First off, let me explain what canonicalization is. According to Matt Cutts:


"Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages."

What are these "several choices"? Sometimes Google has more than one version of one and the same page indexed:

www.example.com

example.com

www.example.com/

example.com/

www.example.com/index.html

www.example.com/?icf=blahblahblah

etc.

Google treats them as separate URLs, but intelligently assumes that they lead to one and the same webpage. In which case it normally picks and returns just one URL out of the group in the search results. Read more »

Search engines evolve fast. In fact, they evolve incredibly fast. Every now and then rankings algorithms change, and good old search engine optimization practices stop working. However, some folks manage to lag behind. As a rule, these are SEO newbies who stumble upon outdated SEO advice and cannot tell it's outdated, or amateur SEOs who know very little SEO and are going half-blind with their optimization practices.

Are you sure your SEO is not stone-age? Hurry up and check this list of antique and, for the most part, useless SEO techniques that some people still practice nowadays.

1. Using meta keywords

This one deserves the first place. There are still a lot of SEO "experts" who think high of meta data and meta keywords in particular. So, here is the deal - meta keywords don't help your site rank higher AT ALL! Neither do meta descriptions. And, even though catchy meta descriptions do make your site stand out among other websites in the search results, they do not do anything for your SEO. The only piece of meta data that should be paid attention to is title tags, that's it. Read more »

The Web is abuzz with Google+ discussions these days. We definitely have a lot to say to the point and would like to give our analysis on the matter.

When Google introduced +1 for webpages, many people thought it was similar to the Facebook "Like". Now Google is launching its own social network that might become the new Facebook. This would change the balance of power in the social media realm forever. The platform is still in the trial phase, and is accessible solely on invitation. And, although it's been only about a month since the project began, Google+ already hit 10 million users - which is, according to Larry Page, the current CEO of Google, a "great achievement for the team". Read more »

Keywords can be short-tail or long-tail. Short-tail keywords are shorter phrases that have generic meaning, for example, "men's shoes". They are also sometimes referred to as head words. While long-tail keyword phrases are longer, more specific search terms that better describe a particular thing or concept, for instance, "cheap gucci men's shoes". There is no distinct point at which a short-tail keyword phrase becomes long-tail - it's all relative. So, one and the same search term can be said to be long- or short-tail, depending on what other term you compare it with.

SEO newbies are often unfamiliar with the concept of long-tail keywords and do not realize the immense potential these keywords hold. Once they find out how long-tail terms can virtually transform one's online business, they are a bit shocked they haven't discovered this earlier .

Actually, there is nothing complicated about the art of using long-tails to your advantage. It's just that one should have a good understanding of how they benefit SEO. There are many good reasons to tap into long-tail keywords' hidden capabilities, these being... Read more »

A lot of people leave blog comments for fun. But for us, Web marketers and SEOs, it is also a way to reach out to other community members and promote our brands. Do we always succeed? Here are some tips on how to write blog (or forum) comments that become a big assert to your marketing campaign.

But before sharing these useful tips, I would like to announce the Golden Rule #1 of power commenting, which is… Read more »

For quite a long time, Google has been accused of turning a blind eye to the big players who violated their guidelines. In 2006, Google made the first step to prove these rumors false - BMW got penalized for implementing shady SEO techniques that were against Google's rules. After that, Google performed a number of other public executions of some really big companies, year 2011 being especially "fruitful" in terms of celeb penalties.

This proves that even big shots may sometimes go wrong with their SEO. So, let's consider top 5 most scandalous crackdowns by Google and see what lessons they teach.

1. BMW - Year 2006

In 2006, Google found out that BMW were using doorway pages stuffed with keywords to funnel down users to their German website bmw.de. This was blatant and outright Black-Hat SEO, therefore BMW got the most severe punishment possible - they got completely removed from Google index.

