Things You Should Know

SEOs Share One Secret
Quick. Get over to the SEW forums! SEW moderator Marcia asked members to share one SEO secret they’ve discovered about any of the search engines and people are actually replying. One member posts almost his entire strategy for site design, while others share small tidbits about MSN, getting Wikipedia links, the power of Meta tags and other fun hints. Check it out.
The Matt Cutts Show
If you found yesterday’s installment of Matt Cutts-inspired videos interesting, he’s back with more today. Today Matt dishes on sitemaps, site architecture, static and dynamic URLs, geotargetting, the hot button topic of supplemental results and other SEO issues.

And don’t worry; the kidnapping background dilemma has been resolved, sorta. The now present low-hanging map doesn’t make him look like he has been abducted (thank goodness), but it does kind of make him look like an oompa loompa. Just move that map a little lower and we should be good, okay?

MSN Acts Like a Proud Parent
MSN has named their vertical search crawlers. Aww, that’s cute. Here are the new names:

  • MSN Shopping bot — msnbot-products
  • MSN News bot — msnbot-news
  • MSN Image Search bot — msnbot-media
  • MSN Search bot – msnbot (still)

Knowing the names of MSN’s crawler is very important for webmasters who want to stop certain bots from crawling their site. To block a bot, simply add its name to your robots.txt file.

Backlink Tool Shows Geolocation
SEO Scoop came across a new tool that profiles your site’s backlinks by geographic location. Search engines use this information (along with language on the site, Meta geo tags, etc.) to determine if you are a county-specific website, which then affects rankings. Barry Schwartz explains that the tool uses the Yahoo! link command to list your sites by linking top level domain.

We ran the tool on the Bruce Clay, Inc. site and found 79.2 percent of our backlinks come from .com TLDs, while 8 percent from .nets and 5.6 percent come from .org sites. The largest percentage of International sites link to us (.9 percent) come from Canadian TLDs.
The Warm and Fuzzies
Rory Blythe, who I admit I had not heard of until about twenty minutes ago, loves Google because they ranked his site number one for the word “rory”, which then allowed an adorable girl to find him, sparking endless endearing exchanges via phone, text and letter, all concluding in him traveling to a North Pole suburb to meet her and take a too-cute-for-words picture together to document the experience. Aaaand breathe.

If you thought that sentence was hard to read, I’d advise you to skip Rory’s first paragraph and go straight to the pictures. Aww, Google love warms me.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.

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Serving North America based in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area
Bruce Clay, Inc. | PO Box 1338 | Moorpark CA, 93020
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