Bah Humbug
It is rare for me to speak ill of anyone or any organization, especially around the holiday season, but I just have a few bah humbugs today. (1) RegisterFly. I. Will. Never. Use. Registerfly. Again. After now going on 20+ days, they have yet to register the previous 10 domains I purchased. Bah Humbug. (2) To CommissionJunction for not releasing funds on time around the holiday season. Because they were off by two days, it may be a week or more before I get paid. Bah Humbug. No tags for this post.
Misreading of #3 and Proposed Experiment
Thank you to the numerous individuals who pointed out my misreading of #3 in Rand’s list of SEO questions unanswered. The real question he was proposing, which I misread, was whether or not link removal could actually injure a site beyond where it would have been if the link had never been posted. While my initial reaction is no, I think a simple experiment is in order. Proposed Experiment 1. Two pages (“Receiving Site A” and “Receiving Site B”) developed using the same 250 nonsensical 7 letter words with no title or meta on a new domain. (“Receiving Site B” will receive the treatment of losing a link) 2. “Linking Page A” will be chosen, with a link to both sites using a 8 letter nonsensical word. 3....
Response to SEO Questions by Rand Fishkin
First, a little note. I mentioned this to Rand when he was considering adding new companies to the SEOMoz Recommended Vendor’s page. At Virante, we use a brute-force method of research. When we want to know something, we run real experiments in the search engines so that we can exclude assumptions regarding the myriad extraneous factors that go into ranking. In our experimentation, we have covered several of the questions he mentions in his most recent post, Questions in SEO that I Can’t Answer. Check out Number 8 if you get a chance. 1. The Diminishing Value of Anchor Text The theory goes that if a page is linked to multiple times on a single page, the subsequent anchor texts (assuming they are unique) will carry less weight, or perhaps no weight at...
Industry Inbreeding
One of the more interesting pieces of data, in my opinion, is the relationship between sites that are ranking for a particular term. In some industries, sites do not link together at all – competition is so fierce that webmasters are unwilling to add a backlink for fear of improving a competitor’s rank. In other industries, sites trade links like 1st graders trade valentines cards (sorry if your site is the one without any link love). I like to call these link relationships as industry inbreeding: a unique situation where competitors (deliberately or not), link to one another despite the obvious implications of boosting a competitor’s ranks. Charting this data can be very useful as it can describe several phenomena. 1. Keyword Volatility In...
HTML Pie Chart
So, one of the most annoying things out there when it comes to creating graphics for the web are pie charts. You can do it by hand in a graphics program, download a PHP class and custom-implement it, or you can do it in a program like Excel, take a screen shot, crop and resize and upload it. Any way you look at it, creating HTML pie charts is pretty ridiculous. That is, until now. I threw together a front-end for a popular open source (GPL) php class for generating Pie Charts using GD (GDGraph by Makko). The tool located here, http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/html-pie-chart.php, makes creation of pie charts as easy as filling out a few forms. I have also added a nice little Javascript implementation so you do not have to go through the front-end every time you...
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