SEO Updates, News, Search Engine Optimization Best Practise Tips - SEO Daily Dose

Started Guest Blogging

2009-01-15T00:44:00.000-08:00

Iwould like to thank everyone visited my blog, given me a feedback help me improve my work. With out all your guidance and support it is impossibe for me to continue blogging in my tight work schedule. Recently I have started posting guest blog posts in ThatsSEO. I am afraid its very difficult to get time to post here as well. Please make sure to check ThatsSEO for my column as well as for the blog owner, Mr. Raghavan who is already doing a great job over there. Once again thank you all guys.

Moving Your Website to New Server - Checklist

2009-01-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

When you have decided to change your server / IP address of your website for some reason, you need to follow some instructions which will help you to keep the website clean and easy to crawl in the eye of search engines. This will further help you hold up the rankings for the targeted keywords in all major search engines.

1. Make sure all your files tested and kept ready on the new server for the launch. This will help you eliminate the chance of getting your site into server down time.

2. Do not change any URLs.

3. Make sure your files does not have capitalization issues. Since some servers are case sensitive and these servers will make issues when you have capitalization issues with the files.
4. If necessary apply 301 permanent redirection.
5. Check with free online link checker and make sure you don't have any broken links.
6. Keep your old files accessible on the old server for a period of time after the switchover. This will allow websites and search engines to update their caches.
7. Make repeated test. After site launch, run a "site:www.mysite.com" search on Google and click on the links to be sure that everything is behaving just the way you and your potential customers expect.

URL redirect and rewrite complete guide

2008-12-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

URL redirection is been a real night mare for many webmasters. While many webmasters would like to solve canonical issue in their website by URL redirecting and without knowing the exact phenomena they are the worst hit by this URL redirection cloud.
People may argue that Google had come out with an option in webmaster tool to suggest which version to be taken care, either www version or non www version. But I would say Google is not the only search engine in the world, there are many notable SEs including yahoo and Live. And of course canonical issue is not the only issue to be solved. When you are trying to move a page to another page and one domain to another domain you need to know all these kinda stuffs in depth.

I have tried my level best to produce a comprehensive guide for URL redirection and implementing them via URL rewriting. Why you need URL Redirection,
You can use it in several situations, including:
• to redirect an old website to a new address
• to setup several domains pointing to one website
• to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)
• to harmonize a URL structure change
Here comes the URL redirection types and its explanation.

301 Redirection:
URL redirection is a permanent redirection method. When you try to redirect you content permanently, please go with that. This is actually a function of web server that redirects a visitor to a new page from the old page and response a server code that the page has permanently moved. This is the most search engine friendly way of doing URL redirection. URL redirected using this method will get all the credibility and link juice from the older domain / old page most probably.

302 Redirection:
This is a temporary URL redirection method. When URL redirected using this method, web server that redirects visitors to the new page from the old page to the new page and returns a server code as the page has been temporarily moved. And there is a high chance of getting your search engine ranking getting lapsed in this method. So go for this method only when required.

Meta Redirect:
This is a clide side function using meta refresh tag. In earlier days search engines believed this method as spam technique as many spammers used this techniques to redirect the keyword rich domain / page to a new domain / page Though search engines have advanced in their algorithum its better you keep in mind all search engines and avoid this type (Meta Refresh) of URL redirection.

Want to read this from the mouth of Big boss Big G? They have given the article in a romantic way here.

URL Redirection Implementation using URL rewriting:
There are two methods to implement this URL redirection. We can do this either by server side URL redirection method or client side URL redirection methods.

Client Side redirection can be done using the following methods.
Meta Refresh using Meta Refresh tag
JavaScript Redirection

Server side redirection can be done using the following methods,
301 Redirection in PHP
301 Redirection in ASP(VB Script)
301 Redirection in ASP (JScript)
301 Redirection in ASP.Net (#C)
301 Redirection in Cold Fusion
301 Redirection in JSP / JAVA
301 Redirection in CGI / PERL

You can find the above mentioned URL redirection how to implement guide here.

