SEO UPDATES

Here’s an article by Matt Cutts (found through ProBlogger) that explain, in a few but informative words, why it’s best to use dashes rather than underscores in your URLs, at least when it comes to Google:

With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines.

This is probably especially valid for blogs, where permalinks often contain the names ofthe posts themselves. Platforms such as WordPress automatically format such titles with dashes, a good thing indeed regarding Google and perhaps other search engines as well.

To conclude with Darren’s words: For Google, dashes are best.

It seems that it can, at least according to this entry I’ve found on Multinlingual Search:

Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the top level domain name - ‘ .de’ for instance, the meta language tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of the text.

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites. Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the top level domain is ‘.de’, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english - which results in dropping a lot in google.de but rising in Google.com.

Is there anything you can do to prevent this from happening to your own website? Yes, if you can get enough inbound links in the appropriate language again. I wish this page would detail the process a little more, though. At least it’s already a good thing to be aware of the problem, since it’s probably not what webmasters will think of first when their sites suddenly fall in ranking…

This indeed was something that had me confused at first, and I know I’m not the only one in this case. It can thus be interesting to have a look at this post on Blog SEO about playing with robots.txt. While, as usually said, meta-tags and the likes don’t have as much importance as they once had, it’s nevertheless interesting to know this kind of little things.

Better than this, though, is the link added at the end of the post, and pointing to robotstxt.org, where one will indeed find all there is to learn, and in details, along with FAQ, recommended sites and readings, and how to direct robots to visit your website.

After having read this, there’s no excuse anymore to not knowing what robots/spiders are!

Google announced that the AdSense program now supports the use of 200 channels:

If you weren’t sure how you were going to track the performance of all of your new pages, your worries are over! We’ve increased the number of AdSense channels available to you, up to 200 active channels at any one time. Use your extra channels to compare the performance of your different ad units, of various page layouts, or to track the results of your optimization experiments.

For those who’re very new at using AdSense and haven’t perused this matter yet, channels are used to track your ads performances:

Channels provide you with a way to view detailed reporting about the performance of your pages. By assigning a channel to any combination of pages, you can track a variety of metrics across your sites. [...] You can even assign a channel to each of your separate domains, to see where your clicks are coming from.

With 200 active channels at any time, advertisers now indeed have more options available to perform their tracking.

Aaron Wall from SEO Book has released his free link analysis software. Going with the name of Back Link Analyzer, you can download it directly here.

What is this tool, may you ask? Aaron explains it all in the page linked hereabove. In a nutshell, however, Back Link Analyzer is a link analysis tool that shows what anchor text is linking into a page or website. It can grab backlink data from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and analyze anchor text, Alexa data, IP addresses, number of outbound links on a page, and other information.

This tool is available for Windows only at the moment.

For anyone who could be interested by SEO techniques applied to blogs specifically, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has started to put up an interesting series about Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs.

The series isn’t finished yet, and will very likely contain a few more articles before it’s declared “closed”. However, the ones that have published so far all contain interesting tips, among which the use of keywords and internal links, and the importance of regular posting.