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Aug
2
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Is SEO just a game?
Consider two chess players, Mike and Tom. Mike has never been able to win against Tom. Mike knows all the rules of the game: how to move every piece, when to capture, when to castle; he even knows all the tactical ideas like forks, pins, skewers and discovered attacks.
Mike's problem is that while he knows all the rules and has read a lot of chess books, he still looks only one or two moves in advance. It is very hard to prepare a winning plan looking so short-term. Tom on the other hand thinks at least five moves ahead and moves all his pieces so that they complete his master plan. Tom anticipates all of Mike's moves and prepares for them with a strong counterattack.
The world of search engine optimization is no different than this. As SEOs we need to think ahead of our competitors and, more importantly, we need to be on top of search engine advances. The world of search is moving so fast that any slacker will be left behind, with no time or opportunity to catch up. Check and mate.
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Aug
1
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We have discussed before how to control Googlebot via robots.txt and meta robot tags. Both methods have limitations. With robots.txt you can block the crawling of any page or directory, but you cannot control the indexing, caching or snippets. With the robots meta tag you can control crawling, caching and snippets but you can only do that for HTML files, as the tag is embedded in the files themselves. You have no granular control for binary and non-HTML files.
Until now. Google recently introduced another clever solution to this problem. You can now specify robot meta tags via an HTTP header. The new header is the X-Robots-Tag, and it behaves and supports the same directives as the regular robots meta tag: index/noindex, archive/noarchive, snippet/nosnippet and the new unavailable_after directive. This new technique makes it possible to have granular control over crawling, caching, and other functions for any page on your website, no matter the type of content it has—PDF, Word doc, Excel file, zip files, etc.
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Jul
27
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My old pal Skitzzo from SEOrefugee revisits what he calls an SEO “myth”: that a competitor can potentially harm a site owner just by pointing links to his or her site.
According to the number of Sphinns, it looks like a lot SEOs agree it’s a myth. That’s understandable, as it would be very unfair for the search engines to allow this type of thing to happen.
Unfortunately the situation is not as simple as it first seems. As has been my practice on this blog, let's dig a little bit deeper to understand why—although difficult and possibly expensive—it is very well possible to pull of this exploit. For those concerned, I explained how to counter this type of attack in a previous post about negative SEOs. Check it out.
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Jul
25
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Link building is without a doubt the most time consuming—but most rewarding—aspect of search engine optimization. It usually takes more effort to promote your content (build links) than to actually create it. As I have stressed repeatedly before, compelling, useful content should make your link building efforts much easier.
Before I go any further, let me note that I have a slightly different perspective when evaluating link-building tactics than most SEO consultants. I do SEO primarily for my own sites and my income depends on the ability of those sites to make money. That means that I try to build links that primarily offer long-term value. I still try to get the short-term and medium-term value links, but I like to build authority for my sites. If you’re working for a client or a boss that wants to see immediate results, your priorities will probably be different.
In situations where I have to pay or put some serious effort to get a link, the most important criteria is always: Will the link send useful, converting traffic?
Why is this my most important criteria? Let's explore three different scenarios to illustrate this:
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Jul
23
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I frequently get asked why a particular page is no longer ranking. I wish there were a simple answer to that question. Instead of giving personal responses, I’ve decided to write a detailed post with the possible problems that might cause your ranking to drop, as well as all the solutions I could think of. I also want to present a case study every week of a ranking that dropped and what we did to get it back. If you have a site that is affected I invite you to participate. Send me an email or leave a comment.
There are many reasons why your page or website might not be ranking. Let's go through each of the three steps in the search engine ranking process and examine the potential roadblocks your page might face. We’ll see how to avoid them, how to identify if your page was affected, and most importantly, how to recover.
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Jul
19
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Duplicate content is one of the most common causes of concern among webmasters. We work hard to provide original and useful content, and all it takes is a malicious SERP (Search Engine Results Page) hijacker to copy our content and use it for his or her own. Not nice.
More troubling still is the way that Google handles the issue. In my previous post about cgi hijacking, was clear that the main problem with hijacking and content scraping is that search engines do not reliably determine who is the owner of the content and, therefore, which page should stay in the index. When faced with multiple pages that have exactly the same or nearly the same content, Google's filters flag them as duplicates. Google's usual course of action is that only one of the pages — the one with the higher PageRank — makes it to the index. The rest are tossed out. Unless there is enough evidence to show that the owner or owners are trying to do something manipulative, there is no need to worry about penalties.
Recently, regular reader Jez asked me a thought-provoking question. I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially he wanted to know: "Why doesn’t Google consider the age of the content to determine the original author?” I responded that the task is not as trivial as it may seem at first, and I promised a more thorough explanation. Here it is.
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Jul
16
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Last month there was an interesting article in Forbes about the search engine marketing saboteurs. These so-called “SEO professionals” proudly proclaim their job to be damaging the hard-earned rankings of their clients’ competitors. I understand a lot of people would do anything for money, but it’s still unsettling to see such people trumpet their efforts with such gusto. A huge thumbs down to all those mentioned in the article.
Earning high search engine rankings is challenging enough. Now we need to work twice as hard to protect the rankings once we earn them. The Forbes article lists seven ways you can damage someone else's website. I can think of three more — but instead of adding more wood to the negative SEO fire, I’ve decided to create a list of things you can do to detect, prevent and protect your rankings from these types of attacks.
Here are Hamlet’s countermeasures. (You may want to read the Forbes article first to better understand the terms.)
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Jul
13
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Quality is king in search engine rankings. Of course spam sites using the latest techniques make their way up top—but their rankings are temporary, fleeting, and quickly forgotten. Quality sites are the only ones that maintain consistent top rankings.
This wasn’t always true. A few years ago it was very easy to rank highly for competitive search terms. I know that for a fact because I was able to build my company from scratch just by using thin affiliate sites. Everybody knows that there has been a drastic change. At least on Google, it is increasingly difficult for sites without real content to rank highly, no matter how many links back they get.
Why is this?
Search engines use “quality signals” to rank websites automatically. Traditionally, those signals were things you might expect: the presence of the searched words in the body of the web page, and on the links coming from other pages. There is increasing evidence that Google is looking at other quality signals to deduce the relevance of websites.
Here are some of the so-called quality signals Google might be using to provide better results:
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Jul
11
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Do you have pages in Google's supplemental index? Get 'em out of there!
Matt Cutts of Google doesn't think SEOs and website owners should be overly concerned about having pages in the supplemental index. He has some pages in the supplemental index, too.
As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
Google is even considering removing the supplemental result tag. There won't be any way for us to tell if any page is supplemental. Read the rest of this entry »
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Jul
10
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Let's face it. We all like to check the Google PageRank bar to see how important websites, especially ours, are for Google. This tells us how cool and popular our site is.
"Advanced yet simple and strategic SEO" 78 pages full of useful insights and valuable tips