On the Matt Cutts personal blog, you can see one of the doorway pages BMW used: Read more »

If you are the only person in your company taking care of SEO, sooner or later the day will come when you have to demostrate the results of your day's work to your boss or supervisor. And this is not always easy, since often SEO metrics are all Greek to the receiving end. You can go on for hours about the new high-PR backlinks you got for the website or those new profitable keywords you've just discovered. The truth is that the only thing your boss wants to know is how SEO helps their business. And, unless you manage to translate your SEO analytics into the language of business, your work will always be underappreciated or, on the contrary, your employer will expect too much from you.

Let us consider some widespread SEO myths and how they sometimes create misunderstanding between you and your boss.

Myth 1. If the website is not going up in SERPs, there is no progress

A very popular SEO metric that’s quite easy to explain is website rankings. Pretty much everybody understands that the higher the rankings, the more visitors a website gets. But what if your website has been # 1-3 on Google for months? Does it mean that nothing has been happening? Well, quite on the contrary. It is exactly thanks to the SEO's hard work that the website is still at the top of Google (or whatever search engine that may be). Read more »

Content theft aka content “scraping” is nothing new to the Internet folks. About every website owner has at least once detected an illegally published copy of his own content somewhere in the vastness of the World Wide Web. Besides, copy cats have become smarter and more technologically advanced nowadays, hijacking whole websites, scraping RSS feeds, and more. So, how does one discourage the lucky duckies out there and protect their content from theft? Here are some basic steps.

1. Warn them

Well, if someone really wants to scrape your content, they probably will anyway. Yet, a polite warning on your website might deter scraper newbies or those unaware of copyright nuances. For instance, copyscape.com and dmca.com offer free copyright banners that you can put up on your website. They are also available in different shapes and sizes.

In order to protect your images from unauthorized use, watermarks are normally used. On the Web, there are lots of different watermark creation tools, for example visualwatermark.com , watermark.ws or picturewatermark.com. They allow you to create watermarks of different degrees of transparency, color, etc. Read more »

My friend's name is Amanda Cohen, which is quite a common name. One day she decided to look it up on Google and, to her utmost surprise, discovered she totally dominated the SERPS - the first page of search results consisted exclusively of her Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other accounts.

Very excited about the finding, she hurried to share it with her friends, including me. However, I told her it was only because Google must have personalized her search results. I said: "Google has become so smart nowadays it even knows what particular Amanda Cohen you are looking for".

Today Google, Bing and other search engines bias their search results to tailor them to a particular user. This means two searchers looking for one and the same term might see quite different listings.

To collect information about users, Google and Bing keep track of:

• previous queries (for instance, if you look for "hotels" and right after that search for "Nevada", Google might include results for "hotels Nevada")
• web history (queries made, search results clicked and websites visited),
• geographic position (they identify your IP address)
• browser language
• social media connections (Google recently introduced Google Social Search that incorporates search results from one’s friends and contacts on Google accounts, Twitter or Facebook. Bing, in its turn, has been integrated with Facebook for quite a while now). Read more »

According to a research by Morgan Stanley, the Internet is expected to get predominantly mobile by 2014. The mobile Web is developing faster than the traditional Internet, because there are more people in the world who own a mobile phone than those who have a desktop/laptop, especially in developing countries.

Besides, the widely spread belief that the mobile Internet is basically used by people on the go is far from being true. About 65% of mobile Web users go online at their homes or at work, and only 35% of them surf the Web while in transit. And, even though today most mobile users go online to send an email, read the news, visit a social network or make a payment, experts predict the growth of mobile search in particular, as mobile browsers evolve to provide a better user experience.

Have you ever visited your website from, say, an iPhone? It may look very different on a mobile gadget than it does on your desktop. Moreover, a mobile search engine may rank it higher or lower than a regular SE would, for one and the same keyword. Yet not many site owners nowadays take mobile SEO seriously. Well, they should, since the mobile Internet will most likely be the future of the World Wide Web.

So, there are two goals to achieve while optimizing your site for mobile devices:

• get top rankings in the mobile SERPS
• make your site's layout mobile-friendly Read more »