marți, 13 septembrie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


How Do I Get Google's Bulleted Snippets?

Posted: 12 Sep 2011 12:13 PM PDT

Posted by Dr. Pete

It can be hard to keep up with all of Google’s updates recently, but around the end of last month, you may have started seeing search results that look something like this:

Bulleted Snippet Example - Bullets

See what I did there – it’s a bulleted snippet about bullets. See? SEE? Never mind.

Google formally started rolling out this format around August 26th, and we’ve already started hearing the obvious question – how do I get those? First, the official word from Google:

If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we’ll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format. The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page (for example, “30+ items”).

The key point – this is being generated by Google from your existing on-page lists. It's not a microformat or a tag you can simply add to your page. Google gives the examples of tables and bulleted lists (let’s assume they mean <ul></ul>), but that’s about all we’ve got to go on. So, I thought it would be interesting to explore some examples in the wild.

Example 1 – Basic Bulleted List

Let’s start with your basic bulleted (unordered) list – here’s an example from DMOZ:

Bulleted Snippet Example - DMOZ

The list on the page itself is pretty standard:

DMOZ List Example

What’s interesting is that Google skips an entire screen of other lists, including categories and languages, suggesting that they have some idea that this list is unique to the page it’s on.

Example 2 – CSS-styled Bulleted List

Of course, modern day lists tend to get a bit more complicated than that, and the unordered list tag (<ul>) is often used for more complex CSS-styling. Here’s an example search result from Dell:

Bulleted Snippet Example - Dell

The bulleted list on this page looks much different:

Dell List Example

While the code is fairly clean, this is clearly a much more complex structure for Google to parse. It’s also (like the first example), not the first list on the screen.

Example 3 – Separate Bulleted Lists

Here’s an example from MetroKitchen.com (thank to Bobby Kircher for pointing it out):

Bulleted Snippet Example - Metro Kitchen

This is another example of unordered lists for CSS-styling, and on the surface, it doesn’t look that different from the Dell example:

MetroKitchen Product List Example

If you dig into the code, though, you’ll see that each item is its own unordered list (<ul>), not just a list element (<li>). Google has still managed to connect these separate lists as one, big list.

Example 4 – HTML Tables

Shout out to Jill Whalen for pointing out this one – she’s got a bulleted search result based on good, old-fashioned tables:

Bulleted Snippet Example - High Rankings

Each entry on the page is a standard table row (<tr>):

High Rankings List Example

So, we’ve got various incarnations of unordered lists and standard HTML tables triggering bulleted search results. How about more complicated CSS?

Example 5 – Nested DIVs

Here’s an example from SEOmoz - the YOUmoz home-page:

Bulleted Snippet Example - SEOmoz

Visually, it could easily be a CSS-styled unordered list:

YOUmoz List Example

If you dig into the source code, though, you’ll see a more complex structure of nested DIVs. The individual entries use a sizable amount of code (for complex styling), but again, Google seems to be parsing our list results appropriately.

So, Why Don’t I Have Them?

At this point, it seems like Google can turn just about anything into a bulleted list, and yet they often aren’t. Even here on SEOmoz, the YOUmoz page has a bulleted snippet, but the main blog page, with more authority and the same structure, doesn’t.

Part of the problem is that they’re new, and Google is still working out the kinks. If you want to encourage Google, though, here are a few tips:

  • Use a consistent structure, whatever it is.
  • Keep extraneous code to a minimum.
  • Test removing your META description or setting it to “”.

Proceed with caution on the last one, as you’re handing control over to Google. Removing your META description is generally safer, though, than using the same description over and over.

If you’re not sure what makes for a clean structure, browse SERPs in your industry – you’ll find plenty of examples, even though the feature is fairly new. See what kind of code Google is already “rewarding” (if you think it’s a good thing), and make life as easy as possible for the spiders.

Update: I want to clarify something on removing your META description. That should only be done as a limited test (say, a couple of pages). The META description is a de-duplication cue, and removing it will put your snippet even more under Google's control (although having one doesn't stop them). If your test is successful, you'll have more data to make an informed decision.


