Online SalesMatt Cutts, Google’s head of the webspam team, answered Which search feature would you add to Google? in the following Google Webmaster Central video.
In it he said he’d like to make the URLs cleaner, leaving just the search?q=whatever parts. He mentioned writing a Greasemonkey script, so I thought I’d write a little bookmarklet to help him out.
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Several months ago the canonical tag was announced and seen as a solution to the issue of duplicate content.
Now, you can simply add this 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.
Google Webmaster Central
I have a client and their shopping basket was being reported in Google 293,000 times. Each link to the basket had options, and within the cart there were remove links. All of these got crawled and added to the index.
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This morning Aaron Wall published Excuse Me, But Where Did Google’s Organic Search Results Go? in which he shows that the organic listings for the term San Francisco Dentists has all but disappeared below the fold.
Curious as to the equivalent UK results I tried London dentist and saw a similar pattern. When I clicked through to the map results though I saw something I’ve never noticed before:
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I recently co-wrote a series of articles Building Web Success with Marty Lamers, a writer and SEO with AdvanceMe, Inc, America’s leading Merchant Cash Advance provider,
The first couple of parts are already live:
The final part Conversion Rate Optimization will follow in the following week. (Link will be updated here when available).
Marty is a great copywriter and editor and it has been a real pleasure working with him on these articles.
In the near future Marty and I will do a back and forth SEO “Ping Pong” interview and particularly focus on copy writing as an integral part of the sales process.
Many sites are examples of the endemic difficulty that faces most internet entrepreneurs and small businesses. A lack of focus on making the site or business remarkable.
Even now, with the web being even-my-mum-makes-money-on-it popular for much of the last decade there is still so much opportunity. However with that popularity comes the feeling that like the land run the opportunity will soon pass. As such the web pioneer may forge ahead into new territories grabbing as much land as possible, but hasn’t yet fully developed the properties already picked out.
The truth is, ten years ago people thought it was too late to get involved, that circumstances had changed and all the good ideas had been done; the same was said five years ago, three years ago and in years to come people will look back to the time we are in now and regard it as a golden period full of promises and easy fortunes.
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Patrick McKenzie writes software that allows you to make bingo cards and often blogs about programming and business on his MicroISV on a Shoestring site.
He’s recently published The IE CSS Bug Which Cost Me A Month’s Salary and in it details a problem in which users in MS Internet Explorer 6 & 7 were not seeing the “Sign Up” button. Although they can still press enter to submit the form most users had a pretty hard time converting.
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Bill Slawski who blogs as SEO By the Sea is one of the very best SEO Brains. A frequent posting method of his takes search engine patents or whitepapers and analyses them for insights into the search engine’s algorithms.
His recent post How a Search Engine Might Distinguish Between Queries from Bots and from Humans is typical Bill. Insightful and very useful.
If you’re interested in learning more about how search engines work “under the hood”, then add Bill’s site to your feed reader and follow him on Twitter.
Alec Kinnear, creative director of Foliovision s.r.o. is a fellow member of the SEO Book community and has just posted two indepth articles reviewing the recent Distilled & SEOmoz Expert Training London Day.
In a widely anticipated move Twitter has introduced lists today to help manage the people you follow.
Twitter Lists
New! Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts. (BETA)
Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You’re part of a small group receiving this feature, so don’t tweet about it yet!
Sometimes I want to know when the Googlebot has visited a page. The following script will:
