« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »
November 28, 2006
Externalize the Javascript
Externalizing your javascript is easy and will benefit you with smaller file size and cleaner code. Excessive javascript in your page HTML can make it harder for the search engines to crawl. It may also be mis-understood and come up in the search engine results pages as relevant content.
If you have access to your HTML
1. Cut all the javascript between the < script > tags and paste it into a text file.
2. Name the text file “anything.js� and place it on your server.
3. Place the following tag (to call the file) in your Page < Head >:
< script type="text/javascript" src="anything.js" > < /script >
If you have multiple javascript applications then use multiple .js files and tags.
Posted by james at 05:01 PM | Comments (1)
November 27, 2006
Evidence of Yahoo Crawling Google Sitemaps
Given Yahoo's recent promise that it would begin to support the Google Sitemaps protocol, it's a bit anti-climactic to document evidence now, but I promised a follow-up.
Back in October, before the "big 3" officially admitted that they would read the same type of sitemap files as a benefit to site owners, I had my suspicions and ran a test to see if and when Yahoo would actually pull a URL from a Google sitemap and add it to the Yahoo index.
I created this orphan page and put it on the blog server. I added the URL to our Google Sitemap file and told Yahoo about the file via the YSE interface. Over Thanksgiving, using a text string query, I noticed that the file had been crawled by Slurp and was now appearing in the main Yahoo index:
Having been too busy to keep a close eye on it that week, I scurried over to YSE to check further and noticed that the file did indeed appear in the list of pages on our blog:
Note that the crawl date for the file - November 16 - is only a day after Yahoo announced its support for the protocol. That's impressive. I submitted the current sitemap file on November 7, and it was processed on the 8th. It's possible that my test file was crawled even before the 16th, since that's only the last crawled date - and I wasn't paying much attention to it during that week.
Regardless, hat's off to Yahoo for making good on their promise - and quickly.
Posted by erik at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 21, 2006
Giving Thanks
Part of my Thursday will include giving thanks ….. and not just for the three layers of food on my dinner plate.
We are blessed with the opportunity to work with some amazing companies and especially the people within these companies. If you’re one of them, we appreciate you and consider you a blessing.
Speaking of blessings, I also consider myself lucky to work with such a big-hearted, funny and intelligent group of people at Intrapromote. I’m sincerely thankful for all of you.
Now, let’s eat.
Posted by doug at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 16, 2006
Sitemaps Protocol Redemption
Nobody took Erik Dafforn seriously when he twice discussed Yahoo's ability to index URLs found in a Google-style sitemaps file. In fact, his incredibly kind and sweet mother even told him he was crazy. That will make this Thanksgiving especially sweet for Erik, as he returns home with news of collaboration on the common Sitemaps Protocol by Google, MSN and Yahoo!
Now Erik isn't known for gloating, so he may reconsider his plan for a public apology from his mother at a Thanksgiving event to which he has invited Three Musketeers Soundtrackers Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting to play a rendition of "All for Love" rewritten to commemorate the new sitemaps collaboration.
That seems a bit much, doesn't it?
Posted by tom at 10:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 15, 2006
Are You Giving Away Links You Don't Know About?
Recently, I was looking through a client's list of indexed pages at Yahoo Site Explorer. (Get ready for another "All Hail YSE" post.) I noticed what looked like a lot of junk pages, and I found a site vulnerability that many sites could potentially have.
Link spammers had been attacking the site with an interesting attempt to get more links to their sites:
- Use the site's internal search feature to create a search results page that "searched" for links to the spam sites
- Get my client's site to output a search results page that links to the spam site
- Link to that spammy search results page to get it crawled and indexed
If none of that makes sense, here's an example. Let's say the spammers were trying to create links to Apple Computer (they weren't). They go to your internal search box and type the following:
...and then hit Submit.
Their goal is that your site outputs a search results page that includes text showing the search term. For example, this is what they want the search results page to say:
Search Results for iPod stuff
Next, they link to the page from their own site (or some site in their ugly network) and it gets crawled and indexed. And voila - they have a new link pointing to their site - from yours.
The spammer's plot failed for several reasons - one of which is that my client's site does not output a heading (or any text) that lists the search term.
But many sites do. So be careful and make sure that if you have a internal search engine that outputs unique search URLs that contain the query string, that someone's not indexing more of your site than you'd like.
Based on the client's unique needs, fixing the issue isn't as easy as you might think. We're looking for ways to ensure that this doesn't happen in the future, including some creative uses of robots.txt, changing form methods, and some contact with Yahoo.
