Testing structured data of the current URL with one click

Any SEO know about benefits of structured data. Google offers a special structured data testing tool to test the existence and quality of the structured data on the certain URL.

But what, if you want to test some URLs? Copy URL, switch the tab, go to the Google Structured Data Testing Tool, paste URL, press Enter. And again, and again...? Annoying!

I've coded a solution for this kind of routine task.

How to SEO long URLs

There are many meanings about the SEO impact of long URLs: they are good, or bad, or have no influence. Our questions in this article are:

• why long URLs occur,
• how to make long URLs short,

The origins of long URLs are mainly

• the wish to stuff URLs with keywords (both of domains and every single URL slugs),
• the necessity (or, to be honest, the wish too) to reproduce the site's structure in the matching URL's structure.

Before we begin let us declare, what we mean as long URL: how many characters it must have to be named long? The longest URL in the Google's Webmaster Blog is 95 characters long, so let's call long URLs longer as this.

How to create your own author-centered knowledge graph

I'm not a fear salesman, really! But the thought to name this article as "how to defend abusive content removal requests" comes to me from the reading of the Google's updated report on "How Google Fights Piracy". The following sentence makes me conceiving suspicion:

...sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results.

On the background of all known Negative SEO cases this can be the next thing, where a honest publisher will be punished for nothing.

There are enough known cases, where content scraping sites get better SERP places as the unique content providers. And there are enough abusive content removal requests - just read the Google's report. The best defense is a good offence. We construct our publishing identities network, which serves as our own author-oriented knowledge graph. Its purposes are, that

• always working removal requests at Google and DMCA takedowns,
• lack of effect in case of abusive third part removal requests,
• doubtless machine-readable relations between author's entity and author's creative work.

Our objective is a solid, structured and chained publisher identity, which will include the author, the publishing medium and the publication itself. Let's work!

itemId vs sameAs vs additionalType: how to distinguish and use correctly

One of the best methods to gain the topical relevance of a text is to use entities instead of "plain" keywords. The most simple way to create an entity out of a keyword is to extend it as a standalone type with the Schema.org-markup and prove it with additional trustful informations. Here is the applying point of HTML5 attribute itemId and Schema.org-properties sameAs and additionalType. All of them are used to provide additional informations to a type. But while itemId and sameAs are pretty much the same, additionalType is used for different purpose. Let's look at the use cases in detail to get clear about distinguishing and correct assignment. Accurate usage of these properties is crucial for semantic SEO purposes, cause the kind of the entity creation turns the algorithms opinion about the given text to finally more or less topical ranking.

Authorship is dead? No! It must be just implemented correctly!

Last news are all about authorship is dead. Don't misunderstand this statement! After thoughtful reading of this and that article it is clear, that really dead are only some actions, which Google performs with very special authorship markup, namely

1. data gathering and
2. partly showing of author's image and name as byline in search results,

based on rel=author. "Partly" cause author images and names are still shown, if you are logged in into your G+ account and the author is in your G+-circles.

I will not analyze the causes of dropping the processing of rel=author - such analyze is well done in articles linked above. I want rather reassure the community, that the authorship still alive and will be so. The only question is how to correctly implement authorship. Let's look a bit into detail:

C for Content: part 4 of the HASCH the OnPage SEO framework

How to create relevant content

Shortly i was asked about the definitive OnPage ranking factors. My first and short answer was, there isn't the single ranking factor, but a combination of some. Then it seemed to me, this question could be very relevant verbalization of the article about website content for the part 4 of the HASCH, my OnPage SEO framework. I don't want to rob your time with commonplace phrases about "the content is king, must be unique, interesting, well-written, useful, fresh, catchy, provoking, outrageous" or the like. I will instead explain, which tangible traits must own your content to rank well. With  "to rank well" i mean, that search engine algorithm will reckon your website text as topically relevant to your chosen and used in the text keywords. Let's ask:

• what makes content relevant?
• how to create relevant content?

To the answers →

S for Semantic: part 3 of the HASCH the OnPage SEO framework

The third part of my OnPage framework is dedicated to semantic of a webpage. With this article i will give an overview of benefits and usage areas of semantic markup. Use this article like a kind of cheatsheet for OnPage audits of existing website, SEO strategy for website under construction, or website preparation for semantic search before relaunch.

Why semantic?

• Search engines use semantic to improve the search results (semantic search).
• Using semantic OnPage makes texts better machine-readable (exacter understanding and distinguishing).
• All fresh kinds of search results output, like rich snippets, Knowledge Graph, the OneBox are based on and populated with semantically rehashed informations.
• Google accomplished a paradigm transition "from strings to things". The "thing" here is the main object of (web) semantic, an entity. An entity means in our context just a keyword, or keyword phrase, but more or lesser interrelated and explicitly verifiable by other sources,
• It's already proven, that semantic markup is a ranking factor: 0,3% of all sites make use of semantic markup, but 36% of sites at SERP encounter it.