Canonical issue is the most common issue one can find in the website. we can solve this using htacess file. Open a notepad copy paste the below mentioned code save the file as ".htacess". (Please note that there is no file extension). And upload this in root directory, Its almost done. Before making this done, make sure you change to your domain name from domain.com. This is the sample file that works perfectly with apache servers.

If you want to redirect from the non www to the www:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you choose to instead redirect the www to the non www:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Share your thoughts in comments!

Micro Blogging Advantages and Disadvantages

2008-12-03T08:48:00.000-08:00

Micro blogging is sharing frequent and brief information in web through specified platform. Generally micro blogging services allow its users to send and read other users’ updates through text-based posts. But now this has been changed and it can be any sort of input like text, video, audio etc… Text messages are uploaded to a microblogging service such as Twitter, Jaiku and others, then distributed to group members. All parties subscribed in the targeted group are instantly notified of the microblog, enabling groups to keep tabs on one another’s activities in real time.
Micro blogging refers to the posting of very short updates about oneself. It is in contrast to long-form blogging, where there are usually at least a few hundred words. Microblog posts usually involve a few hundred characters or less. Instead of posting a message on their regular blog, people who microblog use Web services designed to make microblogging very easy.

So What for Micro Blogging?
As like other internet tools micro blogging can also be used for various purposes. I listed few below,

Stay in touch with kith n kin.

Stay linked for fun

Have useful discussion on selected topic

Clear you doubts from experts

Business people can use this for the following

Sell / market products

To get user / customer feedback

As a live support tool

To make brand awarness

The best example would be http://twitter.com/woot

Twitter is the most popular micro blogging platform. But that’s not the only one. I have compiled few of my favouries here.

But sadly pownce is being shutting down. Pownce blog announced that officially and pownce team is joining the team at SixApart. And they assured that they would be back in action in 2009 with great features. I hope this happens since I like pownce personally a lot.

Advantages of Micro Blogging:

Updates you make in micro blogging sites can be visible to community members to all users depending upon the platform you use.

Unlike with messengers were we type messages to a person (or rarely a group), with micro blogging many more people interact at the same time as they can all see your messages.

Instead of spending hours together to narrate a blog post, micro blogging platform can be used effectively to share things you wish to.

Disadvantages of Micro Blogging:
The biggest disadvantages of micro blogging would be the limitation in characters.

In twitter the character is limited to just 140.

Micro blogging is also prone to getting off topic quite easily.

Which micro blogging site you prefer? Share it in comments!

Why Google pagerank is not important

2008-11-27T08:25:00.000-08:00

People in SEO industry generally obese with Tool bar pagerank. But I would say, its not the one to look for. I wanted to list few points regarding this.
1. Toolbar pagerank is not the real pagerank which Google uses to calculate anything about our website.
i) Myth - Website with high pagerank ranks high in SERPs.
ii) Myth - The quality of the webpage cannot be determined by just seeing the pagerank(PR)
2. Lower PR sites outrank higher PR webpages easily in SERPs.
3. Try build links from your related sites and sites which will be interested to your visitors, your PR will automatically move up.
4. Reaching the goal should be the final verdict rather than finishing up just making up a higher PR website.
5. Getting relatively higher traffic for your website for the related search query would be the best verdict.
When we see the toolbar goes high in green it always makes smile in our face. That even happens to me! But the bottom line I wanted to share is I don't obese with Google PageRank. It’s just a single metric used by one search engine!

Google SearchWiki

2008-11-22T05:14:00.000-08:00

Google recently announced that they rolled out searchwiki feature. I would like to see that feature and play with that by myself rather than juz seeing a screen shot from other people. I was googling for something today evening, and suddenly I find that searchwiki feature visible in my SERP pages. Great na!! :-)

With the seachwiki feature I could able to promote the listings to the top as well as to make it to down. And there is a option to make a comment under each listing. The comment can also be edited at any level. All these changes can only be applicable in your customized search results and the changes you make in SERP for any search query will never affect universal SERP listing.

Bloggers guidelines from Google - Nothing New!

