Dayshift

It's Official: Google Does Not Use 'Keyword' Meta-Tag in Search Results

Matt Cutts echoed a post from the Google webmaster blog, pressing the point that Google does not use the meta keyword information in its organic search results. 

Insider Tips on How To Sell a Website

My friend Roger put together a nice article outlining a few key points that could help anyone trying to sell a website have a more productive relationship with a potential buyer.   He's been the point-man for many website/company acquisitions for about 4 years and I was even a technical consult during the due-diligence phase of quite a few of these.

"No company will sign on to buy a site without first looking "under the hood". Think about the acquisition process like a used car purchase.  The buyer will want to first test drive the car (data collection), then take it to a mechanic to get it thoroughly checked out (due diligence) to make sure everything is in working order.  Lastly, they would want to know that you own the car and have both title and registration to the vehicle (legal)."

Adventures In Domain Parking

In an attempt to increase my revenue from domain parking, I've been trying to move away from Sedo so that I can control my own content and advertisement while at the same time keeping my labor overhead low (by overhead, I mean MY time :).  I'm currently trying two different options and I'm weighing them by different criteria.  Oddly enough, revenue isn't a major focus of the comparison.  I'm assuming that because I'm able to use Google AdSense on both platforms,  I'll have a comparable revenue per visitor (rpv) on both.

The two different platforms I'm currently experimenting with are ExpressionEngine and Typepad.   Here's a breakdown of the criteria I use to compare.

1. Operation Cost (per domain)
• ExpressionEngine
• For multi-site management, there's a $25 fee per domain that you add to the system.
• The one time licensing fee for this CMS is $99.95 personal version and $249.95 for the professional.  This includes one year of free updates and applies only to major release version you purchased.  Each additional year of updates is $20.
• TypePad
  • With only one low monthly fee of around $15 I can have an unlimited number of blogs/domains
2. Ease of setup (per domain)
   • ExpressionEngine
     • Once your preferences are set, adding new sites/domains in the system is easy.  However, you need to set up a virtual host for each new domain and copy over the index.php, .htacces, and a 'path.php' file that contains all necessary global variables. (all sites have to be hosted on the same server for the multi-site management feature to work)
   • Typepad
     • You need to add a new blog, which is really easy.  Then you need to map your domain to your primary typepad domain name (myaccount.typepad.com).  This is a very easy process.
3. Design/Template availability & ease of implementation
   • ExpressionEngine
   • • There aren't very many 'out of the box' templates available for EE, but once you create one generic template it can be copied over and used with any other domain.  I created one template but it's very ugly and customizing it per domain is a little bit of a pain, but isn't that hard.   For some full sites that I host on EE, I've taken WordPress templates and tweaked them to work.  Overall, the templating capabilities of EE are very powerful and flexible, but getting up and running can sometimes take longer than I desire for just seeding a new website.
   • Typepad
   • • The number of layout and theme combinations on Typepad is really impressive.  I can have a near perfect look and feel for my site in about 2 minutes.  I give the design/templating feature in Typepad two thumbs up!
4. Ease of content addition
   • ExpressionEngine
     • Once you're set up, adding content to ExpressionEngine is super easy.  It's a little more flexible than typepad in that you can create separate 'weblogs' and assign them custom fields.  I've used this to have a main content blog and a seperate product or links directory blog.  Even though they are named 'weblogs', it doesn't mean that they appear that way to your visitors.  It's just data after all, and with EE's powerful templating system you can do whatever you want with it.  The ability to separate content like this, but have it all in the same db for potential cross reference is something that I think is very valuable.
   • Typepad
     • Adding content to Typepad is as simple as posting to any other blogging software.   The only 'content separation' you have is through assigning categories to your post, but it works more like tagging than a hierarchical category structure.  You can however, add 'pages' to your blog which appear as .html pages in your webroot.  This is pretty good SEO for content pieces that you want to appear as more permanent.
5. SEO
   • ExpressionEngine
     • You have a fair amount of control over how your URIs are structured.  Since your article file names are automatically suggested by breaking apart the title, you can set a preference for using '_' or '-' as a word separator.  With content, you can adjust the WYSIWYG bold and italic button html to have either <strong> or <b> or <em> or <i>; whatever your preference may be.   Overall, there are very few limitations in EE that directly affect your ability to search engine optimize your structure or content.
   • Typepad
     • For normal posts, you're pretty much stuck with the way t\Typepad names and organizes them.   However, even if you have a theory on URI structure that would discount Typepad's value, I've seen some really high performing Typepad blogs that would make you second guess yourself.   
     • The two biggest SEO gripes I have about Typead are:
       • The images you upload have a path associated with your primary domain (myaccount.typepad), so it's difficult dis-associate your sites if you're using images.
       • You map your domain to a Typepad IP, you have to create a cname record to point to your primary domain.   This makes it practically impossible to dis-associate completely.
6. Expandability
   • ExpressionEngine
     • There are tons of really good modules for EE that allow you to grow your site more if you ever decide to make that energy investment.   Adding a forum is super easy and the user base for one site can be the same for all sites.   This is the same for the Wiki module as well.
   • Typepad
     • If I wanted to really build out a site that I started off on Typead, I'd probably need to export (if possible) or scrape the content and rebuild it in EE or whatever CMS I intended to use.   
     • However, there are tons of cool widgets available for monetization and content that are easy to plugin if I just want to increase the 'meat' of the site.

Overall, I don't think I'll decide completely on one or the other.   I'm definitely sticking with ExpressionEngine for my serious site development and parked domains that I expect to eventually grow into full sites.   The ease of use with Typepad though is so high that I can't resist using it when I'm concerned about my available time.    Both are very good alternatives to just parking your site with a 3rd party.   Especially once you get picked up by a search engine and start to see the real value of your traffic and their clicks :)

How to use the canonical link tag

Having duplicate content has been a long lived problem for people with parameter heavy sites or with multiple versions of the same content scattered across many pages.  There has never really been an easy way to highlight your preferred URL when you have scattered and similar content.   Over on the Google's webmaster blog, they recently posted instructions on how to use the <link> tag to specify the version you prefer.

How is this useful?  Two common scenarios that they mention and that I've personally experienced are the use of tracking parameters and result set ordering parameters.  

Let's say you have a product page called black-beans.php, but you have the need to append tracking parameters for some reason.   You might end up with black-beans.php?tid=4UZ66?ref=moms_site, black-beans.php?tid=4UX04, etc..     With the <link> tag you can let Google (and any other search engine that adopts this standard) know which should be the 'official' singular version of this content.   Here's what your tag would look like:  <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.fake/black-beans.php" />

site.fake vs www.site.fake?
Historically, you would use .htaccess to 301 redirect one version to the other (typically the site.fake to the www.site.fake).    Google claims to honor the canonical <link> tag across sub-domains.  Using the <link> method might be the only way some people can solve this issue if they don't have the proper access or environment.

IMHO, this is a really cool new feature!