'SEO' Category

• iLab Presentation from 2010-02-25

  Click on the icon at lower right of the slide below, to get a full-screen view. Only 30 or so slides, not 280!

  These are the slides we used (well, uploaded to “280slides.com“, and slightly edited for that service) for the presentation last Thursday. The slides wouldn’t upload (from Keynote, via a PowerPoint export) to Google [...]

  March 2nd, 2010

• Duplicate Content, And Blog Spammers

  Around half the people I talk to, about Search Engine Optimisation, are terrified of duplicate content on their own websites. But 80% or more of the spam that I see, is massively duplicated. Why do real site owners, with valuable content but multiple paths to it, fear duplicate penalties from Google, but spammers who endlessly [...]

  February 28th, 2010

• Google Hates Me, I’m Being Penalised. Or Not.

  Great story from a Google staffer about how his site started to disappear from rankings. I’ve seen clients lose *huge* chunks of traffic for very similar reasons. Sometimes the reason you don’t show isn’t for the obvious search engine optimisation reasons or that you’ve lost Google’s love. Sometimes there’s a simple technological explanation…

  February 25th, 2010

• Google Product Search, Ciao, Foundem and the right to make a buck in search results

  The Telegraph gives some details about the cases being brought against Google in Europe, about product search results. Who’s complaining, and about what, makes for some interesting speculation.
  Let’s have a look at what Google Product Search is, and does, first… so we’ve got some context.
  Google Product Search
  It’s free. Anyone can sign up, and feed products. [...]

  February 24th, 2010

• Social Network results in Google Search Results

  Personalised Search - how personal is it? Well, Bill Slawski, author of the SEO by the Sea blog, is someone for whom I’ve a lot of respect. So he’s in my social network. And when I went looking for recent articles on the uses of Google’s Website Optimiser for SEO purposes, look what I found:

  You [...]

  February 22nd, 2010

• Search Engine Spam Reduction Through The DMCA

  Google will act to remove web pages that rank highly, that use copyrighted material without permission. One of the more popular tactics for a beginner Search Engine Optimiser, is to copy material that already ranks well. Apart from the ethical dimensions of copying someone elses’ work, there’s this:

  The technique of copying already well ranking content [...]

  February 17th, 2010

• Search Engine Optimisation - Site Submission Solicitations

  The incubator that we work in, has a bunch of small businesses, with varying degrees of proficiency with the web. Every so often, we run a seminar for them on building web presence. One of the questions that is likely to come up at the end, will be about search engine submission. Our neighbouring businesses [...]

  February 16th, 2010

• SEO: Remember relevance?

  Inspired by a great piece of spam this morning. This looks like a lengthy and individually crafted posting, offering a summary of what looks like the current situation on H1N1 in the USA. The problems? Well, it is targeting a US dentist, and the spam was contributed to an article about how Google has been [...]

  February 5th, 2010

• Google Help Forums, Customer Service, SEO and Stupidity

  Not quite a Jane Austen title, but “Help Forums and Helplessness” involved far too many terminal sibilants. The recent launch of Google’s Nexus One, the Google branded Android phone, highlights Google’s fledgling incompetence with mass market customer service, already demonstrated in abundance in many of Google’s own help forums.
  Harsh criticism, you might think, but I’ve [...]

  January 14th, 2010

• SEO, Click Fraud and Mis-Attribution

  I’ve been involved in some paid search click fraud measurement for about five years. It’s pretty interesting work, trying to understand whether the clicks you’ve bought are related to the traffic on the site, and any qualifiers that you’ve added, such as geotargets and the keywords. Oddly, it has provided a sideways illumination on a [...]

  November 23rd, 2009