But why was this Alt tag invented? Have you ever thought of this question? Surely not to give you some SEO value

Alt tag is basically the text equivalent of your image. This doesn’t necessarily mean a decorated description or title. Ask yourself, what would you have put if you didn’t have the image in the first place? Does this text serves the purpose to share the basic information with the user as the image itself? Then you are using Alt tag with its true purpose

So if the browser is unable to display the image or the image is not available, the Alt tag text will be shown in the place of your picture. So your user will have at least some kind of idea what you were trying to express using the image.

I am pretty sure, you would still continue to make Alt tags keyword-centric. And there is no reason why you should not. But keep in mind its true purpose and your user

Well, that is still true. But think about this case. Somebody has linked to your old domain url. So first the link juice will be passed to the old domain and as you are using 301 redirect it will be passed to your new domain. But there will be natarul decay of link juice while passing from one link to another. Matt Cutts has confirmed this case. So you will still gain most of the PR but there will be some leakage of link juice. Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about it:

Eric Enge: Let’s say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn’t link to it on the new domain?

Matt Cutts: That’s a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

So be a bit more serious while going for a new domain for your site

But still I doubt if spammers will stop spamming. These may be hard facts about comment spam, but comment spammers are hard nuts to crack. They perhaps just like to spam

Google won’t penalize a site for duplicate content. That’s the bottom line. So actually it breaks a general myth as you can say. So what Google actually wants is diversity in results. So if you make some little adjustments your site may also be shown in search results. Otherwise there’s possibility that your site may end up as one of these.

It is a negative effect no doubt. But Google consider that most duplicate content sites are not spam. They have their own methods to detect spam & they banned them for being spam, but not for being duplicate

Now I am coming to meta tags. Here Google confirmed the long time predictions. Google simply don’t consider keywords meta tag in SEO. The reason is simple. It has been abused quite extensively for keyword stuffing to manipulate  SERPs. Suppose, you are targeting keywords that are not in your niche & getting hits for that where users find nothing about the topic. That’s why Google removed it as SEO factor years ago.

In case of description meta tag, it can be useful if Google don’t find a suitable search snippet & will use it instead. Check the above screenshot for an example. But from SEO point of view, it has no effect.

If you want to read the original posts, here is the link for duplicate content & here is for meta tags. They have cool videos attached too. Nowadays Google seem to be publicly releasing more of their point of views on SEO. It is better to know what are going to need to do clearly. When I started it was not like this. If you are a beginner, you are going to like this more

• Nofollow link doesn’t pass PageRank juice at all. You can be sure of that.
• Now I am giving an example from that post about the link juice flow. Suppose you have 10 PageRank points on a page. The page contains 10 outbound links & 5 of them are nofollow. And there is no decay of link juice while passing. So you will think, 5 dofollow links will get 2 points each. But that is not the case. Rather 5 dofollow links will get 1 point each.

As you can see, even though nofollow links doesn’t pass PR, it consumes the PR points. So even if you mark certain links nofollow, you are loosing points depending on the number of nofollow links. So there is not much of value in doing PageRank Sculpting. That’s what you need to know as a new one in the webmaster field.

By the way, if you have some sort of knowledge & want to explore the post if you haven’t already, here is the link to the blog post.

By the way, this blog retained its PageRank to 2. I am quite busy with my work lately. And my posting has gone a bit irregular. But really I never get detouched to blogging. Though I am not a pro-blogger, but it is more than a hobby to me

Search engines like Google consider the neighbourhood the link is coming from. If you get a link from a bunch of relevant high quality sites, it will give your site a boost. Obviously sitelinks in auto-directories can be irrelevant, less-quality & even spam. No one checks them before publishing. And spammers are always there to take opportunity of it. So backlink to your site from there may yield almost no link value. Rather if you gain an approved link from a well-moderated directory after 15-20 days, it may increase your site auhority. So don’t just run after some quick automatic links. Create a good site with content & then submit it to some well-organized manual directories. It will help you in long run. You can’t gain  much instantly in SEO.

Then I thought I should write a post about the difference between PR 0 & n/a. It may look same but there is a subtle difference between them.

What PR0 means: PR0 means that your site has been indexed. But due to the lack of quality of backlinks it is somewhere between PR0 to 1. If you have quite a few backlinks & your PR is still 0, then your backlinks are not relevant & quality enough.

What PR n/a means: It can mean two things. Either your site is fairly new & haven’t been online between two public PR updates (usually 3 months), or your site has been penalized by Google. So if you have a old site that had PR before but now showing a gray bar in pagerank, you should check your site address in Google search. If your site is still there in search, you can relax that you are not banned.

By the way, PR n/a can be shown in case of slow connection where the server fails to connect. So, don’t forget to check again.