Todd Huss

Back at the end of 2005 I wrote a short post titled Cloaking, no need to be ashamed and now in 2007 even more big sites are practicing some form of search engine crawler targeted cloaking. Yet still most SEO’s will give you a blanket answer and tell you to avoid cloaking so you don’t get delisted. I take a more pragmatic view and experience has taught me that certain forms of cloaking can be good!
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Update 2/5/07: I’ve since discovered five plugins that address this very problem with slightly different approaches (the latter two store a permalink in the table, good for mutable titles):

• acts_as_sluggable
• acts_as_urlnameable
• acts_as_slugable
• acts_as_friendly_param
• permalink_fu

Obie’s recent post on search engine friendly URL’s in Ruby on Rails 1.2 and greater couldn’t have been more timely. I was about to tackle search engine friendly URL’s on my little local san francisco bay area boating classifieds site and after reading his blog post, 15 minutes later it was done. Here’s the old URL structure:
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I’ve started using Sitening’s free SEO SERP tracker to track the position of GreatSchools.net for terms we want to rank for in Google. If you rely on search traffic and want to keep track of how you’re ranking for certain keywords I highly recommend checking it out, they’ve done a great job!

Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more concise! For those that didn’t read the whole post, in the last paragraph I say that it’s fine to use HTML image tags for content, I just think it’s bad design to use image tags for style elements. Anyhow, thanks for all the feedback (postive and negative) and here’s the original post:

CSS offers us a lot of power to style and decorate our pages with images, however, replacing text with an image is one gap not well addressed by CSS such that you often see sites doing:

<a href=”/”><img alt=”Home” src=”home.gif”/></a>

which is obviously bad for 2 reasons:
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We’re slowly moving towards making GreatSchools XHTML compliant (we have a long way to go though)! To start we’ve begun using proper XHTML entity references for URL’s with &amp; as a separator instead of plain old & in a few places.
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Update: Bryce pointed out a servlet filter you can implement to disable JSESSIONID’s… very nice!

When we started moving GreatSchools from Perl to Java + SpringMVC + Hibernate one of the first things we had to figure out was how to disable jsessionid’s from getting appended to URL’s when using c:url in a JSP page. Jsessionid is terrible for search engine optimization because crawlers that don’t have cookies enabled will get URL’s from your pages with a jsessionid parameter appended. This makes it virtually impossible for a crawler to match the URL from an inbound link to your site with a page it has already crawled. What’s worse is that you risk having your page rank hurt with Google because it thinks you’re serving duplicate content, ouch!
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The market share change between Google and Yahoo has been breathtaking this past year! The article Google gains search share, widens lead on Yahoo (over at Yahoo news) indicates Google’s market share was 36.3% a year ago and now it’s up to 42.3% while Yahoo was 31.1% and is now down to 27.6%.

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Keeping current with SEO has always been a challenge for me, it reminds me of paying bills, you have to do it but you don’t always want to. However, as the majority of our traffic comes from search, staying on top of it is important and as a result we’ve seen massive traffic growth (more…)

Nofollow really took off in the blogging community as a means to stop comment spammers and I think at this point it’s safe to say that it’s had absolutely no effect on that front. What’s worse is that it’s the wrong approach to prevent spam as it punishes readers who leave insightful comments or trackbacks by withholding the link value they get in exchange for participating. If someone is willing to take the time to leave a comment we should be more than happy to give them the link value. The only thing nofollow does effectively is hurt the pagerank of active blog participants which was never the desired effect! For comment spam we need to stick with less draconian approaches like Akismet and Captcha.

At work when we design a new page that we hope to drive people to via search engines we often consult with our search engine consultant to ensure we’ve thought through the page design and that the HTML is up to snuff (e.g. proper use of the title, h1, h2, etc… tags). We’ve also seen dramatic increases to older pages when we’ve gone through a round of search optimization on the page so I’m convinced that SEO work is time well spent.

A coworker recently sent me a link to the free SEO Analyzer tool which looks like it might be helpful in the process. I don’t think it will ever replace our SEO consultant but it’s good to have tools like this in the arsenal. The other tools we use regularly are the Google Adwords Selector tool and the Overture Keyword Selector tool for helping us get the most effective wording to convey the content of the page.

If you’re interested in learning more about SEO or are curious which blogs you should be reading I’d recommend starting with this post on Matt Cutts excellent blog as he lists some great resources!