An SEO's Guide to HTTP Status Codes (An Infographic)
A visual guide to the HTTP status codes that really matter to SEO (200, 301, 302, 404, 501, 503). Half infographic, half cheat-sheet, half man, half bear, half pig.
Technical SEO
Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the chapter on Technical SEO in our Beginner’s Guide. Below are the latest posts on technical SEO, and we’ve included a few top articles here.
On-Site SEO : What are the technical on-page factors that influence your rankings? Our free learning center will get you started in the right direction.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet : This handy—and printable—cheat sheet is invaluable for anyone building websites. Contains several useful references that cover a ton of technical SEO best practices.
MozBar : This free Chrome extension is an advanced SEO toolbar that helps you to examine and diagnose several technical SEO issues.
The Technical SEO Renaissance : Is it true that technical SEO isn't necessary, because Google is smart enough to figure your website out? Mike King puts this rumor to rest, and shows you what to focus on.
Technical SEO: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Want a quick introduction to the basics of technical SEO? Our guru Rand has you covered—all in about 10 minutes.
Most Recent Articles on Technical SEO
Distilled Stole My Page Title | A Case Study in ORM
Distilled stole my page title. Well, indirectly. Well.... keep reading. (Full disclosure: I was recently hired by Distilled to work in the New York City office. This post was written before I was hired.) One day in early April, I was searching for my personal website using some searches that I knew worked for my site. One of these was my name. I searched "John Doherty" and saw...
Fat Pandas and Thin Content
The Panda update hit hard, and we've heard a lot about thin content. Here are 7 definitions of "thin" and what to do about.
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The True Potential of Anchor Links (#)
Inspired by this cool experiment on how google ignores the first anchor text by Errioxa I decided to set up an experiment of my own, to further look into the issue of how google treats links that include anchors (e.g. site.com/index.html#paragra...
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Create Your Own Pages Crawled Per Day Chart Out of Server Logs
Google Webmaster Tools have a popular function called "Pages crawled per day". This function can show you how many pages Googlebot crawls every day by presenting you a straightforward chart. This tool is awesome because crawling in some way can determine the indexation of your site, so it is always important to know how well your site is being crawled.
Crawler Face-off: Xenu vs. Screaming Frog
Sometimes, you just need a desktop crawler to get the job done. In this post, former champion Xenu takes on newcomer Screaming Frog.
Tips and Must-Haves for your eCommerce Platform
Choosing an eCommerce platform can be a terribly frustrating experience because of the options and packages available, the misinformation, the pushy sales reps, the time and money investment, and so on. I want to talk about this decision because of this experience, but I don't plan on making any platform recommendations. No, no. That's really up to you and the resources available to you. But I'...
Why Is Google Not Using Your Meta Description?
Sometimes, you may wonder where Google gets your search snippets. You can't always control what Google uses, but you can nudge them in the right direction.
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Dealing With Faceted Navigation: A Case Study
Faceted navigation is a pain in the @&$. Seriously. But then I looked to an authority site who I assumed HAD to be using faceted navigation to supply users with dozens of different kinds of combinations of different products: Amazon.com. This behemoth site is on nearly all of my search queries, not excluding the desired search terms of my emp...
Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical - SEO Tips
Duplicate content in SEO has been around for quite some time and even if Google has been saying they have been getting smarter and smarter in figuring out the best page to display in the SERPS from a list of duplicate content pages. They claim that it is something less to worry about today, than before. But knowing this issue exist, they ...
Catastrophic Canonicalization
The Canonical Tag is a powerful tool in the SEO arsenal, used wisely, but used improperly, just one line of code can destroy a site's search traffic. An experiment showing just how bad the damage can be.
6 Technical SEO Strategy Tips for Better Traffic and Rankings [Site Architecture]
If you think about it, search engines are more or less constantly driving us SEO people to keep our technical SEO strategy in a state of near constant refinement. Here are a few ideas (6, to be exact) based on issues I’ve encountered in QA or on our recent client work that I hope will provide a little food for thought the next time you’re planning SEO enhancements to your site.
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A Beginner's Guide To SEO APIs
Back in April 2010, Will Critchlow set himself a challenge, to learn enough appengine, python, yql and xpath in 2 hours to build a useful SEO tool. The resulting article describing development of the tool inspired me to start looking at other SEO related APIs, to see if I could do something similar.
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Increasing indexation with Blogger.com
Few weeks ago caseyhen wrote an article on how Twitter can improve indexation, which referred to my previous one on similar topic. This in turn inspired me to further thinking about off-site methods of improving or speeding up the indexation. A...