Google recently wrote a post on its Webmaster Central Blog addressing site architecture and traffic. Specifically, items addressed include:

• Duplicate content
• Affiliate programs
• Hacking and malicious malware
• Robots.txt
• And rel=”canonical” URL attributes

This may come as a surprise to you, but affiliate program content and duplicate content do not necessarily cause a drop in traffic. But you have to understand where Google is coming from here. They are primarily concerned with attempts to manipulate rankings and if you use duplicate content to do that, well, then you might see a drop in rankings. That could be have an associative affect on your traffic. But if you have two pages with the same content on them then you shouldn’t see any penalties or drops in rankings or traffic. You can fix that issue with a canonical URL attribute.

With affiliate promotion, simply make your content original and place your affiliate links in the midst of your original content. That’s how you should promote affiliates anyway.

Interestingly, a good deal of Google’s post was about hacking issues. That is probably because this is a growing concern as it is happening more often now. The first defense against hacking is to ensure that you have a secure server. Then you won’t have to worry about cleaning up after the mess.

But what if you do get hacked and you end up with hidden text and links on your website? In that case you could see your web pages de-indexed. Before you panic, sign into your Webmaster Tools account - if you don’t have one, get one - and check to see if you have any issues. You’ll see the big red boxes if you do. Get those fixed and you should see your pages return to their rankings.

Understand that search engine rankings fluctuate over time. So if you drop from page 1 to page 3, it’s probably a natural occurrence. You’ll likely return to page 1 in a little while.

The smart thing to do is to monitor your rankings, but don’t freak out if you see big drops. Most of the time, those are short-lived. If you are de-indexed completely, that’s when you need to figure out what happened and fix it. But don’t lose your head and stay on track!

Ever since search professionals starting talking about real-time search a la Twitter, Facebook, et. al, there has been a huge emphasis on the competitive nature and push of the industry. Twitter has even gone so far as to change the look of its search engine (when did that happen?) to look a little bit more like Google. It all makes me wonder, what’s next?

When will the real real-time search engine get here? And, more importantly, who will be the first to make it happen?

What I’m talking about, if it isn’t obvious by now, is a mashup of real-time information coming from the top sources in real-time communications such as Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, and the many other microblogging services out there such Plurk, identi.ca, and Jaiku among others. The only company I can think of that has both the resources (human and technological) and the revenue to make it happen right now is Google. But I can’t help but wondering, if Google has the resources and the revenue then why haven’t they done it already?

What are your thoughts on real-time search?

Chris Crum is da man! His article about Bing and SEO provides some great insight into how Microsoft’s new search engine has, and will, affect search engine optimization. The question is, should webmasters change their SEO strategy?

My take? If your doing well with your optimization efforts right now, Bing doesn’t change anything. Still, you’ve got read Chris’s article. Here are a few highlights.

With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP.

That’s a brilliant statement. Personally, I like the categories on the search page because it’s an intuitive and a recognized way to narrow down a search query. Thanks to the popularity of blogging, people are already familiar with tagging and categorizing. So it will be natural to narrow a search result to a specific category if it fits what you are looking for. Therefore, Chris’s observation that you should focus on getting to the top of the right category for each search query is a great observation. But does that change how you should conduct your campaign?

Not really. But, realistically, perhaps a little bit. It will become more important to rank your blog content into the proper category. It might even become feasible, and perhaps prudent, to add categorization to your static website. Time will tell on that one. At any rate, Bing’s categories could very well make SEO strategies a bit more focused.

On links, straight from the mouth of Bing’s horse:

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. “We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites,” explains DeJarnette.

Bing’s link philosophy is not really any different from Google’s so your link building campaigns really shouldn’t change. As Chris says, the presentation Bing offers may differ from Googles, but your SEO goals should be the same.

One aspect of Chris’s article that I really appreciate is his discussion social media. I believe social media is going to be more important for optimization. It already is and I’ll tell you why. Traffic. Plain and simple. Social media delivers targeted traffic. If you can manage a successful social media campaign to deliver targeted traffic to your site that stays on your site then that increase in traffic coupled with a lower bounce rate can affect your rankings. We’ve discussed that before here and here.

So back to the original question: Should you change your SEO strategy for Bing? I say ‘not yet’. What do you think?

Google has always been interested in bounce rates, primarily to let webmasters know how readers are responding to the content on their pages. But what Google Analytics reports as your bounce rate is not entirely accurate.

