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An Interesting Article on the Supplemental Index

Click our post title to read this interesting article on how to keep your blog out of Google’s Supplemental Index. The writer offers an interesting tip on how to update your .htaccess file to turn all URLs into www’s. However you can only consider doing this if you are using FTP blogging on many different platforms. If your blog is hosted at Blogspot, you don’t have access to the server.

 

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Yahoo Devalues Publisher Content Clicks

I have a love hate relationship with the content networks on the various pay per click vehicles. I love content for helping to establish a new brand or give company identity. But I hate to pay a lot for clicks in content because they typically do not convert at a high rate.

So it is good news for me that Yahoo Sponsored Search has decided to change the way that it prices clicks in content. Now Yahoo will assign a value to a website for content clicks based on conversion rates. This may actually end up giving content a good name, well eventually.

What Yahoo has done has assigned a cost per click value to content on a site by site basis. This is bad news for Yahoo Publishers, but good news for advertisers. Why pay the same amount per click in content for JoeBlow.com versus WebMD.com?

Over time this may change the way that I personally feel about enabling content in a program, but for now, I consider it good news, but I am not ready to turn content on again just yet.

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Blog From Microsoft Word in Office 2007

Blogger had originally released a download for this in 2005, but just couldn’t get it to work. Now Office 2007 is supposed to let you be able to do that. I do not have Office 2007, but will soon and will let you know after I take it for a whirl.

I don’t typically use Word to compose my blogs, but some do. I prefer the Blogger control panel, but I do know of clients and our own ghost blogger who would really prefer to blog in Word.

Currently if you write your blog in Word and then try to paste it into the Blogger interface, you get funny characters, spacing problems, and headaches that you have to correct in the HTML of the post.

It will be interesting to see if this new Office 2007 add on will solve those problems.

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Google Releases New Webmaster Guidelines

Click our post title to see a clickable list of the new items that Google has release today in its Webmaster Guidelines section.

Of note it the mention of WebPosition Gold. Using this product now violates Google’s terms of service. Google has also really spelled out details for duplicate content, affiliates sites, printer friendly page versions, loading keywords in link title tags and image alt tags, and many other important issues. If you are in the business, you really need to take a few seconds and make sure that you are up-to-date.

One thing that I would like to point out that I am seeing that clearly Google will be looking for is the use of false anchor tags in text. The use of this technique may get your site banned from Google as it really falls into the category of hidden text. In several cases on sites that I webmaster that have been optimized by other firms this is a technique that is used. The anchor goes no where, but allow keyword stuffing in the source code. Another trick that I have seen that is sure to give you problems is to include in html comments bogus links to websites that the domain contains your keywords, and I don’t mean one link or two, I mean like 50 links in one commented section.

Be careful, make sure that your site is being webmastered by a reputable firm to assure that this tricks that Google has clearly identified and is targeting for dropping from their index is not being used on your website.