We're happy to announce another feature to assist with managing duplicate content: parameter handling. Parameter handling allows you to view which parameters Google believes should be ignored or not ignored at crawl time, and to overwrite our suggestions if necessary.

If you’re not handling this through robots.txt, this is a great way to simply address duplicate content issues cause by parameters leading to duplicate pages that display the exact same content.

The option in GWT indicates :

Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example, http://www.example.com/dresses?sid=12395923 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/dresses. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL. This can result in more efficient crawling and fewer duplicate URLs, while helping to ensure that the information you need is preserved. (Note: While Google takes suggestions into account, we don't guarantee that we'll follow them in every case.)

Since someone emailed me to ask - here are some of my suggestions for optimal SEO configurations. If you have others – I’m interested.

Gallery2

• g2_highlightId : Ignore
• g2_imageViewsIndex : Ignore

Drupal

• destination
• order
• sort

Google Custom Search

• as_q
• sitesearch

BTW – Yahoo’s Site Explorer has had a similar concept with Dynamic URLs (under Actions) for years.

Specify up to 10 dynamic parameters that you want us to treat specially whenever these are seen in URLs belonging to http://www.yourdomain.org . We will automatically rewrite the URLs containing these parameters as specified below. You can choose to:

1. Remove these parameters from the URLs, such as in case of session ids, you could ask to remove 'sid' from URLs.

2. Use a default value for the parameter, for example you could set the 'src' parameter to be 'yhoo_srch'

Around the beginning of 2010 I saw an explosion of lists with various recommended WordPress plugins :

• Best 16 WordPress Plugins For 2010
• The 15 Best WordPress Plugins to Use in 2010
• 75 Best WordPress Plugins That Make Bloggers Lives Easier
• 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
• Best WordPress Plugins to improve the Security of your Blog

These are okay, but there are a few plugins that can really help boost things up for you. Following are some of my favorite plugins and recommendations for 2010 :

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins

1. SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin - The AllinOneSEO alternative.
2. SEO Super Comments – Index your comments as separate pages (thousands of added long tail pages).
3. HeadSpace 2 – Complete control over metas (overlaps with some of #1, complements #4, not recommended for WPMU)
4. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – All needed SEO tags (overlaps with some of #1, complements #3, not recommended for WPMU)
5. SEO Smart Links – ALinks reloaded. Auto internal and external linking
6. Hotlink 2 Link WordPress Plugin – Make it easy to link to your photos.
7. WordPress Global Translator Plugin – Make translation pages of your blog in any language (thousands of added long tail pages with real added value for visitors).
8. SEO Boost from Google 404 Plugin – Best 404 page possible.
9. WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin – Make the most of incoming traffic.

Speed plugins

• DB Cache Reloaded – Projekty – Using WPSuperCache? try this instead (not tested on WPMU).
• WP Minify WordPress Plugin – Optimize JS and CSS files (not tested on WPMU).

Making money plugins

The only real way to make money blogging is direct advertising. This is the best no hassle direct advertising plugin I know:

• OIOPublisher (aff, I bought this plugin, if you do direct ads, you should too)

Happy 2010.

Story is that filination.com initially had two subdirectories:

• /blog/ - my personal blog
• /tech/ - my tech blog

For reasons I can't recall, I did a 301 redirect from filination.com to the /tech/ subdirectory, which results in a merge in the Google SERP. There was no filination.com/tech/ on the search results page, just filination.com . While the pagerank for /blog/ was PR5, the pagerank for filination.com or filination.com/tech was PR2.

Sometime last month, I moved filination.com/tech to a new domain teqsnacks.com and switched the redirection of filination.com to filination.com/blog/ . It took a while for Google to update the SERPs so that filination.com and filination.com/blog were merged, but that finally happened after a while. Interestingly, when the Google Toolbar Pagerank update occurred a few days later filination.com and filination.com/blog both received the Pagerank of the previous filination.com/tech - PR2.

