Early last month, Yahoo announced that they were introducing a Robots-Nocontent for Page Sections “microformat”. Simply put you can tell Yahoo! which parts of your page are unrelated to the main content on your page. For example, you might have a navigation bar on your page that has links to other parts of your site, but you don’t want the text of those links to be indexed with the content of your page. This does not mean that Yahoo! does not spider those links, it just means that they will not include that content in the index for the page.

The robots-nocontent is very easy to implement. Simply add a class attribute with the value set to robots-nocontent to a container element and that container won’t be indexed. For example:

<div class="robots-nocontent">Some content</div>


It will be interesting to see if other search engines pick up on this much like they did with Google’s introduction of rel=”nofollow”.  Search Engine Land also has some decent coverage on this topic as well.

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Do you know the difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO? Why are the title element and image alt attributes important to help increase your search engine traffic? Need help understanding search engine marketing acronyms like SEO, SEM, SERP and PPC?

Search Engine Marketing Glossary is a site that is chalked full of extremely useful terms and definitions relating to the search engine optimization industry. This type of information can be useful to help you learn about techniques employed by search engine optimizers (SEO) and can be a great resource if you are thinking about employing a SEO firm to help your websites visibility on Google or other search engines. Even if SEO is not your main interest, you can still get succinct definitions about terms that relate to web development/design in general.

Each term is well defined and full of links to other sites that help explain the content using full length articles giving you a broader perspective on the search engine optimization. It will even help you gain a better understanding of the search industry in general.

Another interesting feature about this glossary is that it is published under a Creative Commons license that allows you to reuse and edit the content as you see fit. This could be valuable if you are selling search engine visibility services to your clients.

Wow! Did I miss hell freezing over? Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! - the three major search engines - have United to Support Sitemaps. This can be nothing but good for web developers and content creators. Sitemaps are simple XML files that help search engines determine how to spider your site and how often to do it. For more coverage of this news check out some of these links…

• Yahoo, Google and Microsoft join forces (really !!) behind Sitemaps
• Search Engines Unite On Unified Sitemaps System
• Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol
• Joint support for the Sitemap Protocol

Google has created a site designed specifically for web people like us! Google Webmaster Central offers a range of tools that allow you to gain more knowledge and information about how Google is crawling your websites.

Googler Matt Cutts offers lots of great SEO tips on his blog. The fact that he works for Google is a pretty good indication that his advice is solid. His latest post titled - Writing useful articles that readers will love - is fantastic advice and he uses his own personal experience to prove his points!

Robots.txt Generator is a handy tool that uses a web form to generate a Robots.txt file for your website. There are lots of options that make the file generation a snap! For those of you wondering, Robots.txt is a very simple text file that is placed on your root directory and tells search engines and other robots which parts of your site they are allowed to visit and index.

Google employee Matt Cutts offers some SEO advice on URL canonicalization. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are more than one choice. Home pages are a good example where http://somesite.com/ and http://somesite.com/index.htm are the same pages. Google uses canonicalization when it spiders your sites and attempts to make the best guess at the best URL. However Matt makes a few suggestion on how you can help Google make the best choice!

John Gibbard has two interesting posts that explores whether search engine optimisation (SEO) results in increased usability. In the first post he asks “Does SEO improve usability?” and in the second post he responds to a number of comments regarding his original ideas.

Thomas Silkjær has created a WordPress plugin that will createLanding Pages for your Blog. I never really understood landing pages before I read his article, but if you follow his example you should immediately understand them, and at the same time, see the value in using them. I am already begining to think about how I will use this in my client websites!

Links are dead - long live links! is a great article that suggests that the business of SEO is about to change away from incoming and outgoing links to a method that places more emphasis on Clickstreams. Google is going to great lengths to collect your clickstream by using products like Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, GMail and Google Reader. Add on the Google Analytics webmaster tool and you can quickly see that the search giant are beginning to collect alot of our click behaviours. This clickstream can then be used to determine how important a page or site actually is.