Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category
Monday, October 2nd, 2006 |
Is it just me seeing a lot of “Supplemental Result”s in SERPs? Especially on the site:www.domain.com comand
EDIT:
Is weird. I did a reality check to calm down my paranoia and seems to be true…
On site:www.techcrunch.com amd site:www.cnn.com are a lot of supplemental results. More than that site:www.amazon.com serves only 3 pages. What a hell? Somebody at google spilled a glass of water on a server and they use backups now?
EDIT 2:
Looks like the cache date of supplemental results is from July 2006
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 |
What would you do if a client will come to your SEO company and will say the following:
I have a 2 months old domain and I need optimization for a highly competitive keyword, 100 millions website competition and I need it done in 10 days?
If you are not a scammer you will throw him out or if you have some spare time you will sit down with him and explain it that what he wants is quite impossible.
Breaking News: It is possible. No black hat, no tons of content no links bought.
How about that?
Ajax. Initial a popular detergent and in the past 2 years a geek buzzword mainly attached to what is now called as Web 2.0. 100.000.000 websites competition according to Google. Obviously a suicide job for most of the white hat SEO companies.
Ajaxwrite.com did it. #9 in 10 days and climbing toward the top 5.
Facts:
- www.ajaxwrite.com is a fresh domain. Spotted by Alexa in 7th February 2006 (looking at the detailed contact data it seems that it was manually added by the owner). EDIT: Whois data shows the same thing (Thanks Elvsoft for the tip)
- On March 23rd almost simultaneously appears on: Slashdot, Digg, Techcrunch, Ajaxian, Solution watch and in another 1075 blog articles since than (according to Technorati) – What is curious is that Technorati says that there are only 159 links pointing to that domain.
I will not go again rambling about the quality of the service. Many others have done it and will do it from now on. My point on that is here.
Instead let’s see what Google optimization myths were shattered:
Myth: Only old domains score for high competitive keywords
Truth: As I said probably registered in February or January. That counts 2-3 month max
Myth: Sandbox
Truth: What sandbox? Is #9 in 10 days for a competitive keyword. We already know that spiders are reacting fast on new domains, but many have claimed that even though you are indexed you will score only for low quality keywords.
Myth: You need external links from high PR sites.
Truth: Really? I wonder how many blogs from those 1075 have a PR higher than 3. And probably Google indexed post pages that most of them due to their age have a PR 0
Myth: The age of the links matters
Truth: Probably. But in this case links were not older than 10 days.
Myth: You need a lot of quality content to get in top 10.
Truth: Really? Never thought that 1 page of cheap bullshit marketing is called “quality content”
Myth: Any burst of external links using the same anchor will be marked as bought links and will have no value
Truth: Great one Matt Cutts. I think that India was shacked by an earthquake when all the Indian link builders saw that and started to laugh. The seed of truth is that a sudden burst of external links site wide MIGHT be counted as advertisement and thrown away. Keep in mind that the magic phrase is “10 days”.
So. What to learn from that.
- 1. Nothing is impossible
- 2. Most of the things said in SEO forums are myths based on heuristics AND on negative examples (that might have other logical explanations). As an example of what that means: psychanalysis was developed by Freud on psychiatric hospitals on pacients and in time it showed no value for normal people
- 3. Links are valuable no matter their source (don’t aim for PR 5 or higher links, it might cost you more than is worth)
- 4. One way links MIGHT be the key
- 5. Always when you launch a product be aware of the power of the blogosphere. It’s almost free and all it takes is to know it and to be nice with it
- 6. Don’t trust any SEO advice or excuse. SEO is based mostly on reverse engineering and heuristic. There are no facts only theories and results
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 6 Comments »
Sunday, March 26th, 2006 |
With the increase of awareness of webmasters in the value of a link (usually the overinflated value), is getting harder and harder to find valuable external links and especially one way.
One easy solution for that is the use of social bookmarking sites. Opinions vary on this matter but if is not going to harm you why not use it.
Social bookmarking websites have the following qualities:
- Provide a one way link to your website
- They place your link in themed paged (based on the tags you use)
- Increase your visibility
To help take advantage of this there are 2 approaches:
Passive: In your pages (on regular websites) or on your blog posts, place tools that help your visitors bookmark it on their favorite social bookmarking service. Most of the webmasters go this way but they usually place only 1-3 bookmarking links missing a great part of the advantage. Barry from SEO Roundtable recommends another approach by using a single bookmarking link from Socializer. This one currently covers 20 social bookmarking sites.
Active: You can wait for your visitors to bookmark you or you can step forward by being proactive and do it yourself. This will increase your chances for traffic. To facilitate this I recommend Only Wire that allows simultaneous bookmarking in 17 social bookmarking websites. If you want a complete job you can check a more detailed list of social bookmarking sites.
Conclusion:
To gather the best results using the passive/active approach seems the optimum solution. If you want to stay in the white/gray area of SEO use carefully the active approach. On some of the SB sites any tentative of spamming will end in a termination of the account or a permanent ban on your IP.
