published @ October 30, 2008 # No Comment Yet
For the next in our headsmacking series, I thought we'd look at the ever-challenging task of bringing links to your site. Though it may seem daunting, sprinkling some creativity on the link acquisition puzzle can definitely make the process easier (and sometimes, more fun, too). One of the strategies that seems to elude many site [...]
published @ October 29, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Search engines have been tolerant of subdomain spam for a very long time. Google has been tightening its subdomain rules over the past couple of years but they still don’t make a very clear distinction for what is and is not acceptable. I’ve been told privately there may be a bug in their [...]
published @ October 29, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Unnecessary clicks really put the "super" in "superfluous," yet we run into them all the time. Whether they're the fancy yet impractical creation by a site [...]
published @ October 29, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Someone recently presented me with a link analysis report summary drawn from Yahoo! Site Explorer. A site that barely makes it to the second page of search results for only a moderately competitive expression supposedly has 10s of thousands of backlinks.
There’s a huge disconnect between reality and the link report, which I was able [...]
published @ October 28, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The Problem: You run a website that allows for user-generated content like job listings, rental properties, classified ads, personals or even UGC products (think eBay or Etsy). Thoughtless users, thinking only of themselves and the time they're going to save, wreck your SEO by posting the same content they've put up on ten of your [...]
published @ October 28, 2008 # No Comment Yet
May It Please the Mozzers,Parker vs. Yahoo!, Microsoft, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 74512 (E.D. Pa. Sep. 26, 2008) A federal court recently ruled that a [...]
published @ October 27, 2008 # No Comment Yet
For many Web sites, a healthy, normal link profile will include links that are exchanged with other sites. Many SEOs now advise their clients not to worry about whether exchanging links will hurt them if the links make sense for their visitors. As long as a site’s linking profile is not built [...]
published @ October 27, 2008 # No Comment Yet
One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that [...]
published @ October 25, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I don’t think the science of search engine optimization has advanced enough for us to justify sensationalistic headlines on analytical blog posts, but I couldn’t resist the urge to test a few queries on Google Trends. The results actually surprised me, since Todd Friesen outed the Canadian conspiracy to see Obama become President.
With the [...]
published @ October 24, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:
Dwight Silverman criticizes Valleywag writer Paul Boutin, who said that blogs are becoming obsolete and that nowadays all blogs are a "tsunami of paid bilge." Never mind the fact that Paul works fulltime at the SiliValley gossip blog. What a butthole.
Scary SEO is taking place today [...]
published @ October 24, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Last year I proposed the creation of a Journal of SEO Case Studies, but much to my frustration my duties here at Visible Technologies precluded my going forward with the project.
In February of this year I wrote: we need a truly professional journal that accepts only peer-reviewed documents. But who should be the peers? [...]
published @ October 23, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I'm a fan of Digg and visit it every day to read various stories and check out what's new. Every so often I comment on stories and submit stuff. I get a "woo hoo!" feeling whenever one of my comments gets a bunch of diggs or when a submission hits the home page, which, combined [...]
published @ October 23, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Visit any major news or media site and you’ll like find that its front page is a hodge-podge of links and/or snippets from stories buried deeper in. There is no such thing as “theming” on the front-page of a successful large site.
Conventional wisdom in search engine optimization for years has been to “theme” your [...]
published @ October 22, 2008 # No Comment Yet
This is an older topic, but one which is still worth discussing: what is the best way to investigate linkbait, viral or other content-based link building [...]
published @ October 22, 2008 # No Comment Yet
I wrote about building query spaces more than a year ago but more recently I found myself sharing a detailed plan for building a query space.
This is an important function of search engine optimization that has not been fully embraced by the SEO community. People aren’t even sure of what to call it. [...]