Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category
Thursday, August 11th, 2005 |
On a SES Session Summary we see the following:
Q: I have a client that has a great site, lots of links but the anchor text being used throughout the web is the same.
A: Matt said that is very unnatural. Most natural links are not 100% one exact phrase to the site. It won’t hurt you, there is no OOP, but all the links might be devalued.
Tim agreed with Matt on it being unnatural.
K. Let’s consider the following situations:
- I have a web services company (services from hosting to web design) and I put my link on all my clients
- I have a cool freeware PHP script and I have included a link to me in it.
How unnatural are those situations? To mee it seems pretty normal….but maybe it’s just me
Another one:
Q: Reciprocal links; we have them now, we have plans to do more, what should I do? There are 20 of them links.
A: Matt said here is my rule of thumb, pretend you are my competitor, what would they think of it? Plenty of people have reciprocal links but if its excessive, then you need to be careful. Editorial given links and independent links are best.
Danny then asked 4 people in the audience to point to each other and then asked several to point at each other.
Matt said if you go into “graph theory” you have a “clique”, that clique is when everyone in a network is pointing at each other, that is not natural.
K. I have a blog. I read other blogs. I find some interesting and I quote them or link to their main page. Analyzing logs or seeing comments, the others bloggers decide quoting me or linking to me. I have not beg for links, I have not payed for them. Is natural
In other order. I know that at the examples above there are hundreds of illegal counter-examples. My point was:
“The search engines could tweak their algos in order to spot natural/unnatural within the same behavior?”
Perhaps the answer is no…or not now
Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 |
Mike Banks Valentine has an article based on his experience on how spiders behave when indexing. For example he concludes:
1) Google crawls 250 pages on first discovery of links to site. Then they don’t return until they find more links and crawl slowly. Google has failed to index new domain for 60 days.
2) Yahoo looks for errors pages and once they find bad links will crawl them ceaselessly until you tell them to stop it. Then won’t crawl at all for weeks until crawling heavily one day and lightly the next in random fashion.
Even though I don’t agree with it’s conclusions on Google (see this example, the part on Yahoo it’s interesting.
The complete results of his analysis is here . What I see that he ommited is what submission steps he took if any. As far as I know no one will spider your domain out of the blue 
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 |
Last night doing some research on the romanian real estate market I almost felt off my chair.
Google,Yahoo, MSN were spammed beyond recognition by a site using the old keyword stuffing technique.
Look for “chirii garsoniere” (translation rent single rooms) and see the results.
Google
Yahoo
Msn
Spammed results are those that include “Delta Dunarii”. What is more curious, all the other organic results seem to be gone.
Aparently the guy used a query like “allinurl: _post.htm” to identify old message boards that allow unmoderated posting. Because those results are from old sites their relevancy in all the search engines is higher.
So…what we have heard lately…big words like “human raters” “personalization” “anti-spam filters”and so on are just cheap PR.
The proof is there that any determined low life spammer can mess with results
Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 10 Comments »
Sunday, June 12th, 2005 |
Accidentally I have found a pretty good resource on search engine marketing. The site is called Marketing Experiments
Their motto is quite self explanatory for what you can find inside:
Research + Testing = Results, Discover what really works
Their mission statement comes to clearify their goals:
“MarketingExperiments.Com is an online laboratory with a simple (but not easy) five-word mission statement: To discover what really works. We test every conceivable marketing method on the Internet. We publish the results in the Marketing Experiments Journal (110,000+ subscribers).”
The most important aspect (maybe) is that their research papers are free now
I personally think that this is a must for every SEM consultant
Posted in SEM Resources, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »
Sunday, June 12th, 2005 |
Jeremy spotted an article that shows that Financial Times is using the black arts to get higher rankings 
The hidden links can be found on pages such as ‘FT.com / Your money / Money guides’ . The hidden link is under the list of six partner sites that include The New York Times and Investors Chronicle in the bottom right hand side of the screen.
Tisk tisk tisk…..shame shame shame
The problem is that a smaller site would get banned from Google ASAP….but FT will say it’s not their fault and everything will be solved with an apology letter. Blah
P.S.
that is 1st grade link hidding BTW
Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Monday, June 6th, 2005 |
Barry has an article called Search Engine Guidelines Scare Webmasters that reffers to a thread at Search Engine Watch. I won’t discuss the thread here but the ideea behind.
Since when clean webmasters should fear “search engines” (read Google)? Between webmasters and search engines is a reciprocal relationship. They give us traffic and we give them content. It’s a win/win situation. But when search engines start making dictatorial rules (do this, do that, don’t dare to do that) webmasters should remember that one way or another, more or less, they have a public they can place their influence on and they could promote a much friendlier search engine.
No one has the right to tell webmasters with good “intent” what to do.
Google was promoted by webmasters and they should keep that in their minds
Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Sunday, June 5th, 2005 |
Google Sitemap Generator v2 (hehehe already v2 
)
Features:
- Full WordPress Plugin Support (just copy it in your plugin directory and activate it)
- Administration UI (Customize setting like change frequency from your WordPress Admin Center)
- Creates a static xml file called sitemap.xml in your blog directory
- Gets automatic rebuilt if you edit/write/publish a post
- EDIT:Includes Homepage, Posts, Static Pages, Categories and Archives
A mix of existing ones
Features:
- include posts, pages and category pages
- be configured as to what is included, the frequency and the priority
- gzip everything automatically
- generate only if necessary: It uses a backup file if there are no recent changes, and otherwise generates a new backup.
No time to test now gtg to Alex. But I bet the the second is the best It includes static pages. Hmmmm Word Press community was pretty fast on this. Guess who’s blogs will score better
Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization | 6 Comments »
Sunday, June 5th, 2005 |
A good article points out some good rules to make your fresh directory score better in Google
There are no big discoveries in it but a good roadmap for those who want to start one
Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »
Friday, June 3rd, 2005 |
On Social Patterns you have a detailed article on Google Sitemap Protocol and a plugin for Word Press
What is Google Sitemap?
Google Sitemap is an account based service that allows you to monitor and submit all your sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.
Why using it?
- Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
- Fresher search results
- A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes
Edit:
Semiologic has a valid point on how this feature will be use by spammers:
With the new Google Sitemaps feature, you can now serve your spam pages to Google directly, and give them a low priority on top of that to lower their chances of ending up higher than your preferred landing pages. Sweet, isn’t it?
Yeah…very sweet indeed
Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines News | 2 Comments »
