Obviously, as breadcrumbs are links by nature, they will help a lot with your internal linking. Yet, it’s important to know what other benefits your site will get from using breadcrumbs at each page of your site.

Eric Filter sent this using ShareThis.

Since the pilot Google has been busy perfecting the tool and it now deems it ready for public use.

The tool extracts data from two sets and ingrates it to bring more detailed reports.

For queries data you get number of impressions, clicks, organic position of keyword and click through rate (CTR) for the top 1,000 query phrases.

For landing pages you will also be able to see number of impressions and clicks, organic position of keywords and CTR for the top 1,000 landing pages.

This is a free tool which combines two sets of data from the two free programs that are highly recommended for data analysis. You can sign up to Google webmaster tool here and Analytics tool here. Combining the two is easy using Google instructions.

I have wondered many a times why I need to download both sets of data sepratly and and try to somehow reconcile searches keywords with impressions and organic rankings data. Now with this there is no need to mess about with excel spreadsheets with the the data in one place.

You will be able to see the success of your SEO efforts by seeing increasing or decreasing in average ranking position and relating it to visitor numbers. With Google Analytics in Webmaster tools an SEO services consultant will easily show their client change in visibility, impressions and clicks to justify their work and ROI given average margins for the product or service.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Examples of Other formats include the following

Disallow All crawlers

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Restrict folder

User-agent: *

Disallow: /private/

Restrict file to all robots

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

Some may wonder whether it is worth having a robots.txt file at all if you want to give search engine crawlers unrestricted access. Matt Cutts has answered in his weekly digest that it is useful to have the files even if it is to say disallow none.

As discussed in February, Google released its Panda algorithm update in the US which saw up to 12% of searches affected in rankings. The main negative affects were to do with sites commonly labeled content farms which lead to some calling it farmers update.
Although initially large sites with more pages but now include smaller sites as well, Google confirmed that they think the algorithm change had a positive impact in the US which is comprised of 50% of its market. They therefore felt confident to rollout the change to the rest of the world as part of its quality update to improve user experience.

Google’s proprietary algorithm uses various matrix to determine relevancy of a site for search queries. This includes the html text on the page, content subject and anchor texts of links from other sites and page load speed. However, big G has also introduced ways for searchers to block results which they deem irrelevant to their search. Although still on trial, this may lead to searchers feedback being a ranking factor in the future so if many people block a certain site it may drop in rankings.

Google has also reiterated opening up of their webmaster help forum for anyone who feels aggrieved, as discussed before, while not
promising any manual review.

A list of the sites immediately affected by Panda UK update can be seen in search metrics blog here.

•    Remove or improve poorly written content from all parts of the site

•    You can also update any material that is shallow with more depth.

•    You can block low quality or auto generated content through your robots.txt file or put it to another site or sub-domain.

•    Make sure your content is unique and adds value to what is already available online when adding content to any part of the site.

•    Try to get user generated content such as product reviews and customer feedback for ecommerce sights. Providing further product details in form of user reviews, videos and FAQ’s will also improve user experience which is part of stated remit of Google.

•    Link-out to other relevant sights to show you have genuine desire to educate your readers. For an ecommerce sight his could mean manufacturers website where the user can go to find more information.

•    Ensure web pages with a lot of graphics and video has adequate balance of html content

More details for ecommerce sights from further uk blog and webmaster radio.

However as well as hitting the intended internet spammers the massive update also hit a lot of innocent bystanders who have quality websites.

So what can you do if you feel you were innocently caught out in the spam fight crossfire? Well searchengineland confirm that it is not worth appealing to public opinion because Google has categorically stated this is an algorithmic change and not manual review. There is no white list or blacklist of favoured sites like in the case of Blekko so there is no need of feeling personally aggrieved.

Google admits mistakes can be made with any such change since no algorithm can produce 100% perfect results.

However Google is keen to learn of any casulties in a quest to perfect the algorithm so so it has put a thread in their forum for those who feel they were unfairly affected.

Sistrix crunched through a million search queries and compared them to before the update and came up with the following list of top losers.

A bigger list of affect sights is available at the following Google spreadsheet.

One of the major surprises for me was ezinearticles.com which is a favourite publishing platform for many SEO activists and has very strict human edited guidelines.

ezinearticles.com founder, Chris Knight, promises a major cleanup and making some drastic changes in his blog including removing low quality articles, incresaing rejection rate on some categories, increasing minimum word count to 400 and possible future universal nofollow tags.

Unique article wizard and its sister company uber articles claim they are one of the gainers with reported high increase in traffic.

Ehow.com was not only left unscathed but also experienced a traffic increase much to the surprise of many who claimed Google has effectively killed ehow’s competitors.

www.yoursite.com
yoursite.com/
www.yoursite.com./index.html
yoursite.com./index.html
…. And so on.

Other good examples of internal pages for an ecommerce site are where the product comes in some variation that may not be of immediate interest to surfers such as a different color or size. In this case you can point all variations such as yoursite.com/widget-blue/ to yoursite.com/widget/ as the preferred url to get indexed by the search engines. Once a searcher lands on the relevant page then they can make a choice of various colors, sizes etc.

In a most cases the issue would be fixed upstream by:

• Getting the CMS to always produce standard urls.
• Be consistent with your internal linking though you cannot always control how someone links to you externally.
• Redirect pages such to the preferred URL with a 301 redirect such that the other pages automatically serve up a standard page.
• For the homepage, you can also specify www or http: preference in Google Webmaster tools.  You can also submit one preferred URL to your sitemap which Google will take as your preferred URL.

However if you cannot fix the issue before publish with one of these options then one of the best options is to use a canonical tag element

<head>

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/preferred-url”>

</head>

You simply place the preferred url in a canonical link element within the head tags of the page. That is all for now, we shall explore more canonical issues in future posts.

Below is the video announcement by Matt Cutts announcing support of the canonical link element after SMX 2009.

The algorithm change, internally referred to as Panda, reportedly impacted about 12% of search results in the US alone was reported by Google’s chef engineer Matt Cutts. The news was picked up by several seo blogs such as searchengineland and state of search.

So what are content farms? Wikipedia defines a content farm as “a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content ….” which makes it all seem very harmless and useful to the internet in general. However, a new practice began to emerge whereby some sites would publish articles on expert topics with little substance or research with a sole aim to get to the top of search engines for genuine help queries.

The issue was picked up by the Blekko search engine banning a number of self help type of sites which they felt were of little to no use to searchers as follows:

ehow.com
experts-exchange.com
naymz.com
activehotels.com
robtex.com
encyclopedia.com
fixya.com
chacha.com
123people.com
download3k.com
petitionspot.com
thefreedictionary.com
networkedblogs.com
buzzillions.com
shopwiki.com
wowxos.com
answerbag.com
allexperts.com
freewebs.com
copygator.com

In the words of Blekko and spam clock founder, Rich Skrenta, spam is a major problem that could end up impacting search in a similar way as 90% of emails.

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