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Social News Sites: Finding the Right Mixx

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on April 8, 2008

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HubSpot recently published an article on their blog about the next big social news site called Mixx. Mixx claims to be ‘Your Blend of the Web’, and I feel that it delivers—quite well.

Signing up for Mixx is a short and painless process. Enter a few of your favorite tags and categories and viola…you have a completely custom front page! Much more targeted than using Digg’s (very dry) category system.

I customized my front page to display Web Design, SEO, PHP and Ruby on Rails articles. So far I have been very happy with the news I am seeing, and have even learned about a new service called Tweetburner, but that’s a topic for another post.

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Rank Checker: Automate Your Search Rank Reports

Published

dauclair

on April 3, 2008

in News and SEO

. 4 Comments

Aaron Wall of SEOBook has released a new SEO tool called Rank Checker. This tool allows you to easily track your rankings and rank changes on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search (MSN).

This free tool is packaged as a Firefox extension, making it quite reliable. You can manually check rankings for a list of keywords, and can even setup scheduled tasks to automatically fetch rankings at specified times and intervals.

This tool saves me a lot of time since I used to do this task manually. Digital Point provides a similar tool accessed through a web interface. However, it does not provide data from Google unless you own a now discontinued Google SOAP API Key.

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Redirecting Index Back to the Root

Published

dauclair

on April 2, 2008

in Quick Tips and SEO

. 0 Comments

When someone links to your site, they generally copy and paste your URL out of their browser. To help aid your SEO efforts, try to provide them with consistent URLs at all times. Redirect your ‘index’ pages (index.html, index.php, etc…) back to the root. This way, users will link to: http://www.yoursite.com/ every time. PHP users: try this redirect solution which has worked great for me.

Google Webmaster Help: Group Chat Recap

Published

dauclair

on March 28, 2008

in News and SEO

. 7 Comments

This morning I was fortunate to be able to participate in the ‘First-ever Google Webmaster Help Group Chat’. Though it was labeled as beta, it turned out to be a great session.

The group chat, hosted by Webex, consisted of a panel of 13 Googlers, namely our Google friends Matt Cutts and host Adam Lasnik.

After web-cam-assisted introductions, the Googlers reviewed a site which had been chosen from a small group of submissions to this thread. The very lucky site was pictureline and a comprehensive review covering design, usability and SEO was given. Pictureline was chosen since the site already implemented many SEO best practices, but still had room for review and improvement.

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What are Canonical URLs?

Published

dauclair

on February 17, 2008

in Guides and SEO

. 0 Comments

www vs. Non-www?

The problem is that www is considered a sub-domain, just like: http://mail.yahoo.com or http://analytics.google.com.

Search engines consider subdomains to be a completely different web site. So, http://www.dauclair.com is a completely different site than http://dauclair.com in Google’s eyes.

This affects your SEO in two areas:

If Google happens to index your site as both www and non-www, you may be penalized for duplicate content. Your site is essentially competing against itself.
Google determines your PageRank, the importance of your site, by the number of inbound links your site has. So, if people are linking to www, but your site is indexed as non-www, you are missing out on all the inbound links pointing to your www site.

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