In SEO, What Changes Should You Track

There is a great featured thread at WebmasterWorld on the discussion of what details should you keep track of in a changelog when making upgrades and enhancements to your web site? Now, most of you may know that many of the coding changes can be tracked in a versioning system, one of the most well known versioning systems on the web is CVS (Concurrent Versions System), that helps keep track of all changes made to the code on the site. Most development houses use a form of CVS or version tracking.

But I do not believe it tracks everything. Things like domain name host changes, database updates, new links, and so on. So that is why it is important to set up your own methodology to track these changes. You can either do it in an Excel spreadsheet or build out a custom workflow for your employees to work through, to guarantee (or assist) the process of tracking these changes.

So what is recommended to track in the SEO game? Here are some ideas pulled from the WebmasterWorld.

• every change to robots.txt (CVS can handle this)
• every change to htaccess (or Internet Services Manager in IIS)
• site-wide template changes (especially menu changes) (CVS can handle this)
• DNS and hosting changes
• new outbound links
• ad purchases and run-times
• Server updates (especially reboots or outages)
• Config files
• Firewall block list

There are many more ideas of what you should track in the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Update via Data Refresh

As i was going through the threads there are reports from WebmasterWorld that a new Google data refresh is taking place now. People are noticing both large and small shuffling of the positioning of pages for select search queries. I do not believe this is a huge update but I can be wrong.

The thread was started last night and is already two pages long.

No confirmation from Google yet on if this is a real update or not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Happy Thanksgiving From The Search World

Just watching a thread at search engine roundtable.

* Google is sporting a home page logo that links to a query for thanksgiving that looks like:

* Yahoo has a home page logo also that links to Yahoo Holidays and it looks like:

* Ask.com went simple, not redoing their whole homepage, like they have done in the past, with a simple icon that links to a thanksgiving query and looks like:

* Dogpile always out does everyone with their cool and fun logos:

Does Registering A Domain Name for 10 Years Help Search Ranking?

The question at a WebmasterWorld forum is does registering your domain name for 10 years, instead of one year, help you rank better in Google?

Reading the thread, it appears that most senior members in the thread, feel that it does help.

Here are the arguments to register your domain name for an extended period of time:

(1) Shows the search engine that you are here to stay
(2) Google has a patent application that looks at this data (doesn't mean they use it)
(3) Secures your domain for an extended period of time
(4) Lower price per year if you register over an extended period

Seriously, anyone who is serious about their domain would not flinch at making the small investment of registering for an extended period of time. There is honestly, not that much to lose. There is a lot of back and forth in the forums about why people should not, but I personally disagree with all the arguments. So it costs an extra $30 to transfer the name to a new registrar, it is not the end of the world.

I am off to see when my domains expire, of course I have them set to auto renew, but at what yearly renewal schedule? :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo! Cuts Deal With Newspaper Groups

The Wall Street Journal said on Saturday the newspapers were cooperating with Yahoo's HotJobs on classified ads, but on Monday the NYT said, wait, there's more...

But, exactly how much more is unclear. It is "a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology."

One goal is to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo. Woo! That's doesn't sound very exciting to me.

Google signed 50 papers a few weeks ago in an equally vague deal.

“There has been a big question asked for a while as to how newspapers will navigate the online future,” said William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive of MediaNews Group, one of the members of the consortium. “I think this is the answer to that question," Singleton said, showing that at least he, and probably others, remain clueless. Read full story

You can read more news here

Introduction

Finally, I have got this blog up and running. When everyone else is doing it, why can’t I?Joking aside, I started this blog to share my knowledge about search engine optimization with other SEOs and to talk about current happenings in the SEO circles. There sure is a lot going on in SEO that needs […]