Google AdSense announced the launch of AdSense for Mobile.

This service is intended for webmasters who have created sites especially for viewing on mobile devices. Ads run on an auction model, and are contextually targeted to the content being viewed on the page. It’s now available to webmasters from 13 countries worldwide: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (in the coming weeks).

Here is a short introduction to the AdSense for Mobile platform.

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Operating a dynamic website? This might be interesting. The duplicate content issue is a well known problem when it comes to getting your pages indexed and ranked in the search engines. There are many solutions such as URL rewriting (mostly on Unix/Linux, alhtough there are ways to make it work on Windows), sessions and cookies, URL parsing which is pretty much a variation of URL rewriting…

There is a post about this on Google Webmaster Central. The thing that caught my eye in the post is the following:

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Item (2) is interesting. Unless you actually show different content when your page receives a different value for a parameter, which pretty much means there is no duplicate content, why would Google need to select what it thinks is the “best” representative page for a particular URL cluster. Yahoo allows webmasters to tell it what their choice for the representational URL is. By relying on Google to choose the “best” URL you actually give up any control that Google just gave you:

1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters — keep the URL as clean as possible.
2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can’t guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap’s URL in search results, it’s helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

So if I am not guaranteed to have my URL choice shown in search results, what’s the point of having the option to explicitly state that URL in the submitted site map? Kinda reminds me of the door dilemma - “damned if you enter, damned if you don’t enter”.

The whole story revolves around having your incoming link juice distributed over multiple variations of what’s essentially the same URL. So 100 links towards a “clean” URL will be distributed to all the URL parameter variations, and decrease incoming link value, which is not what you want, especially after all the hard work associated with link building.

In the end, it all comes down to is to try to use URL rewriting even if it takes a hosting solution change. Everything else is an unsure fix, complicates any site development, and will produce unwanted results later.

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Here’s a pop-quiz - how well do you know your SEO stuff? There are 75 multiple choice questions. The score you achieve will give you an idea about the level of your SEO knowledge, although you’d really have to take the quiz when you are concentrated and rested, after wake-up coffee After having completed the quiz, you’ll be presented with a list of all the questions with correct and wrong answers (wrong answers accompanied by right answers naturally), and in fact, this is the most important part of the whole thing, apart from link-bait content which will bring links to SEOMoz. Copy/paste or save the page and you’ve got yourself a neat list of good SEO best practices for future reference and education (you get links pointing to online resources about some of the concepts in the quiz). Great stuff!

SEO Professional - 74%
Are you an SEO Expert?

I haven’t had my wake-up coffee yet when I took the test

Well, gotta go study. How about you, what was your score on the SEO quiz?

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Neil Patel, over at Search Engine Land, wrote a very useful article called Which Social Media Sites Should You Target? To sum it up Neil gives 5 steps to take when selecting the right social media sites for promotion and advertising. He says only the first 3 are actually necessary, but the last 2 are in my opinion quite necessary as well. Here are the steps in a simple list:

• list keywords associated with own website
• visit social media sites (find list) and do searches using afore mentioned keywords
• narrow selection of sites choosing those with plenty of search results
• check what the competition is doing on a particular social media site
• look for comments and check what’s being said about your site/company

And there you go. Sounds simple to the point of saying “I knew that”, but when it’s put in an organized form like this, it gives us a new perspective towards the bigger picture.

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Google has added multi-language support, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA), to Webmaster Tools which will allow webmasters from non-English speaking regions to use all the functionality of Webmaster Tools in their own language. The added support, among other things, means webmasters will be able to list and track domain names that use characters other than the 26 letters from the English alphabet.

This might become useful for me, since I should now be able to list a domain name written in Cyrillic or Latin Serbian letters (example: Google = Гугл in Cyrillic Serbian). I haven’t given it a try yet, but I will soon.

Google is asking for feedback for the new changes, and suggestions for further improvements.

