In response to my article on using RSS for SEO, the question has arisen of whether outbound links from a web page really reduce its PageRank. The answer? Yes and no.

Without going into too much detail, Google doesn't take PageRank away from one page and give it to another, so the answer is no....
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One of the problems with SPAM is that you have to spend so much time downloading and deleting it. Another problem is that people you send email to do too. Your legitimate message may get lost in the deluge. How do you avoid the problem? One way is to offer people to whom you send...
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Here's a copy of an email I sent to Car Talk a little bit back:

If you are going to continue recommending the Dope Slap on a regular basis, it behooves you to offer a tutorial covering basic dope slapping techniques. For example:

The irritating dope slap is used to simply annoy the harmless dope....
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The SOS Band may not have been thinking about web design when they recorded "Take Your Time (Do It Right)", but that doesn't mean we can't apply their words to our craft. "Baby we can do it, take the time, do it right." If you build your website right the first time, you'll reap the...
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Well, I guess it's time for all U.S. bloggers to announce who they are endorsing for president. My endoresement goes too...

...some else. I don't know who, just that it's neither Bush nor Kerry. If I had to pick between the two, if you wouldn't let me off the hook, if you really twisted my...
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Sometimes participating in the AtomPub Working Group feels like being in an atom smasher. The latest topic to be rehashed, thrashed to bits, and perhaps soon to be slashed is the mighty link. We're not quite so dumb that we don't know what a link is, but we seem to be having an extraordinarily difficult...
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I've just posted an article titled SEO: Using RSS to increase relevance and maximize freshness, outlining how to display newsfeeds on a webpage, and optimize their display for SEO purposes. Details include: using free software to display newsfeeds, using semantic markup to emphasize keywords, and a technique for avoiding giving away PageRank.

When a search engine spider reads the text of your webpage, it sees a lot of words. How does it figure out whether the topic of your page is the word "the", the most common word on the page, or "Thneeds", the product you're selling? It's partly a matter of the search engine ignoring common...
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Here's a great gift for someone suffering from empty nest syndrome: baby sounds on CD. One full our of laughs, gurgles, jabbering, and yes, crying, screams and tantrums. The idea is not to fill their home with the familiar sounds of yesteryear, but to remind them of how lucky they are to live in such...
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This morning at breakfast, I had a mental arc related to multitasking. I was shoveling food into my son's mouth with his little baby spoon and into mine with my man-sized tablespoon. Here's how I related it to multitasking:

Using a different spoon (pipeline) for each application (mouth) requires a context switch (putting one spoon...
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