Erics Tech Blog » SEO

Google Securing The Web One Discrete Monopolizing Push At A Time

eric — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:52:31 +0000

Contrary to speculation by some, Google’s decision for encrypting search data is motivated by the goal to make the web as a whole more secure and it’s not driven by economic interests. I think Google is silently forcing the internet to do what they should be doing on their own.

Google can’t just tell everyone to make their sites operate over SSL. That would show their monopoly and their power (even though everyone knows it’s there). So after Eric Schmidt spoke to congress about many things (including privacy), Google is finally releasing encrypted search for logged in users. For more information on everything this means with regard to marketing and SEO, I recommend reading this comprehensive article by Search Engine Land. But for security, this has a whole different meaning.

Looking at this from a slightly different perspective, Google is saying that if you just make your site SSL available, then you can continue to have your referrers. And that is ultimately what people (read marketers and SEO folks) want anyway. To oversimplify a bit, making one’s site available over SSL is as easy as going to GoDaddy or the like and buying and installing an SSL certificate on your web server.

But what does having this certificate really do? It allows a website to be loaded in a secure, encrypted environment. It also allows the browser and the user to validate that the site is who they say they are according to a set of authorities like Verisign or Thawte. These are the folks whose job it is to verify that the certificate is being issued to a valid company (note that I said valid, not necessarily reputable as it’s not the job of certificate authorities to determine reputation).

And on a more technical level, as a user, SSL certificates keep traffic between you and the website you are interacting with more secure. Looking at this via the OSI model for networking; since all HTTP traffic happens at the application layer (layer 7), when SSL is not present, everything happens over plain text communications and can be sniffed. SSL, which is a network protocol, occurs at layer 6 (the presentation layer) and therefore can encrypt and decrypt all the communications that happen at layer 7 (if used).

So if we all bit the bullet and added SSL capabilities to our sites, the net result would be a more secure internet from a user perspective. There are plenty worse things that Google could be doing than forcibly making the internet more secure.

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.