http://www.socialblogroll.com/rss/ social blog roll http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/240883787/ Matt Cutts asks us How should Google handle NOINDEX? That’s a tough question worth thinking twice before you submit a comment to Matt’s post. Here is Matt’s question, all the background information you need, and my opinion. What is NOINDEX? Noindex is an indexer directive defined in the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) from 1996 for use in ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/227371395/ A while ago I’ve staged a public SEO contest, asking whether the 401 HTTP response code prevents from search engine indexing or not. Password protected site areas should be safe from indexing, because legit search engine crawlers do not submit user/password combos. Hence their try to fetch a password protected URL bounces with a 401 ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/240199379/ What was meant as a quick test of rel-nofollow once again (inspired by Michelle’s post stating that nofollow’ed comment author links result in rankings), turned out to some interesting observations: Google uses sneaky JavaScript links (that mask nofollow’ed static links) for discovery crawling, and indexes the link destinations despite there’s no hard coded link on any ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/225560390/ My somewhat sarcastic post “Avoiding the well known #4 penalty“, where I joked about a possible Google #6 filter and criticized the SEO/Webmaster community for invalid methods of dealing with SERP anomalies, reads like “Aaron Wall is a clueless douche-bag”. Of course that’s not true, I never thought that, and I apologize for damaging Aaron’s ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/237806974/ When search engine crawlers burn way too much of your bandwidth, this post is for you. Crawlers sent out by major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search) support conditional GETs, that means they don’t fetch your pages if those didn’t change since the last crawl. Of course they must fetch your stuff over and over ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/233961176/ Fabrice Canel from Live Search announces significant improvements of their crawler today. The very much appreciated changes are: HTTP compression The revised msnbot supports gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (sections 14.11 and 14.39). Microsoft also provides a tool to check your server’s compression / conditional GET support. (Bear in mind that most dynamic pages ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/230207840/ With some Web services URL canonicalization has a downside. What works great for major search engines like Google can fire back when a Web service like Yahoo thinks circumcising URLs is cool. Proper URL canonicalization might, for example, screw your blog’s reputation at Technorati. In fact the problem is not your URL canonicalization, e.g. 301 redirects ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/226820690/ I’ve added SezWho to the comment area. SezWho enables rating and filtering of comments, and shows you even comments an author has left on other blogs. Neat. Currently there are no ratings, so the existing comments are all rated 2.5 (quite good). Once you’ve rated a few comments, you can suppress all lower quality ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/323599369/ Long time no blogging … sorry folks. I’m swamped in a huge project that has nothing to do with SEO, and not much with webmastering at all. I’m dealing with complex backend systems and all my script outputs go to a closed user group, so I can’t even blog a new SEO finding or insight ...] http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SebastiansPamphlets/~3/242119819/ … you’ve boosted your business Web site’s rankings with shitloads of crappy links. The 11th SEO commandment: Don’t promote your white hat sites with black hat link building methods! It may work for a while, but once you find your butt in Google-jail, there’s no way out. Not even a reconsideration request can help because ...]