Apple Fix This Please – IPad Select Field Abbreviation Issue

Getting Links from the Top 50 Domains

The good folks over at SEOMoz have provided us with a list of the Top 500 Linked Domains according to the Linkscape index. I thought it would be interesting to start churning through the list and finding out how search marketers, spammers, etc. are finding ways to get their links on each of these incredible domains. Some of them are incredibly sneaky and blackhat (check out the Flickr and AOL links, for example). Here is a list of the top 50 or so. (Sometimes we have to resort to subdomains)… Google.com: get in the directory Adobe.com: followed forum links Blogspot.com: If you cant figure out how to get a link on blogspot, give up now. Yahoo.com: join the directory Youtube.com: Create your own channel Wikipedia.org: Add it, it will be nofollowed, but still...

The Strongest Cloaking Yet – Cross Domain Canonical Tag

For years the most advanced forms of bot detection, ip delivery, javascript and flash obfuscation, etc. have been employed by blackhat search engine optimizers to accomplish cloaking. These techniques, when used successfully, would allow the webmaster to pull the wool over the eyes of bots and feed sales-heavy (or worse) content to end users. Google has fought valiantly to stop these techniques and, by and large, has removed all but the most sophisticated techniques. However, they have fallen on their own sword with the introduction of the new cross-domain canonical tag. The Canonical Tag The rel=canonical tag was a god-send for most webmasters. It allowed us to defeat duplicate content issues by placing a single line of code at the top of the HTML page,...

LinkSleeve Moved to New Server

Excitingly, LinkSleeve, the distributed anti-link-spam service offered for free by Virante, has been moved to a new dedicated server. We have also updated the codebase to use a new database schema that should up response speeds and lower outages.

The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization

I have long speculated that on-page optimization was trivial. It meshed with my understanding of how a suspicious Google engineer may treat the content of a page in relationship to its rankings. Why trust anything a webmaster says about his or her content (keywords stuffed into H1, meta, or bold tags)? Why trust anything on a page that a user won’t get to preview before visiting (anything outside the Title and Meta-Description, by-and-large)? However, despite my speculations, I lacked the data to truly start making conclusions about the usage of keywords in specific tags. Until now. First, I am pleased to say that our micro-experimentation has found similar results to SEOMoz’s macro-experimentation. In particular, their finding that the H1 tag was no...

NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting Roundup: Changes and Implications

Matt Cutts has decided to reveal a little more about Google’s internal changes that brought upon debate regarding the use of the NoFollow tag and PageRank Sculpting. While there has been quite a bit of discussion, I wanted to take a moment to wrap up what has happened and what the implications of these are for white and black-hat techniques. What Has Changed Think of your webpage as a water tower and links as pipes from that water tower to other smaller water towers. Historically, a “nofollow” tag was like capping the one of the pipes so that no water would flow to the terminating water tower. Google has changed this, though. Instead of capping the pipe, they merely divert it into the abyss. The link still impacts your page’s ability to...