Archive for the 'SEO' category
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
Some well-known SEOs are advocating using rel="no-follow" on all outbound links. Aaron Wall has unearthed this gem in Dan Thies's updated SEO Fast Start (free content flypaper for StomperNet membership which is $800/month):
Add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link for some reason.
This is the most narrow-minded tripe I've ever heard. Google will rank websites higher who don't link to anyone else? Such a strategy makes a mockery of the whole essence of hypertext and the WWW (world wide web).
This school of thought has its origins with Leslie Rohde from his Optilink/Optispider cult days (circa 2002-2003). The clunky and overpriced Optilink has since been superceded by Brad Callen's Link Proctor, later renamed SEO Elite. Aaron Wall has some free tools (alas some of them broken now - SEO Elite is more reliably updated) and there are lots of other pay tools out there now which track your backlinks.
What is valuable advice is not hoarding PR, but channeling Page Rank. I mean really - you don't increase your wealth by putting your money under your mattress. You increase your wealth by reinvesting your money wisely. And the same thing applies to Page Rank on the internet.
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By Alec
SEO |
Monday, May 21st, 2007
Some gentlemen search colleagues are thunderstruck by the acquisition of 24/7 Real Media by advertising holding company WPP for $649 million (a tidy sum it is - congratulations 24/7 - although I've always hated your technology). Raycam wonders why more ad agencies aren't snapping up the smaller search houses.
It's simple. All the assets go down the elevator every night (David Ogilvy is reputed the first to coin this phrase).
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By Alec
Business, SEO |
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
We are currently relatively happy customers of SiteCounter.
I even worked with Aodhan on getting improving the keyword stats. Out of our discussions in 2005, the single and opaque Keyword Analyis became three separate: Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity and Search Engine Wars. Aodhan was a joy to work with.
Statcounter-Summary
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By Alec
SEO |
Friday, April 20th, 2007
There's a big discussion going on now among SEOs (search engine optimisers) about Google's pronouncements about paid links. Basically Google has banned them and promised penalties for using paid links. This is a kind of totalitarianism - Google is free to do what they want with their own algorithm but that does not give them the right to dictate how and when you should advertise.
People have been warning of an impending Google oligarchy and it seems to be coming true faster than planned.
There is some confusion about how much Google knows about your website and your incoming links. Don't be confused.
Touchgraph-Google-Seo-Vertical
A site called Touchgraph.com will show you a lot about what Google knows about your vertical in a java application which loads directly in your browser.
Touchgraph runs off of the similar pages data in the Google serps's (look for it).
Particularly useful is the simplicity - click on a link and see the home page in a new window.
What is frightening in the new Oz is that Google has much better technology behind the curtain. I'm sure Google has a similar chart but with the spam and trust numbers for each website popping up. As they analyse a single vertical forensically, to improve the SERPS (at this point that's pretty much what they'd have to do, as SEO spam is getting better), they can apply the algorithm tweaks across dozens of verticals hypothetically. If they like what they see, new algorithm gets rolled out.
Even as a client you will find it interesting to plug in your key search terms and have a look at the results. Who is in your group?
Ideally you'd want a link from nearly every site in the vertical to your website.
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, April 13th, 2007
I've finally found some simple javascript for affiliate or other links you want to partially cloak. It works well in IE 6 and hides the destination altogether in Firefox. It does not work in Safari. I'd like to know if it would work in IE 7 but as 60% of all visitors to my client websites are still running IE 6, that's already a good start.
Why would you want something like this on your website?
- If you are selling anything via an affiliate link people don't like the strange syntax and will often avoid clicking on the link, even though clicking on your affiliate link does them absolutely no harm. In general, having control over one's display URL. It will also help you with the search engines. They judge a website by the content of its outbound links.
- So this way you can link to the top level address of any given domain, rather than to a convuluted affiliate link, making Google happy.
I'd like to show you the code but alas Xstandard is acting up again and won't seem to respect the code tag.
Without Xstandard, I'm back with the basic example:
<a href="http://www.affiliate-link.com/" target="_top" onmouseover="window.status='http://www.company-name.com';return true;" onmouseout="window.status=' ';return true;">Shop at Company Name!</a>
By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Friday, April 6th, 2007
A very interesting discussion on Aaron Wall's SEOBook about whether Google is contributing to web spam. The best part is in the comments (sorry Aaron!) where two readers to the numbers on AdWords for relatively high priced PPC words.
Basically they just don't add up.
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By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing, SEO |
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Great guidance on how to anonymise your surfing via proxies:
Hiding Your IP Address, Anonymous Internet Surfing HOWTO.
The danger is that unless you do it just right you risk more than you gain. Specifically that the proxy holder can grab all your unencrypted passwords (email, site logins).
