You’re Still Penalized and It’s Your Own Damn Fault
Because Virante owns Remove, ’em a blended tool and service that helps webmasters remove bad links pointing to their websites, we have had a unique vantage point in the post-Penguin world. We actually just celebrated our 1,000,000th link removal. Our perspective has allowed us to see hundreds of webmasters struggle through the process of reconsideration requests and penalty removals – some taking as long as 2 years – and there are a couple of things we have noticed time and time again. By and large, the largest obstacle to getting out of a penalty tends to be the website owner him or herself. I do not mean to trivialize what webmasters go through, I often think it is incredibly unfair, but we all fall victim to a human tendency to prefer...
I am an SEO.
However, what I do mean to say, with great emphasis, is that SEO as a specialty has, does, will and should continue to exist. I felt like I should chime in regarding Rand’s excellent Whiteboard Friday today. 1. SEO is Bigger than SEO: SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” is is a statement of purpose, not a statement of methods. Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” I suppose we could call bakers Gods if this were the case, but I believe most of us would agree that to be generally false. Except for the creators of the bourbon pecan cupcake’. If your goal is to bake foods, you are a baker, regardless of the tactics necessary to bake those foods. Listing off CRO...
Biomagnification, Redirects and Back Link Penalties
I often find that the best sources of analysis in SEO, which is still a nascent industry, come from other academic pursuits. While these are regularly computer sciences (like latent dirichlet allocation) or mathematics (like volatility analysis), we sometimes find interesting lessons outside of those usual suspects – in this case, biology. Biomagnification is a fairly simple principle that through a series of prey-predator relationships, toxic substances tend to accumulate in higher percentages among organisms higher in the food chain. You can see a visualization of this in the image to the left. As mercury accumulates in various organisms, predators consume those organisms and absorb those toxins. Unless the organism has a way of disposing those toxins,...
9,786,010 Reasons to Do Broken Link Building
I have been pretty open about my excitement regarding scalable broken link building, and many of you have read my piece The Broken Link Building Bible over at SEOMoz recently, but I wanted to share some statistics with you that I was able to draw out of Garrett French and his tool at brokenlinkbuilding.com. They are pretty exciting. Since its inception back in October of 2012, brokenlinkbuilding.com has discovered nearly 10,000,000 broken link opportunities. This is pretty amazing. The tool, which is still not nearly as popular as it should be, has managed to discover millions of straight-forward, link building opportunities. 8269448 of those backlink opportunities come from 404 pages with over 100 backlinks. This is huge in terms of conversion...
Piwik Plug-in for SEO Tools Begun… Already tying in SEOMoz, Majestic & AHrefs
So, I wanted to keep a progress report going so I don’t lose site of my goals. It was pretty awesome to start working with Piwik plug-ins. I used the out-of-the-box Piwik SEO plug-in to create this first widget… If you are familiar with the SEOMoz, Majestic and AHRefs APIs, it literally takes only an hour or so to create your own widget that pulls the data directly into your Piwik analytics install.
Why I am Dropping Google Analytics in 2013 – Piwik, Here I Come!
So, for 2013, I have officially dropped Google Analytics off of The Google Cache. There are a couple of reasons behind the decision, so I wanted to go ahead and drop them here… 1. It is not my data to give away. It took me a while to come to this conclusion. I always looked at Google Analytics as a trade off. I will let Google know about my site in exchange for a better way to visualize the usage on my site. But something kept nagging – and that was the reality that Google is not in the Analytics game for your site’s data. They are in the game for your users’ data. Chances are, your users have no idea that Google is collecting their usage data as they move through your site, and they definitely don’t understand the consequences of...
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