Monthly Archives: July 2007

People keep blogging about the unavailable_after tag that Jill Whalen mentions after hearing Dan Crow from Google speak at SEMNE. The unavailable_after tag is apparently exciting because it tells spiders when the page can no longer be crawled. This means that if you have promotional material online, or plan on moving pages to a paid section after a period of time, you simply use the unavailable_after tag. And despite some initial skepticism about the unavailable_after tag, Google has officially commented on this robots exclusion tag.

One the hand, it appears that the unavailable_after tag seems pretty useless. This is a valid viewpoint for bloggers. A loss of backlinks and traffic does not seem an incentive to go the extra effort of putting in the tag, and really, there would be no reason to.

But for newspapers and auction sites like eBay, I can see how these will be of benefit, not only for the sites but for the search engines. This means that sites that produce many pages daily can set a time limit for how long the pages should be crawled, which means that irrelevant pages will no longer appear in Google’s search results.

Most importantly, I think this may mean something to the average Google user – in theory, irrelevant outdated pages need no longer appear in the search results which increases the chance of finding relevant information.

But will they get used? Well, I suppose only time can tell, but I look forward to watching how this tag is used by webmasters. Do you see any positive or negative repercussions of the unavailable_after tag, if any at all?

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At WordCamp 2007, Matt Cutts suggested the SEO Title Tag plug-in for WordPress and I have added this plug-in to this blog. It allows for mass editing of title tags for pages, categories, and posts.

Search engines place a great deal of importance on title tags, and while you want your post titles to attract readers, it is optimal to consider Google when creating SEO title tags.

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The following are things that I have heard (and sometimes read) from people who don’t know about search engines or SEO. This is not to poke fun at people who do not understand SEO, as a majority of the world does not, but rather just to flesh out some myths and identify them as being just that.

1. You pay Google for first page results.
2. The most important search engine is MSN.
3. Ranking in the search engines has something to do with traffic.
4. The most relevant sites are always listed on the first or second page.
5. SEO is not important.
6. You must be very technically minded to understand and engage in SEO.
7. Ranking well in the search engines is about trickery and manipulation.
8. SEO is when someone adds keywords to your site.
9. SERPs exist in a vacuum.
10. The web designer who built your site already did it for you.

And it is this last point that I really wanted to discuss, as it is related to all the others. I have heard this time and time again from local companies, but then looking at their sites along with link popularity, I can tell them that: No. You may have paid for SEO services. And since they are not informed with regards to SEO, it is difficult to gauge whether or not it has actually been done, and done well.

I suggest to anyone that they educate themselves before paying for search engine optimization services, learn a little bit about how search engines work and the basics of how sites come to rank well. There are a number of questions you should ask an SEO consultant before hiring one, but I suggest going that one step further to learn the basics of search engine optimization and the workings of search engines in general.

Ranking well in the search engines can have a big impact on the growth of a company, and it is not something that should take lightly. Hiring an SEO consultant can also be rather expensive, so it should be hard to justify learning a bit about search engines so one can make an informed decision.

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