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Excerpt: Important news from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web Spam, who said at a question and answer session at SMX Advanced conference yesterday that PageRank sculpting was no longer an effective technique. For those that are unfamiliar with the term, PageRank sculpting is the process of using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on your least important page links, such as the terms and conditions, privacy policy and registration pages. These pages have a purpose when the visitor is at the site but they unlikely to be the reason a visitor come to the site. Using the nofollow attribute on the links to these…

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Excerpt: The three major search engines: Live, Yahoo and Google have agreed to adopt a new standard to highlight URLs that contain duplicate content. Duplicate content issues often occur when the same pages of content is accessed can be reached by multiple URLs or session IDs, particularly common in e-commerce sites, for example, where the same product might exist in different categories. There was always a concern that this could result in duplicate content penalties. The new attribute value is ‘canonical’ is used with the rel attribute in the links tag. It specifies the location of the page that this is a…

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Excerpt: When we type a query into a search engine such as Google, how many of us think about what goes on behind the scenes? Any SEO specialist ought to have a basic understanding of how your query gets transformed into a list of results. In the early days of the web, a search engine consisted of a list of a few thousand sites. There were so few websites that it was enough just to list pages of all the sites found by a simple crawler. With the explosion in the number of websites after 1994, the task of indexing the web…

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Excerpt: If you have been signed into your Google account you will notice that there are some strange graphics that appear alongside the search results.

[/caption] These are what Google calls the SearchWiki and it give users the power to personalise their search results either by promoting chosen results and hiding and removing others. Using content can be given more prominence in the SERPs by clicking on the arrow. Results can even be flagged is irrelevant and removed from the search results. Such interaction with the search results could prove useful if you believe the…

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Excerpt: Google Sandbox While there is no universal definition of what the Sandbox is. Most people believe it to be a mechanism which works on the domain level and affects sites with new domains. It is designed to prevent spam websites, on the basis that scammers and spammers will set up a site quickly and exploit it until it is banned and then move on to the next website. Whereas legitimate websites that are here for the duration will tough it out through the lean period and still be around in a year or two. The effect of the sandbox is to filter…