Got through the majority of Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.net, though it did have some snippets that were interesting, couldn’t help but feel a lot of this has already been widely covered. Some of the chapters were very brief – black hat SEO in 30 pages? and some seemed very light on useful information. Still as a round up it wasn’t too bad, and got through it in a morning … I do wonder how much more I should really have read that is not covered in the book though. The technical areas that were the most interesting, it introduced but tend to say the detail was beyond the scope of the book.

Areas that may have been overlooked by developers were outlined in the chapters on duplicate content through multiple urls referencing the same material through parameters/canonicalization, and presenting HTTP status codes correctly to SE.

Content relocation is an area of difficulty where 301 redirects are not available to the developer/SEO person. URL rewriting has probably been discussed/implemented by many developers these days.

A couple of chapters while interesting didn’t seem like core issues or have been covered widely before: link bait, sitemaps and cloaking … the chapter on building an ecommerce site was poor.