There has been much debate in the past few months as to whether or not Google recognizes, and passes link equity, to multiple links to the same page with different anchor texts. There is a recent post at SERoundtable that has re-sparked this debate and some of the comments disgust me.

But first, here is the basic theory of how link equity is distributed throughout your site:

Say you have 10 links on your homepage that go to internal pages in your site. That means that the link equity (juice) is divided in ten and only 10% of the authority from the homepage (which is almost always your strongest page) is sent to each of those pages equally. Now if you used the no follow tag on five of those links off the homepage that were going to pages you don’t care as much about ranking then each of the remaining five links that are followed would get 20% of the link juice! My good friend Ricardo, from eVisibility, has an excellent post with visuals to explain this (those buckets are now famous and have gotten that blog many reputable backlinks!).

This is why people use the follow tag to sculpt page rank throughout their sites. It is a a wonderful technique that has worked great for myself and for clients. However, there are people out there who feel that using the nofollow tag to sculpt your pagerank can set off some sort of red flag to Google and you can get penalized. People have even claimed that this is the reason they lost their rankings! Poppycock! Everytime a site owner loses rankings they look to place the blame on their SEO right away. When this happens to someone, they become VERY emotional and upset because losing rankings can kill your business. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” people cryout, ” that Google has so much power over my situation.” Hey everyone, Google giveth, and Google taketh away. But Google does not penalize or flag your site for using the nofollow tag. They have said repeatedly, and Matt Cutts too, that it is OK to use.

Now I believe that you should not use the nofollow tag excessively, but use it in ways that make sense. Its all about common sense folks! Use it to block Privacy Policy, Sign In, and other useless pages or links. And I only like to use it on the homepage and MAYBE some internal product/service pages. But you must always leave a link to the sitemap or the rest of your internal pages somewhere so that the spiders can index all of your pages.

In part two of this post I will discuss my findings, from stringent testing, on how Google really treats your internal links. I will debunk all of the myths and finally set things straight. I cannot divulge that info just yet as I have made and agreement to withhold our findings until we formally announce them at the San Diego Ad Club Interactive Marketing Day this coming week. Steve Peron, aka imnotadoctor, will be presenting our findings during this event and will be blogging about it over at eVisibility Insider blog as well as our own blogs.

You would be surprised to find out how many businesses have not yet claimed their Google Local account. But you would be even more surprised if you realized how weak local search algos are at this point in the game. The search engines still have a difficult time providing good local search results. They still rely on databases owned by the major print yellow page firms to populate their indexes. That and the fact that many small business owners are not too hip to the game yet combines for some questionable results at times.

Local search engine optimization is still a wild west of sorts.  There are small things that you can do to enhance yor local listings like adding your local keyword before your company name and getting people to write reviews. But even then there is no telling how well you will place. Local seems to be a big part of the future of search and Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land recently did a fantastic post on the future of local search that pretty much sums it all up! Despite all of the fun and useful things in store for local search, the search engines need to come up with a better way for small, un-Internet savvy, business owners to list their businesses and they need to get the algo dialed in better.

Happy New Year to all! I look forward to a great ‘08! Now down to business.

Canonicalization, wow that is a big word! Even the most savvy SEO guru will have trouble pronouncing it. But that’s OK, as long as they know what it is and how to fix it. Because almost every site that I come across has canonicalization issues. Matt Cutts had a good post about canonicalization from the Google perspective here. But what it boils down to is the idea that www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html, domain.com/index.html, etc. can all be different pages in a site. So if you can type all of these variations of YOUR domain into your browser and the same homepage comes up then the search engines may be penalizing you for duplicate content!

So now you are feverishly typing these variations into your browser to check right? Well if not, then you better get going!

And right about now you are thinking, “well how can I fix this?” There are a couple ways. Now there is a section of Google’s webmaster console that allows you to specify to Google which you prefer, www.domain.com or domain.com. This was a very nice and welcomed addition to the webmaster console a while back. I believe that they added this to not only make their index more relevant but also because the community of webmasters was clamoring for it. My preferred way of solving canonicalization issues is to use the 301 redirect. My friend, former colleague, and current organic SEO specialist at Shopzilla, Michael Nguyen had a nice post on how to do this on an Apache server.

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Custom 404 pages are probably still one of the most overlooked things by both SEO firms an in-house SEO teams. The problem is that not enough people are educated on the 404 and why you need to have a customized one for your visitors. The 404 error message, or Not Found, is an HTTP standard response code that basically means that the client is able to connect with the server but that the server could not find the page requested. This usually happens when a user mistypes a URL or when you have broken links to pages that do not exist anymore. You would be surprised how often the 404 page gets served!

The Problem

The problem for the user is that a standard blank white 404 page with that standard text can be confusing for users. They may feel that they are on the wrong site or, even worse, that your site is down! Plus that standard 404 page gives the user no where to go, there is no navigation there to take the user back to your site. So many times you can lose that precious visitor, that you have spent so much time and effort to get, because you did not have a custom 404 page.

What is a Custom 404 Page?

A custom 404 page, at its most basic level, is a 404 error page that you design to have links back to your site so that the user can click back to the site and get back on track. The sky is the limit from there! You should have compelling text letting the user know what happened, why they are at that page, and how to get back. Many companies are now getting clever and are creating very funny 404 error pages to entertain the users and kind of apologize, through laughter, to the visitor. This is the 404 page for the eVisibility, the company I work for.

Others use the entire navigation, search box, RSS feed, advertisers, links to popular posts, news links and more. Others out the search box on their 404 pages, or add a link to their sitemap. All of these things are good because if a spider finds a 404 page they will continue to crawl and index the entire site and not get stopped by a 404 page. Here are some other great 404 pages that people have done:

The bottom line is that in order to make your site more user friendly for your visitors and the search engine spiders, you need to have a customized 404 error page. Plus it gives you the opportunity to express your creativity and to be witty, just look at some of the examples in this post!

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