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In a recent video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel, Matt Cutts talks about creating tags and categories on blogs for SEO purposes. Rather, he discusses how there’s not much point in creating them for this reason.

On average, how many tags do you include with your articles/blog posts? Let us know.

"Google is pretty good at saying, ‘You know what? The first time you say a phrase, it’s interesting, and the second time you say a phrase, it’s still a little bit useful,’" says Cutts. "After a while, we sort of realized, ‘okay, you’ve said that phrase, you don’t have to keep repeating it 8, 9, 10 different times.’ So there are certainly some blogs (including some really popular blogs) who have like an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spent a lot of time, almost as many, you know, minutes writing tags out as they have the actual content of the post. And I always laugh at that because it’s not really that needed."

He notes that a lot of the time, the tags are already words that are used in the post, so it won’t make that much difference.

Matt appears to be discussing how much the tags will benefit the page the actual content appears on. However, he doesn’t really go into the pages that contain listings of the articles contained within those tags, at least with relation to SEO (He does point out that the tag pages can be useful because they can provide a feed for just that category). This is probably because they don’t do particularly well in search engines either, which could be because they aren’t linked to particularly often.

Google is all about providing users with the most relevant results for the best user experience, and maybe the fact that these kinds of sites aren’t often featured near the top of results could be considered an area where Google isn’t necessarily delivering the best results.

For example, If I wanted to find all WebProNews SEO articles, there is no better place than our tag page for "SEO" at webpronews.com/tag/seo. There, any user looking to find WebProNews SEO articles would find all of them arranged by date. If I wanted to see all of the Facebook articles Mashable has, I can do that by going to mashable.com/tag/facebook. Yet neither of these pages are returned anywhere near the top for queries like "webpronews SEO articles" or "mashable facebook articles", at least in the results I get (they can vary from user to user). Instead, you might find indvidual articles and results from other sites, with what I would consider to be most relevant pages nowhere in site.

Links are only one of the many factors Google takes into consideration for its rankings, but they are commonly known to be one of the biggest. These tag pages simply highlight the fact that links may not always be the best indicator of relevance.

Note: Our SEO tag page is crawled, and is even featured as one of our "site links" seen by searching for "WebProNews” on Google.

Would you consider there to be a more relevant result for a query like those mentioned above than such tag pages? Do you think Google’s algorithm could be improved in this area? Are links always the best indicator of relevance? Share your thoughts.

You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don’t count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.

Do you still get links to old content? Tell us why you think that is.

Google’s Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.

"In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time," he says. (Emphasis added)

Now, this isn’t exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to the ever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn’t resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn’t mean your content will continue to perform well based on that.  WebProNews has discussed the value of "link velocity" and Google’s need for freshness in the past:

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.

Do you think link freshness should play a role in search engine rankings? Let us know.

So how do you keep getting "fresh" links?

If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content. Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features. People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share it if encouraged.

Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original. Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they may then link to themselves.

Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant. Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on comments that are left.

Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics. You don’t want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old content? 

Do you get fresh links for old content? Why do you think that is? Share your thoughts.
 

Related Articles:

> How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter

> How Press Releases Can Be Great For Search

> Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

It was recently discovered that search engine/news aggregator NewsNow.co.uk had been blocked by Times Online, a publication from News International, a subsidiary of News Corp. This has been viewed as a possible beginning to what News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has been talking about for quite some time – blocking search engines and aggregators from using its content (and using apparently includes linking).

Do you think linking is a right? Share your view.

NewsNow founder Struan Bartlett is not exactly backing down from the fight. He has gone so far as to launch a campaign called Right2Link, the premise of which is essentially: linking to online content is a basic right, or officially:

Whether you are a consumer, an NGO, a blogger, an independent researcher, a concerned citizen or a business, your right to link needs protection.

Bartlett offers the following video to make his case:

Bartlett picks out the following as "the threats" of media owners stopping people from linking to content:

• Serious damage to the ease of access to digital information that drives the economy.
   
• Media owners cherry-picking organisations to target, accusing them of copyright theft, or demanding cash — this is already happening!
   
• Media organisations with significant economic power cutting deals with selected corporate search engines to guide the public to their online media, their opinions and their political and commercial allies.
   
• Media with the power to enforce it levying additional so-called "licence fees" from any business or organisation using or linking to their websites.

This is not just the argument of one man who is upset that he doesn’t get to link to News Corp. content. Even influential (though he is receiving a bit of criticism) journalist and author Jeff Jarvis, who has worked for a few big name print publications himself, has weighed in on the conversation.

"Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control – any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link)," says Jarvis. "The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all."

