Canonical Link Element

There is a Google Webmaster Central blog post about the presentation about canonical link elements made at SMX West and talked through in a video:

PageRank is Dead, Long Live Page Rank

Go to Google and enter "find Chuck Norris" then press I'm feeling lucky. It's a Google Bomb.

The number one result for "find Chuck Norris" beats out about 8,750,000 other pages, but only has about 136 sites linking to it. What's notable is that these sites that link to the number one result do not have particularly high PageRank. One linking site has PageRank 5, and there are a bunch of PageRank 1, 2 and 3s; most seem to have no PageRank at all.

This does suggest that many links from high PageRank sites are not needed to be a number one result on a fairly competitive keyword. Google returns results we [Google] believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page (from Google's support page about how they crawl, index, and serve the web).

PageRank is not the be all end all of high search rankings it may have once been. It is still one factor Google uses, even if only 0.5% of the factors used. However, Google has also publicly said that the PageRank publicly displayed by Google's systems is not current (usually 3 months old) and is not the private one their systems use to decide rankings.

Is PageRank dead? Or useless? No. PageRank is convenient. When discussing Google rankings with people who aren't focused on or don't have knowledge of search marketing, PageRank is a deceptively concise number that is often used to express success and value regardless of whether either actually exist. It suggests a page is good if the PageRank is high, and bad if it is low. But PageRank does not tell you how successful a site will be at ranking highly.

More important than ranking, PageRank has no relationship with whether a site will be successful; A page's purpose (selling things, engaging visitors, entertaining with Chuck Norris references, etc.) can be fulfilled with no PageRank at all. Also, a page with high PageRank can fail utterly to accomplish anything constructive for anyone (at least short term).

Success online, as in life, is about success itself, as one defines it (e.g., sales, sign-ups, informed visitors, improving the world, happiness). If your page is hugely successful and has high PageRank, wonderful; if it's hugely successful with low or no PageRank, that's wonderful too. PageRank is only one metric among many, and it's tempting to put more value on PageRank than actually exists.

Many times PageRank has been discussed with clients, or other "stake holders," with regards to a site or page's value, and while this easily graspable shorthand may make us feel good, it also can keep us from addressing real value. At the same time, given the secrecy of Google and other search engines' algorithms, many feel utterly in the dark about search rankings that can vastly effect success, income and job security. PageRank is the promise of seeing inside the black box of how search rankings are decided, a promise often broken.

In the absence of clear objectives and metrics, PageRank can be an appealing substitute, but in reality PageRank is only one of many, many elements that need considering. When PageRank is used as the only gauge of a page's value, success or health it leads to bad conclusions, just as using a child's height as the only gauge of the child's heath, success or value would lead to bad conclusions.

8 Reasons Your Web Site is Underperforming (That You Don't Already Know)

A web site's ranking and user experience are affected by many things you may not know because they're beyond the HTML on the web pages themselves. They can help or hurt your search engine ranking and your user's experience.

1. Domain name not registered for maximum length; Google and others take domains registered for many years more seriously


2. Server response time is slow and/or uptime is low


3. Server and/or name servers are in a "bad neighborhood"


4. Server hosts other sites too
   • looks like you are not as serious and are not stable enough to weather a spike in traffic (e.g., the Slashdot effect)
   • at risk of server going down, and taking your site with it, if another site on the server has an error or spike in traffic (slash-dotted/dugg)
5. no robots.txt file


6. no valid xml sitemaps


7. Dynamic looking URLs; they have a "?" in them


8. Character encoding mismatches
   • encoding declared in the HTTP headers doesn't match the encoding declared in the page's meta tag
   • Encoding on the actual page doesn't match either the encoding declared in the header and/or in the meta tag

There are also lots of things that affect your success that are on the web page; subscribe to learn more about those too.

Top 6 Online Writing Tips

Online writing is different than print writing. Make writing for the internet concise, clear and actionable. Readers prefer short articles that help them get something done; readers don't read the whole text online (only 20-28% of an online writing is actually read).

