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New OSE Bookmarklet (OSE Bookmarker) Code
If you are like me and you use OSE Open site Explorer from Seomoz for evaluating URLs for SEO then you might have installed an OSE Bookmarklet to help you quickly load pages in OSE for analysis. With the new update to OSE I have noticed that my OSE bookmarker no longer loads in OSE with the required filters in place i.e. with the filters set to: followed +301, only external, pages on root domain and group by domain. I decided to fix this and I have created two new OSE Bookmarklet codes - one for loading the URL, and another for loading the domain and I have decided to share these below because that is what the internet is all about.
Continue reading...Paid links cloaking: how to avoid cloaked paid links
17 July 2011
Why cloak paid links? As most SEOs will tell you, the buying and selling of links online is still very common practice but there are lots of cowboys out there. Some link sellers are going to the extreme measure of cloaking their paid links from the search engines to avoid being penalised for selling links. This means for example the seller might add a nofollow attribute to the paid link when the page is requested by the search engines but not when requested by normal users. This off course makes the link worthless for the purpose of search engine optimisation. Does cloaking paid links work? Now you are probably thinking that such cloaking technique is more likely to get the link sellers penalised than actually selling links but I am not so sure about that. Such a minute change to a page that does not change the content of the page displayed to the user might be over looked by the search engine; besides, the cloaking of paid links actually helps the search engines filter out paid links. Regardless, it pays to check if a site you intend to buy or exchange link with is cloaking their paid links.
Continue reading...SEO implication of Cufón font replacement
23 September 2010
Cufón is an increasingly popular font replacement technique similar to sIFR and typeface except it is much faster and does not require the use of flash. Why use font replacement? You might be wondering why do we even need font replacement with so many fonts already supported by web browsers? Well, this is because even modern browsers only support a fraction of the total number of fonts available today. Font replacement techniques allow font types that are not supported natively by browsers to be used and it also helps address EULA End-user Licensing Agreement issues associated with the use of third party fonts. What about the CSS @font-face attribute? The CSS @font-face attribute allows for fonts to be imported into browsers as shown in the example below. However, the problem with using the @font-face approach is that the end-user license agreement for most fonts, including free fonts, do not allow for the re-distribution of the font using the CSS @font-face attribute as this exposes the font file which can be easily copied.
Continue reading...How to tell if a site is using Ajax and why you should care
10 August 2010
From an SEO perspective, you need to understand how a site operates in order to better optimise it for the search engine crawlers. Ajax generated contents online are largely not indexed by the search engines, and although this is likely to change in the future, the use of Ajax to generate content that is intended to be indexed by the search engines is not recommended at present − this is a classic example of search engines holding back the progress of the web.
Continue reading...Google analytics virtual page views and non standard event goals
16 May 2010
With dynamic generated content, div overlays and Ajax generated pages, traditional page view count in Google analytics might not represent the true picture. For example when a user clicks a link to join a site and is presented with a div overlay membership submission form; should this count as a page view? Whether or not an event should count as a page view is up to the site administrator but Google Analytics allows you to register any event as a page view via the API method: _trackPageView(uri) Example: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/membership/join']);
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10 August 2011
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