It’s a necessary step if Google wants to have any realistic chance of breaking into the enterprise space with their Google Apps packages — security is a major concern for any business; and some specialized knowledge to find and fill those security holes will be very welcome. This acquisition is a huge step towards serious competitiveness with local applications.

• Google’s announcement on the acquisition.

Yet there are, for what it’s worth, very valid reasons to block pages some times. The trick is to make sure you’re only blocking the right documents.

One of the yet-to-come interesting features for stopping Google is the unavailable_after meta tag, announced by Google’s Director of Crawl Systems, Dan Crow at a Search Marketing New England event this week. This is one of the most potentially useful document meta options, although the value may not be immediately apparent.

The point of the unavailable_after meta element is to inform Google that a page should not be indexed after a certain date. This could be used in situations such as:

• Job Postings with expirations
• Sale announcements
• Special offer deals
• Expired auction listings

Basically, this would be great for any document which expires. From a user perspective, it’s incredibly dissatisfying to arrive at an expired sales page as the result of a search. From a business perspective, at best you’re providing no value; at worst you’re angering the customer. If you remove the page altogether, it may take months before the search engine catches up with you — leaving you with a hefty share of 404 responses. If you could inform the search engine right from the start that your page would cease to be valuable as of a specific date, you could avoid this whole problem.

For when and how the tag will be implemented, of course, we’ll just have to wait and see.

At the top of the list is the failure to actually use basic descriptive language in the text. You may think that it’s bloody obvious that your website sells socks, since the site is plastered with pictures of socks of all sizes and colors. (Normally, that statement would be “of all shapes and sizes,” but I’m electing to assume they’re all generally foot-shaped.) You need to realize, however, that Google is blind. You can help it, by providing appropriate alternate texts to the images, but why not just describe the socks? A simple description is what people are likely to search for. Unless you’re very lucky, searchers don’t know your brand name, they don’t get your inside jokes, and they won’t find you unless you’re using their vocabulary.

Even web sites which have been designed perfectly to be search engine friendly can fall down hard in this respect. Except in rare circumstances, it’s just not the designer’s job to write your content for you. Somebody who really knows their job and is invested in your success will absolutely advise you on word selection and these kinds of concepts, but they can’t make it happen without your help. You know your product better than anybody else.

One horrible example of this kind of problem can happen with sites where (I’m speaking hypothetically, of course) the consultant has been hired to build a search-engine optimized site which can then be maintained and edited by the business owner.
However much time you spend documenting what needs to be done, where the client can write unique page titles and meta descriptions, and what kinds of concepts need to be incorporated into text, it doesn’t mean that it’ll happen.

Yes, it’s frustrating.

The technical issues which can cause search engine marketing problems are many, but in the end your content is what needs to be present. You can remove every possible barrier to indexing and design the information to be perfectly navigable, but if the content is empty of your key words and phrases (or at least, empty of your key words spelled correctly) and you neglect to author any kind of usable title or meta description, you’ve lost the battle.

It’s not that you need to “write for the search engines.” You need to write for the people using the search engines, and be aware that if you aren’t using the terms those people are entering in the search engine, they won’t find you.

The concept of a long tail of keywords is hugely important. It is, however, still based on the idea that the phrase permutations people use to search include certain base keywords. In the above example, if you haven’t used the word “sock,” you have thoroughly emasculated your keyword tail in both the long form and the short.

Just a simple piece of advice: read your content. Read it in isolation, without any reference to your website or any contextual images. Does it make sense? Does it name and describe the product? If the answer is “no,” get rewriting. Now!

Personally, I didn’t go to the duplicate content session. Hopefully this repeated statement did actually cause numerous question-asking individuals to attend that session. It certainly didn’t prevent people from asking about duplicate content in other sessions, however.

Regardless, if you feel like you missed out on learning about duplicate content, have no fear. Adam has just published his thoughts about duplicate content at the Google Webmaster Central blog. I’m going to guess that people who attended SES will have learned more than he’s gone through in this post. Still, the post is definitely a good summary of duplicate content issues and what to do about them. (At least as far as Google’s concerned.)