2008-11-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

Google has recently come up with SEO starter guide which created a great round of applause from fellow webmasters and people in the SEO field. Following this Google has today released best practice guide for bloggers. As like earlier version, its not a PDF version and its been given inside Google webmaster help section.

Google has categorized them under three.

1. Create great content

2. Make sure users and crawlers can find your content

3. Blog and webmaster tools.

Upon reading the guidelines / best practices I don't find anything very new coming out from the mouth of Big G. The only thing I find stand out from other points are Google is informing bloggers to be conscious with affiliate programs. Other things mentioned by them are pretty common and every blogger is following now a days. Say for example, good content, sitemap, webmaster tool, participating with fellow bloggers, rss etc...

What do you guys think about the guidelines from Google?

What is Geolocation - How to use Geolocation

2008-11-20T10:09:00.000-08:00

Geolocation is defined by serving / targeting different content to users based on their locations. We can determine users location based on their information set on cookies, IP, the information they provide during their login session. The only notable point here is Google again presses the RED button and saying treat the Google bot and users as same. i.e, serve the same content to both users and Google bot.
Why Geolocation: Say you have an ecommerce site sells products on sports good. You target world wide customers. Using geolocation, you can serve the web content in their language which would help you as well as customers.

Ways to set GeoLocation:
1. Country specific Domains (CTLDs) – Having a country specific domain would help much better for geo location when you have a single unique target audience. Say for example you have a business in France and you need your business to reach people only in France, a wise decision would be going for a CTL Domain. (http://www.domain.fr/)

2. Using Google Webmaster Tool: When you have a .com domain for your business and you are targeting audience in France. In this case you can set the geo location as France using Google Webmaster Tool. Dashboard >> Tools >> Set Geo Location.

3. Also keep in mind when you have a country specific domain (http://www.domain.fr/). The above said option would be disabled automatically in Google webmaster tools. On the other hand we can say Google would automatically set the geo location to France.

4. Using Meta Language Tag: Using Meta Language Tag would be another option to inform search engines about the language of your website. This helps search engines to display your sites in appropriate countries.

Ø meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr". This informs search engine bots that youe website is having only French content.

Ø meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr, en" This informs search engines bots that your website has both French and English content to be displayed.

5. Using IP for geo location: Serving different content based on their IPs since often IP address helps us to determine the where about of the user. This also knows as IP Delivery. As name differed it doesn’t have different definition. It’s just a specific type of geolocation. The best example would be when you open http://www.google.com/ it automatically redirects to different location based on your IP (County). Say for example, http://www.google.com.au/ or http://www.google.co.in/. Yahoo also into IP Delivery now.

Any more ideas or suggestions, please share it in comment section.

Track Flash with Google Analytics

2008-11-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

Online marketing campaign success can only be measured with metrics like how many clicks, sign ups that particular page received. Flash embedded ads and widget attracts more users and advertisers are also more interested towards such online marketing ads. But till date it was very difficult to measure the success rate with Flash Embed ads. Now again none other than the Big G (Google) in collaboration with Adobe introduced a new way to measure these metrics. "Tracking Flash with Google Analytics".

This gives both advertisers and publishers the below mentioned advantages.

Track ROI across campaigns with fine-tuned statistics
Easily monitor clicks, actions, and length of user participation
Know exactly where to find the most passionate users and target efforts with advanced demographics.

This feature is just a translation of present Google Analytics code in ActionScript 3 programming language. Google analytics official blog post explains about this in detail. I am sure this will be pretty cool news for people involved in Flash / Flex technologies and development.

New Keyword Tool from Wordtracker

2008-11-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

Worktracker recently announced a new keyword tool. They claim it as a keyword question tool and I must admit that it works as it is been named! Check out this new wordtracker keyword tool. I feel this will help bloggers and SEO copywritters more than anyone else. You can also use this tool to find some long tail keywords. Normally logtail keywords easily ranks in SERP pages and do convert quickly compared with other ususal double phrase / single phrase keywords. I like this tool. What about you? Share it in comments!