Every page on your website is optimized for a number of keywords, not just one. Some of those are intentional and some are not. Just in the last 6 months or so Google has been tinkering with the way that it displays SERP snippets. In some cases the snippet is taken from your meta description, most often when the search query used matches your primary keyword for the page. But when a search query is for another keyword phrase the snippet is often quite different. Google will then use a snippet of page content where that search query phrase is used. This supposedly has resulted in increased click throughs.

If Google can measure your traffic for each keyword, which it does, and it can measure your traffic for each keyword per page, then it can measure your bounce rate for each keyword per page. It may not be reporting that to you through Google Analytics, but it’s measuring it. And if Google measures something it’s for a reason.

When a searcher types a search query into Google and finds your website, she immediately determines whether or not that’s what she was looking for. If you have one sentence on your page about the topic she was searching and that’s all she can find then she will likely back out and visit another page on the SERP. If enough users do that then you’ll eventually fall in the search engine rankings for that keyword because Google figures that a high bounce rate for that keyword for that page is a bad fit for its search results page. On the other hand, if you get a high number of searchers who visit your page after a particular search query and they stay on your site longer then that’s a good sign that your web page is a good fit for the search query. You’ll have a lower bounce rate for that key phrase for that page and you’ll rise in comparison to other pages based on their bounce rates for that key phrase.

I haven’t read anywhere that this is the case, but it does make sense and I’m pretty sure that if Google isn’t doing this already then it soon will be.

One really cool tool that few people know about is Google’s change of address tool. This is a tool you can use to notify Google that your website has changed addresses. You could just use your robots.txt or .htaccess file to redirect your old site to your new site, but that can often be sloppy. With the change of address tool you can do it through Webmaster Central much more easily. The downside is that it won’t necessarily work for other search engines.

You have to make sure that both your old address and your new address are verified in Google’s Webmaster Central. After you’ve done that, log into Webmaster Central and choose your old site address. Go to Site Configuration and select Change of Address. Follow the guides and when you get to Step 4 you’ll be given to the option to Select a verified site. Select your new address from the list.

There’s just one caveat here: You can’t redirect to a subdomain. If you are moving your old site to a subdomain then you’ll have to do that through .htaccess or robots.txt, but I don’t know why you’d do that.

Again, this method of address change might work to refocus your Google rankings to your new website address, but you’ll still have rankings for your old site at the other search engines until they crawl your new site so it’s not an altogether useful tool. The best application I can think of is to use it to ensure that your new website is crawled faster by Google and indexed quicker. But you’ll still need the robots.txt or .htaccess to notify other search engines of your change. The benefit to the change of address tool is that the change will happen sooner at Google than it otherwise would.

An interesting article at Marketing Pilgrim quotes Carol Bartz saying search isn’t Yahoo!s biggest feature. But who said it was?

Specifically, she said this:

[Yahoo is more than just search.] We have a much bigger job than this narrow area.

Then Jordan McCollum quotes Danny Sullivan saying that Yahoo! is just trying to make it sound like they weren’t that interested in search in the first place by downplaying it. Possibly. But let’s remind them that Yahoo! didn’t start out as a search engine. It started out as a directory and only later acquired Inktomi along with its search engine functionality.

The fact that Yahoo! purchased a search engine is evidence enough that they were interested in search. But Bartz is correct. Yahoo! is and always has been about more than search. Maybe that’s why they haven’t managed to offer Google any real competition in that area. They don’t specialize in it enough to give it a serious try. Maybe we were wrong to have expected them to.

An interesting blog post on the Bing blog yesterday has some pretty interesting things to say about video search in particular and search technology in general. First, Bing’s approach to indexing videos is unique and very well. I like the Smart Motion Previews feature and if you haven’t played around with it I’d recommend that you conduct a couple of videos searches and preview the videos. The downside is that the videos run in thumbnail so you don’t get a lot of detail, but the upside is it’s a unique approach to allowing searchers an opportunity to preview a video before deciding to click the link and watch it. That’s a very helpful feature and if Bing can assure searchers that clicking the links to watch videos is safe and that no malicious software will be downloaded in the process, they’ll go a long way to securing a segment of the search market.

But let’s move on to another development that I think is out-of-this-world smart. Bing’s default setting on SafeSearch is strict, which means that a searcher doesn’t have to do anything to filter out adult content. That’s a completely different approach that what Google has historically done. Bing’s referring to this a “conservative” approach is an obvious appeal to a segment of the search population that identifies itself as conservative.

But here’s the whammy:

In particular some folks who manage corporate networks have asked for tools now to enforce SafeSearch settings at the network level.