There are six key ways to write for the internet:

1. Scan-Ability Is Readability Online
2. Passive Voice May Help SEO And Readability
3. Titles, Subjects And Headings Need Inverted Pyramid Extreme
4. Vocabulary and Keywords Should Be Old Words Placed Carefully
5. Acronyms And Abbreviations Need Mark-Up
6. Numerals Are Better In Online Writing

Online Writing - Scan-Ability Is Readability Online

Users scan more than read online, and they scan in an F-shaped pattern. This is a heat map of where readers' eyes look while reading online (red areas are most viewed areas, yellow next most, blue least most viewed; click image to enlarge):

(from Jakob Nielsen's excellent article on Banner Blindness).

Readers scan the first sentences of paragraphs to decide whether to read the rest of the paragraph or not. The first sentence should describe the paragraph, giving readers clues as to whether the rest of the paragraph will interest them. The first two words of each paragraph should be the most information-carrying words.

Even deeply interested and engaged visitors often do not read all of an article's text as the first 30 seconds of this video show:

This is part 1 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Passive Voice May Help SEO And Readability

Readers often read only the first 2 words of a paragraph (Jakob Nielsen's October 22, 2007 Alertbox) so the first two words should carry the meaning of, or abbreviate, the entire paragraph without compromising the writing. The first two words of a paragraph or description must be specific, clear and meaningful to a reader or searcher.

Using the best voice in first sentences and descriptions impacts two things:

• how often people click on a given search engine result
• how much of a paragraph the reader reads

Descriptions may be placed in the description meta tag and sometimes accompany non-text items (like video or audio content). They are often used by Google and other search engines as the snippets beneath page titles on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Descriptions benefit from either active voice or passive voice depending on specifics. These are examples of less than ideal use of voice:

• The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to stimulate economic growth.
• Paparazzi attacked by Stary McFamous.

Those don't help users, or search engines, understand the entire sentence; the first two words are not particularly information-carrying words. The first sentence is aimed a people interested in interest rates, not those interested in the broader topic of the Federal Reserve. The second likely interests those who want to know about Stary McFamous more than paparazzi in general.

They are better rewritten like this:

• Interest rates lowered by the Federal Reserve could stimulate economic growth.
• Stary McFamous attacked paparazzi.

This is part 2 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Titles, Subjects And Headings Need Inverted Pyramid Extreme

Titles, headlines and subheadings all need the most meaningful and significant information first, toward the beginning. Many forms of content are often viewed out of context and in contexts outside the publisher's control:

• titles
• subject lines
• headlines

Microcontent must have an even more exaggerated inverted pyramid style than the larger content they designate; the first word or two should be the most important and meaning imbued words in titles, headlines and subjects.

There has also been some interesting discussion about the use of numbers in headlines.

This is part 3 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Vocabulary and Keywords Should Be Old Words Placed Carefully

Users search for terms they already know more than new, made up words or jargon; If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site (Jakob Nielsen August 28, 2006 Alertbox). The keywords you are targeting on a given page should be words often searched by the people you want to have find that page, as Google advises in their guidelines. They should also be pleased to find the page after searching for those words; they should find what they wanted to find.

Targeted Keywords should organically end up in the text since they will be relevant to the text. While some recommend exact percentages of words on a page should be targeted keywords, this can result in very awkward, or transparently keyword-stuffed copy (like this, this, this and this).

The best thing to do, is put the primary keyword somewhere in the first paragraph or first sentence, which should be easy since the keyword is related to the text. If putting the primary keyword in the very start of the text would be repeating a word in the title too soon, and would not be good writing, a secondary keyword can be used near the start of the text. It can also help to put a primary or secondary keyword in the last paragraph or sentence.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

-Winston Churchill

This is part 4 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Acronyms And Abbreviations Need Mark-Up

SEO and accessibility benefit when the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations are clearly spelled out. Instead of leaving search engines to guess which meaning of an acronym you intend, tell them. Using HTML to identify acronyms and abbreviations makes pages more accessible to non-visual browsers as well.

Google indexes acronyms more effectively when they are marked-up properly; Some say they use the acronym tag ...frequently and I have a page that responds to a keyword that only appears in the title attribute.

Even more vital is identifying acronyms and abbreviations when they have many different meanings. For instance "NASA" is both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Auto Sport Association, or "LA" in the following:

I have a friend from New Orleans, LA who now lives in LA.

