Yahoo has finally wised up and implemented support for a new Meta robots tag that will allow you to “opt-out” from having your Yahoo! Directory title and description show up in the search results.

The tag is called “NOYDIR” or No Yahoo Directory, and can be used as follows:

meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR”

or the less common

meta name=”slurp” content=”NOYDIR”

The 2nd tag being specifically for Yahoo’s spider “Slurp“.

This is great news for site owners who feel like they’ve been handcuffed by the Yahoo! Directory editors and their minimally optimized directory listings.

It’s really nice to see that Microsoft isn’t the only company out there getting slammed for security flaws in their software and the Internet Explorer browser.  With a rise in popularity and use, Firefox is starting to feel the heat as well.

Several security researchers have been finding bugs and posting them on the internet - and then sending them to Mozilla’s staff.  The process of publishing the results to the general public before disclosing them to Mozilla developers is troubling for the VP’s at Mozilla, but good for everyone else.  If the problems don’t get exposed, we’d likely never hear about them.

Here’s more on the Firefox security flaws

If only Apple’s computers could become more widely used, researchers could poke holes in their software too.

Site Reference has a good article about “Optimizing for MSN: Is it worth the effort?”.  In short, yes it’s worth it.

While there’s no argument about the higher quality of results that Google provides, MSN is still a valuable search engine when it comes to getting visitors that are going to purchase something from you or fill out your lead form.

The article makes a few points about what makes MSN’s results different from Google’s:

What about MSN? In this case, things tend to be a little smoother. MSN seems to really like new pages, and it has no sandbox. It doesn’t use an “age filter” and classifies sites much faster. Therefore, it is highly probable that the amount of results that a Web user might get for a given search to be significantly higher than the one obtained from Google. Also, it appears that the search speed is higher with MSN than with Google. This may be because their index is considerably smaller than Google’s.

The biggest difference between the two engines is obviously the sandbox effect and the fact that MSN’s Live Search tends to rank newer or recently updated pages more favorably. Not to mention they pick up your incoming links a lot quicker and calculate the link weight in their algorithm much faster.

Ok, so that doesn’t explain the issue of getting visitors to buy from you or to contact you for services.  They go on to detail that the conversion rates for MSN are much higher than from Google. It’s believed that Google users are more prone to looking at many sites very quickly, while MSN users are likely to stay and complete a desired action for you.

Reports show that Google is already a saturated search engine. Its users see so many websites that they don’t have the patience to spend much time on any given site, but still want to visit others as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it appears that MSN users are more likely to produce conversions (sales). This probability is 48% higher for MSN users than for any other Internet users.

Based on this information, optimizing for MSN is very important to any business.  Unfortunately, the same optimization strategies that you use for Google or Yahoo may not help you in MSN. 

Here are some of the key strategies to improving your MSN rankings:

• Create a large site, full of valuable, well organized, and resourceful content.
• MSN is a little more vulnerable to higher keyword density; be careful about increasing yours, however, because Google is adept at identifying spam (& possibly applying a penalty).
• MSN is more vulnerable to quantity (spamming) than the other engines, since they tend to count new pages & links more quickly. This is a pretty easy concept - add a lot of links, move up in MSN.
• Ensure you site is clean, coding-wise.
• Have a well optimized Title tag

While it might seem like a good idea to start doing all these things to optimize your site for MSN, keep in mind that some of these strategies could get you in trouble in the others (Google & Yahoo).

Additional resources on MSN optimization:
http://www.seochat.com/c/b/MSN-Optimization-Help/
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4691
http://ezinearticles.com/?MSN-Optimization-at-a-Glance&id=142141
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum97/240.htm

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz.org interviewed Google Webmaster Tools Product Manager Vanessa Fox for WebProNews.com. Among the topics: Google Sitemaps, Google PageRank, Duplicate Content and Text-to-Code Ratios. (Can’t get video in iFrame to work, but you can watch the video here)

Google PageRank In general Vanessa Fox adivsed users not to focus to much on the PageRank from the Google Toolbar.  It’s not updated as frequently as other PageRank scores that are assigned to your site, nor is it the most accurate source of data.

