how to include rel="author" in your own website? - semantics

As far as I know the rel attribute should only be used with a link, so my current approach
<h1><span rel="author">Peter M......</span>'s website</h1>
seems to be invalid (even though it's working with Google's rich snippet validator). So how would I use the rel="author" attribute when I don't want to link to any external websites like g+, twitter, ... (a link (on my website) pointing to my own website doesn't quite make sense to me)

Another option is to validate authorship with an email address if you have one for the domain of your site.
You said you don't want to use external links, but something like
<link href='https://plus.google.com/[your G+ id]' rel='author'/>
has worked fine for me.
Schema.org is apparently quite unpredictable. You should probably mark a person as an author, which means you might need a lot of markup.

Related

External links: when use rel="external" or rel="nofollow"?

In most of my web site I have a lot of external links to my other sites and other external sites.
I need to know when is better to use rel="nofollow" or rel="external" in a website?
You may use external for every link to a different website, no matter if it’s yours or not, if it’s on the same host or not.
You may use nofollow for every link that you don’t endorse (for example: search engines shouldn’t assume that it’s a relevant link and should not give any ranking credit to this link).
You may use both values for the same link:
Foobar
Note that external doesn’t convey that the link should be opened in a new window.
Note that search engine bots (that support nofollow) might still follow a nofollow link (it doesn’t forbid to follow it). FWIW, there is also the nofollow value for the meta-robots keyword (which may mean the same … or not, depending on which definition you follow).
nofollow links attributes do not allow search engine bots to follow link.
If you have rel="nofollow" then the juice stops.
rel="external" dosent act like nofollow. its DoFollow link.
For rel="external" it means the file is on a different site to the current one.
rel="external" is the XHTML valid version that informs search engine spiders that the link is external.
However, using this does not open the link in a new window. target="_blank" and target="_new" does this, but is not XHTML valid. I hope that helps.
I advise you to use Nofollow Links for the following content:
Links in Comments or on Forums - Anything that has user-generated content is likely to be a source of spam. Even if you carefully moderate, things will slip through
Advertisements & Sponsored Links - Any links that are meant to be advertisements or are part of a sponsorship arrangement must be nofollowed.
Paid Links - If you charge in any way for a link (directory submission, quality assessment, reviews, etc.), nofollow the outbound links
**
If you have an external link to your own site then use
Your Link
If you have external link to someone else's site you don't trust then you can combine both and use
Other Domain Link
If you have an external link to someone else's site and you consider it's trustworthy then use
External Useful Link
It depends what you mean by "better". Those are two comopletely different attribute.
rel = nofollow tells the Search engine crawlers not to look at this link (probably you don't want this to happen for your other websites, but you will use it for other's web sites). Documentation: rel=nofollow - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
rel = external tells that the link is not part of the web site and open the link in a new window (it's not working for older IE). It is used as a valid XHTML attribute instead of target="_blank". Here you can learn how to use it: http://www.copterlabs.com/blog/easily-create-external-links-without-the-target-attribute/

Author data not being recognized in Google structured data testing tool

I've searched all over the place and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. No matter what I still get a Page does not contain authorship markup on the structured data testing tool
I have two sites with almost identical pages. The rel=author tags are inserted the same way.
Here is an example of one page that works: http://bit.ly/18odGef
Here is an example of one page that doesn't: http://bit.ly/12vXdAm
I tried adding ?rel=author to the end of the Google+ profile URL, which doesn't seem to work on either site. I am not blocking anything via nofollow or robots.txt. The tool is not being blocked by a firewall or anything. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong here and why it works for one site, but not the other?
FYI, the site that does not work used to work without a problem. I hadn't changed anything with how the author markup was organized until I realized it wasn't working anymore.
When I test both of those pages in Google's structured data test tool, it shows that authorship is working correctly for both pages.
Here are the results for the page you said was working: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fnikonites.com%2Fd5100%2F2507-d5100-vs-d90.html%23axzz2rFFm1eVv
Here are the results for the page you said wasn't working: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fcellphoneforums.net%2Fsamsung-galaxy%2Ft359099-enable-auto-correct-galaxy-note-ii.html%23axzz2rFFlwz3W

Two URL's, same content, is this considered duplicate content by search engines?

