This post is for those of you which have a blog and run Disqus comment system on it.

Firstly, let me tell you the exact story: I haven't noticed this before, but if you look at the source code of a post (post, not main page) of probably all blogs using Disqus (except Web Upd8 and Mashable), and search for some words in the post, you will see them displayed twice: once in the actual post and once in a div with the "disqus_post_message" id, which is not visible on the actual page because it's hidden. This basically means all your posts text exists twice on your blog which is of course not very good in terms of SEO. Even worse, the "disqus_post_message" has the style "display:none", which Google interprets as trying to hide content.

Here is a weird piece of info which if is true, it will have serious consequences on all the websites. It appears that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results.

While it may seem like a good idea the first time you read this... think about it. This could mean that everyone will use just pages with text, so that they will rank higher in Google. For instance, instead of building a how-to full of images which won't be found through Google, people will just post the plain text.

Of course, we want fast loading pages, but I for one prefer a relevant search result to some fast loading 3 words blog post.

Times like these make you think about the power Google has on all of us. Basically, they can do whatever they want and you just have to adapt to their wishes.

More about this at DownloadSquad.

Update: Google also wants to ditch http:// in favor of spdy:// (speedy) because they are saying http was great for transferring one file, but since websites nowadays use a lot of images, css, javascript and so on, a new protocol is needed. For more info, see the Arstehnica article.

As always, if you are using a Blogger (blogspot.com) blog, you must do things a bit differently than others do. That's why a trick is needed to submit your complete sitemap (not just the normal RSS feed which only includes your latest 10 posts).

The trick I am talking about is more or less known, but Amit @ digital inspiration created a page where all you have to do is insert your blog address and you can instantly submit your whole Blogger sitemap to Bing and Yahoo and you also receive some custom RSS feed links for submitting to Google Webmaster Tools. Read on for a step-by-step how-to.

GoingUp! is a powerful web statistics system with a friendly AJAX interface which which comes with a bonus: it integrate a series of free SEO tools to improve traffic to your site.

After installing the tracking code to your website you can see the usual statistics these kind of services are offering: country, keywords which visitors searched to arrive to your website (referring keywords), what browser they use and how they interact with your site (via a heat map), goals, and monitor your incoming links.

But what makes GoingUp! an interesting service are the SEO tools offered in the same package, which you can access without even registering for an account. Among them:

· Ease of use - just use Crawler or enter your URLs, you don't even need to know XML syntax
· Integrated Crawler that will crawl your site and add all your URL into sitemap file (you can add your own extensions or exclusions)
· Full conformity of generated XML file with sitemap protocol http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html (tested for Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Moreover.com)
· URL parameters changing with right click (fast edit)
· Import and export URL list (in *.txt format)
· Import from your HTML site map or from RSS 2.0
· Open sitemap directly from web server
· Merging different sitemaps
· Auto checking of duplicate URLs
· Search engines notification (submit sitemap directly to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com & MSN (Moreover.com))
· Upload sitemap directly from the program (FTP manager)
· Yahoo Index viewer (indexed pages by Yahoo and other information)

Sitemap Writer Pro costs $29.95 but Emergencysoft, the company behind Sitemap Writer Pro (which also gave Web Upd8 readers some free History Killer Pro licenses) gives Web Upd8 readers 20 free registration keys. To receive your registration key, all you have to do is comment on this post with your real email address so we can send you the registration key. Don't worry, we also hate spam here, at Web Upd8 so you will receive the key and then never hear from us again!

After receiving the key, download Sitemap Writer Pro from here.

Update: All the 20 keys were given away, no more keys available!

http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/ is a website where you can test search results from Google and Bing - side by side. You can also do some localized searches from: .de, .co.uk, .fr, .ie, .es, nl and .tr.

It is a very interesting SEO tool which allows you to see how both search engines handle your query and which one gives you the best results.

Here is how a search for WebUpd8 looks like.

Everybody was saying that the new DiggBar is evil and then so Digg added a link rel="canonical":

<link rev="canonical" href="http://xyz.com" />

pretending that the DiggBar tells Google where the real address is so all the link juice goes to your website, not Digg. But the fact is that the DiggBar's address is http://digg.com/xxxxx and the rel="canonical" does not work across domains, which means the search engine bots will completely ignore the Digg suggestions so the rel=canonical thingy does not work and is put there just to fool you a little bit into thinking they are not stealing your link juice.

Read about how to remove the DiggBar

It seems today (April 2nd, 2009), there is a Google Page Rank (Google Toolbar PR) update. Our 2 months old blog went from PR0 to PR4. How is your website after this update, any changes?

Tools to check PR:

It's quite weird that even though Blogger is a part of Google, it's really poorly search engine optimized by default. There are quite a few things needed to be done so that one can compete with wordpress.

The first and most important thing is the posts titles. Google for instance, only looks at 80 characters in your blog's post title. So if the post title begins with the blog name and only then the post title, quite a few characters may be missed by google. Example of a bad post title for Google:

What's New on the WWW - Blogger (blogspot.com) SEO optimization

To fix this, we need to have the title first and blog name last, something like this:

Blogger (blogspot.com) SEO optimization - What's New on the WWW

That way we make sure most of the characters in our post title are seen by Google. Also, some other search engines use the meta description and kewords to find a webpage, so we need to have that set for the main page and also generated for every single post. Here is what you have to do:


1. Go to Blogger Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML and click "Expand Widget Templates".
2. Find this:

<title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>

3. Replace the above code with this:

<!-- seo title -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.title/> : Blog title</title>
<meta content='Blog description' name='Description'/>
<meta content='kewords, separated, by, commas ' name='Keywords'/>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
<title><data:blog.title/> : Blog Title the same as above</title>
<meta content='Blog description the same as above' name='Description'/>
<meta content='keywords, the, same, as, above ' name='Keywords'/>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'><title><data:blog.pageName/> ~ <data:blog.title/></title>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' name='Description'/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName + data:blog.title +data:blog.pageTitle' name='Keywords'/>
<b:else/><title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title></b:if>
</b:if>
</b:if>
<!-- /seo title -->

Save settings and look at the title of one of your posts. To be able to see the meta keywords and description, look at the page source.