One of the places I browse often for SEO wisdom and trends is SearchEngineLand. Here’s a good article they recommended: 33 Ways to Get Penalized By Google. Nothing earth-shattering there, but a good reminder of core best practices.
In other news, Fluff points out that Hubpages is back on Quantcast, and shows a slight uptick from the July 23 Panda 2.2 update. Way to go, HP! I don’t expect it ever to regain the hyper-inflated numbers it had before– I honestly do not believe its quality/spam ratio is more than double Squidoo’s– but I expect it to be fairly comparable.
Thanks GG ~ Do you know what is meant by h1 tags?
Quote: “Google assumes that multiple h1 tags are a trick to spam its index, and penalises sites using multiple h1 tags. Use h2, h3 and other headline tags instead.”
Yay, a question I can answer!
When you hand-code a webpage, you may indicate text meant as headings with tags. H1 is used to mark a page header, H2 for section headers, H3 for subsections and so on. Web browsers know to display phrases marked with H tags as big and bold. Search engines know that phrases marked with H tags are generally the most important words on the page, so they matter more for SEO.
On Squidoo, we are saved from accidentally having more than one h1 tag (page header) on a single page.
Squidoo fills in the H tags for us:
The Lens Title is coded with an H1 tag.
Module headers are coded with H2 tags.
Module subtitles are coded with H3 tags.
So don’t worry about that one. There are several things Squidoo (and automatic blogging software like WP) do for us to save us from mistakes like this.
Thank you so much for your post. I was looking all over for information on squidoo tags. Do you know how many outbound links are allowed on a squidoo len?
Nine outbound links per domain is the limit.
If you’ve created at least 25 good lenses, you can apply to the Giant Squido program. One of the perks of that program is that the nine outbound link limit is lifted. However, they’re beginning to crack down on Giants who abused the privilege, and they’re locking lenses that they think are spamming and linking out too much to promote other sites or sales without giving much to the reader. (I.e. the link is there to benefit the lensmaster, NOT the lens visitor.) The crackdown is totally subjective — we don’t have rules on what they think is too spammy to be acceptable. So, the rule is no more than nine outbound links to the same domain if you’re NOT a Giant Squid, and even if you are, be careful.
what is the module headers? Is it the same as title of a module when you add a text module? I am so confused.
Yes. It’s the title of any kind of module — Amazon, Text, or other module — that allows you to enter a large-sized text headline at the top of that section.