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Excerpt: Normally, as SEO’s we try to concentrate on getting the search engines crawl and index as much of the site as possible. However, occasionally there might be reasons why you would want to remove content from search engines. For example, if spammers have infiltrated your site and put links to their sites. There are a number of ways in which you can tell the search engine what to do. .htaccess – password protect the content you really don’t want search engines to index. (you have to do this before they index the content.) This is a strong method of protecting the content…

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Excerpt: Following on from the revelations that nofollow will  no longer work for sculpting PageRank, there is a post on Matt Cutts’ blog explaining the issue. It is not the information that it will no longer work that is surprising, more the revelation that it has been this way for more than a year! ….when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank…

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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: How far could you take on-page SEO? There are believed to be around 200 factors that are taken into account by Google’s search algorithm in ranking a page. Many of these are likely to be connected with off-page factors such as the link profile, domain diversity, quality scoring as well as PageRank. On page SEO factors are generally not as important but even the smallest factor has the potential to have some effect for some queries. It is also important to realise that many of these factors can be used improperly or excessively, causing problems or penalty filtering.  There can…

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Excerpt: An interesting interview between Eric Enge and Matt Cutts sheds light on the distinction between the NoIndex, NoFollow and Robots.txt. These are the staples when trying to sculpt PageRank,  so that it accrues only to your most important pages or avoiding excessive duplicate content. The interview transcript reveals lots of useful information but it is helpful to summarise that information which I have done below: Passes PR? Links Crawled? Page Indexed? NoIndex Y Y N NoFollow N N Y Robots.txt Y N URL returned only The noindex and nofollow attributes can be combined. To complicate matters further, the attributes can be used in different ways. Either: a) as part of the link, for example: <a rel=”nofollow, noindex”…