Erics Tech Blog » SEO

Sortfix Or A Next Generation Search Tool

eric — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:45:25 +0000

Although SortFix has been around for a while, I hadn’t heard of it until recently. I also didn’t really have a reason to give it a try because the vast majority of my Google searches were providing me with the results I was looking for.

The idea here is that you can do a normal search for something and then you will be presented with a screen that will allow you to narrow down your search using a graphical user interface (GUI). This will produce a search similar to something that a power searcher would do in Google. After doing this a few times, it becomes fairly evident how its done and one could start “power searching” on their own.

Now what’s exciting to me here is the potential. SortFix currently only uses Google as a backend search engine. There is nothing wrong with that considering that most of us only stick to one search engine anyway. However it would be great if SortFix could act as a meta search engine (a search engine that searches multiple other search engines) to do power searches and search the major players using your search terms, pair down the dupes and give you the results. Technically speaking, I am aware that this is no trivial task. But a unified search engine like that would certainly help quite a bit with finding what you’re looking for in a difficult search.

If you haven’t seen SortFix, then I’d head on over there. It’s a concept with some great potential and a cool user friendly searching style.

Social Search’s Effect on SEO

eric — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:36:50 +0000

There always seems to be something affecting your SEO rankings. Most recently, people have had issues with personalized search. Another kink in the chain may be social search.

The first thing is that Social Search can’t replace Hyptertext search (such as Google/Yahoo!/Bing/etc). Social search has 3 inherent drawbacks, time to receive information, credibility of the source, and subject/objectivity. Technically subjectivity is an issue with hypertext searches as well, but since the information is considered more permanent, people tend to be a little less opinionated and a little more objective (if the information is factual).

According to a recent NY Times article, the majority of social searches are answered within 10 minutes. In our culture, 10 minutes is a long time to wait. We are all about instant gratification. With regard to credibility, most of the time social searches are requests for opinions, so credibility isn’t an issue. What one thinks of a restaurant or some other establishment is generally an opinion based question.

Ultimately I don’t believe there will be a direct impact on SEO. Social search just aim to fill a different niche. People have a different goal in mind when performing a social search than when they are performing a non-social (hypertext) search.

The one thing that this article in the times neglected to mention is that a lot of the hypertext search results are becoming social. With the hypertext search engines indexing sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor for example, they are already allow social search results in a hypertext search engine. Therefore social search engines will need a wholly different approach to searching to be effective.

SEO and Cross-Domain Content Syndication

eric — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:45:02 +0000

When dealing with content syndication, one is occasionally in the situation where you are not the higher ranking site in search engines. You might rank #4 for an article and in that same search, your syndicated content may be ranked #1. What’s the best way to deal with this?

After much reading and discussion, I believe that you have a few options.

The first is taking advantage of the most recent addition to the cross-domain rel=canonical link element. You can read up on it more here. If you can talk to the publishing group and get them to allow the addition of the canonical link relationship, then you will get credit where credit is due (and deserved).

The reason that this can sometimes be an issue is that a lot of SEO types are not comfortable with when and how to use this link relationship and over use it or point it to their homepage for more link juice. That’s not the idea here. The idea is to prevent duplicate content from being index and to allot credit to the deserving party.

The second is to try to take advantage of the syndicate publishing networks credibility and publish a blurb at the bottom of every article. Look at the bottom of every CNET article as an example. There is a blurb about every author with a link. That link could be to the author’s site or to an author’s bio page.

Lastly, you need to make sure that the article links back to your site. This is again taking advantage of the link juice and credibility that the higher ranking site can bring to your natural search ranking.

Sitemaps On Rails

eric — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:45:11 +0000

SEO being an interest of mine, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around releasing a webapp without a sitemap. The problem is that there aren’t any really great sitemap plugins for Rails. Now I will grant that creating a sitemap in Rails is a challenging proposition and one that I would not like to undertake on my own unless absolutely necessary. But I was hoping that there would be a rails sitemap “killer app” like there is with almost everything else in Rails.

