Advanced eCommerce Link Building Guide

Jon Cooper

Have you ever been so excited about something that you’ve had to consistently discipline yourself to keep from ruining the surprise?

Over the last 6+ months, I’ve been working on something specific to those who are building links for eCommerce websites, as I know the unique challenge these companies produce on the link building side of things. And it’s finally open to the world.

The guide is now live to the general public right here: …

Advanced eCommerce Link Building Guide is a post from: Point Blank SEO

SEO

When it Comes to URLs, Does Size Matter?

Matt McAnear

Pop quiz: You’re buying a website domain. You sell disco balls. Disco-ball-fever.com is $200. Disco.ball is $20. Which one do you buy? Answer: If you are trying to maximize how many people can recall your website domain five seconds after seeing it, then buy disco.ball. You’ve probably seen the internet awash lately in bizarre domain extensions. Speculators, […]

Social Media and Social Search

What Ranking Signal is Better, HTTPS or FOAF markup, when Searcher and Searched Author are Connected?

Bill Slawski

Recently, Google announced that they would be ranking pages higher in search results when those pages use a secure protocol of https. The Google Webmaster Central blog told us so through Google Webmaster Trends Analysts Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, in HTTPS as a ranking signal. The use of https doesn’t necessarily make a […]

The post What Ranking Signal is Better, HTTPS or FOAF markup, when Searcher and Searched Author are Connected? appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

All Things SEO Column Channel: SEO Schema.org Search Engine Land SEO - Search Engine Optimization SEO: Image Search SEO: Video Search Uncategorized

The 2 Types Of Rich Media Your SEO Plan Can’t Ignore

Jim Yu

No one would embark upon an SEO plan without optimizing their text for SEO. In this multimedia age, you can’t ignore images and video either.

The post The 2 Types Of Rich Media Your SEO Plan Can’t Ignore appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: SEO Google penguin update Google: Panda Update Google: Penalties Google: SEO Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

The Confusion Over Google’s Algorithm Updates & Refreshes

Barry Schwartz

I personally spend a lot of time within the SEO space investigating claims of Google algorithm updates, it is a fascinating topic because there are so many variables involved and a lot of secrecy on Google’s end around their search algorithms. Often, Google will not confirm updates or…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Pinterest social media

Is Social the New Google?

Michiel Heijmans

During one of our recent projects, we noticed something odd. The website at hand, a shop / blog selling organic products, had over 50% of all pageviews coming from Google Pinterest. Is this really as odd as we felt it was? If you come to think about it, social search has been stealing ground from Google search for years,…

This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Advanced SEO Topics Research

Co-Occurrence as a Ranking Signal

Dan Petrovic

TL;DR: A little-known property of Google Books search highlights co-occurrence as a ranking signal.

The concept of co-occurrence (not to be confused with co-citation) has been on the radar of many search professionals for a while. I accepted the idea as common sense and never thought to investigate it further, then one day I stumbled into a peculiar set of search results which lead to what appears to be conclusive evidence of Google’s use of co-occurrence in their search results.…

The post Co-Occurrence as a Ranking Signal appeared first on DEJAN SEO.

Channel: Consumer Google: Logos Search Engine Land Uncategorized

Leo Tolstoy Google Logo Brings To Life The Author’s Classic Novels

Amy Gesenhues

Today’s Google logo is a an homage to Leo Tolstoy to mark the Russian author’s 186th birthday. The animated logo brings to life scenes from Tolstoy’s classic novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, along with stills of Tolstoy at his writing desk and…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Channel: Industry google antitrust Google: Critics Google: Legal Legal: Regulation Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

Google’s Current EU-Antitrust Settlement Appears Dead

Greg Sterling

Without immediate, new concessions from Google it appears that the company will not be able to finalize an antitrust settlement with the European Commission before antitrust chief Joaquin Almunía leaves office in November. It’s almost certain that a stronger Google critic will succeed him…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website

Cyrus-Shepard

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

It’s rare that Google reveals any of its actual ranking factors, so it came as a big surprise when representatives
announced they would reward sites using HTTPS encryption with a boost in search results.

HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include
increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.

Google’s push for HTTPS adoption appears to be working. A recent Moz Poll found
24% of webmasters planning to make the switch.

SEO advantages of switching to HTTPS

In addition to the security offered by HTTPS (which we’ll discuss below) there are additional SEO benefits for marketers to take advantage of.

1. More referrer data

Whenever traffic passes from a secure HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site, the
referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as ‘Direct.’ This is a problem because you don’t know where the traffic actually comes from.

If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like
Hacker News shows up as ‘direct’, because Hacker News uses HTTPS.

Fortunately, there’s a
simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS.

As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.

2. HTTPS as a rankings boost

On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it’s likely you’ll find the effect of any ranking influence to
remain quiet small.

In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed
no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS.

Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.

In fact, don’t expect HTTPS to act as a silver bullet. If rankings are your only concern, there are likely
dozens of things you can do that will have a bigger impact. Here are several:

3. Security and privacy

Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That’s not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from HTTPS / SSL encryption.

HTTPS adds security in several ways:

  • HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to,
  • Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors.
  • HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.

My advice is this: Make the switch to HTTPS if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.

Challenges to overcome with HTTPS

1. Mistakes happen

Moving your entire site to HTTPS requires many moving parts. It’s easy to overlook important details.