Seeing this, I decided to experiment a bit and removed the redirection from filintion.com to filination.com/blog and only posted a short link. It took 2 days for Google to restore filination.com/blog pagerank to PR5 and - oddly enough - a few days later to set filination.com to PR5 as well.

I think there are some interesting conclusions to be made from this case-study. What do you think?

I was talking with [someone] who giving  me your email for try to tweak my website  www.galeriadelarte.org in google engine at this time no match, seams google robot can't get anything from my site, is programming in PHP and Flash.

To which I usually reply with an almost ready made template with the same kind of advise.

Although Google’s claiming to get better at understanding Flash, working together with Adobe, I generally advise against massive use of Flash, especially in the case where it’s used as the only form of in-site navigation. Still, following are a few things you can do for a Flash-HTML combined website :

• Create a sitemap for your site http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34654. Submit your Sitemap at :
  • Yahoo Site Explorer
  • Google webmaster tools
    • Turn on Tools->Enhanced Image Search.
    • Set preferred domain to “www.”
• Search Engines have some real difficulties with Flash. It’s very not SEO-friendly. Get links that will point to your php generated pages rather than your main flash website. Get as many links as you can, submit it to a lot of free web directories. Ask your friends to links to you with meaningful titles and anchor text. This is one of the most important factors. In the <a href=”” title=””> it’s the title tag. If you’re involved in forums, add the link to your site with your keywords in your signatures.
• Make navigation in your website easy with interlinking between pages. When you don’t have others linking to you, this will count. When you link, link with good keywords.

And the tips for the in-site HTML files are the same just about anywhere :

To get higher on search engine page rankings (SERPS) you should :

• Make sure your page title is meaningful (<TITLE></TITLE>)
• Make sure you have H1, H2, H3 headings in your pages (<H1></H1><H2></H2>)
• Optimize your images with keywords
  • Name of file.
  • The ALT / TITLE tags in the <img src=”” alt=””> images.
• Try to use pathnames that would serve as meaningful permalinks.
• Add metatags
• Use social websites to point to you. For example – to simplify submitting to social websites, use Social Poster (The “Dofollow for SEO” is the more relevant).
  • Choose the right keywords in the title of your submission.
  • Add relevant tags, try to make it appealing.
• Redirect to WWW : Do this next one only if you understand what you’re doing.

If there’s one thing that’s clear is that companies, marketers and IT professionals, now more than ever, are looking to better understand what this whole thing is about.

Let me summarized the web marketing presentations for you :

1. There is no one formula for success - “It depends” or “There are no tips”. Web marketers would like to put it that way – web marketing is a difficult ongoing never-ending struggle to try and understand how users behave and as a result - adjust to audience behavior to get “conversions”. Which leads to the second main point …
2. Webmarketing is all about experimenting. A/B testing, ad adjustment, landing page adjustment, experiment with just about everything.

I’m not sure I agree. Although what they claim is essentially true and is what web power technology is all about – the ability to get instant feedback on what you’re doing immediately – people want something more about web marketers’ experience and talent. For someone to hire professional help or attend a conference and get “we don’t have answers” and “we’ll see, let’s play around a bit” is confusing and frustrating. It’s a problem with all areas of marketing but when it comes to online businesses, this becomes an ever worse phenomenon. The audience in the crowd almost refused to accept it. “Give us some bottom line tips” they demanded, but the presenters wouldn’t go along. Which brings up the question of what a good web marketer does. Is s/he good because they know how to set up effective A/B testing? because they have more experience with knowing that they don’t know and would like to know more?

In recent years my main interest and the focus of my PhD studies has been international cross-cultural differences in organizational and consumer behavior…

Tlalit did a good job of scaring the audience with the notion that cross cultural differences are almost impossible to predict and even more difficult to understand. What might work for one English speaking country will not work for the other. Our globalized world has never been more local, it seems, especially when it comes to the web. I’m mainly involved with the Taiwanese and Chinese webosphere, as opposed to the one I’m personally and professionally related to in Israel and the States and the differences between all of those are remarkable. I could layout some of the basic differences in perception between the different countries that go deep within through values, traits, norms and social behavior, but for now I suggest the example I gave with  “Blogging Ethics - Anonymity Freedom of Speech vs. the Dark Side” to get a sense of the differences. The HSBC campaign for understanding culture differences is another funny look at the subject.