Which is marked-up with this syntax:

I have a friend from New Orleans, <abbr title="Louisiana">LA</abbr> who now lives in <acronym title="Los Angeles">LA</acronym>.

In all cases making the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations clear makes for clear online writing.

This is part 5 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Numerals Are Better In Online Writing

For numbers, use digits, not words, online. Users can more easily read and understand these:

• 24 Reasons Why Marshmallows Are Awesome
• There are 50 states in the United States.
• On August 1, 2008 at 6:18:22 PM GMT the US national debt was about $9,535,720,238,424.97.

Than these:

• Twenty-Four Reasons Why Marshmallows Are Awesome
• There are fifty states in the United States.
• On August first two-thousand eight at six eighteen and twenty-two seconds in the evening, GMT the US national debt was about nine trillion, five hundred thirty five billion, seven hundred twenty million, two hundred thirty eight thousand, four hundred twenty-four dollars and ninety seven cents.

Numerals are more scannable than words.

This is part 6 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Yahoo Opened Their Search Technology to Third Parties

BOSS allows developers to submit queries (and their associated parameters) via an API to retrieve up to 50 web, image, news, or spelling results in XML or JSON format at a time (from TechCrunch).

Domain Registration Length Affects Rankings

How long you register a domain name for impacts it's search engine rankings. Pagerank is essentially the first claim of US Patent 220050071741 (which is held by many people including some Google employees). It states:

A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.

Claim 38 says (my emphasis added):

The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes domain-related information corresponding to domains associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: analyzing domain-related information corresponding to a domain associated with the document over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on a result of the analyzing.

And claim 40 specifies some of the domain-related information they are referring to (my emphasis added again):

The method of claim 38, wherein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.

Therefore, amongst the over 100 factors used in determining a page's pagerank and its ranking in search engine results is the expiration date of the domain of the page. Reason suggests more legitimate web sites are committed to their domain names and would register them for the more time than fly-by-night sites. Google sums it up best in the patent's 99th claim (my emphasis added once again):

Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

Search Results Vary Based on Country

Google localizes search results based on the country from which you are accessing Google. This is intended to give the most relevant results based on where you are. You can choose which country's results you want to see, but you must use some sort of proxy. The international version (what the United States sees when searching) is accessible from outside of the US using a proxy, or proxy website that is located inside the US.

Dialing-up or otherwise connecting to the internet through an ISP located in a different country should also work. You can compare what different countries see in Google results using a geotargeted search comparison.

Title Attributes and Search Engine Optimization

Title attributes in link tags improve user experience and make sites more accessible to screen readers and other browsers. It seems that search engines may consider the title attribute in determining the ranking of the site being linked to in the link tag, but to a very small degree. As with most SEO decisions, improving usability and user experience will likely improve rankings in the long term since search engines continue to hone their algorithms to reflect how usable sites are (among other things).

Aside from being a usability best practice, it's worth noting that Target was sued for not making their site accessible, and that even if web publishers are not required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, it's a good idea that serves both visitors with disabilities and non-visual browsing situations in the future (e.g., various mobile applications).

Server Response Time Affects Ranking and User Experience

The faster your server responds, the better. Load time affects both user experience and how search engines evaluate your web site. Elements of a page's load time include many things, like:

• server response time
• file size of html, image, stylesheet, scripts and other external files
• the user's network connection and location

Search engines factor load time into how they rank pages. Google includes load time into its rankings and server response time impacts load time. A page of any size can only be loaded after the server responds to the browser's request.

A faster server response will mean the page loads more quickly for the user, and that affects how comfortable and how much control a user feels while browsing the web. Visitors are more likely to stay on a site that loads quickly. Since 0.1 seconds is the limit for users feeling that they are directly manipulating objects in the UI Jakob Nielsen, Response Time Overview), every moment counts.

Find mp3s with Google

There are several ways to to find mp3 files with Google. One way I've found useful to find songs is to put in a song name, and the follwoing string after it, in the google search bar:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

For example the star spangled banner can be found searching for star spangled banner or national anthem, though the first gives slightly better results.