Jarvis says that by trying to cut off links, News Corp. is even endangering journalism. "As a journalistic matter, we reporters depend on the ability to read and analyse public statements and documents – from government, corporations or newsmakers – and it should make no difference whether that reading is done by a person or their agent, an algorithm," he says. "We depend on the right to quote from what we find – and online, the link is our means of doing so. In fact, linking to source material – footnoting our work and the provenance of our ­information – is fast being seen as an ethical necessity in digital journalism."

It should be noted that NewsNow offers a paid service, and this is probably the biggest reason News Corp. targeted it out of all other possibilities (of which there must be an astonishing number). But does that matter? If the linking site isn’t stealing actual content, and is simply linking, does it matter if they charge for their service?

It should also be noted that a lot of people don’t think media owners are going after people for simply linking, but one can take a quick look at NewsNow’s home page, and see that they just list links pointing to other destinations. They don’t even include snippets from the articles like other sites do.

Of course not all media owners feel the way News Corp. does. You may recall when Thomas Reuters Media President Chris Ahearn expressed his stance on the matter:

 I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting.

I don’t believe you could or should charge others for simply linking to your content. Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged. If someone wants to create a business on the back of others’ original content, the parties should have a business relationship that benefits both.

Our own WebProNews publisher Rich Ord has written in the past, "I know a little bit about news aggregation since I created the very first news aggregation site on the Internet, NewsLinx.com in 1996. I faced a similar backlash from newspaper companies back then, with many including the Wall Street Journal actually contacting me asking if I had permission to deep link to their articles. My typical answer was that I did not have permission and since the nature of the Internet was links to content, I didn’t believe I needed permission. Their reply 100% of the time was to keep linking, because I was driving them a lot of free traffic."

That stance seems to have changed over the years.

As Bartlett maintains, nobody is saying media owners don’t have the right to put up paywalls around their content, but if that content is freely available, why shouldn’t anyone be able to freely point to it with a link?

Where do you stand on this ongoing debate? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> News Corp. Blocks Content from News Aggregation Site

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Murdoch’s War with the Aggregators

> Is it Really Crazy to Block Google?

When you build your website, you, of course, want to get high rankings in the search engines.  There are lots of ways to do this and lots of ways to NOT do this.  Below are 10 things to avoid if you want to be in good standing with the search engines.

Duplicate Content/Sites – Do not [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

10 Ways to Get Banned by the Search Engines

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates? Discuss here.

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

"At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that," says Cutts. "It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank."

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

Do you like the way Google handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

> Google Makes a Second Real-Time Search Announcement

> Yahoo Rolling Out Something Kind of Like Real-Time Search

Press releases are not only great ways to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines. This is not news, but it’s a commonly overlooked fact.

Have press releases brought you significant search traffic? Discuss here.

"Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic — and potential prospects — to a small business’ Web site," a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. "However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive."

Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said.  "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off.  With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."

In a study from Arketi Group, also back in the summer, journalists were found to use the web in the following ways:

- 95% search
- 92% reading news
- 92% emailing
- 89% finding story ideas
- 87% finding news sources
- 75% reading blogs
- 64% watching webinars
- 61% watching YouTube
- 59% social networks

You’ve got to wonder if that social networks number has gone up by now. My guess is that it has, and social media has since become all the more important to search, particularly with the inclusion of real-time search results in Google and Google’s social search experiment (which may eventually move beyond experiment status).

Marty Weintraub, the President of aimClear shared some great tips and insight into the use of press releases for search in a recent interview with WebProNews. Among other things, he noted that when you do a press release, you’re "hitching a ride" in the search engine results and news results. You can use outbound links in press releases, and perhaps more importantly, you’re out there where the journalists are looking.

Here are some press release distribution sites (some are paid and some are free): 

- Business Wire
- PR Newswire
- PRWeb
- 24-7 Press Release
- PR Zoom
- PR Leap
- I-Newswire
- Webwire
- ClickPress
- PR.com
- PR Log
- eReleases
- MarketWire

Beyond the distribution sites, don’t forget to include your releases on your own site. Journalists like being able to find the most up to date information from the source itself.  Earlier this year I discussed how some companies’ own press centers are holding back some marketing opportunities for them. Your site should have a section for press releases, and that should be up to date with the latest release when it goes out. You’d be surprised at how often these go without being updated even when a press release has been spotted elsewhere. It is also a good idea to link to any company blogs, Twitter accounts, or any other place where company announcements are made.

Do you use press releases for marketing? Do they work? Comment here.

Related Articles:

> Search Engine and Social Traffic from Press Releases

> Press Releases New SEO Back Door to Top Rankings

> Getting the Media to Cover Your Business

It’s easy for businesses to get caught up in Google’s expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too.

I’m obviously talking about Yahoo and Bing, but Yahoo’s share is declining, while Bing’s is gaining. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway.

