New Features and Facelift for Yahoo Site Explorer
The already venerable Yahoo Site Explorer has released a new facelift with improved functionality. I am not sure if the release was today or earlier, or if it is available at all DCs. Aside from a cleaner look and feel altogether, the site provides even stronger data for authenticated sites, making it, in my opinion, once again better than Google’s current offerings. Go ahead and take a look! No tags for this post.
Google Penalty Myths
One of the issues I discuss regularly with clients are elusive Google “penalties”. More often than not, good-willed webmasters and small business owners undertake SEO techniques that are not only frowned upon by Google, but easily detectable and and even easier to counteract. However, these techniques do not usually bring about “penalties”. Penalty: a punishment levied by a search engine, normally in response to techniques which violate the ToS, which leaves the punished site ranking below the point at which it would rank were those techniques simply countered and ignored. Is your site suffering a penalty? It is far too easy to attribute your site’s poor rankings to a penalty when, more often than not, another more straight-forward...
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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