Gmail 302 Hijacked…

Thanks to Jake Bohall, our Director of Sales, for noticing this due to a nasty Firefox 3.0 bug, requires that he type URLs into the Google Search App because the location bar no longer works. It was years ago that the 302 hijack became a popularly abused method to steal rankings but, due to some apparant algo improvements and what I believe to be a well orchestrated misinformation campaign by either people who wanted to still abuse it or Google who didn’t have a good fix, the method seemed to disappear by-and-large. However, the bug reared its ugly head again today, as Gmail.com itself was hijacked in Google. As you can see, Gmail.com, or mail.google.com, are not ranking for the keyword gmail.com in Google. Instead, the ranking is replaced by a spam blog on...

W3C HTML Validation and Search Engine Optimization

It has been a while since I have posted some of Virante’s research to the blog, and a good friend and former COO Bob Misita called me out on it. I figured I would release some of the data from a recent study we did on the relationship of W3C HTML Validation and web page rankings. Because validation is quite complex, we chose to take a macro-look rather than our traditional methodology of getting individual sites into the SERPs via sitemaps and then tweaking individual independent variables. In particular, we looked at the W3C validation of approximately 100 separate keywords in Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask. For each keyword, we extracted the top 10 ranking sites, measured the number of errors via a W3C validation check, and used multiple statistical...