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You asked for it: Your copy of the American Jobs Act

The White House Tuesday, September 13, 2011
 

Yesterday, President Obama was joined by teachers, veterans, small business owners, construction workers and first responders as he sent the American Jobs Act to Congress and urged them to pass it right away.

This is a bill that will put people back to work all across the country. This is the bill that will help our economy in a moment of national crisis. This is a bill that is based on ideas from both Democrats and Republicans. And this is the bill that Congress needs to pass. No games. No politics. No delays. I’m sending this bill to Congress today, and they ought to pass it immediately.

Interested in reading the full American Jobs Act? You can find it on Whitehouse.gov.

Have questions?

Over the next few days there are a number of ways for you to ask questions and engage with Administration officials about the American Jobs Act including Open for Questions live panels and Twitter Office Hours.

Here are the details:

Open for Questions
On Wednesday and Thursday this week, White House officials will answer your questions, submitted through Whitehouse.gov, Facebook, and Twitter about the American Jobs Act live on Whitehouse.gov/live.

Submit your questions:

Tune in and watch on Whitehouse.gov/Live:

  • Wednesday, September 14th at 4:00 p.m. EDT: Answering your questions on how the American Jobs Act will impact young Americans are Brian Deese, Deputy Director, National Economic Council and Roberto Rodriguez, Special Assistant to the President for Education Policy.
  • Thursday, September 15th at 2 p.m. EDT: Join Jason Furman, Principal Director of the National Economic Council and Jon Carson, Director of the Office of Public Engagement.

White House Office Hours on Twitter
This week, we’re bringing back White House Office Hours, where White House officials answer your questions about the American jobs Act on Twitter.

Here's how it works and how you can participate:

  • Use the hashtag #WHChat on Twitter to ask your questions on President Obama’s speech and the American Jobs Act
  • Senior staff will respond to your questions during scheduled "Office Hours" in real-time via Twitter from the @WHLive account
  • Follow the whole Q&A session @WHLive, or just check out the highlights @WhiteHouse

Here's the schedule for this week:

  • TODAY: Tuesday, September 13th at 5:30 p.m. EDT: Office Hours with David Plouffe, Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor
  • Wednesday, September 14th at 4:30 p.m. EDT: Office Hours with Stephanie Cutter, Assistant to the President and Deputy Senior Advisor
  • Thursday, September 15th at 4:00 p.m. EDT: Office Hours with Jason Furman, Principal Deputy Director of the National Economic Council

Follow @WhiteHouse and @WHLive for the latest updates.

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How to Mask Affiliate Links Graywolf's SEO Blog

How to Mask Affiliate Links Graywolf's SEO Blog


How to Mask Affiliate Links

Posted: 13 Sep 2011 10:21 AM PDT

Post image for How to Mask Affiliate Links

How to mask affiliate links is one of the most common questions new affiliates often ask. In this post, we will take a look at the hows and whys of why you should mask affiliate links and how to do it effectively, with an eye towards maintaining long term low maintenance.

Should I Mask My Affiliate Links

This is one of the first questions people who start adding affiliate links have to deal with. As with most things in internet marketing, it depends. If the website is primarily a hobby website, not a money making or a business site, then the answer is no, you don’t need to mask affiliate links. However, what often happens is that people start with a hobby website, build nice traffic, and then look for ways to monetize it. I can’t tell you the number of hobby websites I’ve seen turn into $1,000 dollar a month sites. So, unless you are 100% positive it’s never going to turn into a money website, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Do it right and mask affiliate links right from the beginning.

Free Plugins to Mask Affiliate Links

If you are only going to be promoting a handful of affiliate products, or even less than 100, there’s no real need to use a premium product. There are plenty of free plugins like affiliate link cloaker, URL cloak & Encrypt, affiliate marketing tool. I’ve been a long time user of Go Codes. It has served me here without any issues or problems. Two recommendations,though: change the default directory to something other than “/go/” and block that directory from being crawled. This really is critical. The affiliate links are there for the users, not for the search engines. Until Googlebot gets its own American Express card, there’s no benefit to letting it crawl your affiliate links. In fact, the whole point of masking your affiliate links is to keep search engines from knowing what’s going on.

