Update August 23rd, 2011: Google has made a simpler version available to those of you who are not able to follow the instructions below. It is still recommended that you do in fact follow the instructions below if you have the appropriate access to the blog you're trying to do this on, if not, please follow the instructions I added at the bottom of this post. I also updated screenshots and added two video's with explanations. Let me know if you have more questions in the comments, I've updated the date of this post so it will pop up again in your reader.

I did see some more examples pop up, for example, when I searched for [highlighting authors], both this post from Matt Cutts (on highlighting authors in the comments) and this post from Gina Trapani got an author highlight.

1. Is the link to the Google Profile from the author page required?
2. How to add rel="author" to a link in your menu
3. How to allow authors to add rel="me" to links in their bio's
4. How to allow authors to set their Google Profile URL
5. How to change the author URL
6. Update: the simpler version
7. Last (but important!) step
8. rel="author" + rel="me" actually works!

Is the link to the Google Profile from the author page required?

Apparently, yes, it is. It's quite logical for Google to want a link from your Google profile to your author page, it makes 100% sure that you are indeed the author of that piece of content when you link to your Google Profile and back from your Google Profile to your author page. Of course the link to your Google Profile wouldn't be 100% needed for this, I don't know whether Google will keep this requirement.

The flow should thus be as follows: article links to author page on the same domain. The author page on the same domain links to the Google Profile. The Google profile, in turn, links back to the author page.

So you are not, as some people suggested, meant to link to your Google Profile straight from the article, instead, you should link to your author page on the domain you published the article at and that page in turn should link to your Google Profile and be linked from your Google Profile.

How to add rel="author" to a link in your menu

One of the issues that came up with is that some people don't want to show the author on each and every post when the author on that blog is always one single person. Those people will usually have an "about" page linked in their site's main navigation, for instance, Robert Scoble, on his blog Scobleizer:

That "about" link could very easily be used to identify him as the author of each and every post, to Google, if it had rel="author" sticked to it. Turns out that this is actually very easy to do if you use the WordPress menu editor.

Go to the Menus page and in the top right, click on screen options:

Once you click that link, it'll fold out, and the display options will show, including "Link Relationship (XFN)", be sure to check that box:

Once that box is checked, you can edit your menu item to include the link relationshop "author" which will cause it to get rel="author" added to it:

Be sure to just add "author" (without the quotes) this is enough to make sure the link will have rel="author" added to it.

How to allow authors to add rel="me" to links in their bio's

If you update your bio on a WordPress blog you write on to contain a link to your Google Profile and want to add rel="me", you'll come to the conclusion that WordPress strips out all the rel elements from links. Why it does that is beyond me, I've already opened a Trac ticket and created a patch to allow it. Until that is in core though (if it makes it in), you'll need to allow it yourself. To do that, simply add this to your site's functions.php file or functionality plugin:

function yoast_allow_rel() {
	global $allowedtags;
	$allowedtags['a']['rel'] = array ();
}
add_action( 'wp_loaded', 'yoast_allow_rel' );

This will allow all rel values to be used, nofollow as well. You could tighten this more but I doubt you'll need it.

How to allow authors to set their Google Profile URL

If you don't want authors to add the link to their bio but would rather give them an input field to enter their Google Profile URL, you'll need to hook into the contact methods functions of WordPress. First, tell WordPress you want to add the Google Profile contact method:

function yoast_add_google_profile( $contactmethods ) {
	// Add Google Profiles
	$contactmethods['google_profile'] = 'Google Profile URL';
	return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter( 'user_contactmethods', 'yoast_add_google_profile', 10, 1);

This will add an input field on their edit profile page below the default AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk / Jabber contact methods:

Second, in your theme's author.php file, the author template, you need to add a bit of code to output this new URL:

$google_profile = get_the_author_meta( 'google_profile' );
if ( $google_profile ) {
	echo '<a href="' . esc_url($google_profile) . '" rel="me">Google Profile</a>';
}

Of course you can style this in any way you want, show it in a list, etc. Here on yoast.com, for instance, I replaced the default contactmethods with Facebook, Twitter and the Google Profile.

