Online Marketing Blog

Did you realize that search engines have gone full circle on URLs in variables? It used to be considered something to avoid, now search engines are saying variables in URLs are good, as long as you use the canonical meta tag. Google is pushing them with FeedBurner and if webmasters aren’t careful, they could fall victim to a new onslaught of duplicate content issues.

One of the biggest issues with SEO is duplicate content. If search engines can’t tell which version of a document is the original or canonical version, then there can be consequences involving less than ideal search visibility. For example, the following URLs might all point to the same web page, creating the illusion that they are copies of the same thing. But in reality, it’s just one web page.

We started Online Marketing Blog in December 2003 using Blogger and the feed was run through Feedburner. Recently we had that old RSS feed redirected to the current blog running on Wordpress. This redirection through Feedburner of the old feed to the new feed only works for 30 days and then the old feed dies.

Just in case there are some long time Online Marketing Blog RSS subscribers from 2003-2004 that have not updated which RSS feed they subscribe to, be sure to use:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinemarketingseoblog

This is yet another example of why you should use your own domain name for both the blog and the RSS feed from day one. Doing so gives you control over whether you want to change hosting or blogging software platforms in a way that is fairly transparent to readers. Otherwise, you’re stuck doing what we have to do here, and ask readers to make the change instead of the change happening in the background.

I noticed today that Self Made Minds is working on a list of the top 100 blogs that use Feedburner to host their RSS feeds. I noticed quite a few search marketing related blogs in there and found it pretty interesting. John Battelle is kicking search engine ass with nearly 68,000 RSS subscribers. Here are a few that I was able to pull out from the original list and a few others I looked up.

John Battelle’s Search Blog

Matt Cutts

Search Engine Watch

SEOmoz

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Roundtable

ShoeMoney

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Guide

Online Marketing Blog

Pronet Advertising

Marketing Pilgrim

The podcast and audio search session was very good. It started with Amanda Watlington giving an overview of of podcasting. Other speakers included Darion Babin of Webmaster Radio and Rick Klau of Feedburner. They all made excellent points on podcasting. Takeaway points included:

• Bandwidth can be costly, but it’s worth it.
• Don’t just get into iTunes, submit podcasts everywhere.
• Make it as easy as possible for users to subscribe.
• Quality does matter so get good software, a good microphone and a pop screen.
• Prepare for growth.
• Always transcribe your shows and make that accessible to search engines.
• Use Feedburner to distribute feeds. 302 redirect existing feeds.
• Optimize show landing pages and show episode pages.
• Validate feeds.
• Educate and/or entertain in your podcast for success.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”

This topic could easily have been broken down into at least 2 different sessions as these are somewhat disparate topics and no one really talked about blogs per se. Speakers included: Owen Byrne from digg, Rick Klau from FeedBurner, Chris Tolles from Topix.net and Niall Kennedy.

The news is out on the Blogbeat.net site and the FeedBurner blog of the blogbeat acquisition by FeedBurner. On the blogbeat site a comic newspaper “They Daily Analytic” headline reads, “FeedBurner Invasion! Planet blogbeat acquired by FeedBurner Overlords”.

Blogbeat functionality will be incorporated into FeedBurner’s StandardStats service and integration will be complete during fourth quarter 2006. Current blogbeat customers will get a refund as the new service is free. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The addition of blogbeat technology should further enhance FeedBurner’s lead as a RSS resource for bloggers or will it? The reviews I’ve read about blogbeat haven’t been that great. I did a trial a while back and went back to the trusty analytics package I’ve been using for years. Integration into the FeedBurner control panel would be convenient though.

            Subscribe to this Feed

This week I learned a very important lesson with RSS. Particularly with FeedBurner. A reader of this blog requested that I expand the number of posts in our feed from the default 12 to A LOT more than that. I met him half way and that created a HUGE RSS file. I did this without consulting the people that I know who are far more technically adept at RSS than I (Thomas, Amanda, Rok). Shame on me. Why, you ask?

The day after I made this edit, our handy little blog here was mentioned in a Slashdot post resulting in a TON of visits. Not one new RSS subscriber came as a result. This was curious to me and then I received an email from a reader saying that our FeedBurner feed was showing an error. The feed was too big so no one could read or subscribe.