What kind of recording artist says stuff like “my goal is to make the Billboard Top 10″? Sure, recording labels may set goals like that, but did Lou Reed ever sit down and write songs just to win a Grammy? If making money is your only goal on the web, I don’t want you as […]
Archive for the 'SEO' Category
Your Obsession to Rank Higher is the Final Nail in Your Coffin • Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
I Lurve Shari Thurow Too • Friday, March 7th, 2008
Recently, Shari got some flak for the condescending tone of her anti-nofollow post on SEL. But guess what? I agree with her.
Parasites of the Interweb
There are short-sighted people out there always looking for short cuts. They won’t hesitate to pay you $600/hour to hear you say “you need to write unique META descriptions.” Ya know, […]
How to Check for Position 6 Penalty • Friday, January 11th, 2008
One of my clients is convinced he is smacked with a position 6 penalty. In some cases, he is coming up 7th or 8th, often when sites above him have indented listings. Where would he rank if those indented listings weren’t there?
Usually, Google pulls up indented listings if the secondary URL is relevant enough to […]
Paid Review: Internet Marketing Ninjas • Thursday, January 10th, 2008
You Can’t Judge a Book by its Cover
A while back, Fantomaster advertised Brad Callen’s PPC Arbitrage ebook on Sphinn with a blog post containing an affiliate link, which made some people think Fantomaster was trying to make a buck by leveraging his reputation on Sphinn. His post went hot, then a mod later pulled it off the […]
YAPAPL: Yet Another Damn Post About Paid Links • Saturday, October 13th, 2007
“I do what I do best, I take scores. You do what you do best, try to stop guys like me.”
–Neil McCauley, Heat (1995)
Unless you were living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you know Google’s been busy lately in its War Against Paid Links. According to Danny Sullivan, Google is now […]
Third Level Push (modified Siloing) For Deeper Index Penetration • Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
Third-Level Push (aka “siloing”), according to Dan Thies (who regained my attention after his recent article on Google proxy hacking), helps you get third-tier pages (e.g. article/product detail pages) in the main index and ranking higher by “taking more of the PageRank from your second tier, and pushing it down into the third tier.”
Dan explains:
In […]
How To Exploit The PageRankBot Tool • Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
Building a good house means more than buying a pine dining table or 1080p Plasma TV (more “quality” content) or telling your friends about the new house you’re building (marketing). You gotta know how to use hammers, drills and nails too.
If you rather build a good site than worry about supplemental results, why are you […]
How Google Failed to Hide Supplemental Results • Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
If you’re an SEO with clients that are worried about supplemental results, your job just got a whole lot harder. It’s like having a patient dying of disease showing no visible symptoms. Not only does he believe he isn’t sick anymore, but you can’t tell what he’s sick of.
First, your clients should know that just […]
Hey, it Just Sounds to Me Like You Need to Unplug, Man. • Friday, June 22nd, 2007
Image courtesy of What Is the Matrix
If you spend hours a day surfing blogs, you’re trapped in the Matrix. Being an ex-hardcore MMORPG addict makes me an expert on getting sucked in. In that world, I met thousands of people, I slew dragons, I saved lives.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I sat in front […]
Got Supplementals? Accepting PageRank is Only The Beginning • Thursday, June 7th, 2007
Nowadays, supplemental results aren’t much of a mystery anymore to most people. As Matt Cutts replied to Michael Martinez at Seattle SMX, people know all they need to do is to get more “quality links.” The answer is so simple, so easily digestible that I’m starting to see people answer supplemental threads with just three […]
How Will People Find Your Site If Search Engines Didn’t Exist? • Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
Summary (for people who don’t have time to read blogs all day. We should be building stuff instead of bitching about Google, yeah?): If you depend on Google to survive, your site sucks. If your site gets the same level of traffic from Google a day but your daily visits isn’t rising, your site sucks. […]
Stop Blowing Money on Text Link Ads • Monday, May 14th, 2007
Not all paid links (don’t forget to read the update) are easy to detect, but if you think Google can’t detect blatant schemes like Text Link Ads you’re dreaming. They stick out like a geek on American Idol because:
Anchor text targets money terms. Anchor text like “buy viagra”, “car insurance”, and “search engine optimization” are […]
If You Lack Motivation, Read This • Sunday, April 29th, 2007
Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. - Winston Churchill
Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. - Oscar Wilde
There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path - Morpheus, The Matrix
If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what […]
