Tag Archives: Directory
Yahoo Directories in Europe RIP. Did anybody notice?
Yahoo! has closed some of their European directories sometime this year – their Italian and German directory URLs, e.g. http://it.dir.yahoo.com/, are now redirecting to their search page. Others may be impacted but I haven’t checked. At least the Italian directory is still in Google and Yahoo search results but not those of Bing. Yahoo Site Explorer also shows cached pages from the Italian directory with the copyright 2010; unfortunately Yahoo! doesn’t display a cache date. Other Yahoo! directories, such as the US and UK versions, are still open for business.
Figure 1: Yahoo! Directory in Italy, once upon a time
Yahoo Directory closures not really a surprise
As I’ve previously noted (see question 3), Yahoo stopped updating their German directory in 2006 and the same is probably true for Italy although they never admitted that it was closed to new entries. With Yahoo’s de-emphasis of search, and the long decline in human edited directories overall, these directory closures can’t really be much of a surprise. Yet as one who remembers using the Yahoo! directory before DEC’s Altavista, this is quite a search milestone. I might not miss you Yahoo! directory, but your passing has been noticed.
What’s New With Social Media Marketing?
Search Engine Marketing is part of a bigger web ecosystem. At SMX West 2009, three habitués of the social media scene shared tips on successfully promoting a website using social media.
Moderator: Sara Holoubek, Consultant, Columnist and SEMPO Board of Directors
Speakers:
- Chris Bennett (@chrisbennett), President, 97th Floor
- Brent Csutoras (@BrentCsutoras), Online Marketing Consultant, Brent Csutoras, Inc
- Gab Goldenberg (@GabGoldenberg), Founder, SEO ROI Services
Brent Csutoras describes the user-generated news site reddit. When logged in, the front page is dashboard of reddits. You can create your own social media site using a CNAME sub domain name and the Reddit platform. (Add a CNAME record aliasing your domain to rhs.reddit.com. Enter this new domain, e.g. social.antezeta.com, in the domain field when you create a new reddit. – Sean)
So many aspiring SEOs! – the SEO Quiz results are in
15 questions, 5 weeks and 5 books: almost 700 people took the 2008 SEO quiz challenge.
Note to the reader: this article was originally posted on our Italian blog on December 2nd. The quiz targeted an Italian audience; we’ve published this translation in order to allow a wider audience to follow search marketing developments in Italy.
Why a SEO quiz
The idea of the quiz came from reflections on the state of SEO knowledge and usage in Italy, observed from the perspective of a SEO practitioner.
Search engines, with Google in particular (question 1), are the gate keepers between us and the net. We use search engines not only to search for information that we imagine is out there somewhere, but also to navigate to a specific site, such as Fiat, or to perform a task, such as buy a ticket for a Tiziano Ferro concert (question 15).
Improve search engine and keyword reporting in Google Analytics, a SEO strategy
In three short years 1 Google Analytics has become an important tool for many companies looking to get more out of their presence on the web. Google Analytics’ wide range of website reports, from traffic sources to conversion rates, provide invaluable insight into a site’s business performance for an initial cost which is difficult to beat.
One particular report, the Search Engine report, is of particular interest to companies looking to optimize their organic search engine marketing activity. This report identifies sources of search traffic that brought visitors to the website.
For each search engine source, a drill-down feature shows the keywords people used – the very keywords which express a visitor’s intent as they came to your website.
Just to clarify, for the purpose of this article, by search engine or search engine source, we mean search driven traffic – whether it be from a pure search engine like Google, or from an ISP portal which offers a search function, such as Earthlink or Virgin Media.
Are directories still useful for SEO and in increasing web site traffic?
An ongoing question in search engine optimization (SEO) projects regards which directories might be useful for increasing incoming traffic to a web site and as a means in obtaining better search engine visibility. The question arises due to the importance that was once attributed by search engines to some directories and by the desire to attract direct traffic to a site, where and whenever possible.
For a new site, directories, short reviews of sites organized by categories and subcategories, can be a useful source of incoming links.
However, it is highly doubtful that most directories today help very much in improving search engine visibility, nor in generating much direct traffic.
There are multiple reasons:
- directories are often “generalist” – yet it is thematic links which are most useful for most sites that deal with products, services or in specific sectors;
9 SEO Security Tips for WordPress
In theory, this is a marketing blog, focusing on search engine optimization, web analytics and other web marketing topics. So what does WordPress security have to do with Google and SEO?
Well one downside of the extended web ecosystem is that the same idiots who jump the queue in the supermarket will try to exploit your good blog as a way to jump their way to the top of Google’s search results.
One thing is certain, you won’t be feeling very groovy if you have the misadventure of being de-listed by Google as has happened to several of my fellow blogger friends.
I’m not a WordPress security expert, and I don’t play one on TV. That said, there are a few WordPress security best practices worth considering for your WordPress installation.
Google Sitemap Standard Adopted by Leading International Search Engines
Each of the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live Search, now Bing) have announced joint support of Google’s sitemaps protocol.
2007-04-11: Ask announces support of the sitemap standard. It is not yet clear if they actually use sitemaps. While Google and Yahoo do process sitemaps, Microsoft does not yet use them.
2008-06-02: Yandex supports xml sitemaps. China’s Baidu also supports sitemaps through their Baidu webmaster tools which is currently (2011) invite only. For those interenested in the Czech Republic, Seznam supports sitemaps.
A new site, www.sitemaps.org, has been created to support the sitemaps protocol. While the Yahoo blog indicates Yahoo is apparently already accepting submissions, there is not mention of this on their Site Explorer submission form. Microsoft is committed to supporting sitemaps after finishing internal testing which is currently underway.
How to Specify an HTML Web Document Language for good SEO
So you just wrote a stunning essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses – in Irish Gaelic. Will Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Ask recognize it as Gaelic, hosted as it is on your co.uk domain? Maybe. But you can given them a hint!
The trick is to use all of the HTTP and HTML language code settings available to your advantage to ensure your documents aren’t falsely identified. This article considers HTTP and HTML aspects of website internationalization for search engine optimization.
Why is Language Recognition a Problem?
Search engines try to match a web searcher’s language (based on ip geo location recognition or user specified preferences) to web documents when determining the best matches for a search query. In some cases, a user may specify that results be limited to a specific language. Left to their own devices, search engines have a few clues to determine the human language of a document:
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