Last Friday Google announced searching over SSL at https://www.google.com. This new feature which is good for users in regards to privacy, but not so much for website owners. The reason being is that no referrer (search term) is passed when coming from a link on https as a security measure – meaning that as a website owner you see nothing in your analytics.

Getclicky is calling it the death of search analytics which seems to be true if it was the standard for all Google search users.

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The first 2 minutes of the interview Michael Kahn of Performics talks about the lost art of buying domain names for direct navigation traffic and to provide feeder traffic for branded sites.

Build an iPhone app.

What does a ‘Cute Puppies Pictures’ app have to do with Registry Cleaner Reviews?

Nothing, besides a link from Apple.com:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/cutepuppiespictures.html

With all the iPhone apps getting removed because of sexy content and a cookie cutter approach – one would think they’d start paying attention to issues like this. For the time being, it looks like you can just build an iPhone app and submit it to the app store to get a non nofollowed link with the anchor text of your choosing.

Google announced that they are now showing site hierarchy in search results instead of the actual URL. The image above outlines the changes to the search engine results page. When the site hierarchy is displayed those are additional links to the website too. The official word from Google is below:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

Now it’s even more important to structure your website with properly named breadcrumbs to achieve the best results in Google search.

I just ran across a Google search query that resulted in showing three listings (1 main, 2 indented) for a single domain. This may be a new feature as Google has normally only showed results with a maximum of two listings (1 main, 1 indented) or a main listing with site links in the past.

Understanding how the nofollow link attribute works can help your developed product domain sites stay in good form with the search engines. Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to tell Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask if a link should be followed (voted for) or not (not voted for). These search engines use links and their corresponding anchor text as a signal of how to rank websites and pages, this tag was created to reduce web spam from comments and to allow sites to sell links without negatively affecting search engine results and not get penalized.

Example: <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>cheap tickets</a>

Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask all interpret the nofollow tag differently see below for more information on each:

 
Most common use of the tag include using it on affiliate links, reader comments, and off-site links to sites that you do not want to vouch for. Using the tag on internal pages such as privacy, terms of service, etc to flow PageRank to other pages on a site have been debated that it works well and that Google ignores it.

Todays SEO tip is to save you time by NOT using the meta keywords tag.

Always a topic of discussion and debate mainly among new SEO “experts” is the meta keywords tag and if search engines use it in their ranking algorithms. Well the good news is that the debate can stop as the tag is officially dead with Google and Yahoo, Bing’s usage sounds very minimal – see below:

Google via:

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?

Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo said at 2:09pm (EST), that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for rankings. In fact, Yahoo stopped using it a “few months ago,” said Pierry.

Bing via:

The <meta> tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the <title> and <meta> description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
• Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
• Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list

Using product domains as mini sites are a great way to monetize domains in your portfolio. Depending on your domain name the amount of type-in traffic may be large or small but it is usually consistent. Getting search engine traffic is another way to increase your traffic and income. Starting today and going forward I’ll be adding a series of short SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips to this blog to help you make your product domain sites more search engine friendly to maximize your search results and traffic.

Todays tip is protecting your domains link equity and to prevent duplicate content by telling the search engines that only one version of your domain exists.

These two addresses are not the same in the eyes of search engine spiders even if they serve the same content:

example.com
www.example.com

By redirecting and combining www.example.com to example.com (or the other way around) you are telling search engine spiders that only one version of the domain should be crawled, indexed and ranked.

The following pieces of code should be placed in your sites .htaccess file depending on your usage:

How to redirect Non-WWW to WWW:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

How to redirect WWW to non-WWW:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]