It was mentioned in the Google Grants Blog that they have given a presentation on Search Engine Optimization in their D.C. Office. The main motive of the presentation was educate a group of “issue campaign managers” about the principles of SEO.

Galen Panger from the Google for Non-Profits team has also posted the 31 slides used in the presentation by the group. Here they are:

SEOmoz has recently released their SEO best practices guide.This is for the first time, they used the actual data to back up the best practices. Some of the previous best practices based on the data have also been changed.

The guide covers following SEO elements:

• Title Tag Format
• The Usefulness of H1 Tags
• The Usefulness of Nofollow
• The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag

Last November, Google had released Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide to help webmasters improve their website's performance. To make the guide accessible to international users, Google had been adding localized versions to it. The recent release of guide in 40 languages, is just a simple step in that direction. More than 98% of the global Internet audience are expected to benefit. Now, webmasters across the globe can use the SEO starter guide to improve their website's indexing and crawlability in search engines.

When a client hire’s an SEO company, the sole motive is to boost their website traffic and improve its search engine rankings. But at times there are certain things they end up doing, unknowingly, which can negatively affect their website’s performance and wreck the SEO consultant’s efforts. For instance, they might change the website's navigation structure or the meta tags or even change the core website content, all this can seriously affect the search engine ranking of their website.

I thought it will be nice to have a list of things that the clients are “not supposed to do”, when the SEO process is on.

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In one of the posts by Randfish, he tried to bring focus on the changes of Google's ranking system over the years.

Importance Levels of Various Ranking Factors in Google's Algorithm Over Time

Here are some of the key points on the topic:

In one of his blog posts, Barry Schwartz talks about the confirmation by Google, on the same treatment of "/" and "/index.html" in the URLs. The topic has become a hot debate in the Google Webmaster Forum.

Googler, JohnMu, confirms that both "/" and "/index.html" in the home page are typically treated the same by Google. He also said that with or without these server header responses (301s, 404s, etc.) will remain the same.

Adobe recently launched the SEO Technology Center. The primary purpose of this Center is:

“Ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your rich Internet applications (RIAs)—so that your content can be found by others—is of critical importance to building and maintaining an online presence. While Adobe and the leading search engines are making significant strides in making SWF content more searchable, you can take additional steps now to improve your search ranking positions further.”

Matt Cutts never stays away from news! Recently it was all about Canonical tags and now the guy is going ga-ga on the issue of paid posts that mark their presence in the search results.

Matt Cutts is not at all in favor of paid posts that pass page ranks:

“My bottom-line recommendation is simple: paid posts should not pass PageRank. I’m not going to pay $750 to check whether the Forrester report mentions this important point.”

Now this is an astounding news! A French town “Eu” that holds hundred years of civilization (The County of Eu was created in 996 by Duke Richard I of Normandy) is planning to change its name just because it wants to have higher rankings in Google Search. How strange is that?

Matt Cutts recently annotated about Canonical Link by virtue of his five minute presentation through his slide show. He has again come up with a series of slides via his own blog.

“One exciting new development even since we made the video is that Ask announced that they will support the canonical tag. This means that pretty much all the major search engines will support this as an open standard. That should make life easier for site owners, developers, and webmasters.”