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...
Web Page Packrats: The Top 25 Del.icio.us Users…
As a casual user or del.icio.us (the popular web 2.0 bookmarking site), it always amazes me to see individuals who have even a few hundred bookmarks. My curiosity piqued, I took a few minutes to throw together a script that, in conjuction with Google and del.icio.us, was able to find some of the biggest users of del.icio.us. Below are the top 25 by my calculations, with estimates of the total number of bookmarks they have on del.icio.us. Did you make the list? User Bookmarks planetoid 10260 alancordova 10000 katiesays17 9930 julan 9450 yerfatma 7870 Preoccupations 7680 snfg 7440 tolvuvit 7390 maidenhalo 7310 yesmar 7120 tomz 6940 joaom 6630 mymarkup 6500 hustwj 6470 maratimba 6230 tsupo 6070 bswrchrd 6000 rblackwe 5350 owen 5240 erniesthings 5240 ravee_27 5230...
Surfing As GoogleBot – Their IP, Their User-Agent, Their Bot Characteristics
After reading this article and this article which give frustratingly over-simplifications on user-agent spoofing to get past cloaked websites, I figured I should write something on how to REALLY behave like Google. Cloaking often goes well beyond this, using IP delivery, User Agent cloaking, javascript and cookie detection, and referer detection – all of which can be used to determine that you are you and not a bot. So, how do you beat all 5 major types of cloaking? 1. Beat IP Delivery: Use Google Translate as a Proxy, translating from spanish->english even though the site is already in English. 2. Beat User-Agent Cloaking: Use the FirefoxUser-Agent Switcher to spoof as GoogleBot 3. Beat Javascript Detection: Use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar to turn...
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