Posted by erik at 05:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 13, 2006
A Digital Maginot Line?
Boy, this is some great idea.
I suppose the Newspapers will repose in the same sort of security as that provided by The Maginot Line circa 1940, as I'm sure what they see as Google and Yahoo invasions will quickly find a very similar walk-around to the Scheer Plan, not to be confused with the Schlieffen Plan, the former recently uncovered by Just an Online Minute:
THE CALIFORNIA FIRST AMENDMENT COALITION has a plan to save newspapers from the perceived threat of Google, Yahoo and other portals. Newspapers should withhold their content from all but paying subscribers for at least 24 hours, proposes Peter Scheer, a lawyer, journalist and executive director of the nonprofit. "A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals--Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN--with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from 'mainstream' media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap," he wrote in a column in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle.
Yikes. With Executive Directors like that, who needs enemies?
Posted by john at 05:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 10, 2006
The MySpace Factor
Over the years, I've had the pleasure of speaking with quite a few Marketing Managers about different techniques they use to promote products, services, etc. Most of their marketing tactics are standard ones like SEO/Link Building, PPC, offline & online publicity, email marketing, etc, but some of their other techniques I found to be quite odd, yet intriguing.
For the past year or so, the one marketing trend I find to be interesting is the usage of MySpace as a marketing avenue. I really don’t have any hard evidence of MySpace being a great way of grass roots targeting online, but would certainly relish the opportunity to hear from our faithful Speedwagon readers about any success stories from leveraging a MySpace account for augmenting marketing efforts online.
From what little I know about the MySpace realm, it seems like it might be a good tool for some industries, but certainly not all. A “good fit� example would be a music artist looking to make headway in the music industry, find new fans, and perhaps sell a few CD’s along the way.
Other than aspiring musicians & maybe comedians potentially benefiting from the vast exposure on MySpace, I really don’t see any other industries that could benefit from having their own “space�.
On a SEO note, I really don’t see any SEO-related value from having an account with MySpace, but can only assume that link popularity may be credited from having one with anchored phrases? Link Juice coming from having an account is VERY doubtful IMO, but I love being wrong sometimes.
Please chime in with some MySpace stories of your own. I’d love to be educated on verticals that have successfully launched an effective MySpace campaign.
P.S. – Don’t get sucked in the MySpace black hole! I’ve lost friends and family in the MySpace abyss and don’t know if I can handle losing anyone else.
Happy Friday!
Posted by sean at 09:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 09, 2006
Can You Place a Value on Macaca?
We have discussed macaca before, concluding that its value, or more precisely, that of a Racial Slur Pointed Directly into a Camera is priceless. Does it make sense to say that something has become even more priceless?
Certain people might tell you different things about the value of macaca. George Allen might tell you about 16 points and a presidential bid. Jim Webb might tell you about millions of dollars in campaign funding. Still, those values seemed foreseeable as soon as macaca drew national exposure. Its greatest value was not so foreseeable prior to Tuesday night, and will not be fully realized until today when George Allen concedes.
Can you place a value on a word that ultimately decides who controls Senate? I think we’re still in the priceless realm, just more so. And can you place a value on the Jim Webb 2.0 Committee, those brilliant souls who used YouTube and Wikipedia to draw national exposure to macaca? Knowing what we know now, we should probably throw a priceless tag on them, as well.
Posted by tom at 01:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 07, 2006
I Love Alt-Q (Thunderbird QuickFile)
Do you use Thunderbird for email management? If Yes, this is post is just for you.
Since my back is officially “outa whack�, over the weekend, I spent some time on the couch catching up on some of my favorite blogs. While perusing through Lifehacker, I found a “Download of the Day� called QuickFile for Thunderbird.
When you mix a “sorting freak� like me with hundreds of incoming daily emails, you get a complex and elaborate set of folders and an always-bloated In Box. Even with a long list of filters, my In Box remains difficult to manage as many emails that come in simply don’t apply to my filtering rules.
Each Friday afternoon my PDA chimes, reminding me to clean out my In-Box. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
So, I would guess 30 to 40 times a day, I have to manually find the correct folder, then drag emails from my In Box to the folder where they belong. I can’t stop doing this. The sorting freak must sort. Emails belong where they belong.
And this is why I am now officially am in love with Alt-Q.
