Matt Cutts put up a video about how Google deals with Robots.txt files. This will be a good one if you’re wondering exactly how Google sees your blocked URLs, etc…

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

How Robots.txt works in Google

It has been a long time since I last posted. It’s tough to find time to write when you’re traveling through Brazil, going to the Del Mar Race tracks and winning big, and styling a beautiful mustache in Vegas, so I’m sure you understand why it’s been quiet over here… heh

Now to business. I want to talk about creating something extremely useful on your own, a personalized toolbar. Doing this will save you time and space in your browser.

Before I start, keep in mind that this is not a post about my favorite Firefox add-ons, or toolbars. This is about putting all/or most of your most frequently used resources/tools at your fingertips where you can access them easily and quickly.

In this demonstration, I will go over how I built my personalized toolbar. The tools I like to have at my fingertips (in the toolbar) are the ones I use the most, but there are a lot of other useful tools out there. Don’t think that just because I didn’t list something here I don’t use it, it’s just not in my toolbar. Now, to the demo:

This tutorial on creating your personal toolbar (actually you’ll be recreating mine) is meant to be used on Firefox. Once in Firefox, make sure you have the following toolbars installed:

• Google Toolbar – You will want to have access to info from the source (cache dates, PR, etc)
  
• StumbleUpon Toolbar – Because Stumbling is fun
  
• SEO Book Toolbar – Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar. Not super accurate info all the time, but close enough

Now, make sure you have the Firefox Add-on Firebug installed. It’s a sweet web dev tool, very useful and a real time saver.

Once you have all of the items above installed, open a Firefox window and click on “View”, “Toolbars” , then “Customize”.

Now that you’re here, click on “Add New Toolbar”. You will be saving a new Firefox toolbar that you get to name whatever you want. If you read this post you must name it “Ricardo’s Toolbar”.. Alrigh alrigh, nevermind, you can name it whatever you want!

At this point, you can sort through the different features and drag and drop them from other toolbars right into your personalized toolbar. Here’s what my custom SEO toolbar, aka “Ricardo’s Toolbar”, looks like:

In it, I have my most used stumble upon buttons:

I also have the icons I use from the Google Toolbar:

… other miscelaneous tools from the SEO Toolbar and Firebug that I use frequently:

And last but not least, I also have the printer button, downloads and my bookmarks folder:

The coolest thing about my toolbar is that it has my most frequently used features from three different toolbars, but it only occupies the space of one! I just love it. Even though this seems like a simple and maybe even obvious thing to do, I bet you that most of you reading this post don’t have a customized toolbar. I can’t tell you how much time I save with this everyday, it’s awesome! So go ahead, put together your new [Your Name] Toolbar today!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Custom SEO Toolbar

Thanks to Barry Schwartz and his Live Coverage of the SMX West, and of course to Vanessa Fox’s post in Search Engine Land, those of us unable to attend the SMX West were still in the loop and being fed notes and great information in real time. (or at least very close to real time)

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced their solution to reduce the problem that internal duplicate content issues can cause to a site’s SEO profile. This has been a looooooooooooong time coming, and many webmasters out there will be happy STOKED to finally have a solution to deal with dupe content.

I’m not going to steal their content , so just follow the link above and read the article. It’s good stuff!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agree on Canonical Tags

I was recently asked the following question:

Is code markup validation [through W3C] good for SEO? If so, should I go for Transitional validation or Strict?

The answer was at the tip of my tongue. I knew that:

1 – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the bar for coding, but are not affiliated with any search engines.

2 – Google (the main search engine most of us care about) doesn’t validate some of their own pages. If they don’t care about their pages being validated, they probably wouldn’t care about your pages being validated either.

3 – The only times I ever had to deal with W3C validation, was when a site I built wasn’t displaying correctly in some browser.

I know that wasn’t much knowledge on my part, but I knew those facts would probably lead me to my answer. Just to be safe I did a little digging and the more I dug, the more I found information supporting my hunch. The point is that W3C is a great resource to find how close to the top coding standards your site is, and to make sure it is accessible throughout different browsers, but it doesn’t really count in terms of SEO. Most blogs and web sites out there don’t validate well, heck! seosurvivor has 60 errors! (still less than Google, YES!)  And that doesn’t get in the way of ranking my blog for whatever keywords I may be striving for.

In my educated opinion, W3C is very important for web developers so they can make sure that their web sites are displaying correctly in the different browsers (by the way, here’s a cool place to check your site in different browsers). When is comes to W3C and SEO, don’t spend too much time worrying about it. W3C will improve accessibility, and that’s about it.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

W3C Markup Validation and SEO

Today I’m going to write about a time when you should be turning off your SEO for Firefox tool.

I first noticed this anomaly while working on my own blog, and again when working on a client’s site who uses Drupal. (hey, they already had Drupal installed. Nothing wrong with it, but if you ask me I prefer other technologies)

Alright, back to the subject. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO for Firefox, it’s a Mozilla Firefox add-on that every SEO professional and enthusiast should have, along with SEO Quake. It’s a free resource. Read this post first, then after you subscribe to my blog (hint, hint), you can get yours here.

So, while writing my post about the DoubleClick purchase, I used <rel=”nofollow”> on some of my links cause I didn’t feel like giving Google any of my precious link authority . (If you don’t know about “nofollow” tags, this post explains it, but finish reading first!!)

To add the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to my link tag, I had to switch to the “Code” tab in my post editor.

Now that I was in there, I added the attribute as you can see below:

Then I switched back to the “Visual” tab to finish up my blog post. I switched and notice that my SEO for Firefox was picking up that link as a “nofollow”, and highlighting it red as it likes to do with all “nofollows”. I thought: “Alright, you go nofollow! I mean… ummm… You are actually going nowhere, you’re a nofollow..” It acted as a confirmation that it was in place.

So I continued on with my post and published it. Once it was all done, I checked the live site on all browsers I have installed on my machine, just to be extra anal. Firefox first, duh! Check… Next was Explorer… Check.. umm.. Wait! Something wasn’t right there. I don’t have SEO for Firefox installed on my Explorer and somehow it was picking it up and highlighting it.

I thought to myself… Weird! Specially because that was the only nofollow on my page being picked up. Very weird indeed! What to do? I went back to the code. Logged back into my admin area, went into my “Manage” tab and picked this post.

Everything looked ok, I still didn’t get it.. So I went into the “Code” tab and lo! and behold! Well, see for yourself:

Did you see what happened there? You probably did, but just in case you didn’t, I’ll help you out. When I first added the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to the link tag, I had my SEO for Firefox turned on. Then I switched to “Visual” mode and the SEO for Firefox did what it does best, it highlighted the link red because it saw a “nofollow” on the code behind it. When it did that, my post editor read it as if I had highlighted that word in red myself, so it added the extra code <style=”background-color: #ff0000″> into the link tag. The end result was a link with the red highlight in the code, not something I wanted at all.

From that point on, I learned to turn my SEO for Firefox tool OFF before working on a post

I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please don’t be shy, comment, share, subscribe!

Til next time!

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

When Seo For Firefox Needs To Be Turned Off

As promised last Friday, I wrote a blog post on understanding what the “No Follow” tag can do for you.

The post was just published this morning and it has already received quite a bit of positive feedback from the Sphinn community.

If you have a website, need to explain “nofollow” tags to clients and don’t know how, or are interested in understanding more about how nofollow tags work, you must check this out at the eVisibility Insider.

Have a great week, and look forward to another post later this week.

This post has been syndicated from the SEO Survivor Blog. Please visit http://www.seosurvivor.com/ for more! Thank you :)

Using nofollow tags