Then came SEO and the audience wanted answers. Branko of the Israeli SEO Scientist outlined out some of the principles for SEO and the audience couldn’t get enough. Listening to the people sitting around me, it seemed like they perceive SEO as the black art of online witchcraft, where a selected few know the secrets of the all-capable almighty Google. It really isn’t so.

SEO is not that complicated and it’s something that everyone can do, and fairly easily. You don’t know much about SEO? fine, let others do the job for you, and I don’t mean SEO experts, I mean use open source tools that come with SEO built-in. Unless what you’re looking to do is really revolutionary, there’s no reason not to base an online business or a website on CMSs like Drupal, Joomla and if it’s simple enough – WordPress. If you use those, even if you don’t do much – you’ll get much better results than with a custom made website. With simple modules and tweaks, you can get the CMS based website to implement all of the common SEO guidelines. Don’t want to listen to long lectures about SEO and pay SEO experts for things you don’t even understand? just insist on building your business with an open-source CMS.  Technical onsite SEO has never been so easy as it is today, and don’t let anybody confuse you otherwise.

It was an interesting event, in that it allowed me to see how my clients perceive and understand what it is that I do. Check out the MIT forum website for future events. SMO is always quick to live blog on the MIT forum events in Hebrew. Also, SMX is coming to Israel soon, you might want to check that out if you’re in the area.

First, I strongly recommend photographers that want to get a gallery up and running to run a software that would allow them to do that in an easy scalable way. If you have a choice, I'd recommend skipping Dream-weaver and using one of the many open-source PHP gallery software. The one I like the most and use quite often, integrated with Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla is the excellent Gallery2.

Take a look at the basic site design :

This kind of design is actually quite easy to achieve with Gallery2, and in a more interactive scalable way, but one of the main drawbacks is having to do manual basic SEO work to make the search engines understand what its about.

Following are some general SEO tips suggested for this kind of Dream-weaver website

• Optimize your images with keywords
  • Name of file.
  • The ALT / TITLE tags in the <img src=”” alt=””> images.
• Try to use filenames that would serve as meaningful permalinks.
• Add metatags (tutorial1, tutorial2)
• Make sure your page title is meaningful (<TITLE></TITLE>)
• Make sure you have H1, H2, H3 headings in your pages (<H1></H1><H2></H2>)
• Ask your friends to links to you with meaningful titles and anchor text (less of “Garret” and more of “Taiwan Art” “Asian photography” “culture gallery” and other keywords that you would want to appear on. This is one of the most important factors. In the <a href=”” title=””> it’s the title tag. If you’re involved in forums, add the link to your gallery with your keywords in your signatures.
• Make navigation in your website easy with interlinking between pages. When you don’t have others linking to you, this will count. When you link, link with good keywords.
• Put this script on your website to make the most of Google/Yahoo Image Search traffic.
• Create a Sitemap (method 1, method 2)
• Submit your Sitemap at :
  • Yahoo Site Explorer
  • Google webmaster tools
    • Turn on Tools->Enhanced Image Search.
    • Set preferred domain to "www."
• Use social websites to point to you. For example – to simplify submitting to social websites, use Social Poster (The “Dofollow for SEO” is the more relevant).
  • Choose the right keywords in the title of your submission.
  • Add relevant tags, try to make it appealing.
• Redirect to WWW : Do this next one only if you understand what you’re doing.

Easy simple steps that would make a big differences. Any more idea? other suggestions welcome...

It was so much simpler with my name in Hebrew ("פילי") as there aren't any Israelis I know of with that name :

Wikipedia is an especially difficult one. That site's authority is so high on Google that with popular keywords it's almost impossible to beat.