Google’s Motives Are Selfish - So Are Yours and Mine • Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
As Graywolf said, Google’s motive for cleaning up the SERPs is self-serving and revenue-driven. Robert Scoble explains in more detail:
Why does Google care? Well, Google’s relevancy rankings will be hurt if people can buy their way onto their pages instead of earn their way to those search results pages by doing the best content, etc. […]
21 Reasons Why Anti-Nofollow SEOs Can’t Think Straight • Monday, April 16th, 2007
Paid link buyers and sellers are nothing but black hat spammers (though you’ll never catch me saying spamming is right or wrong - to quote Vlad from Max Payne 2, “you have to do what you have to do.“). Now I’m hearing alot of regurgitation going on, so I compiled a list of 21 major […]
Why Does Viagra.com 302 Its Home Page? • Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
Why did viagra.com drill a 302 into their home page? And why does the redirect dump me on this cryptic, Google-unfriendly URL:
http://www.viagra.com/content/index.jsp?setShowOn=../content/index.jsp
&setShowHighlightOn=../content/index.jsp
No wonder viagra.com is beat by .edu spam for “buy viagra.” It seems the company opted out of hiring a competent webmaster (no you don’t need an SEO to figure out redirects). Or is […]
Why in Elvis’ Name Do I Blog? • Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
Michael Goldberg tagged me. I was also tagged earlier by SEM Zone and I even wrote a response but I forgot all about it. UPDATE: JLH and John aka Softplus also tagged me. John says I’m not revealing enough about myself, hmmm…
So, should I post a serious reply, try to be funny like Wayne Knight […]
Proof is in the SERPS - Overestimating Domain Authority, Take 2 • Friday, April 6th, 2007
In my previous long-ass post titled Free SEO Course - Overestimating Domain Authority, I dared to outrank Peter Da Vanzo from V7n blog for the keyphrases “free seo course” and “seo course.” More than anything, I felt like challenging a slick sound bite that - while holding a morsel of truth - distorted the […]
Free SEO Course Offering Expert Training - Overestimating Domain Authority • Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
If you ever paid for an SEO course run by an expert SEO training you to conquer the Intarweb, you’d be taught what you’ve known all along - that the two major factors Google uses to rank a page are relevance and value.
(Hey, if you decide to skip reading this long-ass free expert seo course […]
How Do 6 SEOs Miss The Obvious? • Wednesday, March 7th, 2007
I used to spend some time looking at sites people posted up on Google Group Webmaster Help as a form of recreation. I enjoyed looking at real examples instead of listening to assertions on WMW people could not back up. So when I read Search Engine Journals 6 SEOs-of-caliber write their take on techsmith.com, I […]
Why Duplicate Content Causes Supplemental Results • Monday, February 19th, 2007
Nearly a year after I had my tentative say about supplemental results, my thinking on what causes supplemental results has shifted away from duplicate content and moved more toward lack of inbounds and internal PageRank distribution, as Matt Cutts recently stated that PageRank is the primary factor in determining supplemental results.
Back around May 18, 2006, […]
Results Don’t Always Say They’re Personalized • Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
Aaron Wall and Graywolf reported that Google is turning off personalization notification:
In the past they typically placed a turn off personalized results whenever your results were personalized, but now they do not disclose when they are personalizing the results - Aaron Wall
If Aaron’s correct that they are increasing personalized search and turning off notification, and […]
Long Tail De Jour: what’s the point in adding more pages to my site if google doesn’t index them or puts them into the supplemental index? • Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
A couple days ago, someone hit my site with this longtail:
what’s the point in adding more pages to my site if google doesn’t index them or puts them into the supplemental index
Crazy, long huh? :) When I start talking to myself, my friends start to worry. When I start talking to Google, I need a […]
SEO Myth: There is No Duplicate Content Penalty • Friday, January 5th, 2007
This is probably old news to black hats, but I often hear people say “there’s no duplicate content penalty.” Newbies worry they’ll incur some kind of penalty for having identical copyright text across 100 pages or something, and other people like me jump in to alleviate their fears: “Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content; it filters […]
Sex Blogs Tank Over Christmas - Matt Cutts Responds • Thursday, December 28th, 2006
Just an early morning post about a Boing Boing post titled Google “disappears” sex blogs? Something’s broken. For the main dish, you can go read their post, but I did find an interesting trail left by Matt Cutts on Comstock Films comment section, dated Dec. 27, 2006:
Hey, I’m an engineer at Google. I just wanted […]
Happy Holidays Guys • Sunday, December 24th, 2006
I’m still kinda irked at myself for not buying myself a PS3 this Xmas, but I guess I’ll get over it. Anyway, I hope you guys are having a great holiday.