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After having taken offline the only tool on Live.com, the link operator, in March this year, Live is back with a promising announcement. They’re putting together Webmaster Portal, a special place for webmasters where there will be tools and information about Live SEO. Initially, here’s what we’ll get:

• Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
• Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
• Statistics about your website
• Consolidation of content submission resources
• New content and community resources

The tools are expected to be available publicly this late Fall, but you can sign-up for the beta program right now if you want to dive in right away.

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Facebook seems to be planning an ad platform that would use a system similar to those already used by other search properties, such as Google, to show targeted ads on its pages. Basically, marketers will be a chance to show ads based on the information users reveal about themselves on the Facebook site. This is a priority plan for Facebook, and the first basic version of this system is to be unveiled late this fall. The plan itself is still in a very early stage though.

Facebook hopes to refine the upcoming ad system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in before they have actually mentioned an area of interest in their profile or actions on Facebook. Facebook acknowledged the plan but didn’t specify any details about the new system. There are indications from people familiar with the plan that the company is aiming to create a similar system to Google’s AdWords, allowing advertisers to place ads next to regular search results.

There has been a lot of hype about Facebook, with opinions ranging from “it will only get bigger” to “the hype will die down”. This new move by Facebook clearly shows the way the company is aiming to go. Indeed, with the number of new subscribers growing every day, and with some 33 million users already, Facebook has something to look forward to with the new ad plan. There is a lot of revenue potential, and with proper targeting, meybe some really good results for future advertisers on Facebook.

Via Wall Street Journal and Reuters.

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Ok, so Yahoo Search decided to try and make our lives a little easier by offering a way to tell Yahoo Search that dynamic parameters in the URL (the ?’s and &’s and this=that) can be ignored on request.

Today comes a new wave for search engines with the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer. The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly.

Hm, nice. But it gets even more interesting. You can actually give the dynamic URL parameter you want Yahoo to crawl your page(s) with. For example, leave the parameter “?show=full” in the URLs to be crawled.

• Login to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search.
• Add to My Sites and then authenticate any sites that you own or manage.
• For any sites that you have authenticated, you’ll see a ‘Dynamic URLs’ tab.
• On this tab you can enter parameters you want us to either remove from URLs or always crawl with a specific value.
• Once you enter the parameter, we’ll show you the # of URLs we estimate will be affected.
• After you confirm the action, we’ll modify our crawler such that every time we see a URL from your site with that parameter, we’ll automatically rewrite it within our system as per your instruction.

Next Yahoo shows us why this may be useful for webmasters:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

See in more detail on Yahoo Search Blog.

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An interesting post over at SearchEngineLand, where Eric Ward discusses the answer to a seemingly simple question of how far you should go with link building in terms of speed and number of links at once. Obviously you want to be below the radar, so to speak, but it’s not quite that simple.

While a question like this may seem well documented on the web, it seems that many people still implement all the wrong strategies for obtaining links towards their sites. I won’t go into too much detail here, because Eric wrote quite an informative post and pretty much explained it all.

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Has anyone tried to get a decent paid listing on a shopping review or lifestyle niche lately? When you visit these sites, they are very eager to show you they are #1 according to [insert favorite internet rating site] or that they rank #3 for some nice keywords. This in turn should guarantee that, after being charged sometimes for very high amounts of money, you will get niche-focused traffic from them, after all they have categories with niche content and lots of visitors. When you see these listings don’t really work, you ask for a direct link because sometimes these pages actually rank well for an interesting search phrase (why not?, let’s get at least some value for the money). Sure, you’ll get the direct link if you upgrade to a premium listing which of course means even more money on top of what you already payed. When you get down to it, if a paid listing is on a page that ranks well, is it worth that much extra money to get a direct link? Should we tolerate this kind of rip off tactics?

It will take a personal recommendation from a fellow online marketer I actually know to get me to pay for these listings anymore. Fortunately, there are alternatives to getting ripped off by greedy webmasters…

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