DDoS, Negative SEO, etc.
This has been an interesting week for myself and Virante. First, some of you may know that Virante runs two free anti-spam services – OpenCaptcha (a free, distributed CAPTCHA system) and LinkSleeve (a free, distributed link spam detection API). This Monday, we were hit with what appears to have been a poorly orchestrated DDoS. I say poorly orchestrated because we were able to effectively control the attack within about 8 hours. Distributed Denial of Service attacks use a large number of computers to flood a server or website with so many requests that the site can no longer function. However, their attacks were not strong enough to prevent us from still being able to access the server via SSH (ie: the attack crippled Apache/MySQL but not our bandwidth nor...
Controlled Experimentation + Correlation Data Gives Solid Evidence
I am always excited to hear that our internal testing using controlled experimentation matches up with that of those doing correlation studies, like the great work coming out of SEOMoz. Most recently, Rand Fishkin posted a great piece on correlations between numerous ranking factors and outcomes in both Google and Bing. One of the more “surprising” pieces of data revealed in this correlation study was the relationship between the .org extension vs. .net/com/gov/etc. It seems that in both Bing and Google, there is a slight bias towards the .org TLD. Interestingly, back in 2008 before SEOMoz had built such a great data set to perform correlation studies like this, we created a controlled experiment to look at potential Top Level Domain Analysis. We...
301 Redirects Can Pass Anchor Text
One of the questions we often receive and has been discussed quite a bit is whether 301 redirects actually pass on any anchor text. This is an important question, as much of the web’s new link graph uses URL shortening style services. So, we set out to do a simple test… Get a page ranked for a non competitive term using only 301 redirects. It is important to note here a few things regarding the scope of this study. This was repeatedly effective This did not test 301 redirecting an old page to another We cannot measure whether or not there is any depressive adjustment made because it is a 301 redirect, merely that the effect does exist. There very well may be special cases where Google does not pass anchor text through a 301 The experiment was quite...
New SEO iPhone Link Juice App Released
Kudos to the team over at Link Juice for their release of a truly fantastic iPhone app. The app allows you to get access to a link data from SEOMoz, Majestic SEO and SEMRush in a useful, intuitive manner. Well done, this is truly an indispensible app for SEOs on-the-go.
5 Things you should do with each SEOMoz Linkscape Update
1. Read the blog post. Linkscape’s index size fluctuates – as do the indices of all search engines – from update to update. SEOMoz normally reveals this information in their blog post that announces the release, such as seen in the graph below from their March 2010 update.
New Free SEO Tool – Google Double Listing Demystifier
The brand spanking new Google Double Listing Demystifier helps you identify the actual ranking of individual pages in the top 10 when there is a double listing present. If two pages from the same domain occur in the top 10, Google will automatically insert the second listing directly under the first with an indent. While this makes it easy to find pages from the same domain, it makes it far more difficult to determine what the actual rank of the second page is. This simple tool will help demystify the double listing by identifying what the actual rank of those individual pages are. This can be incredibly valuable as it will allow you to know whether or not your or your competitor’s second page listing is vulnerable because it is actually in position 10, or...
Wow – PageRank Recovery Tool Usage…
SEOMoz just updated their API usage dashboard and it was amazing to see the jump caused by our new PageRank Recovery Tool – we have had over 440,000 rows returned on top pages alone this month.
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