Semantic website revamp is the key to being understood by machines. Quite enough reasons to scrutinize the subject! Lets go:

How to link guest posts to get the most author trust rank

Guest blogging is a hot topic now. There is much unclear with it: some of doing guest blogging get penalized, other are up and about spreading guest posts, and do it fearless and en masse. Ok, the life keeps moving, and incoming links must be acquired, whatever comes, cause they remain one of the strongest signals for the site ranking. In the last article about guest blogging i've written about guest post markup, which helps you to create an additional trust signals in it. Shortly, reading an article from Bill Slawski about Google co-occurrence patent and keyword relationships i got an idea about utilizing of co-occurrence for guest blogging.

What are main problems with guest blogging from Google's point of view:

• guest article hasn't topically to do with the whole publishing site
• guest article author is rewarded with (highly) keyword-enriched link anchor text from the guest article to author's own site.

The topical relation's issue is the business of an author alone - only author decides, where to guest post. But what is the motivation to guest post if not the keyword-enriched anchor in the backlink? It must be any kind of threading relation from the guest post to the own site. Let us look, how to set the thread without penalty fear:

How to give a face to your entities? Earn SEO profit with making Wikimedia Commons to your media hosting!

We already know, how to become an entity - create a Freebase topic. But this is a common issue that add image to Freebase topic is no longer possible. Our goals regarding semantic SEO and our images are however:

• the ability to provide semantic informations about our images,
• a possibility to share images with belonging semantic informations
• embedding of semantically described images into web documents as images utilizing ImageObject class from Schema.org and, last but not least,
• to host these images with belonging semantic informations on an authoritative source.

All these tasks can be accomplished using Wikimedia Commons, a free media repository of the Wikimedia Foundation. I divide this article about using of Wikimedia Commons into 2 sections:

• How to upload to Wikimedia Commons (things like register, login, create user page, select and/or find out matching license, upload and describe image or other media file)
• How to cite Wikimedia Commons (using on websites, embedding into semantic markup)

How to practice guest blogging successfully without penalty fear

There are hard times for guest bloggers and guest blogging platforms. Google's top spam officer  means, guest blogging is done. Even was penalized one of the most successful guest blogging brokers. There is a big chaos and panic in the webmarketing environment. "Guest blogging is dead" is one of the most searchable phrases. But in my opinion there is a kind of doing guest blogging, which allows the successful valuable guest blog practice. Lets look on what exactly hates Google on guest blogging, what exactly drives a guest blogger into penalty and how the common sense and semantic markup help us to spread our guest blog articles and get valuable backlinks for it without penalty fear.

Solution for "Rich snippets not showing"

During my microdata coding i quite accidentally realized, that "rich snippets are not showing" doesn't always mean "rich snippets not working"! My research was about nesting and inheritance of Schema.org's classes, and, playing with the Google's structured data testing tool, i detected a case where my microdata markup was correctly validated and worked properly, but rich snippets of this code weren't showing. After some tests i got to know about two causes of not shown rich snippets:

Authorship markup: how to combine correctly several kinds of it?

Yes, exactly, how to correctly combine them? More: why is it useful and needful to use several authorship markup and whether it produces any SEO-profit?

Some SEOs dispute about differences of using author and publisher properties, another SEOs advice to use only rel="author"... I say: use all you might use simultaneously! (it's needless to say, don't use something, what doesn't fit your context and could be ranked as e.g. rich snippets spam etc ).

How to SEO Joomla? - advanced SEO extensions and workarounds

From all free PHP web CMS i like Joomla more than all other. Why? I can work with it very effectively and get done alone enterprise level projects, which would need e.g. with Drupal or Typo3 about 3 working persons. I started to use Joomla as it was called Mambo and use it still on some projects. With the time it become more and more pleasant to work with - the structure becomes mature and MVC, usability makes fun, extensions repository grows and contains fantastic extensions. And there are too some wonderful tools and workarounds for accomplishing Joomla SEO tasks, speciall OnPage. Some extensions, which i use extensively myself i will introduce below. I will talk only about free or extremely lowcost extensions.

How to result co-citation into valuable backlink?

What yields co-citation for SEO?

There is much stuff written about the role of co-citation for SEO. To explain co-citation briefly: if site A links to sites B and C, then Google means sites B and C are somehow related. But how SEO makes a valuable backlink Profit with co-citation?

Schema.org + Notepad++ = 💘

I love Notepad++. Since i use Windows this is my code editor of choice (there are 4 years, befor i was a Mac-fanboy using TextWrangler). It is free, stable, customisable (visually with themas, and with user defined languages), extendable with rich plugin repository, has active development team, so it gets offen updates. One day i thought, there could be something better beside of Notepad++ and searched. What i found, was an article about 15 most popular code editors and a poll - look at the poll results, you know, what was my decision;)

Since 2011 i love Schema.org too. I extensively use microdata on each site i get in my hands - my own record is 125 microdata classes and properties in a single web document (detail page of a books online shop), and no single one is spam, all of them are existing and useful product informations.

Getting married

It was just obvious i decided to optimize my handwork and make Notepad++ and Schema.org vocabulary working together (and, last but not least, to create a free additional value for all, who have similar needs).