Online Reputation Management and Brand Awarness

2008-11-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

A strong brand helps a company communicate with its customers / clients. So many companies don’t bother spending millions of dollars in building online brand awareness for their company name / brand name. This helps them boost up their online sales in a periodic manner. But for businesses, all this great awareness can come crashing down with one online "reputation disaster."
Even after many years of wonderful business activities among the customers, one single negative event can totally spoil the company’s image in the public eye for a very long time. If a company get a negative product review or service review in blog, that may lead to a very serious problem. Today, millions of people engage in social activities for example, in facebook alone 50 million customers are registered and half of the registered user login everyday. So when a negative comment posted in social networking sites like facebook that may totally spoil the brand image you have build for years together. As media continues to scrap with the outburst of social networks, aggregators like Google will become increasingly important in helping users decide whether or not to do business with you.

So what should one do to tackle this? I recommend three important steps that should be incorporated in your routine business structure.

1. Monitor: Companies should authorize an employee or hire an external service to scrutinize, and drive positive discussions.
2. Respond: Your technical staff should be ready to respond to any product or support issue raised from any online communities. And he / she should be able to develop a positive action plan if at all negative sentiments develop.
3. Optimize: Optimize your reputation online. You should be ready to invest in the online aspects of your reputation just as you invest in other dimensions of your brand.

Don’t ever make an assumption that having a strong brand leads to a strong reputation. Strengthening your brand also involves a dedication to an effective reputation management strategy. Ignoring this critical factor is a risk that companies can’t afford to take today.

Ecommerce Conversion Tips

2008-10-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

This is a festival season and all online shopping sites would love to increase their sales in this particular period. Christmas, Black Friday and Thanks giving day are the most prominent festival seasons in online sales.

When you try and finish up with some cool features and important features in the website, you can surely convert your visitors into customers. Offers and discounts are the coolest thing which attracts users at the first sight. But when your website has default mistakes itself, users will loose their trust in you / your website and will not go on to purchase from you.

1. Provide security badges like verisign, BBOnline etc in the store front / home page which convey users that their personal information will be kept confidential and the transaction will be quite clear without any hassle.

2. Provide Toll free number and make sure you display in the first fold of the website. Also don't forget to mention the time when you would be available to answer the call.

3. Offer live chat support. Live chat software offered both in terms of free and paid. When you choose to use paid service you can receive some enhance support.

4. Present testimonials and feedbacks from customers in the corresponding product pages. But don't use fake testimonials and if you have decided to use photos use genuine photos don't go for stock photography.

5. Provide the product link after the user added the corresponding product in the shopping card. This helps them to verify whether they have selected the correct product.

6. Place the ADD CART button / link in the prominent place with bright color and bold font.

7. Differentiate the links Add to Cart and Add to Wishlist.

8. Contact Us page is the important one. Provide the full address including phone numbers.

9. If possible list your company's top management photos in the website.

10. Above all make the website simple and make the navigation easy and pages fast loading.

Hope this helps you finding some cool tips for this festival season. If you have any extra tips share it in comment section.

XML Sitemap A-Z Guidance

2008-10-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

What is a XML Sitemap?

XML Sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs of your blog / website with some extra details which helps search engines to know better about your website / blog. Big G first introduced this in 2005 and soon after some time, Yahoo and Microsoft joined hands with Google to support the common sitemap protocol.

XML Sitemap Advantages

1. XML sitemap makes your website more search friendly by informing the search engine crawlers / bots about all the pages.
2. Newly added pages can be informed to search engines with ease with the help of XML sitemaps.
3. Help large sites like E-commerce websites to get index sooner
4. Help new websites to get indexed sooner in search engines.

The XML Sitemap Format

The Sitemap protocol uses XML tags and must be UTF-8 encoded. The following is an example XML sitemap with all optional tags and one URL.
http://www.example.com/2005-01-01monthly0.8
*- , and are the optional tags here.

How to Create Sitemaps

One need not know the technical jargon to create this XML sitemaps. There are number of online free tools available in the internet to make this done in a matter of few mins. My favorite Google sitemap generator is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Also here you can find a great list of third party sitemap generator tools from Google itself.