Premium Plugins to Mask or Hide Affiliate Links

If the primary goal of a website is to make money via affiliate links, then investing in a premium plugin is a smart investment. There are a few on the market like SEO Smart Links and Affiliate Link Cloaker Pro, but my favorite is Eclipse link cloaker (see Eclipse link cloaker review). A premium link cloaker has a lot of advantages such as:

  • Masking all outbound links
  • Working with datafeeds
  • Importing a large number of links
  • Direct naming of links
  • Google Analytics integration

Subdomain Affiliate Link Masking

If your website is primarily focused on selling one type of product (like travel bookings) and you work with an established merchant, you can often set up a branded subdomain. This is a little complicated, but basically you set up a CNAME entry for your subdomain to redirect from your website to the merchant. This does require someone with some technical expertise, which is beyond the scope of this post. Usually the merchant will give you instructions, like this document from IAN. The merchant usually lets you upload a stylesheet, header, and footer, so the website has your branding. Again, the specifics are beyond the scope of this post, but you can usually get help from the merchant. You need to make sure to block this subdomain from being crawled by the search engines. I can’t stress enough how important that is. Blocking it via robots.txt is better, but meta tags are an alternate solution. I recommend setting up a Google alert for indexed pages in the subdomain so you will know if Google does somehow find a way in.

Hybrid Solution

In some cases, you will want to mix approaches and use a hybrid solution. For example, I run a travel website with a booking engine on a subdomain. I then use Eclipse link cloaker to mask affiliate links for travel related products.

Dangers of Not Masking Affiliate Links

Letting Google see too many straight affiliate links is a dangerous game to play. Numerous quality rater documents have shown it to be something they are told to be on the lookout for, so it may work against you. Using JavaScript to mask links is also dangerous because Google is getting much better at crawling JavaScript, so it is not recommended. Using nofollow on straight affiliate links is much closer to a band-aid solution, so it is  not recommended as well.

What are the takeaways from this post:

  • Showing affiliate links to a search engine are of little benefit to you. Unless you do it sparingly, masking affiliate links isn’t a good idea.
  • If you will only have a few affiliate products, a free light-weight solution is fine.
  • If you are running a serious website in which affiliate marketing is a primary goal, invest in a premium link masking solution (I like Eclipse link cloaker review).
  • In some cases, a subdomain is a better solution. Be sure to keep search engines out via robots.txt or meta tags.
  • You can mix solutions, such as a subdomain and masked links.
  • The key here is to block the search engines from seeing/deciphering your intent and quality raters from easily detecting that links are affiliate links.

Disclaimer: If you purchase Eclipse link cloaker review from the links in this post, I do receive a commission; however, I use Eclipse link cloaker on this website and many others and am very comfortable recommending it.

photo credit: Photospin

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Related posts:

  1. How to Be Crafty and Mask Affiliate Links Fine since Matt started this whole thing on hiding links...
  2. Cloaking Affiliate Links, How and Why Today’s topic is one that gets asked about pretty regularly,...
  3. Can Google Detect an Affiliate Website One of the questions that often comes up is does...
  4. The Affiliate Marketing Newbie’s Guide To Finding Niches When I started out in internet marketing, I browsed around...
  5. Is This the 11th Hour for Thin Affiliate Sites While some people realized affiliate marketing has has slowly been...

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How to Mask Affiliate Links

"No games. No politics. No delays."

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
 

"No games. No politics. No delays."

Yesterday, President Obama was joined by teachers, veterans, small business owners, construction workers and first responders, as he sent the American Jobs Act to Congress and urged them to pass it right away.

This is a bill that will put people back to work all across the country. This is the bill that will help our economy in a moment of national crisis. This is a bill that is based on ideas from both Democrats and Republicans. And this is the bill that Congress needs to pass. No games. No politics. No delays. I’m sending this bill to Congress today, and they ought to pass it immediately.