Bing’s work around for network people is to add a phrase at the end of a search query to filter out adult content. But that’s not a perfect solution. The fact that Bing has mentioned this on its blog tells me that a real solution for network administrators is forthcoming. Will Bing attempt to establish a search relationship with corporate network managers? Microsoft has done this in the past with its other products so it’s not out of the question for the company to approach in that manner. If this is Microsoft’s plan and it manages to convince the U.S. government to program all of its computers to block all search engines except Bing on network computers then Microsoft will no doubt position itself to become the No. 2 search engine rather quickly. Microsoft rose to prominence in the 1990s precisely because the U.S. government, and its corporate partners, chose Windows as their organizational operating system. That practically standardized the entire culture of computer networks at the corporate level. Is the plan for Bing to do the same thing with search?

An off-the-cuff remark by Matt Cutts at the SMX Advanced conference has some SEOs and webmasters up in arms. Is PageRank sculpting dead or is it alive and well?

As you’ll see from reading Rand Fishkin’s post on the subject, he thinks it was a Google diversionary tactic that is going nowhere. Is Google just trying to, paraphrasing an unnamed celebrity SEO as quoted by Rand, dissuade new webmasters from attempting to sculpt their own PageRank? It’s possible. But there is a third possibility that neither Rand nor the doomsayers have mentioned. Maybe this new algorithm change is in the planning stage and not yet implemented and Matt Cutts just opened his mouth too soon. Perhaps that is why his PR team doesn’t want him discussing it.

More important than the PageRank genie recently unleashed, I think Rand Fishkin’s subtle clarion call at the end of his blog is a more important issue:

It’s also frustrating that, if true, this now means one can sabotage a competitors SEO by adding many nofollowed links in comments or other UGC areas (by “evaporating” percentages of the PageRank that will flow).

You can do that now if you link to another web property within the post of your own blog, but to use UGC areas for that purpose would take the competitive stakes to a new level. It could lead to cutthroat tactics and legal issues if large businesses used that technique as a bullying tactic against smaller competitors. This is clearly something Google needs to think through completely before implementing. But, as Matt Cutts has said repeatedly, PageRank Sculpting is something most of us shouldn’t worry about anyway.

MSN Live’s new search face Bing finally announced its launch and it seems to be the big buzz this week. My initial impression was that it looked a lot like MSN Live. Not much changed. But upon conducting a few searches I’ve noticed that there actually is quite a big change. The results seem to be far superior than they have been in the past. That makes me wonder if Microsoft’s relationship with Powerset is the driving force behind the new changes or if there more to it than mere search technology.

Personally, I believe Microsoft realized it was losing the PR war. I think they realized it was time to rebrand their search engine or forever be relegated to third place. Of course, Ask.com tried that and dropped Jeeves. It didn’t help. Will rebranding help Microsoft? Will it boost traffic to Bing?

I wouldn’t expect a sweeping turnaround. You won’t see a mass exodus of Googlers running to Bing themselves to oblivion. For one thing, Google is still the top brand in search and they got there with superior technology, so the underlying technology does matter. And Google is still improving on the best of the breed. But I think if I were on the Yahoo! search team I’d be worried. The first step to overcoming the leader in any race is to first overtake the followers ahead of you. Bing could very well do that within two years if searchers who typically use Yahoo! see the value.

The only way Bing is going to outdo Google is if you see a viral move from the ground up of searchers defecting because they think they’ll get better search results. No matter how good it is at Bing, I don’t think that is going to happen. What about you?

Microsoft are reported to be releasing their new version of ‘Live Search’ and are to brand it ‘Bing’. Known throughout the industry as ‘Kumo’, this updated search engine is purported to be ‘better than Google’ - we will soon see.

There are also reports that Microsoft has an $80-$100 million advertising campaign ready to launch that will promote Bing as one of the best search engines around. The main reason that new search engines fail is in the area of branding. Let’s face it - when the word ‘Google’ changes from being a noun to a verb, and you get sayings such as ‘go Google it’, you know the brand has stuck. You rarely hear anyone suggest you ‘go Yahoo it’ - the question is, will people ever suggest you ‘go Bing it’? Some how I cannot see that entering the language, not even ‘go Bingle it’ - it’s too close to ‘go bungle it’.

Will Microsoft’s new version of Live Search change search engine optimization? I doubt it. In fact, if your SEO strategies are well targeted, you should be aiming for results from all major search engines. You should also be looking at demographics and shaping your SEO to where your audience is. If ‘Bing’ (or whatever incarnation appears) has any effect it will most likely be in those demographics. It will all depend on how successful their marketing campaign is and who they target.

