Comments for SEM CLUBHOUSE

Comment on Understanding Robots.txt by Christine Churchill

Christine Churchill — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:14:54 +0000

g1smd: you are correct: there can be several Disallow records in the file, and a given robot will attempt to pick the ONE set of Disallows that best matches its User-agent. The “User-agent: *” record is a catch-all default which will ONLY be used if a more specific User-agent line cannot be identified.

Care should be taken to avoid MULTIPLE records for the same User-agent, since the Standard (such as it is) does not specify how a robot should handle this case. If you have multiple Disallows for a given User-agent, you should put all the Disallows (one per line) within the same record, then put a blank line to indicate the end of that record.

User-agent: first robot name
Disallow: /directory1
Disallow: /directory2
Disallow: /directory/subdirectory3

User-agent: 2nd robot name
Disallow: /directory1
Disallow: /directory2

# 3rd is allowed everywhere
User-agent: 3rd robot name
Disallow:

#catchall (for robots not listed elsewhere)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Comment on Understanding Robots.txt by g1smd

g1smd — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:50:57 +0000

One thing that is often overlooked is explained by the following simple example.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dogs

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cats

You might expect that all agents (including Google) would desist accessing the /dogs folder and Google would additionally desist from accessing the /cats folder.

In reality, Google will continue to access the /dogs folder because when there is a Googlebot-specific section in robots.txt Google will read ONLY that section.

To be absolutely clear, if you have both a User-agent: * and a User-agent: Googlebot section in robots.txt you must put everything that you want Googlebot to obey in the User-agent: Googlebot section even if this duplicates directives already listed in the User-agent: * section of robots.txt.

Googlebot reads only the most specific section, by User-agent, of the robots.txt file.

Finally, add a blank line after the last Disallow: directive in each section of the robots.txt file.

Comment on Pinterest Gaining Traction For External SEO by Anna

Anna — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:02:06 +0000

Any guesses as to why Pinterest is overwhelmingly female?

Comment on I’m A Social Media Goody 2 Shoes … And Proud Of It by SEO Sheffield

SEO Sheffield — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:32:49 +0000

What is the single best search engine optimization (SEO) tool to help position a brand new website on Google?

Comment on The Day We Closed Google: An Illustration Of The Problem With Crowd Sourced Edits by Chris Silver Smith

Chris Silver Smith — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:01:31 +0000

I was purposefully vague about who and how many of us were involved. I believe Mike Blumenthal may have mentioned it only required 4 separate accounts, but I could be mistaken. There were more than 4 of us involved in this experiment. I don’t believe it has anything to do with how many people visit the Place page for the listing involved.

I think there should be an opportunity for businesses to respond to reports that they’re closed before their listing gets flagged. A month doesn’t seem too long. User edits could then still affect a listing, but it would reduce the chance of the business getting its bottom line negatively affected by mischievous or hostile false reports.

Comment on Pinterest Gaining Traction For External SEO by Chris Silver Smith

Chris Silver Smith — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:52:51 +0000

I’m not doing promotion work on behalf of Pinterest, if you were suggesting that.

Actually, I don’t mention that it’s beta or only open to invites because I signed up on the site and they pretty promptly gave me access to start using it. Getting an invite doesn’t seem inordinately difficult, thus far.

Comment on Pinterest Gaining Traction For External SEO by Local SEO

Local SEO — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:37:43 +0000

I keep seeing Pinterest mentioned on my G+ Stream that Pinterest has Local SEO value and has potential to rival or even over take Flickr and Photobucket for this reason. Thing is, it seems getting a Pinterest invite is part of the pre-buzz stealth marketing strategy? I vote you put the kibash on that plan and open the gates before we lose interest

Comment on The Day We Closed Google: An Illustration Of The Problem With Crowd Sourced Edits by Scott

Scott — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:13:45 +0000

What I want to know from this post is how many were the “handful” that reported the Google HQ closed & over what period of time did the “handful” report this? Also we don’t know the amount of normal traffic that the places page received during this period to compare the ratio of visits vs. the number of people reporting the location as closed.

I would hate to see claimed places pages get locked down to protect them because business owners can’t be relied upon to self report if they close the doors. The fact that “reported to be closed” and a link to report it “not true” appears, along with the phone # for the business seems a fair protection for the SMB. Add an E-mail notification to the owner and you really couldn’t ask for more.

Comment on Keyword Research for Local SEO by Nisheth

Nisheth — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:30:31 +0000

I’ve been searching far and wide for information on keyword research for local businesses, since I’m now starting to enter that market. And it’s been almost impossible to find good information. This post probably has some of the best information that I’ve found so far.

Compiling some of the comments, it feels like a good approach to local keyword research is to do the following:

1. Do keyword research on a national level.
2. Do keyword research on a local level by making some assumptions from the data gathered from step 1. It seems like you can still get some good data from the Google keyword tool at the local level, it’s just incomplete.
3. Run an Adwords campaign for 30 days where possible to get some concrete data on the keywords that you’ve found so far and then use this data to optimize the client’s site.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this post!

Comment on Save The Date: Google’s Juiced-Up Freshness In Rankings Underscore Dates, Too by SEO Agency

SEO Agency — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:57:06 +0000

Hi. I suspect that even for non-blog posts and non-news articles, dates can have an importance at times, such as when copyright dates on sites are extremely out-of-date. Thanks for sharing this information.
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Allen