Does the physical location matter at all? With the introduction of the hreflang attribute we decided to check how it works in practice for different language and location settings. We tested the three following factors for two different languages (en/pl) and two locations (GB/PL): Physical location of the searcher (UK vs PL) Country specific Google [...]
We have just spotted today that Google started displaying a message instead of an empty description. This happens when you disallow a page in robots.txt preventing Google from indexing the content of a page and therefore the description as well. The message looks like this: The “learn more” link points to: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 It is [...]
Last year Google added support for canonical tags in HTTP headers. You can view the headers which are normally invisible by using a HTTP viewing tool such as Rex Swain, Web Sniffer or a local application like Fiddler. HTTP/1.1·200·OK Date:·Tue,·24·Jul·2012·20:23:29·GMT Server:·Apache/2.2.16·(Unix)·mod_ssl/2.2.16·OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5·DAV/2·mod_auth_passthrough/2.1·mod_bwlimited/1.4·FrontPage/5.0.2.2635·mod_perl/2.0.4·Perl/v5.8.8(CR)(LF) X-Powered-By:·PHP/5.2.9 Vary:·Cookie Link: <http://blog.semetrical.com/>; rel=”canonical” X-Pingback:·http://blog.semetrical.com/xmlrpc.php WP-Super-Cache:·Served·legacy·cache·file Connection:·close Transfer-Encoding:·chunked Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=UTF-8 As with normal canonical tag [...]
— DESCRIPTION: Each user starts the journey from being a new visitor to a website. New visits are attracted by either brand or non-brand campaigns resulting in “new non-brand” or “new brand” visits. The goal is to convert new visitors into ideally “registered brand” users. Users of different type should be a subject of customised messaging [...]
Update: Google has confirmed the behaviour and provided detailed documentation. The original Robots.txt syntax was pretty straightforward. You could only use the Disallow directive to exclude pages and each Disallow directive acted like a broad match at the end. This seemed pretty intuitive to most people and for a while the world was a a [...]
Google engineer Greg Grothaus clarified a number of issues around duplicate content in a video posted on the Webmaster Central blog. He confirmed that there is no direct penalty as a result of duplicate content as in most cases it is accidental. However, they can still have an indirect negative effect on your SEO performance [...]
We selected WordPress to power our blog as it’s a fantastic platform that you can configure to your SEO heart’s content. The standard installation needs a few plugins and tweeks to make the most of it so here is our essential WordPress checklist. Domain, Subdomain or Subfolder This is always a tricky choice to make but [...]