Mixed Messages from Yahoo Search Team
It is always a sad day when a site gets unwarrantingly banned from the index, but it is an understandable outcome of the imperfect algorithms that run search engines. Â Ultimately, what search engines companies do have control over is how they handle those handfuls of situations where mistakes occur. It was brought to my attention via a comment made on this blog that a user had seen his site banned by Yahoo a few weeks ago. What interested me was not that it had occurred, nor that his site was completely clean (aside from a few spammy backlinks caused by someone’s content generators), but that he had received two separate responses from Yahoo regarding his reinclusion request. The first response was the automated “Violation of ToS response” you...
In Defense of Hats: White, Gray, Black and Blue
There has been quite a bit of talk lately about the resurgence of gray and black-hat panel discussions at the SMX Advanced conference held recently in Seattle. I posted a lengthy comment at the trail end of Matt Cutts’s post regarding the matter, but I felt that it deserved a little more attention. In short, any advanced SEO conference should not shy away from the full gamut of SEO techniques, regardless of the stigma attached. Black Hat is Beating You: Regardless of your position on the ethics of black hat techniques, it does not change the simple fact that these techniques exist in the wild and they are being employed by your competitors. If the only information you gather from a discussion on these techniques is how to identify and out those activities,...
PowerSet Will Never Be a Google Killer
Many of you have seen the recent stories about Powerset releasing its public beta. First off, I must say that they have done a great job on an interesting product. However, I think we need to quickly – and I mean very quickly – put to rest this conversation that Powerset could EVER be a Google Killer. ** Please Read the Comment below from Mark at PowerSet for their side of the story ** It takes Powerset a month to index and analyze just Wikipedia – 1/8000 of the web. (Mark from Powerset Disputes this Claim Below and, unfortunately, I have no way to verify one way or another. That being said, even a couple of days to handle a site like Wikipedia which has similar formatting across the entire domain is slow in comparison to a giant like Google)...
Quintessential Digg Guide
I felt like I have to give a nod to the good folks over at www.invesp.com for the first free guide I have read in a long time that I actually consider valuable. Sure, the ones at SEOMoz are always valuable, but you have to sign up for premium membership (which I recommend), but this one is absolutely free to RSS subscribers. So, if you want to learn to break the digg code, go ahead and follow their instructions. It is well worth it. No tags for this post.
Really Solved: Another Common Site Review Problem
Matt Cutts wrote recently of a common site-review problem. Many sites prefer to store links within drop down menus (the “select” element). Unfortunately, this non-standard way of using javascript to link to pages within your site is quite difficult for search engines to spider. (ie: search spiders like GoogleBot have difficulty determining that your javascript code is meant to be interpreted as links). Here are a few examples: http://www.pickwicktea.com/ http://www.evinrude.com/ http://www.yoofi.com Luckily, there is a pretty easily solution to the issue. Start by creating a DIV tag with traditional text links inside representing each of the items you would like to appear in your menu. And then just run the javascript I have included below to...
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