  • Did you block important URLs in robots.txt?
  • Did you point your canonical tags at the wrong (HTTP) URL?
  • Is your website causing browser bars to display warnings that frighten people away from your site? (Side note: That’s the very first article I wrote for SEOmoz!)

While rare, these problems do happen. Moz has spoken privately with webmasters who have seen both rankings and conversions plummet after implementing HTTPS.

In most cases it’s a simple fix, but beware the risk.

2. Speed issues

Because HTTPS requires extra communication “handshakes” between servers, it has the potential to slow down your website – especially on slower sites.

Add to this the fact that
speed is itself a ranking factor, especially on mobile.

The good news is, if you follow
best practices your site should be more than fast enough to handle HTTPS. New HTTPS friendly technologies like SPDY offer you the opportunity to speed up your website more than ever before.

3. Costs

Many webmasters pay between $100-200 a year for SSL certificates. That’s a significant amount for small websites. It’s also a barrier that most spammers won’t bother with.

On the other hand, it’s completely possible to
switch to HTTPS for free.

4. Not everything is ready for HTTPS

Sometimes, things don’t play well with HTTPS. Older web applications can have trouble with HTTPS URLs. (Fortunately, Moz updated
Open Site Explorer just this year.)

If you run AdSense, you may see
your earnings fall significantly, as Google will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant.

Even Google’s own Webmaster Tools
doesn’t yet support HTTPS migration. The world may be moving toward 100% SSL encryption, but in the meantime be prepared for growing pains.

Growing number of sites using HTTPS

Lots and lots of sites use HTTPS today, but most restrict usage to checkout and registration pages.

Very, very few sites use HTTPS sitewide.

According to the latest statistics from
BuiltWith, only 4.2% of the top 10,000 websites redirect users to SSL/HTTPS by default. While that number appears small, the percentage drops to 1.9% for the top million sites.

This number is likely to increase in the very near future as more websites pursue adoption.

SEO and HTTPS best practices

This post talks about the
SEO implications of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a technical guide, there are several we’d recommend:

What type of SSL certificate works best?

Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:

  1. Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
  2. Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.

From a rankings point of view, it makes
absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.

John Mueller of Google has stated that Google
doesn’t care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.

From both a security and user experience point of view, the type of certificate you choose can have an impact. Consider how different certificates alter how your website appears in the web browser address bar.

The green bar associated with extended certificates communicates trust, while the warning symbols associated with errors can cause worry with visitors.

SEO checklist to preserve your rankings

  • Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network.
  • Use 301 redirects to point all HTTP URLs to HTTPS. This is a no-brainer to most SEOs, but you’d be surprised how often a 302 (temporary) redirect finds its way to the homepage by accident
  • Make sure all canonical tags point to the HTTPS version of the URL.
  • Use relative URLs whenever possible.
  • Rewrite hard-coded internal links (as many as is possible) to point to HTTPS. This is superior to pointing to the HTTP version and relying on 301 redirects.
  • Register the HTTPS version in both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
  • Use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google can properly crawl and render your site.
  • Update your sitemaps to reflect the new URLs. Submit the new sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. Leave your old (HTTP) sitemaps in place for 30 days so search engines can crawl and “process” your 301 redirects.
  • Update your robots.txt file. Add your new sitemaps to the file. Make sure your robots.txt doesn’t block any important pages.
  • If necessary, update your analytics tracking code. Most modern Google Analytics tracking snippets already handle HTTPS, but older code may need a second look.
  • Implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This response header tells user agents to only access HTTPS pages even when directed to an HTTP page. This eliminates redirects, speeds up response time, and provides extra security.

Tips for FeedBurner and RSS

Many sites still use FeedBurner for RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Google stopped supporting it long ago and FeedBurner isn’t compatible with HTTPS.

If you use FeedBurner, you’ll need to migrate your RSS to an HTTPS-compatible service. If you’re technically competent you can do this yourself, or FeedPress has a
very inexpensive RSS migration solution.

Migrating social share counts

When migrating to HTTPS, you often want to preserve you social share counts. These are the numbers that display in social share buttons.

These counts don’t impact your rankings (as far as we know) but they act as strong social proof, and it’s frustrating to migrate a page with thousands of tweets and likes only to see them reset to zeros.

In fact, some social networks will transfer the social counts through their APIs, but it may take
weeks or months for them to show up correctly. Here’s a list of what does and doesn’t eventually transfer over:

  • Facebook: Yes
  • Twitter: No
  • Google +1s: Yes
  • Google shares: No
  • LinkedIn: Yes
  • Pinterest: No

If you want
instant karma, Mike King wrote an excellent tutorial on how to preserve your social share counts by altering the code of your social buttons. We used this method on Moz when we migrated from SEOmoz in order to preserve the counts on our content. 

Example button codes to preserve social shares (edit for your site):

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" </div>


<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-url="https://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-count="vertical" data-via="moz">Tweet</a>


<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations"></div>

Keep in mind: This only displays
social shares from the URL you dictate. Because of this, it doesn’t update your counts with any new social shares. This works best with content like older blog posts that are likely not to get many new shares. 

If you expect your content to continue to earn social activity, you may simply want to let the numbers update naturally over time.

Making the leap

Much of the web is now moving towards SSL encryption, and within a few years it may even become the default. SEOs, consultants and agencies that become experts know may be rewarded as the popularity of the protocol grows.

Will you make the switch to HTTPS?

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