John Reese of Income.com wrote a post in his blog on Tuesday calling for some help from all SEO Super Geeks. While I don’t really think of myself as an SEO Super Geek – some of my partners have often referred to me as a Google God – not quite sure how they came up with that so I don’t call myself that. Although I do have google license plate frames on my car.
Back to my point – Mr. Reese brings up some very valid questions about the importance of meta descriptions, tags and permalinks in blogs and blog posts. We use a meta description plugin that allows us to type in a meta description should we choose to, a tag plugin so we can tag everything, and a permalink structure that uses the year, month and title of the post. Some say that you just have the title and or the title and the category – I prefer the date part because it tells you if what your looking at it is old or new very quickly.
That all being said some of the comments on the post have proved to be great reading – thats for sure.
Have a great day
Here are the answers you requested:
1) It’s better to use a folder instead of a file name whenever possible because if you ever switch programming languages, you don’t have to worry about 301 redirects to get all the old links to point to the new pages.
2) There is no way to accurately measure this. So its better to use best practices and try to keep pages close to the root. However, its not enough of a difference to change an existing structure compared to the potential for problems.
3) Tags work if the tags point to the EXACT URL and not some scripted redirect. So if you have a page at http://www.domain.com/product and your tag points to that page, it will work as long as the tag cloud is able to be seen by search engines (its not encased in java script or flash). If you tag points to http://www.domain.com/product?SomeVariable it won’t work.
4) putting rel=nofollow on links like privacy, contact us, shopping cart, etc except from the sitemap will make a difference in your Page Rank and is worth doing.
Hope that helps.