How to change the author URL

If for one or more authors on your blog you want to change their default author URL, you could do something like this:

function yoast_change_author_link( $link, $author_id, $author ) {
  if ( 'admin' == $author )
    return 'http://example.com/about-me/';
  return $link;
}
add_filter( 'author_link', 'yoast_change_author_link', 10, 3 );

This would change the author URL for the author with username "admin" to http://example.com/about-me/, you should of course change this to what you need in your specific case. This should work with most themes, if it doesn't with your theme, let me know what theme you're using and I'll try to come up with a solution.

How can I test whether my rel="author" implementation works

Once you've added one of this bits above, you probably want to test whether it's working. To do that, use Google's Rich Snippets testing tool. You can find an example report showing that my implementation is correct here. See the screenshot:

Now don't forget to take the last step, keep on reading below the simple version!!

An explanation video from Google

After this post Google's Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson did a video on the topic, feel free to watch it here:

Update: the simpler version

Because not everyone either has the technical knowledge and/or the actual access to their sites to be able to accomplish the above, Google has made a simpler alternative. I don't know whether this alternative will work forever, it does work now though. It's quite simple, just follow these steps:

1. Find your Google Profile URL, copy paste it.
2. Create a link with that profile URL, and add this ?rel=author to the end of the URL.
3. As an anchor text, use your full name with a +, in my case the anchor text would be: +Joost de Valk
4. Go to the last step, below the video embedded below.

The full HTML of my profile link would look like this (line break just to make it easier to read, you shouldn't have that):

<a href="https://plus.google.com/115369062315673853712
/about?rel=author">+Joost de Valk</a>

Of course, there's a video explaining this version too:

Last (but important!) step

Whichever version of the code you used, be sure to submit your details through this form. You probably won't get an email back but at some point it (might) suddenly start working!

rel="author" + rel="me" actually works!

To show that the markup above works (I use the complete version, not the simple version):

rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WP and other platforms is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's all sorts of factors that decide on whether your email is delivered or not, but one of the most important ones is a DNS record called SPF. SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and let's the receiving mail server reliably determine whether the server that is sending you email is actually allowed to send you email. Adding one will increase your email reliability incredibly.

As with most DNS type records, the syntax is quite hard to explain so I won't even try. Let me link you to the Wikipedia page if you really want to know. What I found way more helpful though when I was searching and trying to figure out how to do this is Microsoft's wizard for this stuff. It asks you a bunch of questions and will still require some time from your side but it got me to the desired end-result a lot faster.

SPF records, Google Apps for Domain and email reliability

I use Google Apps for domain to handle my email, which means that I do most of my sending through a Google SMTP server. Because of that I had set the SPF record in the manner Google suggests here. The thing missing from that is very, very subtle, but makes all the difference. It's a few letters, let's see if you can spot it. This is the SPF record Google gave me:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

This is what it actually needed to be:

v=spf1 a include:_spf.google.com ~all

You will have spotted the addition of "a " after "spf1". This simple addition means that all web servers that are identified in my domains A records, hence, all the web servers from which I run my domain and subdomains, are allowed to send email as well.

The include directive means that Google can setup SPF records for the domain _spf.google.com and thus add or remove mail servers without you having to change anything.

How to test email reliability

If you're now thinking "I don't know whether this has been set up correctly for my domain", don't fret. You can test it quite easily. Go to this SPF testing tool and use the 3rd form on the page. Using only the first and third input of that form, enter your web server's IP address and your from address, which is usually wordpress@yourdomain.com if you're running WordPress. With my initial test, it gave this result:

This means that this test won't fail your email per se (as there was no SPF record), but for stricter email servers, it might, in other words, you've got quite low email reliability. Now I ran it with the SPF record I has just fashioned using Microsoft's wizard and it gave me this:

That is the result you want to see, as that means my server's email reliability just went up quite a bit.

WordPress specific email reliability: using another SMTP server

Quite often email from your own server won't work as expected, especially when you're on a shared host it can give issues. There are quite a few plugins out there to help you set up an external SMTP server, I've relied on Coffee2Code's Configure SMTP plugin myself a few times. There's some issues with that though, especially once you're starting to get more visitors, as most SMTP servers for free email services have a limit to how many emails you can send per day.

If you can, just use your own server or outsource the email delivery to a third party that specializes in sending service emails. I've been testing SendGrid myself, but wasn't completely happy with it. Their reliability was a lot higher but the costs are quite high too when you get several hundreds of comments. You might think "that's only a couple of hundred emails", well, it's not.

