All About Content

Want your site optimized for search, but don’t know where to start? Since it’s probably too late for you to jump on a plane to go to SES San Jose this week, go drop by SEOEgghead.com where Jaimie Sirovich is doing a free SEO clinic every month.

If ever an Internet company appears to have a long-and-painful-death wish, it appears to be AOL. Forget about the news that AOL is giving away free email, the big story hitting the fan (if you’ll forgive my mixed metaphors) is that AOL is giving away massive information on user queries performed the last three months.

What a wonderful opportunity to finetune your SEO strategy (or: generate more search engine spam — depending on your orientation):

Google/ AOL have just given some of the worlds biggest spammers a breakdown of high traffic terms its just a matter of weeks now until google gets mega spammed with made for adsense sites and other kind of spam sites targetting keywords contained in this list.

Hitwise stated on Thursday that Google, Yahoo Search and MSN accounted for nearly 95% of all searches in the United States in July.

Of Internet searches conducted in the U.S., 60.2% were handled by Google, up from 59.3% in June. In the same period, Yahoo Search went from 22.0% market share to 22.5%. Meanwhile, the #3 engine MSN Search saw a dip falling to just below 12% last month.

New research by search marketing firm 360i and paid search provider SearchIgnite examines search behavior leading to conversions. According to their research, 37.3% of transactions were completed with at least one “assist” click prior to the click that resulted in the sale. However, “many marketers are looking at the last click before a conversion and crediting it entirely. Most ‘assists’ are being ignored,” said one of the study’s authors.

The study also shows that searchers were more likely to start with a paid result and convert after a click on a natural result. That scenario accounted for 12.6% of conversions credited to natural search results, more than twice as many as natural-to-paid paths produced,” according to the ClickZ article about this study.

As regular readers may know, I’m endlessly fascinated with how del.icio.us pages end up ranking well in search results, considering each page has robots noindex and noarchive instructions. About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that the snippet for the result (in Google) had changed. Whereas before it only displayed the URL, it now was also displaying text from within the page. (Compare this to what the same search result looked like earlier.)

Does this mean Google was not ranking the page based only on a “guess” regarding the page’s relevance, based on the combination of domain and URL? Consider, it had to actually crawl the del.icio.us page to display this snippet. It’s reasonable to assume that if it’s displaying the snippet text, it’s also reading and storing it somehow.

[So if "noindex,nocache,nofollow" together don't mean "don't crawl"... is there a robots tag (not including a robots.txt file) that would instruct a spider not to read the content at all?]

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us add the noindex robots instruction to discourage SEOs from gaming the site. The idea is that no one would bother posting not-bookmark-worthy links solely for the “link juice” — those links are not supposed to “count” (for link weight, not traffic, obviously). But I also thought noindex and nocache was supposed to prevent Google or other SEs from displaying snippets from the page, and that assumption was proved wrong.

If the del.icio.us page for a specific tag — your company’s name, for example — has PageRank value, ranks well for that keyword in a Google search, and lists your site at the top of the page, it becomes harder to believe, in light of this snippet being displayed, that there still is no IBL value in making sure your site is frequently del.icio.us’d.