1. In high school and college I was a pretty serious goth. Lots of makeup, all black clothing, the whole 9 yards. I varyingly had extremely long hair (to the lower back, usually) and a completely shaved head.
2. I never owned or lived with a computer before 2001. I’d never worked with any kind of programming language; knew nothing whatsoever about this “command prompt” thingamajig or “objects”. I’ve never held a full-time job in anything in the computer industry. On a related note; I’ve never designed a website using tables for layout.
3. Before going into computers and web development, I pursued classical history and music composition. I’ve been accepted to grad school on a number of occasions for each, but never actually went. Schools I’ve been accepted to include Boston University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and University College London. I still play classical music regularly and read on classical topics, but don’t particularly intend to pursue them academically.
4. I don’t drive. I did finally get my driver’s license two years ago, but have not actually been behind the wheel since sometime in early 2005. I will eventually drive, because it’s an unfair burden on my girlfriend for me not to, but I haven’t managed to take that step yet. Driving scares the hell out of me.
5. I grew up in Montana. My mother grew up on a farm in western North Dakota; my father on a ranch in eastern Montana. My girlfriend is a professional horse trainer. Everybody asks me whether I ride: No, I don’t. I’m a city boy: growing up in Montana is not equivalent to growing up in the country.

I’m going to have to tag some new people, here…let’s see — Mike Cherim, Jack Pickard, Emma Sax, Nadir Garouche, and Michael Jensen. (He says he hasn’t been tagged yet – but he started the whole thing! Seems only fair.)

So, the fact that IBM and Yahoo! are teaming up on a free enterprise search product suggests that they want to put a bit of pressure on Google. And why wouldn’t they? Google’s stock prices just keep going up despite relatively modest increases in their earnings (and certainly not comparable to their total stock value), so why not try and force them out of one of their key corporate markets?

Granted, it’s debatable exactly how much impact this might have. Google’s revenue is largely focused on their search advertising, after all!

This seems like a clear attempt to budge Google out of one of their markets, however – and may be the kind of thing that Yahoo! needs to be doing in order to continue to compete.

The IBM and Yahoo! product, Omnifind, is available for free. You can also read more about it at SEO Principle or Search Engine Land (linked above.)

You can’t take the easy out. Just telling your client, authoritatively, that “PageRank is not a usable metric” will do nothing for you: they’re not convinced. You have to find a way to show them the fact that this abstract number attached to their website is not relevant to their search marketing strategy.

So what are the relevant points?

True PageRank is not Available

Matt Cutts has stated on his blog that:

I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users

Matt Cutts, More Info on PageRank

Further, in the same article, he’s stated that:

It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

Although many would argue that anything Matt says must be taken with a grain of salt, this particular factoid has been reiterated enough that I’m convinced. PageRank is only made available to the public “from time-to-time.” When it is made available, it is made as a 0-10 integer which is relative to a far more complex floating-point number. If you track these updates, like at SEOCompany.ca, you’ll observe that they occur generally speaking in three month-ish intervals. They aren’t regular, and they aren’t frequent. So: Available PageRank numbers are historical and approximate.

PageRank is correlating all web pages in Google’s Index

Keep in mind: you’re competing against your competitors. Sites within your same field, selling the same products, offering the same services, etc. But PageRank is ranking all of the pages of all the websites which Google has indexed. A PageRank of 3 in one industry is not correlative to a PageRank of 3 in another. If you’re going to compare PageRank at all, you need to keep firmly in mind that your PageRank does not necessarily need to be a high number. Make comparisons exclusively within your industry if you want to get any meaning at all.

PageRank is not related to traffic

Currently, this site’s index page has a PageRank of 4. The blog main page had a PageRank of 5 before I switched to Wordpress and changed all the URLs, and is now unranked. The site is 8 months old. The site receives approximately 100 unique visitors a day. This is essentially unchanged from before the WordPress switch.

Another site of mine, Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design, currently has a home page PageRank of 3 – with it’s associated blog bearing a PR of 4. That site is 2 1/2 years old, and receives approximately 400 unique visitors per day.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Is PageRank irrelevant?

No, not entirely. PageRank conveys some very basic information about your site: has Google gotten around to indexing your page, have they found backlinks to it, etc. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t be interpreted as any kind of goal-oriented metric. It’s better to pursue valuable content, links, and traffic than to attempt to reverse-engineer your PageRank.