The real reason I’m posting though, is I was looking through my traffic tracker log tonight, and I saw another hit on this page I […]
WMW Google Bashing Over Reciprocal Links • Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
Some people over at WMW are going ballistic over Stephanie’s recent article on Google Webmaster Central Blog about “non-earned” links, titled Building link-based popularity. These guys who, I guess, pay their bills by swapping and buying links are miffed over the thought of losing their Google ranking and are shooting the messanger. A big chunk […]
Blog Tag: Five Things You Didn’t Know about Me • Sunday, December 17th, 2006
Thanks alot John for tagging me so I can spend my Sunday morning in front of a computer - before the sun even has a chance to rise :D Here’s five things you didn’t know about me and would have never ever guessed:
1. I never got drunk, smoked cigs, or did any drugs till I […]
Still Plenty of Loopholes in Google’s Paid Link Detection Algo • Saturday, December 16th, 2006
Warning: I’m just rambling to get a free link on Google’s blog. Why do I want that? Cuz I’m bored? :)
There’s not much new in Google’s recent post, Building Link-Based Popularity, in which Stephanie Ulrike underscores Google’s increasing ability to find and devalue artificial links. Matt Cutts has mentioned it during the release of Big […]
Why Google Will Not Move Away From PageRank • Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Recently, I’ve got a little flak in Google Group Webmaster Help for coming down hard on people in the “Google is broke” camp. Basically, some of them were upset that the supplemental index was based heavily on PageRank because Google’s PageRank paradigm is broken and unfair:
Google may misread the intent of a link. For example, […]
A Quick Update: AJAX/PHP/MYSQL and Google Stealin’ • Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Just to let you know if you’re reading this blog, I’m working on a non-SEO-related script right now and I’m won’t be really posting for another week or two (Stop reading here if you’re not a Javascropt geek).
What kind of script is it? Well, like other scripts I wrote, its mainly for my own use, […]
“PageRank Doesn’t Matter” is Now Officially an SEO Myth • Friday, November 24th, 2006
Back in August, after having fixed my 99% supplemental site to the point where duplicate content could not possibly be an issue, Google nonchalantly stuck my original pages back in the supplemental index. At that point, I claimed the existence of a PageRank hurdle preventing supplemental pages from getting back into the main index:
On gfe-eh.google.com […]
NSFW Reddit is No More • Monday, November 13th, 2006
Just a few minutes ago, I noticed reddit dropped nsfw.reddit.com. If you haven’t already, you can read a loooong thread about it posted 13 days ago here. Why did they kill NSFW Reddit?
Lack of community compared to regular reddit.
It was never intended for porn: “Our intention for nsfw.reddit was for adolescent humor that, when on […]
Adam Lasnik Posting More Often? • Friday, November 10th, 2006
I’ve been taking a break from SEO for the last two weeks, instead spending more time working on my own sites, writing up project plans for the next few months, working on a possibly groundbreaking SEO script, and doing a few SEO consulting on the side.
Though tonight, I couldn’t sleep, so here I am at […]
Hack: Installing Rel=Nofollow in PHPAdsNew • Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
If you use PHPAdsNew to serve ads on a relatively low FBPR (foolbarPR) website and your site is suffering from supplemental problems, installing rel=nofollow on your ad links is a tiny tweak that will help tighten your internal links and get some pages back into Google’s main index:
around line 366 in libraries/lib-view-main.inc.php, just before these […]
SEO Surgery: resistinc.org - Banned Without a Clue • Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
This morning, I saw a guy on Google Webmaster Help asking why his domain is banned. Sure enough, site: query returns no results. According to domain tools, resistinc.org was created back in 1997 with 2 DMOZ listings and 3 Y! Directory listings. A site: command on MSN, though, turned up this cache page (dated 10/20/2006) […]
Matt Cutts: PageRank Primary Factor Determining Supplemental Results • Thursday, October 12th, 2006
I was going to write a long post about this Matt Cutts quote, but I think it speaks for itself.
PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a url is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results.
I predict many seasoned SEOs and newbies alike will dismiss his statement. Firstly, PageRank doesn’t matter, right? Or […]
Lost and Grey’s Anatomy on My Google Calendar • Thursday, September 28th, 2006
We all read Google blog’s recent announcement about a new Google Calendar feature that lets you add web content events, like “weather forecasts, moon phases, and even Google doodles.” Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t care about all that, though holidays on my calendars I’ve already added. What I desperately need are TV […]
Rel NOFOLLOW = Granular META ROBOTS NOFOLLOW • Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
In a response to John Battelle’s recently released interview with Matt Cutts, Danni Sullivan asks Matt:
Matt, in the interview, you suggest that Google now views meta robots with a nofollow value as being the same as the completely different nofollow attribute, in terms of flagging links as not trusted. Is that now the case?
Matt’s response:
Danny, […]
SEO Surgery: Monx007 • Friday, September 22nd, 2006
I’ve been spending the last couple weeks checking out posts in Google Webmasters Help. One thing that these posts keep hammering home to me is the fact that there’s a huge gap between what’s being posted on SEO forums and reality in cases where either people are not allowed to link drop or they choose […]
SEO Quotes of the Week September 6, 2006 • Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
Some memorable quotes I came across so far this week in SEO forums and the blogsphere. None of them may be revolutionary or news breaking, but they resonated with me and hopefully with you too.
the reason some did not believe it for a long time is that — as is true with so many […]
Gotta Love The Web • Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
Hey, I just made a brand new tape. It could definitely be my stairway to riches and fame. And for your information, I hit the low notes better than Danny. I kid you not. So if I go head to head against him on American Idol, look out!
You betta lose yourself in my music the […]
Supplemental Cache Refresh Revisited • Tuesday, September 5th, 2006
After the recent supplemental cache refresh, more than a few webmasters asked: “why are my perfectly structured, original content pages still supplemental?” and “Do I have to wait another 12 months for Google to get it right?”
We fixed our META description tags. We got rid of thin content pages. We installed 301 redirects and even […]
Google Engineer Toys with 64.233.187.whatever • Sunday, August 27th, 2006
At the risk of sounding like another SEW echo chamber post, here’s a recent Googleguy quote (now a random Googler dude, or is it Matt Cutts pretending to be a random Googler dude? You be the judge) regarding recent reports of backlink updates on several DCs:
It’s Brett’s decision to call something an update, but I […]
Long Tail: “how many words to make page unique google supplemental” • Friday, August 25th, 2006
I figured I’ll serve the public occasionally by answer a few questions people are arriving here with, including this lengthy one: “how many words to make page unique google supplemental.” I know these questions will probably bore the hell out of most readers, since they’re un-news-worthy and fall under the beating-a-dead-horse unbrella, but hey, a […]
Supplemental Index Fuzzier Than Ever • Thursday, August 17th, 2006
On gfe-eh.google.com and other DCs, the supplemental pages cache dates no longer go all the way back to Aug 2005. But the new “system” makes it even harder to tell why a page is listed in the supplemental index, because now you’re required to jump over at least two major hurdles to break out of […]
GoogleGuy Announces Radically Fresher Supplemental Index • Tuesday, August 8th, 2006
Earlier this morning, GoogleGuy announced a supplemental index facelift:
Okay, I believe most/all U.S. users should see radically fresher supplemental results now. The earliest page I saw was from Feb 2006, and most of the ones that I looked at averaged in the ~2 month old range.