If you have subscribe to comments enabled, which I highly suggest you do, it'll be a lot more. I get anywhere from 20 to 200 comments on a post, average about 80 at the moment. If 50% subscribes to comment notifications, that adds up to an enormous amount of email being sent.

As for newsletters, there are plugins for sending those from your WordPress install too. I highly encourage you not to do that. Use Mailchimp, or any other newsletter service for that. Their reliability is way higher and you get awesome statistics and subscription services to boot. I use them for my WordPress Newsletter and never regret it.

Are you using other services that send email for you?

If you're using other services that send email for you, for instance if you're using Freshbooks (aff) for invoicing like I do, be sure to include them in your SPF too, just add another include like we did above for Google:

include:_spf.freshbooks.com

There are more services that support this, be sure to check if you're using any services that send email on your behalf. Email reliability is important, but even more important when it's sending your invoices!

Update from Antonio Romero in the comments, the same goes for MailChimp:

include:servers.mcsv.net

Just updated my own SPF with that as I use my own email address as a from address there.

Conclusion: make sure your email reliability is high!

Whether you run your own server or not, it can't hurt to do the check above to see whether your email has a high chance of being delivered. If you're sending email from your web server, be sure to do the above check and make the necessary changes to your SPF record if needed!

Bonus tip: DKIM

If you're using Google Apps for domain, be sure to read this guide and implement everything in it. It'll help you set up domain keys, which adds another layer of spam protection.

Email Reliability: use an SPF record is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let's draw an analogy: when you have someone build a house for you, what would you say if they'd say: "oh and btw, we'll leave a banner up on your roof", or to make the analogy better, when they said nothing at all and just did it? You'd either be mad and tell them to come take it off, or you'd throw it off yourself, right?

The question is of course: why do web designers and web developers do this? The reasons are simple: they'd like everyone to know that they designed that certain website and they use these footer links (if they're smart), to increase their search engine rankings. Luckily search engines, most notably Google, have been aware of this practice and are pretty good at making links in footers of pages not work as well, but that doesn't change the basic fact that the link should not be there.

The reason why this annoys me is that it's abusing the fact that most people who have a website built either for themselves or their company don't know the value of these links. It's basically the web developer taking advantage of the ignorance of their customer. A customer who, in most cases, wouldn't even now how to take a link like that out. Now what does that make them?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying web developers and web designers can't have these links, they should just be very open about it and not make it a default. If you're a customer with footer links on your site, and it hasn't been discussed with you, nor is it not in the contract with your web developer or designer, feel free to take it off or, better yet, ask for that discount.

If you're using a WordPress theme or free template that has one of these footer links, and you've gotten it for free, I'd leave it there, because that's how you "pay" the designer / developer. If it has multiple links like that, or really spammy ones like sometimes happens on non-legit theme sites, I'd personally take them out immediately, or not use the theme at all.

“Design by” footer links… is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How I "activate" a hReview

I alluded to it in last tuesdays podcast with Dougal Campbell: When I add a custom field "rating" to a post, my theme now automatically marks up that post as an hreview microformat. So it's as simple as this:

The rating is between 0 and 5, because that way Google understands it best and we don't have to give Google any extra metadata about it.

The hreview_echo function

To make this whole process easy, I've created a function in my functions.php file called hreview_echo. It looks like this:

function hreview_echo($val) {
  global $post;
  $rating = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'rating', true);
  if ($rating) {
    echo $val;
  }
}

We'll use this function on the several places where we need to add extra classes to make up the hreview.

