Group items tagged

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include: * An Index of the World Wide Web - 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape * Linkscape - a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value. * A Fresh Design - that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience * New Features for PRO Membership - including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more. Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion: Check out the Linkscape Comic SEOmoz's Index of the Web For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics: * Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site. * 1.83%

The funny thing about duplicate content is that you don't really have to have it for it to appear as if you do have it. But whether you have duplicate content on your site or not, to the search engines appearances are everything . The engines are pretty much just mindless bots that can't reason. They only see what is, or appears to be there and then do what the programmers have determined through the algorithm. How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development. For example, we know that when we link to site.com/page1.html in one place but then link to www.site.com/page1.html in another, that we are really linking to the same page. But to the search engines, the www. can make a difference. They'll often look at those two links as links to two separate pages. And then analyze each page as if it is a duplicate of the other. But there is something we can do with our internal linking to alleviate this kind of appearance of duplicate content. Link to the www. version only Tomorrow I'll provide information on how to set up your site so when someone types in yoursite.com they are automatically redirected to www.yoursite.com. It's a great permanent fix, but as a safety measure, I also recommend simply adjusting all your links internally to do the same. Example of not linking to www. version. In the image above you can see that the domain contains the www., but when you mouse over any of the navigation links, they point to pages without the www. Even if you have a permanent redirect in place, all the links on your site should point to the proper place. At the very least you're making the search engines and visitors NOT have to redirect. At best, should y

"Accuranker"

Oct 14, 2008 at 1:08pm Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Problems Continue With Google Local Business Listings What do the Google searches; Orlando Hotels, Miami Discount Car Rental & Dallas Discount Car Rental have in common? The obvious answer is that they are all local searches on popular phrases in major metro areas. A less obvious answer is that like the infamous Denver Florist search last December, they all return seemingly authoritative OneBox results on popular geo phrase searches in a major market, as in the example below: Orlando Hotels or the Marriott The searches demonstrate clear problems with Google's Universal Local OneBox algorithm. Certainly, "major city + service/product" searches should return a broad range of consumer choices and not an authoritative OneBox that limits the view to one highlighted provider of the service. Google returns the OneBox result because the ostensible business name in the result supposedly mirrors the search phrase and in Google's opinion provides strong relevance in relation to the user query. The problem with the above result is that the business shown on the map is the Marriott Orlando Downtown, not "travel.ian.com." The Marriott's business listing has apparently been hijacked. In fact, all of the listings returned on these searches have apparently been "hijacked" via Google's community edit feature and the business name of the listing has been modified from the original, Marriott Orlando Downtown, to match the search phrase. The URL's of the listings have also been modified to direct users to an affiliate link on an appropriate site. How? Through the use of Google's community edit feature for local business listings. Google's community edit feature has become the playground of black hat affiliate marketers and is sorely in need of more security. Of interest in this regards is that many of these listings are for multinational corporations. These are not small independent business that are t

"niche ranking factors"

"Searchmetrics"