How to Submit Sitemap to Search Engine

1. For Google, Login to Google Webmaster Tool verify your website and add sitemap.
2. For Yahoo, through Yahoo site Explorer sitemap submission can be done.
3. For MSN, you can do this with a ping service. http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.YourWebSite.com/sitemap.xml Replace www.YourWebSite.com with your URL
4. Robots.txt file also offers a way to inform search engines about your XML Sitemap.
5. HTTP request also helps you to do XML Sitemap Submission.
To do this, add use the following: /ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
Example:/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Types of Sitemap

Google has recently implemented specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content. These Sitemaps are specific to Google and are not supported by other search engines.
1. Video Sitemaps – enables you to publish and syndicate online content and its relevant meta data to Google in order to make is searchable in the Google Video index.

2. Mobile Sitemaps – enables you to create a mobile Sitemap for mobile friendly URLs
3. News Sitemaps - allows publishers to give Google information that can appear in Google News search results
4. Code Search Sitemaps – helps users find function definitions and sample code
5. Geo Sitemaps – enables you to publish geospatial content (geo content) to Google so it can be searchable in Google Earth and on Google Maps.

Google Made Changes in Webmaster Guidelines

2008-10-05T02:50:00.000-07:00

Google webmaster guidelines are more like "SEO BIBLE" among industry people, at least to the SEO beginners. Now Google has significantly made a change in their webmaster guidelines.

Previous Guidelines Includes:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google
uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to
increase our coverage of your web pages.
* Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages
are aware that your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open
Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific
expert sites.

Present Guidelines Includes:

* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your
Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our
coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are
aware your site is online.

So what could be the reason for google to make this step?
>>Are they not identifying a DMOZ link as a authoritative link?
>>Are they depromoting Yahoo Directory?
>>Do link popularity still hold value in search engine? (at least in Google)

And here in Google groups Googler "JohnMu" answering on this controversial topic and also asking for suggestions from fellow people what to add / remove from Google webmaster guidelines.

Google Page Rank (PR) Update

2008-09-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

I could see Google toolbar showing green for many of the site. And I could see in many places webmasters reporting about their sites doing good or bad with google tool bar. As I am concerned, many of the sites that I am working at present have brought up BIG SMILE in my face as they have raised to PR4, PR 5 from PR 2. Another one claimed from PR 0 to PR 4. But my blog doesn't get any at this time. My TL would often say if you want to know better on PR ask a mathematician rather than a SEO person! Sounds cool hah! Please do share your bonus from Google in the comment section!

Google Moderator Announced

2008-09-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

Google announced “Google Moderator” yesterday. It’s a free service looks quite interesting for me. Its an internal application Google was using and now its made public. Google allows its engineers to spend 20% of their work week on projects that interest them. The latest "20% project" got released with the title “Google Moderator”. It allows asking question on various selected topic (US Election, Google) to selected people (World Leaders, Google Engineers etc). People can vote for your question / flag as inappropriate. Looks interesting for me. But I have a small (Of course a BIG doubt) doubt here, if some one answered for the post say for example and Google engineer, will it be visible down the question? Please let me know if anyone knows this. By this time, I am sure people will be storming into the application with the questions. (Especially to Google engineers asking why my site is banned, why Google don’t rank my website blah blah…)

General Blogging Checklist

2008-09-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

You must have come across checklist for almost all things you do in SEO. Say for example On Page, Off Page, Online Marketing all would have a solid checklist. But I often think that there is very less importance given for blogging checklist. I wanted to draft everything here under this one post. Please do read and share if you would have any other thing to be included. Keep in mind the following points before pressing "PUBLISH POST" button.

Select your topic wise: Selecting your topic for your post would be a more crucial one. Don’t just think about something and finish it off. Take up a topic in which you are well versed or what users want from you.

Write in your own style: Write your post in your own style. If you are comfortable presenting the post in more graphical way (charts, graphs etc…), you can go with that as that gives users more colorful feel and look. If you are very good at language, you can present your post with bulleted points with some brief description.

Give importance to your users: Always treat your users wisely. Allow them to participate in comments section and when honor them with a backlink. (Do follow links in comments.) Do reply for the comments you get. This will help you to gain returning visitors for your blog.