I've developed a service that allows users to search for stores on www.mysite.com.
I also have partners that uses my service. To the user, it looks like they are on my partners web site, when in fact they are on my site. I have only replaced my own header and footer, with my partners header and footer.
For the user, it looks like they are on mysite.partner.com when in reality they are on partner.mysite.com.
If you understood what I tried to explain, my question is:
Will Google and other search engines consider this duplicate content?
Update - canonical page
If I understand canonical pages correctly, www.mysite.com is my canonical page.
So when my partner uses mysite.partner.com?store=wallmart&id=123 which "redirects" (CNAME) to partner.mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123, my server recognize my sub-domain.
So what I need to do, is to dynamically add the following in my <HEAD> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123">
Is this correct?
It's duplicate content but there is no penalty as such.
The problem is, for a specific search Google will pick one version of a page and filter out the others from the results. If your partner is targeting the same region then you are in direct competition.
The canonical tag is a way to tell Google which is the official version. If you use it then only the canonical page will show up in search results. So if you canonicalise back to your domain then your partners will be excluded from search results. Only your domains pages will ever show up. Not good for your partners.
There is no win. The only way your partners will do well is if they have their own content or target a different region and you don't do the canonical tag.
So your partners have a chance, I would not add the canonical. Then it's down to the Google gods to decide which of your duplicate pages gets shown.
Definitely. You'll want to use canonical tagging to stop this happening.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Yes. It will be considered as duplicate content by Google. Cause you have replaced only footer and header. By recent Google algorithm, content should be unique for website or even blog. If content is not unique, your website will be penalized by Google.

Use of canonical tag in HTML

I read about canonical tags in HTML and from what I understood it is used to help search engines to realize which is the original content. I have articles in my recently created blog, which I have pasted in certain other popular websites. In those websites I gave back a link to my original blog post with the canonical tag. But yet my blog page is not visible in search engines (other websites do show my article). Before I had pasted onto other websites, my articles were indexed on google and could be seen on the 1st page. So I guess, there is no problem on my SEO part.
Can someone please suggest a method where my original blog gets higher preference for the content?
You can use cross domain canonical tags.
So if you have duplicated content on other domains you can use the canonical tag on those pages pointing back to the original page on your site.
This a great way to deal with syndicated content; of course you would need code level access on these other websites so you can implement the canonical tag.
More info below
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Don't just copy paste your articles on every place on the internet, that will not do you any good. After writing a good article go to other sites and write something else about your articles like what your article is about, how it is helpful to someone, something like that so that people and websites come to your website to read your article. For this you don't need "canonical"
If you copy paste articles to other websites, it will only create duplicate content issues and will only harm your SEO efforts.
No, it is not required for your Blog section to do canonical issue.
Canonical means Google displays same pages with different URL.
The first thing is not submitting your article in different websites I will not give you any benefit in your ranking. If you write a good and quality content you should post in only one website if you post in different sited google will consider as a duplicate content. So it's better for you you can share your approved blog link in social media sites and also do social bookmarking, microblogging. And after you don't need canonical tag.
As #moobot said you can indeed use a cross-domain canonical tag to let Google know about the original source of the content. How exactly are you adding the canonical on other domains?
The canonical link should be in the head section of the html code. If you're adding it yourself somewhere in the body tag that's not going to do you any good.
Check out this article for some other common mistakes with the canonical tag
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
#metadice mentioned that copying your content all over the web isn't good for your SEO and i agree completely. If you do this for some extra backlinks or something i would recommend you to stop doing this.
Hope my answer will help someone who has this same question.

How to setup a simple site search for a simple website?

I'm maintaining an existing website that wants a site search. I implemented the search using the YAHOO API. The problem is that the API is returning irrelevant results. For example, there is a sidebar with a list of places and if a user searches for "New York" the top results will be for pages that do not have "New York" in the main content section. I have tried adding Yahoo's class="robots-nocontent" to the sidebar however that was two weeks ago and there has been no update.
I also tried out Google's Search API but am having the same problem.
This site has mostly static content and about 50 pages total so it is very small.
How can I implement a simple search that only searches the main content portions of the page?
At the risk of sounding completely self-promoting as well as pushing yet another API on you, I wrote a blog post about implementing Bing for your site using jQuery.
The advantage in using the jQuery approach is that you can tune the results quite specifically based on filters passed to the API and playing around with the JSON (or XML / SOAP if you prefer) result Bing returns, as well as having the ability to be more selective about what data you actually have jQuery display.
The other thing you should probably be aware of is how to effectively use #rel attributes on your content (esp. links) so that search engines are aware of what the relationship is between the actual content they're crawling and the destination content it links to.
First, post a link to your website... we can probably help you more if we can see the problem.
It sound like you're doing it wrong. Google Search should work on your website, unless your content is hidden behind javascript or forms or something, or your site isn't properly interlinked. Google solved crawling static pages, so if that's what you have, it will work.
So, tell me... does your site say New York anywhere? If it does, have a look at the page and see how the word is used... maybe your site isn't as static as you think. Also, are people really going to search your site for New York? Why don't you input some search terms that are likely on your site.
Another thing to consider is if your site is really just 50 pages, is it really realistic that people will want to search it? Maybe you don't need search... maybe you just need like a commonly used link section.
The BOSS Site Search Widget is pretty slick.
I use the bookmarklet thing but set as my "home" page in my browser. So whatever site I'm on I can hit my "home" button (which I never used anyway) and it pops up that handy site search thing.