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...
Googlebot’s Javascript Interpreter: A Diagnostic
Warning: This is very old. I began writing this several months ago and just never published after some back and forth w/ Matt Cutts. Take with a grain of salt. Over the past two weeks multiple respected bloggers in the search community have commented on the increasing abilities of Googlebot, especially following Google’s announcement that it can now handle some forms of AJAX. I have, admittedly, long believed that we over-estimate what Google and Googlebot are capable of, so I wanted to run a proper experiment to determine the exact capabilities of GoogleBot in reading and interpreting Javascript. The Question How sophisticated is Googlebot’s javascript interpretation and, more specifically, which Javascript functions can Google accurately interpret....
Google Laughing in the Face of the FTC – Raven, SEOMoz, and the AdWords API
Update2: As expected, Google’s “leniency” with Raven came with a huge price – drop the SERPs. Yep, exactly as I said, Google doesn’t want you to ever have the ability to compare the value of Adwords to SEO. Update: Google has reopened the API for Raven Tools! Let’s keep a watch and see if they do the same thing for SEOMoz. Keep up the pressure! What is Going Down? If you are in the search marketing community, you are likely familiar with Raven Tools and SEOMoz. These two SEO tool leaders provide incredible tool sets for webmasters looking to improve their search performance – in both paid and organic. They aggregate data from numerous sources including the Google Adwords API. Back in September, SearchEngineLand.com...
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