The wrapper class: hreview

The first class we should add is the wrapper for the entire microformat: the hreview class. This should be on the div surrounding the post (this div should include the title and author). In the default theme (and in mine) it looks like this:

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

In this case the class of this div is actually put out by the WordPress core post_class() function, so we'll need to hook into that function. Luckily it allows us to easily do that using a filter, which we'll do using the functions below, which you can drop into your functions.php too:

function hreview_post_class($classes, $class, $post_id) {
  global $post;
  $review = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'rating', true);
  if ($review) {
    $classes[] = 'hreview';
  }
  return $classes;
}
add_filter('post_class','hreview_post_class',10,3);

If your theme doesn't use the post_class() function, it's even easier! Let's say your post div looks like this:

<div class="post">

You can just use our hreview_echo() function:

<div class="post<?php hreview_echo(' hreview'); ?>">

The item reviewed: the title

Next up in the line of things we have to add a class to is the post title, it needs two classnames: the item and fn classes. In my case it looked like this:

<h1><?php the_title();?></h1>

This is easily turned into the following, again using the hreview_echo function we created before:

<h1 <?php hreview_echo(' class="item fn"'); ?>><?php the_title();?></h1>

The date of the hReview

For the date we'll have to work it a bit. The hreview microformat determines the date should be in ISO date format. Meaning the date should look like: 2010-03-01. Your theme probably has another way of showing the date, I know mine does. My date looked like this:

<span class="date"><?php the_time('d F Y');?></span>

Now to make it so that it can still look like that but we can also give the microformat the correctly formatted date, we'll use a trick: by adding a span with a class of value-title and then adding the correct date in the title of that span, microformat parsers will ignore the other content and pick the value from that title.

So we'll turn it into this:

<span class="date<?php hreview_echo(' dtreviewed') ?>">
  <?php
      hreview_echo('<span class="value-title" title="'.
        get_the_time('Y-m-d').'"/>');
      the_time('d F Y');
  ?>
</span>

This outputs:

<span class="date dtreviewed">
  <span class="value-title" title="2010-02-10"/>
  10 February 2010
</span>

That's a nice, non-intrusive solution, right?

The reviewer: the author

The next class we need to add is the reviewer class, as this is the author of the review, that's a simple one too: it's the author of the post. In my theme, my author block looks like this:

<span class="author"><?php the_author(); ?></span>

Now you'll get by now what we'll do:

<span class="author<?php hreview_echo(' reviewer'); ?>">
  <?php the_author(); ?>
</span>

Easy does it, right? You can basically do something like this with any kind of showing the author's name. Other functions that might be used in your theme are for instance the_author_link() or the_author_posts_link().

The content of the review

We've done more than half of it now! Let's get going with the contents of the review, in the microformat, this needs the class description. In my theme, just like in the default kubrick theme, the content is wrapped in the following div:

<div class="entry">

You've guessed it by now haven't you? Here we go:

<div class="entry<?php hreview_echo(' description'); ?>">

By the way: if you want to mark up articles on for instance your fronpage as hreview too, and you use excerpts there instead of full articles, like I do, you should use summary, instead of description:

<div class="entry<?php hreview_echo(' summary'); ?>">

Finally: the rating!

And now, finally, it's time for us to add the rating, because that's what it's all about right? There's all sorts of ways to display a rating, I have chosen to do it in HTML that looks like this:

<div class="rating">My rating:</div>
<div title="4.5 out of 5 stars" class="rating_bar">
  <div style="width:90%"></div>
</div>

Which outputs this:

The second div (class rating_bar) displays the rating, and it contains the empty stars. The div within that contains the yellow stars, and fills the stars up to where they need to be.

The CSS for these 3 divs looks like this:

.rating {
  float: left;
  margin-right: 10px;
}
.rating_bar {
  float: left;
  width: 55px;
  background: url(images/stars.gif) 0 0 repeat-x;
}
.rating_bar div {
  height: 12px;
  background: url(images/stars.gif) 0 -13px repeat-x;
}

Download the (sprited) image of the stars here.

Now we'll need to do two things: dynamically output the size of the inner div within rating_bar, and make the rating readable for a microformat parser.

To display the rating, because it's a value between 0 and 5, we'll multiply it by 20. To make the output parseable by a microformat parser, we'll use the same value-title trick we used before. Finally, we'll turn this all into a function to display the rating, which you can drop into your functions.php, just like the two functions before.

<?php
function display_hreview_rating() {
  global $post;
  $rating = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'rating', true);
  if ($rating) {
?>
    <div class="rating">
      My rating:
      <span class="value-title" title="<?php echo $rating; ?>"/>
    </span></div>
    <div title="<?php echo $rating; ?> out of 5 stars" class="rating_bar">
      <div style="width:<?php echo ($rating*20); ?>%"></div>
    </div>
<?php
  }
  return $output;
}
?>

So, now you can just use the display_hreview_rating() function anywhere in your post where you want to display the rating. If there is no rating, it won't display anything.

