number at the end. This is to prevent Google from assigning too much authority to the number as directory “name”.

Make sure that an URL like this can always get identified just by the number. So ford.com/1234 should still lead to the same page at ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234
This also works with WordPress blogs. Having numbers in the URL allows you to change the keywords in it or mistype it without breaking it.

We’re done. Now we can optimize a littel if we like to.

Step 5: Optimize URLs
This step is already optional. Some of you might argue that an URL like the above ford.com/de/autos/ford-focus/1234 still has some issues. For instance it mentions ford twice which is a little too much if you ask me. It looks like SEO out of 1999.

So you could cut the second “ford” in “ford-focus”. This results in:

ford.com/de/autos/focus/1234

Also if you change cars to autos earlier on you don’t need the “de”. You could use

ford.com/autos/focus/1234

instead as “autos” applies to the German part of the site only. The English site says ford.com/cars/focus/1234

Now we’re really done. At this point we’ll probably face the special characters issues with so called umlauts (äöü) for instance but that’s another post. So you see the basic user and search friendly URL design for multi-language websites is no voodoo at all. 4 easy steps are enough.

Related posts:

1. Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
2. Digg-Like International Social News Communities
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

1. Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites
2. Digg-Like International Social News Communities
3. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

CC: Your Move by Durotriges.

A buddy of mine, styletime, Twitter power user and one of the brightest new bloggers asked what else he should you look after when moving content to a new domain or blog beyond using an indispensable 301 redirect.

For those who are new to SEO:

When you don’t use a so called 301 permanent redirect to tell Google you moved it’s like changing your real life address and telling nobody where you’re at from now on.

Nobody will find you.

CC: Moving a Tree 1 by Satosphere.

There are several excellent effective howto’s, tutorials or manuals out there to tell Google and users your whereabouts. They all differ a little so I decided to compile a list of 7 effective “moving content to a new domain” Manuals. Most of them are from highly trustworthy SEO professionals, one is from Google itself:

1. How to Move to a New Domain With Minimal Ranking Loss and Downtime – Search Engine Guide Blog
2. How to Move Your Site to a New Domain According to Google | Ask Enquiro
3. SEOmoz | Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain
4. SEO issues with moving a domain | RagePank SEO
5. Bruceclay.com – How to Move Your Web Site without Chaos – SEO Blog
6. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Best practices when moving your site
7. How to: Move a Website…Should You Fear 301 Redirects Hurting Your Rankings? : SEO Book.com

CC: Moving, Always Moving by code poet.

On a side note: There is an old saying for programmers:
Never touch a running system. This means: When it works don’t change it. Likewise: When you rank high in Google, don’t move. New domains are bad for SEO.

Only move your website or content if you have no other option.

Also don’t mix moving your content to a new domain up with changing hosting. Changing your server has been explained by Matt Cutts of Google himself.

Related posts:

1. Authority and Trustrank
2. How I Outranked Matt Cutts for the Term SEO in 7 Easy Steps
3. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design

1. Authority and Trustrank
2. How I Outranked Matt Cutts for the Term SEO in 7 Easy Steps
3. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design