Evidence-Based Search Engine Optimization
Over the last several years, our industry has produced myriad theories of how firms or consultants should go about SEO, each with their own set of shortcomings. Through these flawed systems, a new overarching theory of how our industry should behave has budded. First, let’s identify some of those flawed systems. Ethical SEO: A do no harm type of solution that strictly adheres to the guidelines of major search engines. Greatly inhibits the ability of a site to perform in the most competitive industries Follows a subjective set of ideals (whose ethics is right? mine is) Forces SEO’s to react drastically to position changes (such as Google coming out against reciprocal links or paid links) Performance-Based SEO: An elusive goal which attempts to create a...
SEOMoz Quiz Feeds My Ego
SEO Dark Lord – 100% Are you an SEO Expert? I must say that every time one of these quizzes comes out, I have to go take it. It is an addiction which I am currently unable to crack. The last test I remember had more of a focus on industry news than SEO-specific knowledge, so I was able to perform a little better this go around. Go ahead and take a crack at it! No tags for this...
Exclude-by-Keyword: Thoughts on Spam and Robots.txt
Note: This solution is for spam that cannot be filtered. There are already wonderful tools to help with comment / forum / wikispam such as LinkSleeve and Akismet. However, this proposed method would prevent the more nefarious methods such as HTML Injection, XSS, and Parasitic Hosting techniques. Truth be told, I rarely use the Robots.txt file. It’s functionalities can be largely replicated on a page-by-page basis via the robots META tag and, frankly, we spend a lot more time on getting page into the SERPs than excluding them. However, after running / creating several large communities with tons of user-generated content, I realized that the Robots.txt file could offer a lot more powerful tools for exclusion. Essentially, exclude-by-keyword. The truth is,...
Ad Blocking is Immoral
After a terrible write up claiming that Ad Blocking is Moral made the front page of Reddit, I felt obliged to respond. First, a brief response. For lack of a better word, (actually, this is pretty much the perfect word), the piece is drivel. It cases the ethics of Ad Blocking (visitor) and Ad Serving (publisher) in terms of effectiveness, relevancy, and business modeling. While these may all be useful arguments of whether a publisher ought to use advertising to generate revenue, it does not create a meaningful ethical statement on whether subverting advertising efforts is moral. Examples: Sarcastic Response: “In other words, people should support bad business models because it’s more convenient for the businessmen.” Not supporting a bad business...
Google’s New Algorithm: if($domain==’wikipedia.org’){$rank=1;}
I decided to take my last look at Wikipedia a little further to see just how much Google had sold out to everyones-favorite-online-encyclopedia. Does Wikipedia really deserve the rankings that it receives? Or, as many suggest, are single Wikipedia entries receiving the benefit of the doubt by Google’s algorithm because of the strength of the domain? While merely anecdotal evidence (I have yet to run a complete check as I did before), I wanted to take a look at an example where Wikipedia recently took the #1 position. I chose the keyword Entrepreneurship This simple test looked at the number of inbound links pointing directly to the page currently ranking in Google. Instead of looking at site-wide links, we look at the page that ranks itself while excluding...
Simplest Trick to Optimize Body Content
So, the general rules of thumb for body content are this… Keywords in important tags (h1, h2, h3, b or strong, em, maybe alt tags) Unique content as close to the top of the page as possible. The first issue is quite easy to handle, and has been spammed to death across the internet since the inception of search engines. However, moving unique content to the top of the code while maintaining an attractive, Google-guidelines-compliant page has proven more difficult. Let’s take a look. Headers, advertisements, navigation and more normally precede the really unique content on the page. But how much code and duplicate content does that create? In the case of FindArticles.com, we are looking at nearly 370 lines of code between the body tag and the unique...
Recent Comments