What a surprise — for the first time I got search results surfed by Microsoft's Bing search engine. And I did not even intend that. All I wanted to do was to find a particular project for a Wave client (software) I read about on the Web. I typed my query into the address bar, hit enter, and got these results below.

Not necessarily what I was looking for. But wait a second … Why didn't Firefox serve the result from Google as usually?

Well, I played around with Bing a tiny bit, right when Microsoft had launched their new search service but I did not stick with it for long. Honestly, Google is my most favorite search engine. Period. Google did not only catch me for search, but with a plethora of other great applications. From Gmail, to Google Docs, AdWords, … to their translation tool, and … Wave is the latest on the list. They hooked me up. Probably for life.

So I was quite surprised that I suddenly got Bing results displayed.

What has happened?

I remember that I had updated my Alexa Sparky add-on for Firefox this week. I also remember having seen a note about new features but I kind of ignored it. Now, it's obvious what had happened. Alexa Sparky is one of the FireFox Add-ons I use.

Do you have Google Toolbar With Sidewiki installed?

If yes, please, watch the navigation bar of your browser.

I am using Firefox and noticed a hashtag after the URL in many instances. Not always, so I am not sure about a pattern, yet. When I turn Sidewiki off in the toolbar this effect disappears. Here is the proof.



Google Toolbar Seems To Interfere With Other Browser Add-ons

A very quick insider note.

The infamous NOFOLLOW attribute has been removed from this blog for the backlinks of all trackbacks.

I think, why not share some appreciation for (quality!) bloggers who write about my posts.

Right now this blog still does not accept PINGBACKS, but TRACKBACKS are highly welcome (quality only!). Regular comments are still not followed.

Now, it's up to me to write and distribute posts which are worth to be written about.

I think about upgrading and enabling PINGBACKS as well.
Let me think …

Of course, I will monitor, possibly moderate trackbacks, and update the comment policy accordingly shortly.

Yours
John W. Furst

This shall be a very quick update and summary with my final SEO advice for some time. It seems that my chronological report about the evolution of SEO configuration on this blog confused many readers.

I apologize and make it good with this post.

It was not so much the fact that most of you live and breath in a Wordpress world. It was more about my deep dive into the abyss of Apache's URL redirection, .htaccess configuration, and the ever changing schemes of URLs used here on this blog. That's where I lost many of you.

It's too easy to get carried away while being intensively involved with fixing a problem.

Yesterday I already have emailed a short summary with Top 10 SEO Tips for Blogs (↑) to my newsletter subscribers. It lists the major points and adds you should make use of sitemaps and Google's free webmaster tools.

Now, in order to conclude this short, unplanned series of articles about SEO I have for you:

• A 20 minute long video presentation of Google's Matt Cutts talking about duplicate content and how to use the new canonical URL parameters properly.
  
  
• Plugins for
  
  
  • Wordpress and
  • Serendipity S9Y weblog software.
  
  
  
• And I also found a comprehensive SEO guide for Wordpress users.

Let me start introducing the video with a catchy quote.

We reserve the right to do what we think is best.
--Matt Cutts, Google.com

Finally following up my previous blog post about the SEO improvements on this, my E-Biz Booster Blog. I promise I'll keep this post as short as possible and to the point. And I must warn you. This post might be a bit straight forward and advanced. If you have questions leave a comment and I'll be happy to explain what needs to be explained in further detail. At the end of this blog post I refer to other bloggers who are going a similar route. Kind of social proof that I have moved in the right direction with the latest changes in the inner workings here.

I originally stated, “I don't care about rewriting the short versions of the URL.” That means if someone typed for example, http://blog.fcon21.biz/230/ for an article about email marketing tips, into the browser or clicked a corresponding link the navigation bar of his browser showed exactly that URL. Not anymore.

I argued it does not matter as long as the content is what the user is looking for and the search engines can use the meta information for the canonical URL from the HTML Head section.

Well, that was theory.

Rewrite non-canonical versions of your post URL

Not all search engines and other types of robots are taking advantage of the meta information for the canonical URL at this point.

I noticed problems with Google Adsense when requesting a particular page with using the shortcut URL. The AdSense bot did not know what the page is about and served no or totally off-topic ads in many cases. I knew this is not very good. So I needed to fix this problem.

I implemented a couple of SEO related (search engine optimization) changes on this blog. But I did not stop there. I introduced some new features for my readers as well.

As a result and the side-effect of it, the 10 or 15 latest blog posts have been re-published on the RSS feed with ever slightly changing URLs. I had the RSS feed turned off today to minimize the effect this had on Feedburner, and your RSS blog subscriptions.

I hope you can forgive me that faux pax. I wrote about those side-effects in the original article where I go in detail over the background for the SEO changes.

The main SEO changes revisited