Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Great SEO Table Tip

I found a great little SEO tip for working with Tables over at Smartlab Software.  It basically tells us (reminds some of us) that if you are working with tables, find a reason to work with tables, or maybe even if you go out of your way to work with tables, you can include the following code:

in order to help the search engines better understand what your table is about.  This will also likely help when it comes keyword density as well.

Now, I don’t want to just mention this great tip and give a shout out to Doug at Smartlab Software (They really do have some great tips there!)

But I also want to add to it with another tip to mix with the rest of the toys in your SEO toy box.

If you are writing articles for a blog or even if you are designing individual pages, you can use this tip for image optimization as well.

You could simply input your images straight into a page or site.  However, if you drop that image into a table, creating a caption box with a top row for the image and the bottom row for the image caption, you will then be able to include a table summary, include all the normal image information, plus include an image caption.

All of these steps will help your page performance around the image and it will also help your page for SEO, especially where keyword density applies.

Best 301 Redirect Resource - Bookmark this Link!

I routinely run into questions about setting up 301 Redirects in situations that I have not encountered yet.  When I run into these new challenges, I do a quick Google search and never find the same answer twice about 301 Redirects.

That said, today I had a quick refresher question about the SEO benefits of 301 redirects relating to pushing a www site to a non-www site (Canonical Situations).

I came across this excellent article at SEO-Consultant-Services.co.uk which answered the questions I was looking for and it also answered the typical questions that most people ask when they are looking for 301 redirect solutions.  I have come across a number of similar articles on 301 Redirects in the past, but this one was easy to understand, easy to implement, and very comprehensive in covering all of those 301 Redirect tangents that will eventually confront a web site owner.

http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/301-redirects-www-non-www-canonical-problems.html

I have no relationship to this site, they do not sponsor me in any way, but I would highly recommend web site owners to bookmark this link.  You are going to need it someday, and Google as good as they are sometimes, rarely returns a reliable result on 301 redirects!

Note, the CSS was a little hosed up on this site when I visited.  I’d guess that they updated the theme and did not check this older article on the new theme.  Regardless the content is good.  I prefer things to look good, but I’ll take great content any day.

Perils of Blog Scrapers

There are several different types of website and blog content scrapers and many different activities that they use.  Some are harmless and some could be harmful to your websites health. 

Some but probably not all the types

1. Copy and paste all your content onto their site with no credit
2. Copy and paste and unreasonably large amount of content onto their site with no permission but with a link to your site as attribution
3. Copy a paragraph of your content (or maybe a few sentences) and a link to your article saying something like -> “Here’s another great article about botox complications and hemorrhoids! “
4. Running a short syndicated feed of your material (Headline, excerpt and link to your article)
5. Building an entire news or blog site dedicated to doing number 4 with all the news and blog sites in the world (think
6. Google news or Google Blog search) -
   1. Note. I am not passing judgement on Google for this behavior.  Google has been sued for this several times.

Any of the above (not counting Google news and the syndicated feed) can trigger a potential comment in wordpress with a trackback link in your comments that points to the permalink that referenced your site.

If you allow that comment to go through, you are allowing a nofollow link to point to that website.  You are not passing juice, but nofollow links are indexed and you could be mixing your site with a blacklisted neighborhood on the internet.  This could be very bad for your website health.

I recommend marking scraped trackback comments as SPAM, just to be safe at a minimum, remove the link from their trackback, and maybe just show their url address in text form.

If you consider your readers perspective, if they come to your site first, and they then click out from a link to a scraper site that has a link in your comments,

1. you are losing readers to a scraper site
2. Your sites credibility is harmed in the eyes of the reader as a crank website is pointing at you
3. They may see something very vile on the other end or even pick up a computer virus or something if they are scraping not to steal your content but to pull people away with your content and give their computer something nasty!

Other Articles that I read before writing this article about content scrapers

• When Scarfing Content Strikes Back - I wrote this back in October of 2007. 
  • I first noticed this issue when writing an article on a satire site.  I happened to include the word botox in a derogatory way about Anna Nicole Smith or something like that.  I then immediately got a pingback from a site dedicated to the B injection and started looking into the issue.  I have seen it on sites ranging from diet pills to SEO to Webkinz and politics.
• Getting Value Out of Scrapers - (I do not agree with this article, but do like the idea of including a link in your feed back to your own site.) dated 1-10-2008
• Fighting Scrapers and Using them to Our Advantage  dated 1-10-2008