 | May 21st, 2010 | | Welcome to the SEO Chat newsletter! Have you heard about Google's latest cloud computing initiative? The search giant is letting developers store code from cloud-computing projects on its servers while they're being built. Check out eWeek for all the details. So what else do we have for you this week? Well, if you're near the end of the spring cleaning process, you may be rethinking the way you do things so you don't have to deal with so much clutter again ? digital or otherwise. So this week's articles show you a few ways to rethink your website and what you do online. Take Monday's item, for instance. Do you have an FAQ page but still get asked lots of questions - many of which are actually ON the FAQ page? Maybe you need to rethink how your information is organized. If you have a Flash-based website and you're having trouble ranking in the SERPs, you'll want to read Tuesday's article. And if you're a Facebook user concerned about privacy, you need to read Wednesday's article for a surprising way you could still be turning up in Google, even if your profile is totally private. After you've explored those articles, be sure to stop by Tutorialized for some of the best SEO-related content from our readers. You'll find more than 100 tutorials covering topics such as choosing keywords, website promotion, and more. You can even share your expertise by submitting your own tutorial! Google is on the ball with so much that we can forget what it doesn't know. Sure, the company is smart, but the search engine is just software...so a little thing like knowing that the www and non-www versions of a website are the same can give it fits. And those fits have consequences, as you'll learn from this week's thread. Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, tells you why you should fix your broken links and suggests some good, free tools you can use to find them.
As always, thanks for reading. Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff | | | | |  | | ADVERTISEMENT | |
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| | | | | | It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use,
and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: |  |
- DevShed Hulk is back to discuss the iSmash. PAUL SCHAEFER EVERYBODY!
- Jenny brings you all the news that's weird.
Watch the video! | | | | | | | ADVERTISEMENT |  | | | | | Facebook Privacy: an Oxymoron?
by Terri Wells
2010-05-19
If you're online, odds are you are a member of at least one social networking site - probably Facebook. And you already know that the things you do online can affect your friends online. But you may not realize the many ways that decisions about your own privacy can affect your friends.
For example, say you have some friends on Facebook who have decided to opt in to Facebook's privacy settings. They want to keep their Facebook profile and various information from getting into Google. That's certainly understandable, whether or not they've shared anything embarrassing. But you don't share their opinion, so you've left your profile public. Now say someone searches for you in Google. Your Facebook profile will turn up; no surprise there. But listed beneath your profile may be the names of a few of your friends...including the ones who chose to make their profiles private. For good or ill, you've just unintentionally "outed" your friends. Read Facebook Privacy: an Oxymoron?
| | | | | ADVERTISEMENT |  | | | | | SEO for Flash Websites
by Codex-M
2010-05-18 Flash-based websites are becoming more important and popular on the Internet. Sadly, Flash websites are not exactly SEO-friendly. If you want to improve the indexing (and hopefully ranking) of your flash-based website, keep reading.
Although there has been recent good news about Google improving the crawling and indexing of Flash content, it is still a good rule of thumb not to go overboard when it comes to developing flash websites, and stick to the classic rules of search engine crawlability. These classic rules are the following (based on Google's technical guidelines): a. Prioritize the use of HTML text links more than any other technology in presenting a hyperlink (such as using flash-based hyperlinks or JavaScript). b. Search engines find new content by following hyperlinks, therefore it is more important to use HTML-based hyperlinks pointing to all of the other content on your website (even if it uses Flash). Read SEO for Flash Websites | | | | | Rethinking Your FAQ Page
by Terri Wells
2010-05-17
FAQ pages can be wonderful things. They can also be a sign of extreme laziness. Laziness? But you're answering your visitors' questions; surely that's good customer service, right? Perhaps ? and perhaps it isn't quite good enough.
I've advocated for the use of FAQ pages before, and I still think that web sites should include them. But an article by Mike Moran at Search Engine Guide recently made me think about why we actually include those pages...and what they start to look like after they've been up for a while. An FAQ page, in order to be useful, needs to be maintained. Webmasters maintain it by noting how frequently certain questions get asked, and the most popular ones get added, along with answers. It's a Frequently Asked Questions page, after all. But the list of questions keeps growing, and pretty soon it's too long to be contained within a single page. Then what do you do?
Read Rethinking Your FAQ Page
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Read the tutorial. | | | | | | How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue?
Is there a topic you want to learn more about?
What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement,
so please email us. Email us. | 
| | | | | | Sometimes Google isn't as smart as we'd like it to be, as this week's thread reveals. Fortunately, there are workarounds.
suncat100
Domain(dot)com vs www(dot)domain(dot)com, different PR. I have a website [URL deleted], where the www version has PR5 and the non-www version has PR3. I thought the days were gone where Google looks differently upon two links that are apparently identical... Is there any reason to be concerned about this? Am I sharing my page rank between two different URLs? Thanks!
coreyman The two URLs have separate page rank. Google has always done this, and won't stop, it looks like two different sites to Google. Use a 301 redirect to your www. so you can get the backlink juice from your non www.
Nickfb76 As corey mentioned, a 301 redirect will help focus all your "link juice" on one domain. If a 301 redirect isn't possible, use the canonical tag. It isn't a redirect, but the search engines will read this line of code and then understand that you are trying to avoid duplicate content. This will result in the search engines condensing all your links to the URL you noted within the code. Good luck!
Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread. | | | | | Fix Those Links! What happens when you visit a web site with great content and find a link within whatever you're reading that promises more information? Perhaps you like to juggle and you're reading about a record-setting 12-ring juggling stunt. The site links to video of the stunt, or maybe a bio of the juggler. You click the link and get a 404 Not Found error. Doesn't that just make your day? Admittedly, this sounds like a minor frustration. With more great content just a click away, however, a simple broken link like this is enough to make your visitors go elsewhere. It's bad enough with a hobby site; think about what you stand to lose when it happens on an e-commerce site. It leaves your visitors not only frustrated but also wary. Broken links look unprofessional; on a money-making web site, it's like showing a resume with typos on it. What can you do about it? You need to be proactive. Don't assume that all of the links on your site work; check them to make sure they work. Recheck them, especially if you update your content regularly. Once a month is not too frequently to do this. And if you get reports of broken links, take care of them quickly. How do you find broken links before your visitors? There are a number of ways to do this. If you sign up your website with Google Webmaster Tools, you can get a report on all of your 404 errors. Best of all, this option is free. You can also use a free sitemap generator. Just put the search phrase "free sitemap generator" into Google and you'll get many hundreds of hits. Respected SEO Chat forum member (and moderator) jsteele823 notes that "A good one will show you which pages exist and which do not, and will tell you what is linking to those pages." Another option you may have seen mentioned in some of our articles is Xenu's Link Sleuth. This is what PhilipSEO, another one of our respected forum members and moderators, likes to use. It's a free download with a simple, no-frills interface. And the site's FAQ even explains how to go about fixing broken links. Whichever method you use, your visitors will be grateful. Good luck!
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