David Plouffe, Senior Advisor to the President, will answer your questions about the American Jobs Act today at 5 p.m. EDT during White House "Office Hours" - use the hashtag #WHChat on Twitter to ask a question and follow along at @WHLive.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden greet participants in the Roosevelt Room of the White House before a statement on the American Jobs Act in the Rose Garden, Sept. 12, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Observing the Tenth Anniversary of September 11
President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden honor those who were lost in the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Open for Questions: Youth and the American Jobs Act
Join senior White House officials as they field your questions on how the American Jobs Act will impact young Americans on Wednesday, September 14th at 4:00 p.m. EDT.

Affordable Care Act in Action: Fewer Uninsured Young Adults in America
Today, a new report shows that the Affordable Care Act is working. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey released today, there was a significant increase in the number of 18-24 year olds with health insurance in the U.S. over the past year.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:30 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:00 AM: The President meets with senior advisors

10:15 AM: The Vice President meets with President Basescu of Romania in the Roosevelt Room

11:00 AM: The President and the Vice President meet with Secretary of State Clinton

11:45 AM: The President departs the White House en route Joint Base Andrews

12:00 PM: The President departs Joint Base Andrews en route Columbus, Ohio

1:15 PM: The President arrives in Columbus, Ohio

1:45 PM: The President tours a newly modernized graphic design classroom

2:15 PM: The President delivers remarks at Fort Hayes Arts and Academic High School WhiteHouse.gov/live

3:05 PM: The President departs Columbus, Ohio en route Joint Base Andrews

4:15 PM: The President arrives Joint Base Andrews

4:30 PM: The President arrives at the White House

4:30 PM: The President and the Vice President meet with Secretary of Defense Panetta

6:30 PM: The Vice President and Dr. Biden host a reception in honor of the 17th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

Get Updates

Sign up for the Daily Snapshot

Stay Connected

  

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SEOptimise

SEOptimise


5 Low Profile/New SEO Tools You Should be Using

Posted: 12 Sep 2011 06:13 AM PDT

If you have worked in SEO for any period of time, I'm sure you will be familiar with a number of the better known tools around, tools such as SEOmoz Pro Tools, Majestic SEO and the Google Keyword Tool. For a lot of SEOs and situations these tools can provide all the help you need, but there are a number of awesome low profile tools that can take SEO campaigns and agencies to the next level.

Tool: Linkdex
Use it for: Competitor analysis, back link analysis, on-page keyword analysis, rank checking…
Price: from $49

Linkdex is probably one of our favourite new tools in the SEOptimise office as it offers visual analysis of back link profiles as well as anchor text reports, rank checking and on-page keyword analysis (among a host of other things).

By far its most useful feature is the ability to analyse the type of links in your profile as well of those in your competitors’ profiles (powered by a quality filtered version of the Majestic SEO index), and it even has the capability to add a time dimension to the analysis. Basically, if you want to know why you're being outranked and what type of links to build to beat the competition, it's all laid out in bar chart form. That's a pretty epic tool to start with, right? Well in addition to this, if you click on any of the bars to see a list of the links (which you can sort by "influence"), you can then explore them and add them to your "to build" list. And finally, you can hit a tick box and see what links have been built recently, effectively giving you a sneaky peek at your competitors’ SEO efforts.

linkdex screenshot

It's still pretty new and there is some stuff that needs work, but it's still a great tool that gives you loads of actionable stuff and they are constantly updating it.

If you want a more detailed write up check out this Linkdex review from Sam Stratton at Koozai.

