Hello Everyone and welcome to another SEO Roundup.
It’s an interesting SEO week this time around and we’re bringing you news on the new Canonical URL Tag, a post on content and justification for SEO, and my top 10 recommended Twitter profiles for SEO.
Right well I was originally going to post this mid-week but I thought you guys should have the weekend to find out about it yourself and do a bit of research first. One of the biggest SEO announcements for a long time came out last week when the big three search engines decided they would all support a new tag.
The new tag is the canonical URL tag and is primarily used to help search engine identify duplicate content.
If you have read through the MoreNiche affiliate tutorials you will be aware of URLs duplicating content to be a problem and so far there have been several fixes but none quite as specific or effective as this new measure.
Implementing it is easy, just place the following code in the head section of your site.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/primary-page.php">
See, nothing to it. The href attribute should just point to the primary page with the content on, i.e. if you have a product review inside example.com/diet-pills/ and example.com/archives/2008/1872 you would point the archive page to the more SEO friendly category 1.
Still a bit fuzzy? Try reading this nicely illustrated post from SEOMoz or the officially announcements form Google, Yahoo and MSN.
All good reads (if not a little repetitive) but I have to echo many others online this week when I say thanks to the massive three search engines for actually sorting this out, we have needed it for a long time.
How does all this help you though I hear you ask? Well it means that you can have small content tweaks inside reviews and aim them at different people without risking duplicate content penalties. For example say we have the same diet treatment review from the previous example, maybe this review is written with women in mind and will convert adult female customers, now you can tweak it slightly to target men, an American audience or even people being referred from a certain site, duplicate it as many times as you want because now there is just no risk.
Oh worried about how this affects Wordpress or one of your other CMS? Don’t plug-ins are already rolling out, especially from Joost de Valk, he has already done a Wordpress, Magento and Drupal one.
We don’t know 100% for sure what the long term effects are going to be of this yet, my advice use it but don’t abuse it, his could be an important tool for SEO and affiliate marketing and we don’t want to get it taken back off us.
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This next post from Aaron Wall over at SEOBook is also very interesting; it looks at the value of content compared to SEO instead of just assuming they are 1 and the same. It has some interesting ideas in it but is more of a discussion article than tips on how to optimise your site.
I think it’s a valuable read for 2 reasons; firstly there is a nice updated ranking distribution pie chart and secondly there is the main idea of the article which is “hoarding 100,000 articles does not get you rankings, no matter how good the quality”.
In a way I think the post is also still coming back at the (already too many people taking his link bait so I’m not going to) John Dvorak debate, that SEO has a value in every field because it is simple an important part of modern marketing and all businesses need marketing to survive.
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Finally my top ten recommend people to follow on Twitter, follow these guys and you’ll get plenty of good SEO tips (and obviously some not so SEO related stuff).
These aren’t in any order by the way just all there as one.
Obviously the top dog at SEOMoz but Rand has great tips on a regular basis as well as useful news links, there is an official SEOMoz 1 too.
Offers an amazing new take on SEO and runs the super interesting blog www.science forseo.com, 1 to see if you care about the future of the industry, which you should.
Sugar Rae is a pretty famous SEO and her Twitter feed is very active. Lots of great info inside here though so defiantely follow her and/or a company.
Aaron Wall of SEOBook fame is a great one to follow too if you want to stay on top of the SEM news, he posts quite a lot and also links to lots of great resources.
Obviously Cutts is a great person to follow on Twitter, partly because he gets lots of information first and partly because he is quite active, especially at communicating with some of the large brand SEO’s out there like Aarron, Danny and Rae. You can pick up on some really interesting conversations if you can see both sides.
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan
Another massive player in the SEO field Danny posts a lot as well but a good portion fo these focus on search news, tools and reviews. He’s a great person to follow for the same reason that Matt Cutts is in respect you get a lot of interesting conversations between him and other SEO’s that you can take knowledge away from.
One of the biggest players in reliable SEO programming that I know of, keep on top of his updates and your Wordpress blog is always going to kick ass.
Another large time SEO and a generally positive Twitter user, Jim is great to follow because he often has interesting opinions on the SEO world.
Garry covers more than SEO but all of his advice will be fantastic for improving your site as a whole and we all know that for the best in the long run.
http://twitter.com/craiglparker
ME, because I also constantly link to the latest SEO news and shaft updates I read! I also post a small on other topics and do lots of Twitter chatting.
OK that’s all we got time for this week, 1 last thing though, if you use feedburner for anything you may want to look up migrating your feeds, Google have moved some servers and you likely need to do something about it, log into your feedburner account to find out more!