Provide a way to contact you: People may want to contact you and ask something; maybe just a sincere "thank you" for something you wrote. It's just nice to have that available.

Present in a friendly manner: Present your blog post in a friendly manner. This can be achieved through splitting up the content into small paragraphs, adding cool images etc.

And finally if you have provided any external links, double check them that they work properly. The above list includes only general blogging checklist. I would try to publish a blogging checklist in terms of SEO sooner.

SEO Do's and Don'ts - SEO Best Practise

2008-09-17T10:21:00.000-07:00

SEO is the much debated topic on the net and lets discuss the important do's and don'ts in SEO here.

Do’s:

1. Provide unique, fresh and compelling content which makes both users and search engine appealing.
2. Keep an eye on usability / design.
3. Target more relevant and more specific keywords.
4. Provide unique title and descriptions which best match your webpage.
5. Don’t forget Image optimization. (Alt Tag, File Name, Content around the Image)
6. Make use of header tags.
7. Do provide descriptive title attributes for links.
8. For better natural link building, vary your anchor text.
9. Keep your keyword density strict.
10. Make and present the website for users rather than search engines.

Don’ts:

1. Don’t submit your website to search engines. One good external link would do the trick for you.
2. Don’t use all Flash sites. (Even though search engines started indexing flash files, all flash site would be a night mare for you to rank all targeted keywords)
3. Avoid using frames / ajax.
4. Don’t obsess on Page Rank.
5. Don’t target more general keywords like “Attorneys”, “Games”. It perhaps very difficult to rank.
6. Don't allow your website to get trap in canonical issue. (www and non www version URLs)
7. Don’t use unethical ways to increase your keyword density. (Hidden Text, Footer Links etc…)
8. Don’t use third party tools to query search engines. (Specially Google)
9. Don’t over use internal linking and don’t take it as granted.
10. Don’t delay your SEO Process. SEO implementation should be there from the day you would start scratching the line for your new website / updating your website.

Social Media Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages

2008-09-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an upfront trend in SEO, SEM industry. But what does it mean for SEO guys? What are the great advantages this new marketing method has? Social media can engage your audience, increase your online visibility, helps you create your brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad), so SMM does has its own SEO benefits. But it doesn’t convert.

I would say the following would be the greatest advantages from SMM.

Brand building

Relationship management

Product development

Reputation management

Customer interaction

Customer feedback

Customer support

Community building

The only disadvantage with SMM is some time your own marketing strategies would backfire you and build a bad reputation amoung your customers / visitors online. You can bury the bad reputation with the right customized reputatation management services. We would see about this (Reputation Management) in another post. I would conclude this saying, Social Media is a powerful medium and it’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer.

Google Digitizing Old Newspapers

2008-09-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Google announced they have started digitalizing the news papers in terms of “Newspaper Digitalization”. They have recently partnership with few notable news agencies such as American newspapers, ProQuest and Heritage and has begun digitizing printed newspapers, making them both searchable and browsable exactly as they appeared in print. This also includes photographs, advertisements.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=w0sNAAAAIBAJ&dq=pittsburgh&sjid=D20DAAAAIBAJ&pg=6256,2864141

This link would explain you the above said point in a better way. Google official blog quoted,

You’ll be able to explore this historical treasure trove by searching the Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. Not every search will trigger this new content, but you can start by trying queries like [Nixon space shuttle] or [Titanic located]. Stories we've scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators, and are marked "Google News Archive."

With the above news, sooner or later we can expect Google to produce this news archive result as a blended result with the universal search result.

Robots.txt Tips and Tricks

2008-09-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, here with providing you some indepth points to write a perfect robots.txt file. Having the perfect robots.txt file will help you have your site indexed properly in all search engines. Vice versa, if you don't format your robots.txt file properly, some or all files of your Web site might not get indexed by search engines. The below mentioned points would help you have a proper robots.txt file in your website.
1. Avoid using comments in robots.txt:

Though comments are allowed in robots file, this may tend to confuse some search engines. Better avoid them.

