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Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings?

We are planning to use  ­ in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9...

In HTML 5, the "­" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs.

Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text?

Does it still make sense to use ­ or would you switch to <wbr> already?

I've tried submitting various pages, some even authority news sites that have existed for decades (in print, at least...). Nothing has ever been accepted by DMOZ. I'm referring to German DMOZ, but I hear this exactly from every country.

Anybody around that has managed to get a DMOZ entry in the past couple of years?

I've already seen great results just by submitting XML-video sitemaps.

To facilitate interpretation for search engines a description of the video's content should be made in writing. One best practice could be to place the video's description in HTML in the same section where the video is placed. Emphasize the video by constructing a class like

or a similar indication in the source code and place all information concerning the video (video, title and description) into this class. That way, a search engine should better understand the connection between this information.

Like so:

 
 

## Video: Keyword

 Here is a short description of the video
 
 
 

Here is a Whiteboard Friday Video with some further information: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080

yup, it works now. you're the best yannick! thanks a lot for helping me with this!

ok, i changed it. Thanks Yannick! I'll post in a couple of days if the tracking works now.

It doesn't work in either new or old interface.

I've not added any other custom variables. I don't think I added any additional onLoad Code to the tag either (not sure what you're referring to though). You can find the site here: http://www.travelcostarica.nu/

oh sorry, i indicated the wrong source! i am actually referring to the code from this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables!

which php-part? didnt notice that..

no, i just used exactly the code you see above.

I followed the instructions here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables, but cannot see the report in Analytics under "Custom Variables".

As I dont know JS syntax, I assume the code is wrong. I just added dohertyjf's code under my normal tracking code. Can someone tell me if and where the error is?

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Much obliged!

nocando as far as i know. you might be ranking in G-news US if the content is relevant locally.

When submitting your site go G-News you can chose some local preferences. These will matter (as well as location of servers). If you're not based in the US, you should still be able to rank with relevant articles, though the competition is definitely tougher there than in the UK.

I have similiar issues with Germany and Switzerland (both in German): Lots of German sites can rank in G-News Switzerland. Swiss pages have a harder time to rank in Germany (probably due to harder competition and better-linked sites in Germany) - but they do appear, when relevant.

@Aran: Did you find out if people actually clicked on those footer links? From the screenshot, the links don't look too bad and it's possible to keep an overview. So it would be interesting to know if people don't even click on a well-done footer...

Thanks Keri, nice resource. I guess the main issue now will be to sit down with legal department and hear what they have to say...

Yup, I would do it exactly like kieran says. Make sure to have some anchor text variation though, so that the "scheme" looks more natural and not like it's bought or something.

Wired Magazine has started to publish images under CC licence as reported here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/wired-releases-images-via-creative-commons-but-reopens-a-debate-on-what-noncommercial-means/

The images are found here http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/

They allow noncommercial use (though this is not clearly defined) and request to attribute to the original source and "ask for a link back to the original story where the photo first appeared". The latter does not seem to be compulsory, but of course is a great SEO tactic to generate deep links.

What's your take on this? Does anyone have experience with providing image material with the request to attribute you as the original source?

I agree with Yannick here. Even though I always run into various competitors who are successful with shady techniques, I don't believe that this makes sense in the long run. Sometimes it can take incredibly long until these spammers get detected, but eventually they do go down the drain. Be patient and don't worry. Linkspam will go away, good content is here to stay:)

Google could crawl the dynamic URLs created by your searchbox - but it usually doesn't unless there is a link to such a dynamic url somewhere. Internal searches don't create much problems anymore, but if you want to be sure, you could always block your dynamic search results pages via robots.txt or Google Webmaster Tools (>Site configuration >URL parameters).

So if the URL generated by internal searches is http://www.site.com/search/?searchword=search+query+here, you could add this to robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /search/

How can i track image searches on google analytics?

To filter the refferers by image.google or /imgres does not work in new google analytics (and brings an impossibly small number on old GA). also, this would not cover local google image refferers, that don't come from image.google.com.

anyone knows how to find image search sources? i haven't found anything helpful in google's documentation or forums. thanks!

i have a few customers now that work with magento. they're all satisfied and as far as i can see it's pretty much optimised out of the box already. you can tweak title tags, urls, meta descriptions, on page copy and i've not seen any duplicate content issues. definitely the solution i would chose, were i to open an ecommerce.