Testing your hreview & rich snippets

Testing your hreview markup can be done with multiple tools, but I myself found the Google Rich Snippets tool to be extremely useful. If you use Quix, just type 'snippet' on the post you want to test! In my case it outputs a snippet like this for my review of a WordPress backup plugin:

Bonus: pricerange and tags

As you can see in the above snippet, it includes something that is not documented anywhere in the official Google documentation for reviews, but that Google does support: the pricerange.

Credit where credit is due: I first found this pricerange attribute when my colleague Eduard pointed me to this post by the SEOgadget guys, which pointed to this Knol. It's extremely useful and seems to basically allow for all sorts of text. People use it to display a pricerange in a €€ - €€€ style, or to display a "real" pricerange, like € 100 - € 150. In case of an individual review, you can just use it to tell what you paid for it.

Since what I paid for a product is not a real part of my theme, I just make it simple: when I tell that the plugin is free, I mark up that line as:

this plugin is completely <span class="pricerange">free</span>

If you do want to put the value into a custom field and display it, you could easily adapt one of the functions above to do that, I'll leave that as an exercise to you, the reader.

Another thing I found that Google recognizes is the class tags. That's really easy to do: I just added the class 'tags' around my tags. I don't know how Google uses that though, haven't seen it anywhere in the wild.

A final note on Rich Snippets

If you've modified your theme to mark up as hreview, please make sure to use this form to let Google know that you have. They might not show it if you don't fit their test segment though, because as Google states in the Knol:

Currently, review sites and social networking/people profile sites are eligible. We plan to expand Rich Snippets to other types of content in the future.

I hope you've found this post useful, let me know in the comments if you've used it to add hreview to your (premium) theme, and feel free to post links to examples, I'd love to see them! If you're wondering: all code examples on this site, unless specifically otherwise stated, are MIT licensed: free to distribute, free to modify. Please do add a link to where you got the original code though.

It's my humble opinion that additions like these should make it into all the premium themes, because that's what really makes a premium theme premium, in my opinion. Happy coding!

Implementing hreview in your WordPress theme is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google FriendConnect API is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Suppose you have read my Twitter Analytics post, and you've started tagging all the URL's you spread on Twitter with Google Analytics campaign variables. So at some point, Google enters your site through this URL:

http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter
&utm_campaign=twitter

If it did, in "old times", this would mean you'd have a duplicate content issue: the same content indexed under two different URL's. An issue SEO's have been trying to solve on web pages for ages, which sometimes created huge limitations. This is where the new tag comes in. You add this code to the <head> section of your page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/"/>

And now, Google will suddenly count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL anymore. Simple, yet effective. Cool huh?

Disclaimer: this tag is only a "hint" to the search engine. While they'll probably use it 99% of the time, they reserve the right to handle things any way they want, in case of errors etc.

Of course this isn't just useful for campaign tagging. Many a webshop needs the URL to store sort variables, for instance. But a page that's sorted by price ascending, is often almost the same as a page sorted by price descending.

Now I have to admit I had a bit (like a couple of days) of a headstart on this one, so I can now make it easy for you if you're running WordPress, as I've got a Canonical URL plugin ready for you!

Also, if you're using Magento E-Commerce, I've collaborated with Joachim Houtman to make this Magento canonical URL's extension for you, that does this for you in Magento!

Working with Marek Sotak, we've also developed a module for Drupal that does this, by modifying the global redirect module. Grab it here. Note: this is not an official release of this module, we'll do that soon.

If you've written a plugin or extension for another open source system that does this, or would like to work with me on doing so, let me know in the comments!

Canonical URL links is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Basically, this is Google offering me, the user, to translate the search term into english. When you click this link, you'll get a SERP for "flight amsterdam", where it shows the SERP translated in German on the left, and the original SERP on the right (click for enlargement):

I'm curious as to how Google decides to put this in... I'll be trying to figure out with our analytics staff here how many traffic we get off of these translated searches.

Google translating search results is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google subdomain & 302 spam is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What amazed me again was which URL's Google picked, on some sites they seem "obvious", on this one it picked a few posts, and I can't say I really understood why. None of the posts it picked were particularly well linked, both internally and externally. It would be nice to be able to influence those site links a bit more...

