The New Standard for Search Privacy
There are really only two legal/ethical issues that are regularly lodged against search engines: copyrights and privacy. The copyright debate has taken its way to courts across the world and has resulted in several technologies which empower webmasters to protect their copyrighted information. No fewer than 4 separate standards: robots.txt, nocache, noindex, and nofollow, allow webmasters to opt-out of indexing, caching, and other search engine activites which may violate or endanger their copyright. How many standards exist to protect privacy? Until today, none. I am proud to introduce #privacy (http://www.poundprivacy.org), the new search standard for privacy. The concept is fairly simple: searchers should be able to opt out of tracking mechanisms when they...
LinkFromDomain, MSN, and New Tool…
So, finally one of the search engines decided to add a linkfromdomain: command. This is incredibly useful as it allows sites to tell who they are linking to, which in turn can be used for all kinds of useful things such as… Bad Neighborhood Tools: http://www.virante.com/resources/free-tools/banned-sites.php Percentage Reciprocating: http://www.virante.com/resources/free-tools/percentage-reciprocal.php This will check the first 100 links in MSN for your site and tell if they are not indexed by google (an indication of banning). Thank you...
Virante in Wall Street Journal
While we are proud to call ourselves the the SEO firm of entrepreneurs, it is not every day that such an assertion is validated by the Wall Street Journal. Kelly Spors, a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal tapped Virante, Inc. CEO Ryan Allis to discuss some of the issues regarding SEO for fledgling businesses in the WSJ Startup Journal (the “center for entrepreneurs”. The story is available online, but was also published in the September 26th edition of the Wall Street Journal. http://www.startupjournal.com/columnists/smalltalk/20060927-smalltalk.html It was also nice to hear from one of our former clients and a fantastic success story, Jim Kitchen with Spring Break Travel. They do great work over...
Building Your Site for Users is Not Enough.
I am not going to make many friends with this post, but I think it is about time someone said it. If your SEO firm (search engine optimization firm) is telling you to build websites “for the user” and not “for the bots”, fire them. Yes, that’s right. Politely tell them to stuff it, and move along to better things. There is nothing wrong with building websites for the user, but there is something wrong with doing it in lew of building websites for the bots – especially when the two are in no way mutually exclusive. Let’s take a look at a real world example of how a website “built for the user” fails because it wasn’t also “built for the bots”. We will look at OpenOffice.org, the popular...
EBay Keyword Stuffing
What would you do with a PR9? Keyword stuffing of course! The venerable auction super-power EBay has put it’s massive product data to great use, by throwing it all together into the worlds longest sentence.ÂÂ OfÂÂ course,ÂÂ withÂÂ aÂÂ simpleÂÂ mod-rewrite,ÂÂ feedÂÂ pulling,ÂÂ andÂÂ maybeÂÂ someÂÂ additionalÂÂ hand-editedÂÂ content,ÂÂ theyÂÂ couldÂÂ reallyÂÂ rankÂÂ forÂÂ allÂÂ theÂÂ keywordsÂÂ theyÂÂ stuffÂÂ atÂÂ theÂÂ bottomÂÂ ofÂÂ theÂÂ page. Reads: “Looking for the all time top selling albums? eBay has them new and used at the great prices: The Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-1975 (The Eagles), Thriller...
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