I was trying to explain what a canonical tag was the other day, and I realized (not for the first time), that the canonical tag is not actually a tag. If you break down HTML syntax, it looks something like this: If you apply that to the syntax of a “canonical tag”, which is usually …
Adding The Vary HTTP Header In WordPress
I finally finished building a mobile site for Salsa Vida SF, which was definitely a learning experience. Since responsive design sucks I used dynamic serving for the mobile site (using the Any Mobile Theme Switcher plugin), and basically rebuilt the site from scratch, allowing me to completely re-optimize the site experience for mobile. One of …
Google+ Quietly Nofollows All Links
Google+ used to be a great source of dofollow links, but it looks like the party has finally come to an end. When Google+ first launched, all of the links from the site were dofollow. This included all links from your posts, all links on your profile page, and all links in your bio and …
Why Amit Singhal’s Swiss Army Knife Isn’t Reassuring
Yesterday during the SMX West keynote, Danny Sullivan asked Amit Singhal (Google’s head of search) a question that has been on the minds of many webmasters lately: How is Google balancing the interests of users, who want answers immediately through Knowledge Graph, and the interests of webmasters, who provide the content for those answers. What …
I Am Entity (And So Can You!)
So it looks like Google just updated their Knowledge Graph, and I am officially an entity! The information comes from Freebase, an open source database of entities and things that was acquired by Google in 2010. Freebase is one of the databases that Google pulls data from for its Knowledge Graph (along with Wikipedia and …
How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site In Less Than 2 Minutes
I’ve been playing around with the new Site Speed Suggestions Tool that was released today for Google Analytics, and noticed a couple of issues that popped up on my WordPress site. One was that I needed to “eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” and the other was that I needed to “leverage browser …
How To Get A Google+ Vanity URL
It looks like Google+ vanity URLs are finally rolling out for the masses! This morning, I received the following message for one of the pages that I manage: You’re now eligible for a unique Google+ custom URL that lets you easily point folks to your page (no more long URLs!). Here’s what we’ve reserved for …
Rejoice! iOS 7 Coming Next Week!
MacRumors.com announced today that Apple will be holding an iPhone event next Tuesday (September 10th) at 10am PT. If past iPhone events are any indication, Apple will likely introduce iOS7 to download on that day, or shortly thereafter. This is a huge boon for Internet marketers. As most SEOs know by now, iOS6 prevents referral …
Share 13 Conference Highlights
I had a great time at the Share 13 conference organized by BrightEdge this past week. BrightEdge definitely knows how to treat their customers well, and they put on a great event with some great speakers capped off by a wine tour in Napa Valley. Hard to beat that. I started off the day feeling …
Pinterest Links Dofollow Again?
UPDATE: As of November 15, 2013 Pinterest links appear to be nofollow again So I was going through backlinks today using Open Site Explorer’s “Just-Discovered” feature (which is handy for finding newly found links), and I noticed that there were a lot of Pinterest links in there. What’s more, these links were all dofollow. When …