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By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO |
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Our clients are ready for another round of SEO.
One component we will be doing more of in this round is directories. It's too tedious and slow to have someone senior do it.
There are lots of directory submission services.
But you want to be sure to be applying to directories worth being listed in.
Here is a very good list of directories which are mainly pay for play.
Here is another list of quality directories which are mainly free.
For project preparation, you should fill in the data in the form at addurl.nu for each site for which you are creating a directory campaign.
Another huge concern with a directory campaign is having too many links come online at the same time. One can count on the search engines not to index all the directories at the same time so that the new links will appear more gradually, especially on the more obscure regional categories.
On the other hand, it would make sense to go through a hundred directories per month to avoid any sudden surge.
Even with these vetted lists, I worry that too many of them wouldn't pass my own bad neighbourhood test.
By Alec
SEO |
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
We are planing to start using article marketing much more often this year for our clients. While the train may have left the station for Internet Marketing or Make Money at Home hype articles, with complete oversaturation of those markets, my sense is that there is still lots of demand for quality, original content in other subjects.
EzineArticles.com seems to be the place to start (and strangely enough they allow affiliate links in articles now).
Beyond EzineArticles, what are the top article directories to submit to?
Here are fellow Canadian (and alas pro article spammer) Jason Potash's own shortlist of top article sites:
- www.ezinearticles.com
- www.netterweb.com
- www.jogena.com
- www.ideamarketers.com
- www.certificate.net/wwio
- www.impactarticles.com
- www.articleavenue.com
- www.isnare.com
- www.goarticles.com
The sad thing is how much people have to be policed. All of these article directories have to have extensive automated anti-spam testing.
What is article spam?
Article spam includes:
- nonsense content (machine-generated drivel)
- duplicate content (stolen content)
- public domain content (doesn't belong to nominal writer)
- misappropriated content (from government websites or Wikipedia for example)
- near duplicate content (machine modified good articles)
The last one is the toughest one to filter for.
After the machine testing, editorial review is also essential. While the article directory owners complain about the resources required for editorial review, it's a little bit of crocodile tears. Newspapers, yearbooks and magazines all need extensive editorial review. Editorial review is just part of publishing. If you don't like editing, don't become a publisher.
On the other hand, automated tools like Copyscape to bring the workload down by rejecting flagrant abuse are essential.
In a nutshell, Copyscape will scan an article or web page and tell you how many other web pages contain substantially the same content.
I've used it to catch other webmasters ripping off my client's websites. Sadly enough, I've also caught my clients ripping off other people's content which they were passing off as their own.
Ironically, it's the people who are most paranoid about having their own content stolen, who are actually the thieves themselves.
I even confronted that same client about the issue - we don't steal content - amazingly enough the client refused to take down the articles or credit them to the source. It should come as no surprise that in the end that same client tried to burn us at the end by not paying their final bill.
Golden rules for doing well long term on the web:
- Don't steal content!
- Do pay your web development and/or SEO company!
By Alec
SEO |
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
Many people are focused on duplicate content penalties. I've haven't seen the duplicate content issues as big a problem as people make it out to be but here are some very helpful tips on handling vBulletin to reduce any chance of duplicate indexing.
1) disable the "search engine friendly" archive. All this does is create a duplicate copy of your entire site, which is what we are trying to avoid.
2) Add the following entries to your robots.txt file This will stop bots from crawling pages they don't need to crawl:
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /clientscript/
Disallow: /cpstyles/
Disallow: /customavatars/
Disallow: /customprofilepics/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /sendmessage.php
Disallow: /sendpm.php3) eliminate the " « Previous Thread | Next Thread » " bread crumb at the bottom of threads. This can be found near the bottom of the "SHOW THREADS" template. The problem is that these two links create two additional copies of threads (e.g. /forum/showthread.php?t=87654&goto=nextoldest). This is bad, very bad and how many people actually notice these links actually exist let alone use them? Oh and yes DP needs to kill these two links.
This is good advice for any CMS. Just use the robots.txt file to handle the principal crawlers and keep one's site out of trouble. Some of these shopping sites should do the same thing with their multiple access points to the same material.
By Alec
SEO |
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
This is one great tool! Download your YouTube videos hasslefree and for free. Great job Techcrunch. Nice tool. Not overcommercialised (looking at you SEOchat.com).
To download a video to your computer, enter the YouTube URL for the video in the box above (example). It will be downloaded in flv format - use VLC or another compatible player to view it.
No stupid application to install (doesn't work in Safari Mac though, does in Firefox Mac). Simple instructions.
Now that's the way to do linkbait!
By Alec
SEO |
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
My acquaintance Nick Wilson of threadwatch.org fame (founding editor)
has created an interesting Firefox plugin for posting to one's weblog directly from within the browser.
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By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
