Poor Attempt at Cloaking: Exhibit #1
Generally speaking, if you are going to try to do geo-targeting via IP address, you might want to make sure something like this happens… Now this prime ranking position in Google is not only drawing the attention of Google’s spam team, but it is also keeping would-be subscribers from clicking on what appears to be a page specifically for Mountain View, California, home of “the Google”. Who knows, maybe it is a ploy to get Matt Cutts to buy DirecTV? No tags for this post.
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...
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...
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...
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