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Sunday, March 26th, 2006 |
March 26th 2006
Let’s say that there is a new buzzword in town and is going to stay here for a while. Of course anybody will want to proove themselves as an expert on it and to score for that buzzword in Google and the rest of the search engines. What to do?
The hard way. Start working, train your employees in the new field get some good products out get reviews all the drill. It takes work, it takes people, it takes time and it takes MONEY. Most go this way but very few see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Or the easy way. Make a super basic product with a slight resemblance to the buzzword, put the buzzword in the product name, announce yourself as the biggest competitor of the bad boy in town and than use your PR channels and the blogosphere to let the world know who you are. What do you need? A small team with basic skills, very few money for a server that can take a combined effect of Digg+Slashdot, and an email account to let the people know who you are.
But why take the easy way? Because when you have won the PR and the SEO game everybody will start throwing money at you and perhaps if you don’t plan for a quick retirement you will have enough funding to do the hard way too.
In big lines this is what the guys at Ajax Write did this week. Full coverage on
What else would someone wish for Xmas?
After you get that coverage all the trolls from the blogosphere will be at your feet copying quoting the masters and pointing to your lame product website.
Ok. So? It’s a dirty game anyway why should anyone care?
Well, because when in a few weeks when that website will be on top10 for the word “ajax” don’t tell me anymore bed time stories about search engines relevance and quality of results. Unless you have a strong AI engine behind you can’t tell what the relevance of a page/website is. Is all a game that can be reversed engineered and can be tricked by anyone with an IQ slightly above average and enough motivation to do it.
Is the same game that you see in the real world. Is not what you do or what you know. Is who you know that matters and visibility. That’s why people that appear on TV seem smarter than the audience, that’s why the people with an IQ way below average but who know the right people get elected presidents.
But this is the current game and can be changed only from inside by playing it. BUT don’t tell me about quality anymore.
EDIT (April 5th 2006):
10 days later and they are in Google’s Top 10 for Ajax. As I said…cut the relevance crap talk
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »
Thursday, March 16th, 2006 |
Site Overlay with Google Analytics
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Google added a few days ago a new feature to their Analytics service. The feature called Site Overlay is available in Google Analytics->Dashboards->View->Site Overlay and is described in their own words as:
Google Analytics displays your website pages superimposed with click and conversion data for each link. Site Overlay doesn’t require any downloads, and allows you to easily see which links lead to conversions, just by browsing your site.
A service (Crazy Egg) offering a similar feature was presented on TechCrunch but is still in private beta and the GUI is lees usable than the Google Analytics.
Data offered by those 2 services are not new on traffic analysis packages but the method of presenting them is more valuable
Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Saturday, December 31st, 2005 |
If you are working on the SEO field sometimes you feel the urge to know what dirty tricks others might have used or what competitive advantages they have on you. What to do then? Instead of scratching your head and hunting optimized pages start a litlle SEO contest and relax enjoying your new external links and all the new techniques you haven’t thought of 
Costs for this? Less than an Indian link building campaign 
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Saturday, December 31st, 2005 |
Spotted via LifeHacker is this post on how to increase traffic to your blog.
The 3 techniques mentioned there are:
1. Technorati tags. Ok this one is good but not always a valid ideea. It depends on how you formulate your tags and your field of blogging. Not all subjects/tags receive the same traffic and you have to research a lot in order to have maximum profit. Why tags are important:
- some of them are closely monitored through RSS feeds by a lot of people and you get instant traffic after publishing a post.
- due to the fact that Technorati site is extremely SEF they score well on Google (some may argue that this is because of their partnership with Google Adsense but that’s another story).
- Technorati links are clean, without condoms. They might help you as external links. So choose carefully your post’s titles.
2. Feedburner headline animator. Blablabla. Not a bad ideea but for sure not a great one. Instead or complementary you can use personal content aggregators.
3. Trackbacks. A good point if used properly:
- When writing a post check Technorati for others that have approached the same subject. Look for those with many incoming links, they will get you the traffic you want. This is the technique that Techcrunch used on the early posts and now is on the A-List. Best way to do this: Write your post and at the end make a section like “Additional infos” where you put apx 3-5 external links. Don’t forget to send the trackbacks
- Look for those blogs that put trackbacks above regular comments or react fast to market trends.
- Don’t be an idiot. Don’t just write smthg like “X has said this” and send the trackback. Bring your personal view into the post
Beside those above you can use the following too:
- Comments. Comment as much as you can but again avoid being an idiot. Try developing a relationship with the bloggers you are commenting on. Identify valuable posts as on trackbacks
- Use social bookmarking sites for SEO and organic traffic. Barry Schwartz used to do that on Yahoo’s MyWeb but there are at least 5-10 valuable ones. Properly tag your posts of course.
- Inspired by the original post: Use a mischivieng title like “Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days” :). I say that because it may take longer than 30 days but what a hell we are the fast-food/fast-fuck generation and we want to believe is possible. And….it only applies to blogs not to all websites (static ones for examples). If you have a static website though, you can create a blogger account and you can deploy that blog on a directory or a subdomain of your main site.