Using high density keyword strategies and related strategies which optimize a website for just a few terms are kind of like assuming your audience has a 500 word vocabulary. Not really a wise assumption, given that the average native English speaker suppsedly uses between 1200 and 2000 words in everyday speech — and that this number is estimated to be 10 percent of their known vocabulary.

These statistics on vocabulary are an interesting question of their own, as an aside. It’s well worthwhile to question the veracity of that statistic. I suggest reading How many words? by Michael Quinion to get a sense for the true complexity of the question.

Regardless, by focusing your research on a narrower body of keywords all you’re doing is restricting the usable search vocabulary for visitors to your site. Is this an effective way to build traffic? Absolutely not. Even the long tail of keyword research is restrictive: but, rather than favoring a very small vocabulary it opens the doors to cover your topic as thoroughly as you can imagine.

Open your mind to all of the possibilities: consider that people’s vocabulary choices are based on their life experiences, not yours. No short list of keywords can possibly encompass the search terms used by your visitors: even when attempting to apply a list of thousands of terms across your site, you can safely gamble that a significant portion of your visitors may still arrive via terms you have not considered. All you can hope to do is make certain that the broadest scope of descriptive terms for your site are present and available to be indexed and searched.

And, of course, there is a corollary advantage to wide-ranging keyword research: you can expand your own vocabulary in the process!

The vast majority of customers for any web site are amateurs. Amateurs buying ski gear, amateurs buying computer equipment, amateurs looking for medical information. They aren’t likely to be professional researchers, either. So you should never assume that they actually know anything specific about your product.

After all, why would a beginning canoe enthusiast know that your particular brand of tortured plywood kayak is the best? For that matter, do they even know what "tortured plywood" is? Probably not. But they do know that they’re looking for a boat which is light, easy to portage, hard to overturn, and they may even know whether they’re going to be using it on whitewater or flat water.

Even assuming amateur customers, you’ve got to assume some knowledge at some point…

But the key point here is that you can’t just describe your product – also describe how it’s used and what advantages it has. Not only will this provide you with a wider variety of search phrases to be found for, but your potential customer will be able to learn more about your product sooner. It’s a win-win situation.

A good practice technique to use when thinking about product searching and product descriptions is to go shopping for something else. Specifically, some product you don’t sell and don’t know a lot about.

Searching for gifts is a great way to explore this whole avenue of thought. You’re looking for a product which you know little about and you can’t ask the nearest expert without giving away the secret – the perfect opportunity to try and discover what a good product description is in this industry.

Escaping the barrier of your own knowledge is such a challenge in writing product descriptions. When you are an expert in your product line it’s easy to find yourself focusing on the nitty-gritty details and ignoring the more widely known characteristics in your writing.

Providing your detailed specifics certainly doesn’t hurt you – but don’t write your description just for the product’s designer.

But, assuming you’ve understood what this tool is meant to do, you’ll click the link and head off to the search box. And once you’ve reached it, you’ve got no beautiful suggested refinements, no suggestions of ways you might refine your search, and no clue.

Of course, that last bit might be your own fault…

However, the lack of a simple, user-friendly, and one-click solution to search refinement is a big lack. They do keep playing with various ideas along these lines, however – today, Michael Martinez takes note of an integration with Google Base which has some neat features.

Specifically, this example currently comes up for a search on cheese dip recipe, and provides drop down menus which allow you to examine recipes which use a specific main ingredient, in a chosen cuisine, and using a specific keyword. In this case, the main ingredient and keyword fields are prefilled from your search query.

It appears that "recipe" is the particular keyword which is triggering this additional search, although that actual behavior is a bit more complex. The drop down menus were triggered by a search on "artichoke recipe", but without providing an additional keywords field. I thought this might have been because of the lack of a third word in the query; but experimenting with a variety of third terms in the query simply caused the menus not to appear.

Generally speaking, however, most searches (all that I tried) for a food item and the word "recipe" bring up these drop down menus, although I have been unable to reproduce the extra keyword field.

So, if you’ve got a weird lump of kohlrabi and you don’t know what to do with it, Google will gladly help you figure out a solution!