2. Avoid Using white space at the beginning:

Bad Practice:
User-agent: *

Disallow: /support

Best Practice:

User-agent: *Disallow: /support

3. Don't change the order of the commands.
Don’t change the order of the comments if you want your robots.txt file to work cent percent.
Bad Practise:

Disallow: /supportUser-agent: *

Best Practise:
User-agent: *Disallow: /support

4. Always use one directory per line:
Search engine spiders may not understand the format if you mention more than one directory in one single line.
Bad Practise:User-agent: *Disallow: /support /cgi-bin/ /images/

Best Practise:User-agent: *Disallow: /supportDisallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow: /images/

5. Use right case always:
If your directory is Images, then mention as Disallow: /Images/ not as Disallow: /images/

6. Practice to write precise files:
If you want all files under folder “support” don’t write as below,
User-agent: *Disallow: /support/orders.htmlDisallow: /support/technical.htmlDisallow: /support/helpdesk.htmlDisallow: /support/index.htmlInstead, you can replace this withUser-agent: *Disallow: /support

7. There is no "Allow" commandDon't use an "Allow" command in your robots.txt file. Only mention files and directories that you don't want to be indexed. All other files will be indexed automatically if they are linked on your site.

General Tips and tricks:

1. How to allow all search engine spiders to index all files
Use the following content for your robots.txt file if you want to allow all search engine spiders to index all files of your Web site:
User-agent: *Disallow:

2. How to disallow all spiders to index any file
If you don't want search engines to index any file of your Web site, use the following:
User-agent: *Disallow: /

3. Reference URLs:

I have listed some website URLs here for your reference, where you can find some detailed robots.txt files.
http://www.cnn.com/robots.txt
http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
http://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt
http://www.spiegel.com/robots.txt

Bottomline: Your Web site should have a proper robots.txt file if you want to have good rankings on search engines.

Importance of Robots.txt File

2008-08-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

Even some good ranking sites wont be having robots.txt file. Is it important to have robots.txt file. Or does it any way related to ranking? Here is a detailed analysis on why to have a robots.txt file on your website.

What’s the need of robots.txt file:

It's there for you to tell the spiders / crawlers shouldn’t crawl / spider. If you have pages you don't want to be indexed, use it to stop that happening. That saves bandwidth. Lack of a robots.txt file will mean that the spiders will try and index everything your website have. (Mean all the pages including admin folder etc). Similarly, if there are search engines or other automated processes that you don't want indexing your site (like the way back machine for example) then robots.txt is useful.

How to I create robots.txt file:

It’s a plain text file that need to be uploaded in the root directory of your website. The easiest way to create a robots.txt file is to use the robots.txt generator tool in Webmaster Tools. If you want to create the file yourself, you can use any text editor. It should be an ASCII-encoded text file, not an HTML file. The filename should be lowercase.

SyntaxThe simplest robots.txt file uses two rules:
User-agent: the robot the following rule applies to
Disallow: the pages you want to block

These two lines are considered a single entry in the file. You can include as many entries as you want. You can include multiple Disallow lines and multiple user-agents in one entry. If you would like any additional information, look for the following post Robots.txt tips and tricks.

Does SEO Certification Necessary

2008-08-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

What’s your opinion on SEO Certification? Does this really make sense? Do the companies that offer SEO Certifications really do it for making the SEO crowd more knowledgeable or just doing it for money sake? I have recently tried one SEO Certification, in which they offer some 20% deduction in exam fees for all those who attend a simple quiz like application. Even if we answer 5 questions out of 20 we get the same deduction in fee structure and for my surprise the same applies even if you complete the quiz with 20 out of 20. So what you guys think about this? If you have tried out any such SEO Certification, do let everyone know here and the pros and cons that particular program has.

Welcome Post

2008-08-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

Blogging!!! My long time dream. But I am too lazy to put up all that into a point and start doing that. Thanks to the rain that come into my way today, that lovely climate made me to sit up and start scratching the line. Hope you guys would have a happy stay here in my blog. Hope you all make this a lively place with the suggestions and feedback. Keep reading and Keep sharing.