Are there broken links on your site? Have you removed some old pages while forgetting to clean up the links pointing to those pages? Did you change your file structure and leave some legacy links behind? You may not even know if you have these issues, but the search engines do.

Do these broken links affect your search engine rankings? Out of curiosity, I asked some colleagues in the industry this question and the general consensus was they don’t even worry about it as an organic factor, which leads me to think they do not believe this affects rankings. Well, I am fairly certain this is incorrect for a number of reasons. Broken links can degrade your rankings on a site wide basis. I recently wrote on the fact that search engines rank individual pages and not whole sites, but I also mentioned there are a few site wide ranking factors. I believe this is one of those factors.

Let’s set aside for a moment that having broken links on your site is bad for a wide variety of user experience reasons and focus on why it is bad specifically for search engine rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

SES has come and gone and it was a wealth of information. You can find some good coverage of the sessions at Search Engine Strategies ’07 New York Session Coverage Roundup. For me, it’s the linking sessions that catch my attention.

What it basically comes down to is that quantity of links is no longer a major factor. Quality is what counts. It seems that the search engines are taking into account the user experience. This means that it is vital to acquire links that are relevant to your topic. Find the experts in your field, the authorities and get them to link to you. How do you do this? One way is submit articles to the industry forums and newsletters. Another is to use press releases and PR services to get your name out there. Just keep relevancy in mind… if it’s not related to your product or service, don’t do it.

Take some time to review the session coverage for Link Building Basics and Linking Strategies as they are filled with information and tools that you can use for improving your rankings through linking. One important thing to remember is that building links takes time, anytime I see a site that acquires a lot of links in a short period of time, I get suspicious. There is no quick fix, what we are aiming at is long term web presence and credibility.

Many web site owners would really love to have a mobile version of their web site available. Not only is it just cool and convenient to browse for the latest information while on the go, it is also becoming very popular. Soon most web sites will have a mobile version. If you can’t offer this service you may lose visitors in the future.Now is a good time to start learning about the technologies involved and the issues you may run into while deploying a mobile web site.

Most mobile enabled sites are using syndicated versions of their standard site. This could create some duplicate content issues which should be avoided. I’m in the process of learning new ways to fix this issue right now. One way is to make sure that your site is being crawled by the engines correctly. The standard SERPs should only index your standard content and the Mobile SERPs should only index your mobile content.

You have probably noticed that the big players in search are all starting to offer mobile versions of their search engines which are designed to index mobile content, this means that there will probably be a mobile SERP for each engine.

With a bit of research on Google’s site, I found a list of their user-agents which can be used in your sites robots.txt file. If I had my mobile content serving out of www.mysite.com/mobile and wanted the site to get indexed correctly I would add something like this to my robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /mobile/

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /mobile/

This would tell the standard Google SERP to not index the content in “/mobile” or any of it’s sub-directories. Then the next two rules would tell the mobile Google SERP to index everything in the “/mobile” directory and ignore everything else.

This is just one way to avoid the issue, There is also the .mobi domain which is to be used only for mobile content. I will discuss this more on another day. For further reading on mobile site development and the DotMobi domain, I would recommend this awesome guide which is in PDF format.

DotMobi Mobile Web Developer Guide