Tool: Scrapebox
Use it for: Keyword research
Price: $97

Those of you well versed in the dark arts of black hat SEO will know that there are plenty of more boundary-pushing tactics that Scrapebox can be used for. Any tool that contains the words "auto comment" and "the complete harvesting solution" in its sales patter, and (let's face it) has scrape in its name, is unlikely to be whiter than white, but it does have its white(ish) hat applications.

scrapebox screenshot*

A while ago Marty Weintraub wrote a really interesting post on radical keyword research which basically shows how the tool can be used to mine the suggest boxes of not only search engines but also sites like Amazon and YouTube. I won't cover it again, but combining it with other tools like WordTracker or the Google Keyword tool can result in some fantastic (and quick) keyword research.

I'm guessing I should add some kind of "use at your own peril" disclaimer here. I'm fairly sure that this is probably against the T&Cs of at least some of the sites it scrapes, in much the same way as tools like the SEOBooks Rank Checker technically could be and so I am in no way endorsing its use.

 

Tool: Workbooks CRM
Use it for: Conversion tracking, ROI and reporting
Price: Free

In the spirit of ethical blogging I should probably start by mentioning that Workbooks are one of our clients, but I didn't want that to preclude them from my list as they have an awesome new free tool for SEOs. Workbooks supply CRM software to businesses to help track their sales and marketing efforts and keep track of ROI.

While not specifically designed as an SEO tool, through the use of cookies and their software you can actually track exact ROI right down to the keyword level. While this may not sound anything new, we have actually found it a lot more accurate than tracking both SEO and PPC through Google Analytics and AdWords, as it not only allows for first touch attribution for sales but also better understanding of the quality of leads. It is particularly effective for sites where sales often aren't made instantly and the sales process can take months.

For example, a PPC ad for a specific term may get 100 clicks and then five of those convert by filling out a web form. This is the point at which Analytics and Adwords would stop tracking, so you'd work on a conversion rate of 5%. Workbooks would then take this forward and you may then find that three of those web forms weren't good quality enquiries, and that of the remaining two only one fully converted, so the actual conversion rate is 1%. Knowing the exact number of conversions and exact sales then allows you work out a proper ROI and even potential in the sales pipeline. All in all, it gives you some great insights into actual performance.

workbooks screenshot

Tool: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Use it for: Site crawling and analysis
Price: Free

These guys got their tool called ugly the other day in an SEOmoz post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-tools-that-rock) and I'm about to call it low profile (which it's probably not anymore), so they will probably end up with some kind of complex. But as far as spidering tools go this is definitely our favourite.

The main reason we love it is that it’s an awesome time-saving tool, and an easy one to use at that. No matter what the size of the site, all you have to do it whack in a URL and it goes off to spider it for you. Once it has worked its magic (depending on the size of the site and settings, it may take some time) you get some great reports out the other end.

screaming frog screenshot

In the office we use it for crawling client sites, grabbing all the meta data (and highlighting duplicates), <h> tags, canonical information, http status codes, in links and out links and various other useful bits and bobs. As a starting point for audits, to help make meta data recommendations or even just generating a list of all the URLs on a site, it's great.

 

Tool: WebPageTest
Use it for: Page speed analysis
Price: Free

The final tool in this mini box of tricks is webpagetest.org, which is a website speed testing tool which was originally developed for AOL. Given the global nature of SEO, it's a handy little tool as it lets you speed test your site from a number of different worldwide locations, using a number of different types of browsers.

Once again it is a tool where all you need to do is pop in the URL and it does the rest (after a little bit of queuing usually). Once the scan is completed you get access to some excellent information, including a waterfall view which allows you to see, resource by resource, how long it takes items to load. The beauty of this is that you can see the stuff that really slows your site down and it's really easy to spot 4xx and 3xx header codes which could be killing your page speed.

webpagetest screenshot
One of the most useful tools is the Full Optimisation Checklist, which gives you a whole list of possible areas that you can improve to make your site run quicker. Given the fact that page speed is a ranking factor (although only a minor one) it's great to see what could be holding your site back and where you can improve.

So that's my list of some of the more hidden gems of the SEO tool world (well in my opinion anyway). If you fancy suggesting any for me to add please suggest them in the comments in the bottom and I will check them out and, if they are good, add them.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, none of these are affiliate links.

 

*Image from the Scrapebox website.

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