General Search Ranking Penalties
There is not much clarity regarding penalties and, as I have mentioned before, the very term itself is applied loosely and inaccurately time and time again. I have taken a few moments to put together a list of common search penalties and their diagnosis / prognosis / and treatments. Time estimates in the prognosis are based on our previous efforts – each penalty removal is different. Sitewide Ban: Diagnosis: Sitewide bans are the easiest to diagnose. You were in the index, now you aren’t. To determine this ban, check site:[yourdomain].com in G/Y/. If your site normally shows up for this query but no longer does, you have suffered a sitewide ban. Please make sure to determine the following though: 1, you are not employing a robots.txt or meta robots...
New Features and Facelift for Yahoo Site Explorer
The already venerable Yahoo Site Explorer has released a new facelift with improved functionality. I am not sure if the release was today or earlier, or if it is available at all DCs. Aside from a cleaner look and feel altogether, the site provides even stronger data for authenticated sites, making it, in my opinion, once again better than Google’s current offerings. Go ahead and take a look! No tags for this post.
The Tedious but Effective Way to Use Digg “Recommended”
The Digg “Recommended” engine has changed the effectiveness of submissions on Digg quite substantially. However, there are certainly ways that you can take advantage of this measurement to your own good. First, what exactly do we want to do? We want to find people who… Vote on stories that are like the content we are trying to promote Vote on stories that are still in the Upcoming section Vote on stories regularly So, let’s go to work finding exactly those types of people. Let’s assume that you are promoting health products, so your target would be the /health topic. Point your browser to http://digg.com/all/health/upcoming and click on “Most Diggs”. Click into the comments of each story (at least 5), and then into...
Google Penalty Myths
One of the issues I discuss regularly with clients are elusive Google “penalties”. More often than not, good-willed webmasters and small business owners undertake SEO techniques that are not only frowned upon by Google, but easily detectable and and even easier to counteract. However, these techniques do not usually bring about “penalties”. Penalty: a punishment levied by a search engine, normally in response to techniques which violate the ToS, which leaves the punished site ranking below the point at which it would rank were those techniques simply countered and ignored. Is your site suffering a penalty? It is far too easy to attribute your site’s poor rankings to a penalty when, more often than not, another more straight-forward...
Poor Attempt at Cloaking: Exhibit #1
Generally speaking, if you are going to try to do geo-targeting via IP address, you might want to make sure something like this happens… Now this prime ranking position in Google is not only drawing the attention of Google’s spam team, but it is also keeping would-be subscribers from clicking on what appears to be a page specifically for Mountain View, California, home of “the Google”. Who knows, maybe it is a ploy to get Matt Cutts to buy DirecTV? No tags for this post.
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