The QuickFile extension allows you to press Alt-Q, enter a few characters in the folder name, and select the destination folder from a beautiful dropdown menu.
Life changing? I like to think so.
Posted by doug at 06:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 06, 2006
An Update on Yahoo Sitemaps Optimization
Reaction to my recent post on optimizing Yahoo sitemaps has been mixed, ranging from "that's amazing" to "you're crazy and your testing methods are shoddy - that will never work!" (thanks for writing, Mom). So I'm trying to take an honest look at the actual probability that Yahoo is able to pull (and subsequently index) URLs found in a Google-style sitemaps file.
The original site I referred to in the post is still showing signs of increased indexing from Yahoo, and the sitemap file I've told Yahoo to use is the same sitemap.xml that I created for Google.
This alone, obviously, does not prove that Yahoo is pulling URLs from the sitemap.xml file. In addition, there are a few other reasons to be skeptical:
- About a month ago, in the YSE forum, the Yahoo rep ("Mr. Slurp") said flat-out, "we currently do not support Google's sitemaps protocol."
But does that mean that Yahoo can't even open the file, or merely that it doesn't recognize and work with the various tags within the file, such as <.lastmod>, <.changefreq>, <.priority>, etc.?
- Following on that point, on the feed submission page, Yahoo says "For any URL (directly submitted or obtained from a feed) our crawler will extract links and find pages we have not discovered already. We will automatically detect updates on pages and remove dead links on an ongoing basis."
So should this statement not apply to URLs such as www.site.com/sitemap.xml?
- When I submitted the sitemap file to Yahoo, it was "processed" within an hour of uploading and gave no indication of error or incompatibility.
But why should I expect such an error message? Sometimes all you get is an error if the page throws a 404, but little more.
I am currently running some tests that should prove definitively whether Yahoo can (and will) extract URLs from an xml sitemap. It could take a few weeks, but I'll certainly share my results here.
Posted by erik at 11:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 03, 2006
Does Content Match Work?
disclaimer 1: I am going to be blunt {“…Abrupt in address; plain; unceremonious…�}
disclaimer 2: This post is not intended to offend, just ask some questions and hope for honest answers
You may know it as Contextual Advertising (Google), or Content Match (Yahoo). Unfortunately for me it has only been synonymous with the age old practice of flushing money down the toilet.
In almost every PPC campaign I’ve had the pleasure of working on this has become an issue that sooner or later must be addressed. And in every campaign that it comes up in the issue seems to be one of relevance, how ironic.
I can definitely attest to the fact that content match generates impressions and clicks. However I have yet to see it produce more relevant clicks than non-content match clicks. Back to being blunt, in other words it can whip up a ton of numbers – especially the kind that cost you money – but I have yet to see it meet the core goal of relevancy.
To take it a step further, every article I read about click fraud seems to describe, if not outright mention contextual matching being used in “Ad Farms� (surprisingly Wikipedia turned up no definition of this term – check this blog post to get a definition if you need one.) This reminds me of a wise saying...."If it smells bad it probably is." Words to live by indeed.
Now I realize that I haven’t seen or done everything so I’m sure there must be some contextual success stories out there. I would love to hear from you and hear your experience with contextual matching. Please remember this is ultimately an exercise to make everything better, but it does feel good to vent sometimes too so let’s hear it.
Posted by brent at 10:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 01, 2006
Search Engine Friendly Pull-Down Navigation Menu
One of the issues I run across frequently is site navigation that is not easily crawled by the search engines. One of the mistakes made by developers is using pull-down menu’s that don’t include the href tags within the page html. Depending on the pull-down script, these href’s/url’s are usually hidden away in an external file and out of sight to the search engines.
It’s been my experience that sites using non-href pull-down navigation exclusively have a hard time being crawled and fully indexed.
There are options:
1. Change applications. Use a pull-down script that does include href’s within the page HTML. With today’s web development technologies, a pull down script utilizing href’s within page code may be a tough find but well worth the effort. DHTML opens up many opportunities when it comes to this issue and some further research will provide you with some options.
2. Provide alternatives. If you must use a pull-down script that excludes the href’s then try providing the search engines some crawling alternatives. Use a footer with text links to your pages, use image links or an image map. As well as any other method of posting your links in a more search engine friendly format.
3. Site map. In addition to the options listed above. Make a site map using basic href text links.
Bottom line: Don’t use a pull-down script that does not post the href tags within the page html as your only form of site navigation.
Posted by james at 03:35 PM | Comments (1)