As data gets copied to more places, the fresher […]
Vanessa Fox and Susie Bright Mingling at BlogHer? • Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
Earlier today I read Susie Bright talk about “the elephant in the Blogher living room”, so I was somewhat surprised to just find out Vanessa Fox was also there. That they have two completely different take on the convention is obviously a no shocker. But it doesn’t hurt to run a little comparison, does it? […]
Google Guy, Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, and Adam Lasnik in One Thread? • Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006
In the last two days, both Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik made cameo appearances in the second installment of WMW’s Google Webmaster Communications thread. Now that’s Googleguy, Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, and Adam Lasnik all in one thread. Is this for real? Reading reseller greet them (”Its inspiring and a great pleasure to see our […]
Matt Cutts Releases SEO Video Quickies • Monday, July 31st, 2006
Perhaps as part of an extended response to his recent cameo appearance on a WMW thread started by Reseller, Matt Cutts posted three videos answering questions asked previously on The Simple Life, er Grabbag Friday. Here’s the cliff notes:
Does updates of sitemaps depend on page views? Matts: No, page views isn’t really a factor when […]
Log - Emailed Business.com and Built a New Rig • Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
I finally finished putting my new PC together and I gotta say after frying my old rig, it felt like walking on a tight rope without a break for 2 days (gimme a break, it’s my first try). Seriously, I connect the reset wire to my new ASUS ATX mobo in bullet time. First time […]
Snippetization Experiment Follow-Up • Friday, July 7th, 2006
Just a follow-up to my last post about description snippets, posted on July 3, 2006. Lucky for me, Google cached a few pages on the same day, including this category page:
This is what I predicted. BTW, all I did was remove an H2 element so that H2 preceeds a text block, instead of having an […]
Experiment with Description Snippets • Monday, July 3rd, 2006
I just removed H2 elements from archive page posts on this blog; I want to see what effect that has on how Google snippetize my archive pages. HOPEFULLY I didn’t just shoot myself in the foot, but what the hell - I’m in the mood for a little experimentation. BTW, this is a follow up […]
Mosaic Rambling: Kawasaki, FURL, Fried CPU • Monday, July 3rd, 2006
I just finished watching Guy Kawasaki speak. Nearly 40 minutes, but man.. do I feel inspired. “Don’t listen to the bozos!”
I’m seeing FURL redirect pages ranking high on Google. A double edged sword: More SE traffic, but original pages seem to be getting knocked off the index.
It’s a long story, but I fried my CPU […]
SEO 101: Feeding Google Juicy Description Snippets • Saturday, June 24th, 2006
How can you get Google to pick up the description snippet you want? And why should you care? If you use META descriptions, good. If not, read on. My views on this isn’t authoritative but if you disagree, post a good counterexample.
Don’t use H tags just to make text look bigger. Enuf said.
Avoid wrapping text […]
Corrupt Titles in Google SERP • Tuesday, June 20th, 2006
I’ve been keeping track of a WMW thread about Google displaying corrupt titles in their new SERP. Basically, Google is tagging on on-page text snippets to the end of the TITLE tag (or element, whatever). Since similar TITLE/description snippets throw a duplicate content flag, this little bug may end up causing major problems for some […]
How Do You Bait Without Looking Stupid? • Thursday, June 8th, 2006
Dan Thies wrote a number last week titled Link Building: Are Bloggers a Bunch of Morons?, a title that got one of his foreign readers a little riled up. The intent of the title is plain as grey, but does it get the job done? Don’t cry wolf unless there’s really a wolf, and don’t […]
Google Sitemap Reporting 404s under Summary • Saturday, May 27th, 2006
Note: This post is a follow up to my earlier post, Googlebot Refreshing Supplementals.
I noticed this morning that Google Sitemap is reporting 404s on the Summary page. The pages Google Sitemap reports missing include some of the pages I’ve been getting emails for since May 20th.
Not all the urls showed up under HTTP errors, just […]
My Next Obsession - Getting a Site Back in the Index • Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006
For the last two months, I’ve been maintaining a holding pattern with one of my adult sites, to no avail. The general concensus was that something was up at Google and I shouldn’t do anything drastic. But now I’m going to start working on my site again. Till I see some progress, how to get […]
Google Doesn’t Parse Keywords in URLS • Monday, March 13th, 2006
A few days ago, John Scott blogged that Google doesn’t parse keywords in urls. I was previously told by many reputable webmasters that Google can parse common keywords in urls. Here’s what would seem to be an indisputable proof: searching for “search engine optimization” returns searchenginewatch.com, with the words search engine in the domain name […]
