Find out what the engines think are your most important pages
This is an easy one – it’s not perfect, but it will give you a fairly good idea of which pages on your site have the most “juice” with each of the engines. Use the query format – site:yourdomain.com inurl:www (sorry folks who don’t use the www). Here’s some examples:
- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aseomoz.org+inurl%3Awww (I note that this matches up almost exactly with the data webmaster central gives me for pages with the most links)
- http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Aseomoz.org+inurl%3Awww – Yahoo! has a bit of a different opinion (but still looks very relevant)
- http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Aseomoz.org+www – at Live.com, they don’t allow the “inurl” operator, so you can just use “www” which may skew things a bit, but you’re still likely to see many of the most important pages first
This can be very useful for figuring out where your high link juice pages are and re-directing some of the goodness over to places that need it.
How to Get Google & Yahoo! to Spider Your Site More Quickly
These “tips” have both been around for a few months, but they’re still not common knowledge, so it pays to have them here.
Google – set up AdSense units on every page you want indexed. Googlebot has to come by anyway to check that you’re following the rules, and thus you’re often spidered more quickly. Heard from a little bird that the AdSense trick doesn’t work, but that installing Custom Site Search may…
Yahoo! – install Yahoo! site search on your domain and Yahoo! promises they’ll make short work of indexing your domain. It seemed like a dirty trick until a Yahoo! engineer told a crowd at a search convention that it’s public knowledge and not, in his opinion, corrupt or spammy.
Want to Become a Top Digg User?
Go see what Tamar (Barry Schwartz’s “sidekick”) is doing on Digg. She posts a few dozen stories a day from major media outlets – stories that got popular on Reddit, stories that were popular on CNN, stories that made the top of Yahoo! or Google News or had success in the blogosphere. She’s a smart cookie when it comes to getting to the top of Digg, and with 76 friends already in the system, anything she digs is getting 10+ votes, and a high percentage go to the top of the site.
Yes, now you too can become one of the top Diggers – and be wooed away by Calcanis and his ilk 
APIs Provide Great Fodder for Easy Content Generation
I barely need to say anything here, because between Stephan Spencer’s blog on Open API’s and the list he points to at ProgrammableWeb, there’s not much else to say. However, it is important to remember that a lot of API content is going to be duplicate unless you can add some additional value or mashup a lot of good quality text stuff that Google hasn’t seen before. The last thing you want is a great API application that’s seen as spam because it looks like how spammers mashup and re-purpose content.
Now go read those links!
Taking Advantage of the Fresh Content Boost
It’s no myth – there really is a sort of “fresh content” ranking advantage at Google. To get the most out of it, you’ll need real, spiderable, unique content (not like a weather display or updated calendar) on the page(s) you’re trying to boost. We’ve had the most success by using snippets of new content that’s created on the site (in blogs, articles, news items, etc). It’s an easy way to get both the fresh boost and get links in to your new material to ensure quick spidering.
The fresh boost can be addictive and problematic, though – we’ve seen times when rankings would fluctuate several positions when new content wasn’t added to the page, making the task an essential. Ideally, you want to be ranking without requiring new development time each day, and this can be accomplished in mid-larger sites with widgets that automatically update pages with pieces of fresh content. Don’t get lazy and start recycling old pieces or using snippets from other sections of the site. We were surprised to see how “smart” Google appeared to be with fresh content detection – apparently, they’ve seen all our tricks before