For now, check out their new search engine but don’t make any drastic changes to your current optimization strategies, especially if they are working. The old saying - if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it - holds very true for SEO. One wrong move can you see you drop many places in the SERP’s and recovery can be slow and painful - SEO, don’t ‘bungle’ it over ‘Bing’.

Page Rank may be a little out of date these days but it does still hold a little value. Julian M Bucknall has written an interesting piece on TechRadar that goes into some detail regarding Google’s Page Rank and on how it is determined.

What is more interesting is the section on how search engines index pages. Of course, in the past the two where closely linked. Now, Page Rank is only one component of the algorithm that determines a keywords SERP placement.

If there is one message that comes from understanding how search engines index pages and determine each pages place in the search results - that is that one page will have many different ‘rankings’ - not one single rank. The report will go a little towards explaining why, after optimizing for a particular keyword or phrase, you notice a lot of traffic coming for a completely different keyword or phrase.

I won’t go into all the detail here, you can read the post for the nitty gritty and it is lengthy and quite detailed in places, so grab a coffee before you start to read. As the report concludes:

This article should have given you some insight into how a modern search engine works. There are more details to understand, though….

This is not the definitive article, however for those wondering how search engines index pages and what relevance Page Rank had (has), it certainly is an a bit of eye opener.

DMOZ Editor Emily Kayser has a point. If you think DMOZ isn’t useful today then you don’t understand directories in general and DMOZ in particular. There are plenty of reasons to use DMOZ and other directories. Sure, it’s frustrating if you’re a webmaster trying to get your site listed and it’s taking a while. The service is run entirely by volunteers.

Unlike other top directories like BOTW and Yahoo!, DMOZ is free. That’s why it takes longer to get listed. But if you do manage to get through the editorial review process and get your site listed, there are enough people using DMOZ to find information that it will be worth your while.

Besides traffic, DMOZ is useful in other ways too. It provides links back to your site and at least one search engine uses DMOZ to craft SERP snippets. In other words, perform a Google search for any topic under the sun and you are likely to find at least one, probably a few, results that come up with a snippet taken directly from DMOZ. If you’re a site owner, that can prove to be a real off site optimization benefit.

Your URL is more than just a keyword-based ranking tool. It can be a useful ranking edge if you use your keyword in the right way. But it’s so much more than that. It’s also a branding item. And if you use it as both a branding item and a ranking tool then it’s even more powerful. Well, it may have just become even more important. According to Marketing Pilgrim, Google tweaking is Suggest feature:

Google’s also added navigational suggestions–so if you start typing the name of a company or brand, you’ll more likely see the actual URL appear in your suggested items.

This is actually a useful feature, but I think it will have a much more powerful effect if people are typing in a keyword and Google recognizes an authoritative brand based on that keyword. For instance, let’s say you own http://www.widget.com (made up for this example) and a searcher queries “widget”. Will Google Suggest show the url http://www.widget.com in its results to be more helpful to searchers? That’s what it seems like Andy Beal is saying.

How important do you see your URL now?

It seems that Google has improved its blog search function and made it more competitive with Technorati, Techmeme, and other blog search services. Competition is always a good thing.

The thing with Google Blog Search has always been its lack of relevant results and often older results. I guess the domain age part of Google’s algorithm was a bit too dominant. According to an article in Mashable recently, Google fixed those issues. I certainly hope that’s true.

So I thought I’d test it. I searched for “search engine optimization” using Google’s Blog Search. The first thing that popped up were results for relevance. That’s no good if I want to know what the latest information is. So I clicked on the “Sorted by date” link and the latest information I got was 44 minutes ago. On search engine optimization? Not likely.

So Google’s Blog Search may be improved, but it’s far from being perfected.

In all fairness, I was able to click on “Last hour” to see the truly latest results. But 11 minutes ago was the closest I could find. And one cool feature that is very recent is the “Choose Dates” link, which allows you to search within a specific time frame. Now that’s an improvement!

On the same day that Google introduced Rich Snippets, Microsoft Live introduced a podcast series on Powerset and semantic web technology. While the initial video isn’t very deep informationally, it is interesting that Microsoft is stretching to become more competitive with Google regarding this type of technology.

Google has been using semantic technology for a while now. Of course, that’s not to say that they’ve advanced to the point that artificial intelligence is a reality. But Google has been able to discern what a web page is about semantically by looking at a text document. Powerset has attempted to take semantic technology a little further and that’s what has Microsoft Live personnel so excited. I believe they actually believe this technology will make them more competitive. It could, but I’m not holding my breath.

Who do you think will lead the way into semantic technology as we move beyond the Web 2.0 space?