So I dove in and tried a few options until I found one that worked. First I wrote some code to generate an XML file and then created a sitemap_index.xml.gz file by hand. This was very kludgy and definitely not a permanent solution. I had also read suggestions about doing it in a sitemap_controller.rb file, but that seemed just as kludgy as using a view to generate the XML. It was then time to explore the plugin world.

After trying a few random plugins that I stumbled across, I finally found one that works for me. It’s call sitemap_generator by Adam Salter. What I really like about it is that it supports actually Ruby code in the config/sitemap.rb file. Additionally, it solves a few common sitemap problems from the getgo (taken from the github README):
* Support for more than 50,000 urls (using a Sitemap Index file)
* Gzip of Sitemap files
* Variable priority of links
* Paging/sorting links (e.g. my_list?page=3)
* SSL host links (e.g. https:)
* Rails apps which are installed on a sub-path (e.g. example.com/blog_app/)

Using this plugin is easy. Install it just as you would install any other plugin or gem (instructions are in the README). Getting right into the sitemap, it’s really easy to accomplish whatever you want to do using regular Ruby code. For example, if I simply want to find all the businesses on the site and add them to the sitemap, I can do this:

Business.find(:all).each do |biz|
sitemap.add business_path(biz), :lastmod => biz.updated_at,
:priority => 0.9, :changefreq => 'monthly'
end

And if I have a slightly more complex URL structure like this one for posts (and who doesn’t have a posts model in their webapp):

http://foo.com/blog/2009/12/17/article-title

Then I can do something a little more complex like this:

Post.find(:all).each do |post|
sitemap.add show_path(post.named_route_generator), :lastmod => post.updated_at,
:priority => 0.7, :changefreq => 'monthly'
@comments = Comment.find( :all, :conditions => [ "post_id = ?", post.id ] ).each do |comment|
if !comment.blank?
sitemap.add show_comment_path( comment.named_route_generator ), :lastmod => comment.updated_at,
:priority => 0.4, :changefreq => 'monthly'
end
end
end

The only thing that I can’t seem to figure out if it supports is custom links in the URLs. Meaning links that are fairly convoluted and (for some reason) not generated with a link_to, but have a custom link generator. Other than that, you should probably go with sitemap_generator for your sitemap needs.

If you have a favorite Rails plugin for sitemaps, I would certainly like to hear about it. And if you aren’t using sitemaps and are worried about SEO, then shame on you.

Testing Sessions with Digest::SHA256 Passwords In Rails

Remembering that Content Is King

eric — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:08:18 +0000

Recently, Matt Cutts answered the question “Will SEO still exist in five years?” His answer is available here. To paraphrase, he said, “There will likely be SEO because there will always be people wanting to put the icing on the cake to get themselves found.”

I think that’s an obvious statement (not that I am taking anything away from everything Matt Cutts has said/done). I say this because the more search engines evolve combined with faster computers and more available computing power, the more they will have at their disposal to weed out the garbage. Eventually it will all boil down to content. How often do users actually search for advertisements?

The meme “Content Is King” refers to the idea that there should be unique or original text supporting whatever product or idea that you are trying to put forth. I believe that some of the biggest offenders of this are corporations (small or large). They are so intent on getting people on the phone that they (for the most part) do not put enough information on their web site about their products. Restaurants have their entire web site (including menus) in flash. This is a migration away from having original content sufficient to convey your intentions and ideas.

So as people create web sites, I believe that the following items need to be kept in mind:

People come to you for your ideas. That means that your content is what separates you from the other guy. Once you engage your readers, they will continue to come back for more. If you just tease them with partial content, then they probably won’t come back more than once or twice.
Context adds to the content. If you are consistently writing solid content about a subject, then people (and therefore search engines) will see all your ideas within the context of your content. For example, if you have a blog about cars and you write about a show that you went to at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City in April, then by context, the search engine and your readers will expect that to be about a car show. The more content you have, the more context is built up around your content.
Don’t write towards the search engines. Write your content the way you want your ideas conveyed to people. The search engines will do the rest.

Although the content of a site is not the only thing that accounts for a quality site, it is certainly incredibly important. If one does not consistently have relevant content, then people will not continue to visit or link to their site. Content is not a concept to be overlooked in designing a web site, especially in the long term.