SEO and Social Media

As SEO takes the (long) corner, and the web matures, there’s always going to be a need for reshaping.  SEO has a funky name in some circles, mostly from those who lump all the bad in with the good. To me, the things that really stood out about SEO were the connections it could make to people who are specifically looking for connections, and the idea of actually helping engines be more, well, human.  Humans helping robots helping humans.  It’s not as noble as DMOZ or Mahalo, but stands to work much, much better.

So last year, as SEO 2.0 started to make some noise, and the basic concepts started to bubble up, I was hooked. I took it to my agency. I define my consulting around it. I adore sites like seo2.0.onreact.com (who in true SEO 2.0 spirit are bringing the SEO community together with requests for definitions) who work at getting this new philosophy out into the SEO space. Maybe one day fewer people will look at SEO less as spamming, or a ‘throw darts at a map’ tactic, and more as an actual attempt to improve user value legitimately, and bringing to life the legend of storybook search engine goals.

Popularity: unranked [?]

One of the greatest (mostly) unknown abilities of robots.txt is wildcard pattern matching. We know how robots.txt can block files and directories from being crawled, but in the case of URLs with unique paramaters and duplicate content issues, did you know that Google and Yahoo respect wildcards (this was verified by connections at the engines – but MSN said they do not respect pattern matching “at this time”).

If you have URLs with unique parameters – for example, UTM with Google analytics, paid search tags, and so on – you can create a robots.txt entry like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*utm

How cool is that? Remember, this only should be employed if you have very unique parameters. If your parameters are keyworded, and that keyword appears as other directories or page names, they will get blocked too… quite possibly to your dismay.

More from Google’s Webmaster Blog.

Popularity: 6% [?]