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...
Google Adds Yet Another Way to AdWords Bowl
Every now and then Google adds new features that, supposedly, help users get a better experience from Google Search. More often than not, this has been a shameless attempt to explain some new hassle webmasters and Adwords advertisers must undergo so that Google can make a few more bucks. The latest in this list is that Google AdWords will soon be rolling out a modification to the Quality Score based upon your landing page load times. This addition, while seemingly innocuous, actually makes it quite easy for a competitor to force your Quality Score lower, thus causing you to pay much more per-click. All a competitor needs to do is send a ton of bogus traffic to your website and, voila, your page load times will increase due to server load and, subsequently,...
Googlebot Indexing Emails, What Will They Think of Next?
Sometimes I have to ask – Google, what the hell are you thinking? Googlebot has a way of sneaking into almost every crevice of the web (it is quite remarkable in all actuality), but in the process seems to indiscriminately publish items of all kinds of nature. While I am certainly not surprised, I recently came upon Google’s indexing of the .eml file extension. This is most commonly used for archived emails. As you can plainly see, Google is now indexing and displaying these files. No tags for this post.
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