After reading on lifehacker that google have added some new search options to refine your searches I had a brain wave. One of the new features is to narrow your search by “Visited Pages” and “Not yet visited”. If you spend alot of time searching through the serps for possible websites to request a link from, narrowing your search down to “Not yet visited” will be a great help as it will only show you websites you have never visited before (and presumably already requested a link from).

Please note to get these new search options, you need to be logged into a gmail account.

Offsite SEO is an important element of any SEO campaign. There are many ways in which this can achieved and one of which is the very thing that you are reading right now - Blog Posts.

Many companies write and distribute blog posts as a way of getting anchor text links to a site that is being optimised for a particular keyword. A blog much like this one providing regular original content is more likely to be picked up by major search engines. Blog posts about relevant topics and themes that link out to related sites all reinforce what the website is about. For example if I wanted to use the keyword brilliant SEO Blog as a link you will find that if you click that link it takes you to the homepage of this blog. So hopefully when the search engines scan this page a see a link highlighting that a ‘brilliant SEO blog’ has been found then the search engines will identify this blog as a brilliant SEO blog. Obviously the more links you have that point to the site using that anchor text then the more likely that the search engines will find and index your site and the more clout you will have.

Visit our SEO Glossary if you need more information about some of the terms used.

A thread sprang up last month on the Google Webmaster Help forums with an interesting issue about duplicate content from sites harming rankings in instances where the duplication may have, in fact, been appropriate.

The particular problem was for two sites that required separate, but incredibly similar, content for an Irish audience and a UK audience. Each one was hosted on a country specific domain, but due to the overlap between the UK and Ireland, the Irish site was appearing in the UK search rankings.

Because of the duplicate content showing up in one set of rankings, both sites dropped in rankings.

What then follows is some helpful advice from two contributors on how to avoid this problem, the best option being to utilise sub-domains so that the duplicate content is contained within one place.

The highlight of the thread is when ‘JohnMu’, a Google employee, enters to outline the company’s policy in these matters, and the difficulties they face when deciding what to do. He mentions that normally in these circumstances, one site will be removed from the rankings so that the users are not faced with duplicate entries.

If you care to check the two websites listed by ‘Mr Code Red’ and attempt to find them in Google, it appears that the measures ‘JohnMu’ talked about have been taken. The Irish site does not appear, but the UK one does.

From this, we can see that overlap between search engines has to be considered during SEO work. We’re also reminded of the fact that research before hand can stop these problems from even cropping up in the first place.

A quick read and potentially useful. So, as JohnMu says, “Hope it helps!”

SEOmoz Linkscape tool is part of the armory of most SEO companies. Linkscape allows you to put definable metrics on incoming links, DmR, mR, DmT. The team at SEOmoz has now developed a new tool on the back of linkscape called The Competitive Link Finder.

It works by comparing you to your competition. You simply enter your URL and compare it against your competitors. The Competitive Link Finder then reviews all the incoming links to you and your competitors website and produces a targetable lists of linking websites. This list is normally 1 - 25 and ranked on SEOmoz factors (DmR, mR, DmT,)

It works by identifying websites where you are not found, analyzing link metrics and then producing a list of target links, it is that simple.

The tool ignores nofollow links, so you’re only seeing pages that have actual, live links to at least two of your competitors.

You have probably all heard of the Google Caffeine sandbox test that the powers that be have unveiled for us to look at. Well thanks to our good friend Sean Revell, we have been made aware of a website that lets you compare old google results vs google caffeine results at http://www.comparecaffeine.com/. Give it a try

I will be launching my own SEO for Beginners resource with SeoForDummies.co.uk,  please come take a look and see whats going on

I personally have never seen this before, but it is a great clear beginners guide to SEO straight from the horses mouth. You may know most of this information but it acts for a good refresher course.  Download the pdf here: Google’s SEO Starter Guide