Are you being outranked by you? Is "your" content showing up in searches, but on sites that aren't yours? Do you have multiple websites that compete against each other? Well this discussion on duplicate content from external sources should be right up your alley.

Earlier in the week, I started our discussion on duplicate content by trying to lay to rest the idea of a duplicate content penalty. Now we pick up that discussion with one aspect of duplicate content . . . content duplication from other sites.

While I'd love to start out our discussion with the idea … Read more

Several weeks ago at SMX West I had the pleasure of meeting and having lunch with Brian White from Google. White works on Matt Cutts' Web spam team, tirelessly working to make Google's search results the best they can be, ensuring the best user experience. Quite a hefty task indeed.

You'd think that someone who spends his days fighting the never-ending battle that is Web spam might be a bit negative or jaded. If that is the case, he does an amazing job hiding it. Instead, he was upbeat and you could feel the excitement in his voice as he spoke. Here's a guy who loves what he's doing and truly wants to not only improve the searchers' experience on Google, but wants to make the Web a better place. You can't help but like a guy who's fighting the good fight.… Read more

Google's new teleportation, its search-within-search function, is getting mixed responses, at least from some site owners, who may be remembering occasions when teleportation in the Star Trek transporter went wrong. Earlier in the month, Google introduced the teleportation functionality as a way to better help searchers find information within a site by providing a search box below the snippet of the top listing, which performs a "site:" search on the domain of that listing using the additional search terms the searcher added in.

The "site:" advanced query is quite familiar to those within the search … Read more

At Netconcepts, we often work with clients who have portfolios of domains. Some of these may be domains from other businesses or sites that have been acquired that are no longer active, while others are typo and brand protection names, and still others may be used for marketing purposes. These portfolios can range from a handful to hundreds or even thousands.

When kicking off work with a new client, one of the things we look at is their portfolio to see which domains are in use, what other sites they have, and which domains are parked or have redirects in … Read more

Over the past year, there has been a lot of talk about the best way to handle Flash on your site. I previously covered quite a few aspects about this heavily-debated topic in Flash Alternatives Blessed by Google and in Progressive Enhancement is Good for SEO. In my previous interview with Maile Ohye, Google's support engineer I had asked her about Google's view on Flash. Maile confirmed that Google looks at the content within "noscript" tags, but she advised to be careful to mirror accurately the Flash-based content you include within the noscript tags or it … Read more

MSN's Live Search team announced back on August 22 that they would be launching a set of tools for Webmasters. At that time, this was strictly a private, by invitation beta. Even then, Webmasters and SEO practitioners alike were excited and hopeful as one of the much awaited features was the ability to pull up backlink information. MSN had previously turned off the special "link" and "linkdomain" query operators that provided a count of links pointing to a page or entire site, respectively.

The Live Search team is really trying to give everyone something to be thankful for. Karen Blakeman reported in October that Microsoft had restored the link and linkdomain queries, though with the slight modification of leading them off with a "+" sign, like: +linkdomain:www.cnet.com

With apparently no official announcement from Microsoft, news of this seems to have just now picked up notice after Barry Schwartz reported it on Search Engine Land.

And now the Live Search team has… Read more

Search engine optimization is one of those ongoing tasks. SEO only has two directions...forward or backward, and the day you stop paying attention to SEO is the day you start moving backwards.

If you are one of the so-called little guys, you may feel overwhelmed with how you can ever compete against the big guys. Well good news, as you'll see, even some of the big guys miss the mark on some of the most basic concepts.

Canonicalization

Simply put, in regards to SEO, we might describe "canonicalization" as identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source. … Read more

The dreaded "404 File Not Found" error page is one of the great frustrations of the online world. No doubt that it must be a close relative of the "no longer in service" recording for phone numbers.

While they are important for visitors already on your site, they are even more important to visitors coming in from other sites or search engines. These visitors may be entirely new to your site and haven't really "invested" in your site yet or realize what a great site you have. Without a good 404 page, the … Read more

Oftentimes, SEO is much easier to accomplish within a small company. It's hard to be nimble when working at a behemoth.

When I talk about items like title tags, URL structures, meta descriptions and canonical URLs, it sounds all quite logical and seems prudent to implement, doesn't it? Well imagine, what it must take for a company like IBM--whose myriad divisions and business units span 90 countries and over 30 languages--to make even the slightest SEO enhancement.

It's a big deal.

To find out more about what it's like to chip away at SEO (search engine … Read more