links for 2010-04-16

Mobile search engines have different bots and algorithms than those used for traditional web search. They evaluate your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone, and they rank results partially based on how well the page will render on the type of phone that submitted the query. If you look in your log files, you can even see that Googlebot-Mobile has different user agents that spoof different phones, like a Samsung phone, an iPhone or an Erickson phone. In some cases, different handsets will have different search results based on the evaluations that Google makes with the different user agents. The best thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to ensure that the mobile crawlers and user agents determine that your content will render well and load quickly on any mobile phone.

Every day a new SEO myth is born; unfortunately, not every day does an old SEO myth die off. The net result is a growing population of myths. These are nearly impossible to squash because the snake-oil salesmen of our industry keep perpetuating them — bringing them back from the brink, even. You can talk at conferences till your blue in the face. You can develop SEO checklists like this one, or even author a book. You’ll still get asked how to write good meta keywords.

Стартово Ръководство за SEO с препоръки за изграждане на сайт според уеб стандартите за максимална успеваемост в търсачки и оптимизиране за Google.

This is a really big (79 items, in all), real list of real things you can do to improve your site's onsite SEO. I try to put it all in a sensible order. It is way oversimplified and missing some of the more complex stuff, but a good check against what you're doing, or what your SEO pro is supposed to be doing:

An import measure of the value of a page for Google is the PageRank. When you’re moving your pages you would want all of the PageRank from the original pages to be relocated to the new locations you specify in your 301 redirects. But in an interview in January with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts confirmed that with using a 301 redirect there might be some loss of PageRank. Too bad Matt didn’t really explain why. In my opinion moving a page, shouldn’t make that page of any less value. It’s still the same page with the same information people originally linked to. Imagine changing your company name or optimizing you URLs for SEO purposes. You would be forced to change all the URLs of your website and you would lose a little bit of PageRank for every redirect. But that means losing a little bit of PageRank for every page on your website and decreasing the authority of your whole site.