January 11, 2008 at 3:21 pm
· Filed under Search News, MSN News
MSN has announced that it will buy the FAST “Enterprise” Search engine for $1.2 dollars.
Fast is a Norwegian enterprise search company focusing on providing tailored search software and solutions to large global businesses. The deal was announced last Tuesday and gives Microsoft a strong footing in the Enterprise search market where “Fast” has traditionally been a leader.
Analysts say the purchase of Fast Enterprise Search will fill in the gap by giving Microsoft a strong footing in the business search sector and complement Microsoft’s MSN Live Search and Microsoft Search Server and SharePoint Server for small businesses.
Where Google is a dominiant player in the mainstreaam search market, MSN is now trying to get a dominant position in Enterprise search where they’ve always been comfortable. Through the acquisition of Fast, they’re well on their way.
Fast Searh is now a business offering but its story began with consumer web through its AlltheWeb.com search engine which was aquired by Overture in 2003 and later purchased by Yahoo!
It’ll be interesting to see what Google will now do to counter this unexpected move.
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January 8, 2008 at 11:04 pm
· Filed under SEO, SEO Tips
Keyword Cannibalisation is the term used for the common SEO mistake of having several of your website’s pages targeting the same keyword. This confuses the search engines as to which page to serve back to users. This also confuses other sites owners that want to link to your site thereby leading different sites to link to different pages leading to a dilution of your link popularity.
So what are the most common causes of keyword cannibalisation?
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Duplicate Title and Meta Tags
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Duplicate Content
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Similar internal links pointing to different pages.
How do you solve Keyword Cannibalisation? Easy, make sure each of your pages are targeting different keywords by optimising the meta tags and ensuring unique content on each page. Also ensure that all internal links on your website support the landing pages’ keyword target.
There are various tools available to help you solve Keyword Cannibalisation including:
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Conducting a site colon search ie type site:yoursite.com in Google; You can tell by browsing the results if you’re suffering from Keyword Cannibalization.
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Performing permanent redirects (301) to ensure that many pages with similar content are all merged into one.
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Using content similarity tools to check duplicate content, a good tool of this sort can be found here: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
To sum up, make sure that your website’s pages are not cannibalised by following the simple steps mentioned above. Good luck!
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January 4, 2008 at 9:41 am
· Filed under SEO Tips & Tricks
Here’s a quick way to find and eliminate spam on your website.
Type: “popular spam word” site:yoursite.com in Google and analyse the results. You’ll be surprised, well I was! I noticed that someone had managed to spam some of my members’ blog comments in my Invision forum blog software. They had used spam words such as “vi*g*a”, “c*si*o” and “p*nis enlargement”. Anyway I deleted them right away.
So why is it important to remove spam from your site? Well, its as simple as this:
Search engines want to provide the best possible user experience to their users and serving sites that contain spam undermines that goal.
So go on and remove spam from your site today!
Again, the way to do it:
“spam word” site:yoursite.com
where spam word can be something like vi*g*a or any of the spam words found here.
Good luck!
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January 3, 2008 at 1:17 pm
· Filed under SEO, SEO Tips
A good article was published by Brett Borders on his Copy Brighter blog listing 7 SEO techniques that no longer work. here’s the summary with links to related posts on this blog:
Thanks for your article Brett, very thorough!
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