Do you take Bing into account when optimizing your site? Comment here.

We don’t hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for honoring Bing’s policy, does not differ too much from advice that Google would give you. It is, however, still always nice to see how they feel, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. "Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," says DeJarnette. "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

What Not To Do

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

3. Using hidden links in your pages

4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web

5. Linking out to known web spam sites

"When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction," says DeJarnette. "If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index."

What To Do

DeJarnette also shared some tips for getting more quality links. Following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

1. Develop your site as a business brand and brand it consistently

2. Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they’re aware of your site/content

3. Publish concise, informative press releases online

4. Publish expert articles to online article directories

5. Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site’s content when applicable

6. Use social networks to connect to industry influencers (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles)

7. Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content

8. Launch a blog/forum on your site

9. Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
  
10. Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of. That said, there are clearly plenty of online (and offline for that matter) businesses out there that don’t have savvy search marketers on the payroll. It can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and what not to do to help webmasters get better rankings.

Related Articles:

> What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO

> Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

If you write for the web, whether that be on a blog or any other content site, there is a good chance your content has been scraped at some point, if not on a continuous basis. The good news is that it’s probably not that big of a deal. At least that is what Google’s Matt Cutts imples.

Answering user questions as he so often does, Cutts took on the question, "Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?"

The simple answer to this is yes. You actually may be able to slightly benefit from having your content scraped. According to Cutts, if you make sure the pages on your site have links to you in them, the scrapers may leave the links in and end up linking to you. He says these links can "help you along."

"There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down on them and try to get every single one deleted or kicked off their web host," says Cutts. "I tend to be the sort of person who doesn’t really worry about it, because the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, it’s going to be you that comes up, not the scraper. If the guy is scraping and scrapes the content that has a link to you, he’s linking to you, so worst case, it won’t hurt, but in some weird cases, it might actually help a little bit."

It’s the same principle that Cutts talked about when talking about having links in low-quality directories. He says Google tries not to score the low-quality directories too high, but it doesn’t hurt your site at all for being listed there.

He says that most of the time, you don’t really need to worry about scrapers, because they don’t have a large effect in terms of the actual impact on users very often. He does add that if you see a scraper ranking higher than you, you can consider doing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request (DMCA), or if it’s a true spammer (gibberish, etc.) you can go ahead and do a spam report on them.

Google has started adding links to specific parts of webpages in the snippets on search results pages.

Google gives the example of the result for the Wikipedia entry for "Trans Fat." The snippet provides links to History, Chemistry, Presence in food, and Nutritional guidelines. These are all sections of one page that the user can go straight to from the results page.

Obviously, if you want to increase the amount of calls to action for your webpages from Google results, you will want to do what you can to cater to this new feature. Luckily, this isn’t a completely mysterious part of the algorithm (though the links are generated algorithmically) that Google is leaving you to figure out for yourself. A post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog essentially tells you what you have to do to get these links in snippets.

"We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links)," says Raj Krishnan of Google’s Snippets team. "There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages."

To increase said chances, you should make sure any multi-topic pages are "well-structured" and broken into distinct sections. You should also make sure each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name. Pages like this should have a table of contents which link to the individual anchors.

One thing to keep in mind is that these new links won’t appear for results in every search. Google says whether they show up or not depends on the specific query used to get to it. Ok, there is a bit of mystery there after all.

URL-shortening service bit.ly, the favorite of Twitter, has introduced a new URL-shortening service, or an extension of the original one rather. The new one is j.mp, which as you can see by looking at it resides at a domain with very few characters.

That is exactly the reason bit.ly has introduced it. The company says that for some people, "every character counts," and that is certainly true in the Twitter age, where a maximum of 140 characters is allowed per tweet.

"j.mp has the same short URLs, metrics, history, user accounts (you’ll have to login again, but your bit.ly accounts will carry over), and customization you’ve come to enjoy on bit.ly, all on a short, memorable domain," says bit.ly on its blog.

So by simply using j.mp instead of bit.ly, you will be saving two characters automatically. This doesn’t seem like a major difference, but it could be the difference between including one more word or not.

To some people – particularly marketers, tweets could almost be thought of like an email subject line. Having the right words can be key in getting someone to click a link (the tweeting equivalent to an email open).

Then there is the subject of being found in real-time searches. Keywords play a very important role in what tweets appear in these results. When there is a 140-character max, every character certainly can count. Either way, using a service like j.mp could save you from having to abbreviate certain words, which can frankly, sometimes make your message sound dumber.

We’ve certainly seen a lot of URL-shortening services appear over the last year or so, and I suspect we’ll see quite a few more. I have a feeling that we might see more going for this as-short-as-possible approach with them in the future. J.mp has a pretty good advantage being an extension of bit.ly though.