You may be getting at two things here:

Internal linking structure for crawling
"Sculpting" specific links to flow or not flow page rank


The first is critical for any initial site design. ...

Don't worry so much about crawling frequency -- focus on quality and relevancy to your business or website purpose.
If frequent updates to your content is relevant, then do it. If your content is...

Yahoo and Microsoft are also supporting this.

This is a very important feature for anyone who has problems with canonical URLs. Rather than a mess of 301 redirects, robots tags, rewrites, etc,...

Also, don't rely on the hover technique to verify direct links. It is very easy to spoof this, and make it show your URL but have it link elsewhere, use rel="nofollow", use a redirect, etc.

The...

Keywords in the domain name are VERY important. You will rank much better for a keyword if it is in the domain.

The challenge is that you can only have one or two keywords in a domain, since you...

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I disagree -- you can't discount the idea of traffic being a factor in rankings. Think about it: link and content spam is so prevalent now, if you were a search engineer looking for other ways to...

Actually, they can help by improving the quality and relevancy of your site. I've seen rankings improve when quality, relevant links are added.


Yes it can.


Given that most .edu and .gov...

Both Alexa and Compete have thin data and are not really accurate. You can use them to get rough indications on traffic and keywords, but don't take them literally. In many cases, I've found them...

If your site really got banned from Google (no pages in results at all, even when you search on exact text), assuming you have corrected all of your violations you can ask for reconsideration. To...

That is spam, or at least misuse of the tag. I don't think you will face a penalty but I'll bet the search engines will not give you any lift from using <Hn> tags this way.

The conventional...

Ultimately there is nothing you can do to hide any source code that is served to the browser. Any attempts to hide that can be bypassed by simply using an HTTP viewer or other tool that reads...

This varies widely based on what you are capturing or selling. In classic lead generation (e.g., mortgage, real estate, white paper download, etc) a typical range is from 3-8%, but it can be over...

For the most websites, there is no difference between a dedicated vs a shared IP for ranking algorithms.

There are, however, rare cases could make a difference with a shared IP:

1) The...

Only Google knows for sure.
The conventional wisdom is that page rank for a given page is divided up across the links on that page to other pages. Thus, 3 links to one page might get a little more...

Actually, Google will now crawl and index some portions of Flash. See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

I'm starting to see this work, with some...

Here are a few best practices for creating good title tags, meaning they help pages rank better for your target keywords, and are inviting to users who see them in the search results so they are more...

To answer the specific question "Does W3 validating code help SEO", the answer is no, it does not.
However, having invalid code on your page could hurt your SEO, and that is why it is considered a...

I'm not sure what the "problem" is here.

It does help a page rank better for a given keyword if inbound link text includes that keyword. However, this is not the only factor, just one of many. ...

You are correct -- you need the town or other location name in the body text of the page. You should also have the name in the page title, meta tags, headings, alt text and other areas (with...

I don't know of any way to directly influence the speed with which Google will crawl and index sites, or update the cache. Setting update frequency in your sitemap or meta tags will have no effect...

Implementing a 301 redirect depends on your web server technology. There are a number of options.

At a basic level, you can use either:
1) Web server commands (usually IIS or Apache), or
...

To be clear, the standard GoogleBot crawler will honor robots.txt, so by all means continue to use robots protocols (robots.txt, robots meta, rel=nofollow) to manage crawling and indexing of your...

Don't fool yourself that just because you use robots.txt or rel=nofollow to "exclude" a page Google will not look at that page and evaluate it. Google has separate algorithms for detecting spam, and...

Putting pages into folders should have very little, if any, impact on rankings. There is some evidence that pages within many levels of folders are given less weight than pages in top level folders,...

Don't bother. Build a site with good content and get links from good quality sites, and you will get crawled. No need to submit to any of these engines, especially meta-engines like dogpile that...

First, if the content of your header tags (I assume you mean title, meta description and meta keywords) match the body content of the page, Google will not consider this "fishy", and in fact this is...

Sure. You can cross-link your sites and they will benefit each other, and there is no problem linking from www.domain.it pages to www.mydomain.com/it (as long as content is unique across the...

For the long term, you are better off creating country-specific domains, and building up links for each. Google and other engines will give preference to county/language-specific TLDs (top level...

Don't fall for it. Directories don't really work anymore, and doing mass submissions like this can get your web site banned.

LSI is a term that now has multiple meanings. It is related to the term "Latent Semantic Analysis" (LSA), but refers to the practice of using LSA for indexing text. From an academic standpoint, LSA...

First, the Google link: command only shows a subset of links, and usually only the best quality links. If that is what you are using, I'd suggest you look at the Yahoo linkdomain: command results,...

Search engines, including Google and Yahoo, will definitely find and index text with display:none and hidden. Lots of examples out there. For example, do a Google or Yahoo and search on

seattle...

Sascha,

This site likely ranks well for several reasons:
- Age of site under same owner.
- Lots of content.
- Good, diverse, organic inbound linking.
- Targeted topic or market.

From...

The meta keywords tag is not given much (if any, in some cases) weight by search engines, but since it is easy to populate I think it is still worth doing. Other areas such as title tags, meta...

Cscgal,

Regarding use of NOFOLLOW on internal links, it is a technique that is "blessed" by Google for focusing page rank. See the interview with Matt Cutts at ...

You don't really "lose" link juice from having outbound links -- it is more a matter of how the link juice of your web page is applied to the various pages it is linking to. Using nofollow on some...

Ahem. Careful here folks.

Directories can be used to build link popularity to some extent, and maybe a little traffic, but be very careful about using any service like this.

Google is on the...

There are two very good reasons to keep your site content fresh:
1) Search engines do like fresh content, and sites will go "stale" and rankings will go down over time if they are not updated at...

Using keywords in the subdomain name will definitely help positions, but as noted above, unless you do external link building on that subdomain it will still not rank well. If there are just one or...