I was browsing through my RSS feeds a couple of minutes ago and I came across an interesting post from the Google Webmaster Blog, titled Google’s SEO Report Card.,

The report was created to help Google’s engineers and employees better optimize their product pages for search engines. So yeah, even Google practices SEO!

You’ll find that the report touches on many on-page and on-site SEO factors, including title tags, meta tags, heading tags, canonical URLs, image tags and link anchors.

The most useful part, however, are the examples that are included on each point. You’ll be able to understand what is right and what is wrong on each SEO factor.

Here is the direct download link for the PDF (hoping Google won’t mind…).

It looks like Google used the new year’s eve to update the nominal PageRank around the web. My established websites didn’t experience any fluctuation, but I noticed that many of my recently created niche websites gained PageRank.

Most of them went from PR0 to PR2. I was surprised to see one of them jumping from PR0 to PR4 though, especially because the site is less than six months old.

What about you, did you notice any changes?

Finally, it looks like the frequency of the updates is indeed increasing. The last one was just two months ago (late in October), so keep an eye for the next one around March.

The guys from EvanCarmichael.com compile a Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year list every year. The 2009 edition is available already.

If you want to get a roundup of all the 2009 SEO tips, check it out. Daily Blog Tips was included in the list this year as well, with the post 4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic.

As the year gets closer to the end I am sure we’ll see more of those “best of 2009″ lists. If I come across some worthy ones I will let you know.

If you thought that spammy links on your comment section were not a big deal, well, think again. The official Google Webmaster Central blog published an article last week talking about this issue. Here is a quote from it:

Comments can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site’s users in discussions. This valuable content should not be replaced by gibberish nonsense keywords and links. For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

Disallow anonymous posting.

Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.

Turn on comment moderation.

Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.

Disallow hyperlinks in comments.

Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

The article also warns against using blog comments as a link building strategy, which probably means that Google is scrutinizing more closely the links posted in blog comments now. This means one thing: posting hundreds of comments (either on dofollow or nofollow blogs) with tailored keywords would probably be a good idea, as it could get your site flagged for manipulative behavior.

Bing recently introduced a new and very useful search operator, called “linkfromdomain”. Basically it allows you to find all the web pages that a certain domain is linking to. For example, if you search on Bing for

linkfromdomain:microsoft.com

you will find all the pages that the microsoft.com domain is linking to. You can also add normal search parameters to your query, to make it more specific. For example, if you searched for

linkfromdomain:microsoft.com windows

you will find all that pages that are being linked from the microsoft.com domain and that contain the word windows inside them.

Cool, right? I am sure that webmasters will come up with all sorts of creative ways to use that operator. From example, many people are already using it for linkbuilding purposes, as the operator allows you to find what kind of content a particular domain likes and links to. SEOMoz has an interesting article on the topic.

Playing around with it I also came up with an interesting use: finding spammy links inside your own website. We all know that linking to “bad neighbors” can hurt your search engine rankings, so spotting and removing those links is essential. This new operator can help you with that task, and here is how.

First of all run the operator for your own domain, and add spammy keywords to the search query. For example, once searched for

linkfromdomain:dailyblogtips.com viagra

I got 213 results. Those are basically pages from around the web that contain the word “viagra” and that my blog is linking to.

The next step to examine each of the pages on the results, trying to identify if they are spammy/malicious or not. On the very first page of results I came across a page that was serving malware. Once I clicked there I got the alert from Google saying it could damage my computer. Linking to such pages is a big no-no.

Now we need to find what page inside your website is linking to the malicious page. Luckily Google can help us here. Basically you will need to combine two operators. Let’s suppose that the URL of the malicious page is http://www.domain.com/bad-stuff/. You will need to run a query that will find all the pages inside your site linking to that URL. Here is how you do it on Google:

link:http://www.domain.com/bad-stuff/ site:yoursite.com

The first operator (”link:http://www.domain.com/bad-stuff/”) finds all the backlinks pointing to that page, and the second one (”site:yoursite.com”) filters the results only to pages inside your own domain name.

Once I used this query I found exactly the page inside my blog that was linking to the malicious site. After that it was just a matter of updating the post to remove that link. The process will take some time, but I believe it is well worth it, because linking to spammy and malicious websites is a big problem.