Continue Reading »

It appears that Microsoft has decided to shut the door on their Submit It! services, including their bCentral Directory listings.  The website has a notice stating that “as of November 15th” they’ll no longer be offering the services for new customers.  Read the full discussion on WebmasterWorld here.

Existing customers can continue using the service, but can’t purchase any additional directory listings or submissions.

For those not in the know… the bCentral Directory was one of the easiest & cheapest places to purchase relevant keyword text links.  For $49 per year, you could add up to 9 keyword rich text links in your directory listing, as well as a e-business card and page summarizing your products/services.

Unless they’re coming out with a similar product in the very near future, I’d have to say this is a poor decision on MSN’s part.  Ok, maybe I’m just upset because they shutdown a very good SEO tool, but making $50/yr per site for doing basically nothing seems like a good business model…  Leave it to Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot.

The top three search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) announced last week that they’re all in support of a “sitemap” protocol/standard for websites.  This news should make most webmasters relax a little bit since they now only need to create a single sitemap file to appease all three engines, versus the complicated ways to do it before (multiple sitemap files).

The sitemap should be created as “sitemap.xml” and placed in the site’s root directory.

MorePro Marketing, Inc. can help you create a valid sitemap for your website and submit it to the various engines on your behalf.  If you’re interested in this service, please use the contact form on our website.

One of the key points made at least week’s PubCon conference in Las Vegas is that product feeds from manufacturers are considered duplicate content by most search engines.  If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense… if you have hundreds and thousands of e-commerce sites out there marketing their products with the original manufacturer’s product description and details, then you have hundreds & thousands of sites with the exact same product page (minus their own site template, etc.).

Why would the search engines want to show hundreds of pages of the exact same result?  Answer… They don’t want to.  They are going to pick one page from you or your competitor’s websites and display the results on a very limited basis; you won’t see the first 10 results in Google showing the exact same product description, etc.

I queried a snippet from a watch description of a popular online retailer in Google and got the following results:

Query: “14-karat gold case and bracelet. Cabochon crown”
Results: 87 pages with the exact phrase on them.

The solution: if you’re an online retailer serious about driving organic search traffic to your website, you better make sure that your content is unique and that you’ve “added value” to the manufacturer descriptions you’re using.  You can still use everything the manufacturer provides, but you should enrich EVERY PRODUCT with quality keyword phrases and also add your own descriptions and comments about the products.  Start with your top-selling products or your highest profit items and work your way down from there.

Ideas for adding value to your store’s content & descriptions:

• Custom write a description of each product and/or provide insight if you’re an expert.
• Provide “add your comments” or “review this product” type facilities for visitors to dynamically add the content for you (see Amazon.com product pages).

Overall, you just need to make sure you’re adding valuable, unique content to your pages in order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.  Remember, if you and all your competitors are using the exact same thing, only one of you is going to be seen!  Be sure to differentiate.

A member over on Cre8asite Forums started a topic suggesting that Link Baiting was ruining the web.

At first glance, the content seems informational, educational, or perhaps it’s just entertaining. However, that’s usually not the case: the content was only created to cause a temporary stir, a short sensation, a short-term mass of links, a short-term rise in popularity; perhaps in the hope of building a medium- or long-term reputation.

I don’t think it works that way, however. A “bubble-gum” content - nice, juicy, makes big bubbles: but stale after an hour. Boring. Lots of stale bubble-gum is just that: stale bubble gum. Lots of short term sensationalism / link-bait is the same: fresh for the moment, stale before your coffee gets cold. The only reputation that is built up is for providing stale bubble-gum. Looking at a website like that, you see a few fresh pieces, but 99% is old, out of date, out of fashion. Do you really want to be caught keeping old link-bait online?

Link baiting is one of the hottest methods for SEO companies and bloggers to increase their marketshare and their incoming link popularity.  All you need is a story or idea that people agree with and want to link to, or that they disagree with and make a big stink about it (gaining exposure for the original poster).

The comments in the forum post suggest that most link bait becomes stale pretty quickly, but I think it really depends on what the topic is and how useful the topic is to each reader.  For some folks, the information will become stale very quickly, but for others the topic could live on for several days/weeks/months or even years if it’s applicable to them or their business and it’s provides a benefit/value to them.