On Black Hat SEO
So, the last few days have been interesting to say the least. I spoke in London at Distilled’s Link Building conference specifically on the issue of social media link building. It stirred up quite a bit of controversy after blog posters decided to give their own spin to what my talk was about. While I am not going to sit here and pretend that I did not discuss a wide range of SEO techniques, I want to make something clear. If you think that we use black hat techniques to promote client sites or our own properties, you are a damn fool. Hell, we run a link spam prevention service for free that blocks hundreds of thousands of spam links per day. We have a free CAPTCHA service that blocks thousands more. Do you think we came up with effective spam prevention...
Strong Correlation between Facebook Likes and PageRank
First, let me say that everyone should take this study with a huge grain of salt. While I believe the data is intriguing, it does not implicate anything specifically. So, here goes. I have long guffawed at the social graph and, in particular, it’s relationship to search engine optimization. I am quick to argue about anything that would imply that Google search results are meaningfully influenced by social activities. One of my most common points is that in the majority of open social websites, the social graph is closely patterned by the link graph. Take Digg for example. If you submit a story on Digg, it gets a link from your profile. If someone votes on that story, it receives a link from their vote history page. As more and more votes are tallied, more...
Pretty Spam Sites
Numerous search information outlets have been recounting over the last several months that Google’s search results seem to have hit some sort of brick wall in terms of spam. Matt Cutts recently rebutted these claims in a recent article on the official Google blog, pointing out that “Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness”. Search engine marketers should really take a look at that last sentence carefully. Notice that Matt does not say there is “less spam than ever before”, rather that relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness are greater than ever before. Ultimately, Google is interested in the user. The overwhelming majority of Google users will never check...
Putting Social Media for SEO Back in Its Place
SEOMoz’s recent social media SEO piece is is informative and worth reading, but please don’t forget priorities. I dropped a simple link in the sidebar with the correct anchor text and within 24 hours the #2 listing (Ciplex.com) is outranking SEOMoz. See here. A screenshot is here. While Social Media can be a valuable part of your SEO strategy (hell, get every link you can get), don’t rely upon it. Your smarter competitors certainly wont. No tags for this...
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Correlations Clarified
Upon SEOMoz’s announcement regarding the relationship between LDA Cosine values and Google search rankings, I immediately had reservations about the way that many individuals in the community were reading the results. Admittedly, Rand and Ben have been careful about taking some of these observations with a grain of salt, making it clear to state that by no means does LDA represent the majority of Google’s ranking algorithm. That being said, I took special interest because, like many other SEO’s who work in competitive spaces, I have long regarded on-page factors as being only valuable for long-tail searches. My first and primary concern was that because SEOMoz’s team was looking at a large keyword set without regard to competitiveness,...
Google Instant and the Long Tail
Just something I thought worth pointing out. Since users will now be able to see results before they finish typing their query, it is very possible that sites that rank better for the short tail will get more traffic. If someone is, for example, searching for baseball card dealers, and a baseball card dealer ranks in the top 3 for baseball card, the user will probably not wait to finish their complete query. Better start focusing on root keywords. No tags for this post.
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