Three New WebmasterRadio Shows Debut in August

August is a busy month here at WebmasterRadio.FM. Along with our full scale coverage of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Conference (complete with a full-scale SearchBash party), WebmasterRadio.FM has three new shows debuting this month.

WordPress developers and bloggers will be pleased to note, world renown WordPress expert, Joost De Valk hosts “Press This!”, a show featuring exclusive interview with fellow WordPress developers, topics such as WordPress hosting and SEO, and news on the latest plug-ins and updates. “Press This“ premieres August 4th and will air every Tuesday at 5pm Eastern/ 2pm Pacific.

For email marketers we have, “Inboxed”, an e-mail marketing program recently added to the network offering best practices for email marketing strategies. “Inboxed“ is hosted XY7 and Rapid Response Marketing CEO Kevin De Vincenzi, Marketing Director Jon Fondy and and email marketing expert Adam Young. The program airs Wednesdays at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific.

“Search Cowboys” is a program that covers news on search engine marketing, social media and other related subjects. Based in Europe, “Search Cowboys“ will have a special interest in Search in Europe, and they will also feature bloggers from around Europe. The program is hosted by European search engine marketers Bas van Den Beld and Roy Huskies, premieres August 20th and will air every Thursday at 1pm Eastern/ 10am Pacific.

Joost de Valk to host WordPress Podcast on WebmasterRadio.FM

WordPress mega-guru Joost de Valk announced today he will be hosting a weekly WordPress podcast on the WebmasterRadio.FM network, starting next month. A short post to his Yoast.com blog says,

I’ve just agreed with my buddy Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM to be the host for a weekly WordPress podcast, no names or time slots decided yet but I’m so excited about the news that I wanted to share it with you all!

All your suggestions for names, topics and guests are welcome in the comments!

Joost is a SEO Consultant living in the Netherlands. He has emerged as one of the preeminent experts in WordPress design, tools, and plugins, as well as in CSS and the creation of useful scripts.

The show will be launched at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose as part of WebmasterRadio.FM’s full-show coverage of the event. Joost’s show will air Thursdays at 5pm eastern on WebmasterRadio.FM.

Google Yahoo and Microsoft Agree on Canonical Link Element

Arguably the most important SEO initiative announced at SMX West last week came from Google’s chief quality czar, Matt Cutts, who outlined a new Canonical link element which will tell search engines which version of a page a webmaster wants indexed. Designed to delete duplicate content from the search engine indexes, the new relational element allows search spiders to determine which pages to index and which pages to gloss over without adding duplications of pages to their indexes. The element has been accepted by the three major search engines, each of which has pledged support for it.

For example, image a content management system that automatically names pages with numbers or appends tracking or session IDs to a URL string. A URL leading to a page about something nice like Rupert the Bear might read: http://www.yoursite.com/specific-page.html?sid=yucky85448633572/. A good SEO would rather that URL be phrased in a far cleaner and clearer way: http://www.yoursite.com/rupert-bear.html/.

The element looks like this;
<link rel=”canonical” value=“http://www.YOURSITE.com/correct-page.html”/>, and is coded in place of the 301 redirect formerly used to steer spiders to the correct version of a specific page.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have all published information on how to implement the relational link element in the HEAD section of your website. A note of caution; the Canonical link element is domain specific and will not pass juice between different domains though it will within a sub-domain structure.

Also, Joost de Valk (happy birthday Joost) has written several WordPress, Magento and Drupal plug-ins for the Canonical link element.