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...
A Cross-Browser, Bookmarklet Speed Reader
Yesterday, via both Digg and Reddit, I came upon Spreeder, a wonderful speed reading app. However, it has a major drawback. To use the application, you actually have to perform the speed reading on spreeder.com, taking you away from the page you need. You can either cut-and-paste content into their application, or use their bookmarklet that redirects you to their site after highlighting the text you want to read. So, I took a few minutes to cobble together this app, which I think is a lot easier to use and far more simple. It is also cross-browser compliant for FireFox, Opera and Safari, no luck in IE as of yet. Just simply drag the link below to your browser’s bookmark bar. Then, when you want to speed read your favorite blog or magazine article, just...
Hold Your Ground, Rand.
Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz has made a call to his readership to determine the future of black and gray-hat content on their blog. Being a staunch advocate of information openness in the Search Engine industry, I have decided to chime into a handful of the issues/questions which Rand poses to his audience. I have quoted liberally, but you ought to read his post in its entirity. We’ve received some harsh criticism from those who engage in black/gray hat practices and been asked to STFU about these topics. Spam, obviously, succeeds more when less is known about it, so its natural for those with a potential interest to keep it close to the vest. If SEOMoz knows about these techniques, then the search engines already knows about these techniques. No effective or...
The End of Paid Links is Near
Author Note: This is speculation and is not currently a tool Google offer’s via Webmaster Tools. It is merely the expected next-step in Google’s fight against Paid Links. It was my intent to help prepare SEO’s for what I believe to be a huge blow to the Paid Links industry To be honest, I am shocked that Google has not yet implemented such a technique, but after a few conversations, it appears that a Paid-Links killing system is in the works. The solution is simple, elegant, and will silently poison all multi-site paid-link networks (whether or not those networks are open or closed). The method is quite simple: using Google Webmaster Tools, Google can easily allow webmasters to type in CSS classes or HTML elements within which all links are...
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