- Use all the Google Publisher Tools available, especially Google Analytics.
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 30th, 2005 |
Sometimes using analytics tools on this blog (Awstats, Google Analytics, Measure Map), I discover that some small on the run made posts generate a lot of traffic by being on first page on Google for certain keywords.
When this is the case I add more infos in order to make them more usefull and enhace others search experience.
Considering that this post is curently no.1 for “personal content aggregator” here is a round up of the services I am aware:
This is the first service I tried and I really like it. Here is my aggregator and the reasons I like it are:
- Custom Templates / Template Customization
- Multiple sources. It has a default of popular sources but you can also add any service that has an RSS feed
- Global Tag Cloud
- Comments on each entry
- Clean Links to the user content (doesn’t use “nofollow” or any other techniques )
- Global RSS feed
- Update:Now it counts as backlink in technorati rank
Dislikes:
- Slow reaction time
- Template customization doesn’t allow advertising insertion. Somehow understandable, if they would then setting up a splog would be a piece a cake for any wanna be outhere
Aditional infos:
SuprBlog
Mentioned by Bosko in a comment to the original post, People Feeds is a an overall good service. Here is my page and why I like the service:
- Global page for all content and sections for general services (photos, bookmarks, blogs, others)
- Global and section tag clouds
- Global and section RSS feed
- Clean Links to the user content (doesn’t use “nofollow” or any other techniques )
- Good reaction time
- Blog Tools - like global search script
Dislikes:
- No templates
- Rough avatar handling
- If a custom feed is not automatically asigned to a category it goes to others section without the posibility to change that. For example I cannot put my 360 page in blogs
- No password recovery (that one really sucks)
- No user advertisment allowed
Additional resources:
Dev Blog
Not a real personal content aggregator but has some basic functions:
- Flickr badge
- Yahoo photos
- Up to 3 custom feeds
Dislikes:
Additional resources:
Dev Blog
Again another not real personal content aggregator but allows integration of multiple feeds under a single one
Using personal content aggregators for SEO purposes
Everyone that has done SEO knows that links coming from same theme sites are more valuable than random ones. Using the power of custom content aggregators, you can setup in a few minutes thematic sites and include your target site among the feeds (or in the template - like on SuprGlu - a few targeted links). This is somehow a gray SEO technique and depending on it’s (ab)use can be moral or imoral. But this is up to each individual
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 |
On a post from Techcrunch regarding some meta search engine Jeremy Zawodny says the following:
So now a spammer (err, I mean “SEO”) can get money from a search engine by being in the top 10 even if they’re never clicked on.
Comment no. 15
Ok, Jeremy has a very unusual sense of humor and saying things in the face and I LIKE that but putting an equal sign between SEO and spam is quite …not a thing to do. I know that there are suckers outhere spamming blogs and screwing up results (and yes I am no stranger from the black arts) but not always SEO=spam. Proper page formatting, proper site structures, legit sites submissions and tweaking, keyword research, web analytics and so on do not equal spam.
And I think that this dangerous association was started/promoted by Matt Cutts with his posts (miss)labeled “SEO Mistakes“. If a Google engineer thinks that SEO is nothing more than spam and the “mistake” is being caught then this SUCKS big time.
Additional resources:
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 |
Someone asked me last week to give some advice for a digital artist trying to promote himself on the net. It is a pretty interesting case, because is that annoying case for every SEO guy where a client with almost no content wants to score high on competitive strings.
So, we are talking here about a website composed of a few image galleries and a link exchange page and the following characteristics:
- Only main page indexed by google
- No image in Google images
- Main page has links to the rest of the site in JavaScript
- Main page has spam text with font size of size -7
First step:
In the first step is needed to clean up the site and make it search engine friendly.
- clear spam
- make normal links instead of JavaScript’s ones
- research keywords using Good Keywords(freeware) and build meta keywords and then build unique meta description tags for each page
- make unique titles for each page
- make descriptive URLs for galleries
- put ALT on images and link them to the bigger images.
- use proper formating on page: h1 tags for Gallery titles, text links for images with descriptive titles, use if appropriate strong and em tags
Second step:
The client MUST understand that especially on his particular case, counting solely on Google is a bad business model and he needs traffic, targeted traffic that will convert in customers and reviewers. Usually when you try to explain this they leave and usually get stuck with some black hat seo that will quickly rank him for about 1 week only to bury him forever.
If they are still around when you are done with explanations you can proceed to the next step.
Third step:
If the client understood that at least in the beginning Google is a lost cause you will need to give him alternatives. Those are:
- exposure
- blogosphere
- social bookmarking sites
- Google images *
* I know that in the second step I said that Google is not the solution but I was talking mainly about regular results. In this particular case, Google images can be an achievable target on short term
Tommorow I will give details on the third step. Feedback and discussions welcome and encouraged
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