More Sitelinks! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Well, yes, these pages do have duplicate title tags. But they have something else as well:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow,noodp" />

Perhaps, Google, instead of working on these nice webmaster tools, you should start honoring simple stuff like a meta name="robots" first.

Google Webmaster Tools Content Analysis shows Google breaks the rules. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If you know that a site has decreased in visible PageRank, are you going to buy a link there and expose your linkbuying efforts? Or are you going to look for sites who have not had their PageRank lowered to buy your links from? Exactly.

That is why you want to keep track of PageRank for sites you might at some point in time consider buying links on...

PageRank: more valuable than ever is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It's not enabled for me yet, but once it becomes available, I think I'll switch to that instead of my regular IMAP.

That’s it! I’m switching to GMail! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So let me get this straight, they couldn't reach the page, because it gave a normal HTTP 200 Success code? Seems like a bug to me...

Google doesn’t get it? is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

This creates some very odd looking results, see this search for "makelaar" instance, there's 5 pages in that top 10 that are of no use to anyone, beginning with the #1... Or check the SERP for "hypotheek" (mortgage in Dutch) the second site there basically is an affiliate site showing the big banks what they should be doing (writing good content about the subject), but it's probably ranking also because of the enormous keyword density for the word hypotheek... (Just search for hypotheek in your Firefox and check "highlight all", if the page is all yellow, you know what's happening.)

So basically, Google, do something about it, you're looking stupid now...

BTW, Google quality guys, check this out, I hope you know what to do with people promoting their sites like that :)

Google: keyword density should NOT be this important is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• Results from the last 24 hours
• Results from the last week

Searching for freshly indexed pages is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Searching with Google: country based results made easy is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

This is a rough version, so I'd love to hear your comments on how to improve this cheat sheet!

Google Search URL parameters cheat sheet is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/come-see-us-at-ses-london-and-hear.html
2. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/atom.xml
3. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/rss.xml
4. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Now as you can see, 3 out of the 4 results here, are feeds... All these three feeds show the exact same content. That is one giant duplicate content problem right there... And I'm not even starting about the horrible user experience this is for me... Come on guys, start plumbing the blog!

“Plumbing the web” – duplicate content issues at Google Webmaster Central is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Another reason why Google is slow in spidering your site might be that your server is slow... Google actually indicates this to you, and I shortly addressed this in my post on how to use Google Webmaster Tools. If this is the case, Google shows you this in the "Crawl rate" overview of the Diagnostic tab:

My advice: set it to "Faster", but don't stop with that: make your server react faster, either by upgrading your hosting, your hardware, or whatever is needed. Chances are that when Google is suffering long load times, your users are as well.

Now if both of these aren't right for you, Google has found many great links to your site and it's not telling you it would like to crawl faster, there is one solution to make sure it crawls your new articles or pages even faster: sitemaps.

I don't use them on this site myself, as I want to know how Google crawls my site without me interfering in the process. However, if you think you have something to gain by Google crawling your new pages faster, an XML sitemap is a plausible solution.

Do consider though that you're throwing data away, you'll never know if and when Google would have found a page by itself if you hadn't put it in the sitemap.

How to get Google to crawl your site faster is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Wikipedia describes an API as: 'An application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them.'

Now these API's are super useful, I use them in several of my scripts and have great fun with them. I used the Technorati API, for instance, in the first version of the Technorati rank and link count Greasemonkey script I wrote. This was fast, and worked quite well for a while, so I was very happy. After a few hours of browsing though, it stopped working. The error I got was 'You have used up your daily allotment of Technorati API queries.'

Now I can't understand why they'd want to limit use of the API like that. Why not? Well, now that I have decided to not use the API (after all how much is 500 queries when you distribute this script to 100+ people?), I'm left with no other choice but to scrape the content of their normal site. This costs them way and way more bandwidth, and it's significantly slower. That's not much of a service is it? Remember: I do want to use their services! I want to know the Technorati rank for each page I'm visiting, that's a good sign for them, isn't it?

So, please Technorati: get rid of that maximum number of queries. Oh and Google and Yahoo!, if you're listening? Do the same, please!

Web 2.0 and APIs: the case for Unlimited queries is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!