I recently shared my insights about Google rich snippets, Schema.org, and microdata at SMX Advanced on the panel session “From Microdata & Schema To Rich Snippets: Markup For The Advanced SEO”, along with Marcus Tober, founder of Searchmetrics, and Julia Gause, Director of SEM at Scripps Network. The session was all about structured data markup, […]

Bummer that I missed PubCon this week but I have just been traveling way too much lately. Speaking of traveling, I was in Indianapolis last week visiting the offices of Compendium Blogware. I got a demo of their hosted blog platform — including a look under the hood — and it’s pretty slick. There were […]

I just got off the panel on The Future of Search at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. There was a bit of discussion about social media and whether SEO will still be relevant if users are spending their online time inside of social networks like Facebook and YouTube. The consensus from the panel was that […]

I spoke on The Future of Search on Tuesday at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. It was a fun panel. Not only did I get to pontificate (which I love to do), but I also got to be really ‘out there’ — not my typical presentation style, which is typically pretty geeky and focused on […]

As a blogger I can’t tell you how many spammy link requests from “link builders” that I get on an ongoing basis. It’s just way too many. You certainly don’t want to hire the kind of link building firm that sends out such spam link requests using cheap third-world labor. It’s these same sorts of […]

I have to say, I am impressed with Wolfram Alpha. I think it’s a game changer. It provides a powerful new way of interacting with the large repositories of data available on the Web. For instance, instead of googling for “number of google employees” (incidentally, it isn’t until the 4th result down that you get […]

Using Google engineers’ terminology will help you look like a search industry insider. For example, talk about “signals” rather than SEO “factors”. Describe weak, undifferentiated content as “thin” (as in a “thin affiliate”). Work “canonicalization” into a sentence at least once every 5 minutes. Share your enthusiasm for “shingles” (yeah, NOT the disease). Speak in […]

I’m a big fan of the new canonical tag (er, element, to be more technically correct). It’s a powerful tool for dealing with duplicate content. But it’s not exactly reliable yet. Google wants us use it as if it were. Unquestionably, it’s a signal. But it can be ignored, even when it should clearly by […]

I mentioned towards the end of my Search Engine Land article about redirects how you can use the hash or pound symbol (#) in a URL to append tracking information. Why do this? Because it would prevent duplicate content (ie. the same page at multiple URLs that look unique to the engines), and it would […]