Either way, branding your name on Google has its affect, especially when you claim you know something about SEO. The first thing most people who want to know me do is Google my name and read what I'm about. It surprises me everytime how people I've never met know so much of what I do without me having to tell them anything about that. I had a friend that made a few business cards for me with nothing on it except a big "Fili" logo and a short small font caption under it saying "Just Google me". The few I've given those cards to were happy with the idea of me promoting myself that way. It just makes your point so much better than anything else.

There are a few essential reads on how to implement this (quoting the most important section for SEO) :

 "301 Permanent Redirect from Blogger Beta to WordPress" by Techcounter.

What this code is doing is taking the URL from Step # 2 and redirect the user to the corresponding entry in your wordpress blog. In case it does not find the corresponding entry, it redirects to the homepage of your blog.

If you insist on using a WordPress hosting service like wordpress.com, then you can check "how to redirect Blogger Beta to WordPress.com" by laffers.net.

The tricky part comes now. We want to redirect users from individual post pages to the corresponding post pages on the new blog. For that, we need a piece of JavaScript spiced with Blogger proprietary tags.

Although it took some playing around with, it works. Pagerank and SERP authority were preserved and together with the rest of the WordPress SEO tweaks, your WordPress based blog will improve significantly.

With a perfect post on "17/19 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images", Dosh Dosh has done a great job of listing the ways you can increase traffic from the Image Search sites (which he can actually implement on his lovely Anime images on every post). Obvious tips include using the ALT and image-name wisely with relevant text & keywords as well as setting the image preferences in Google Webmaster Tools, but there were a few less-known tips that are worth mentioning.

The first is "Use Javascript to prevent framing of your webpages" which is a feature in Google Images I've always disliked a little. It's like coming in from Google Search with an annoying header showing a text highlight the search words (a bit like with Google Cache). Basically, you can use a piece of Javascript code that I use on most of my sites which will disable that frame:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location = self.location;
</script>

It is recommended to add this higher up your theme so the change would take place sooner and be more unnoticeable.

For those who are using WordPress and are not comfortable adding code to their theme, there's even a Break-Out-Of-Frames WordPress plugin.

The second is about making the most out of users who are using the images on your site. You can implement something that would replace right-clicking and copying with a suggestion on how to copy the image with a link back to your site.  This way you'll atleast get some link-love and a small SEO boost.

Blogstorm wrote the basic script, and has even released a simple Use Google Images to build links WordPress plugin. Visitors coming in through Google or Yahoo image search would see the link suggestion when right clicking. Not sure what it would look like? Blogstorm even did a demo video.  It's not perfect, as it puts the link suggestion on top of the post no matter where the image actually is, but it's still a neat idea. He's also been pretty clever about using his "Close" button image used in the plugin for some incoming links to his domain .

Try it out.

- Added on June 09, 2008 :Maurizio Petrone has a sweet tip with "Link Building Secrets".

Look at the following Analytics stats :

You can see that the site experienced a massive drop in visitors which was all due to Google not sending any more traffic to the site. There was no warning, there was nothing special that happened, the site has been running for ages and then this suddenly hit. At first I thought it was just a glitch, since it happened on a Pagerank update, but as the update completed with the site preserving the original PR I already knew something was wrong.

It didn't have any of the -30/-950/etc. symptoms. After a month or so of discussing this with some SEO expert friends and giving up on their advice, I decided to head for the last resort. I changed domain names with a 301 redirect.

As you can see - it helped. After 2 days of quick indexing through sitemaps, some of the traffic was regained. Traffic hasn't been back to what it used to be probably due to domain name age and the time it takes for the engines to pick up a redirect from incoming links.

This means that there was some kind of a domain penalty on that domain. Why? I'll never know. Will this happen again? no one knows. Although I don't make anything from that site, this does make me think whether anybody can really rely financially on long-term online activities when something like this might hit you out of nowhere.