'SEO' Category

• Google Hates Undeclared Paid Backlinks

  Tuesday, a client sends me an email asking if they should take advantage of an offer to buy a page on a directory on which they can create links. It’s accompanied by the email soliciting business, which includes a story about how a couple of businesses benefited, and the prices for pages at different tiers [...]

  October 1st, 2011

• Google Goes Social With +1 for Websites?

  Google’s new “plus one” button for web sites is an interesting development and potentially a game changer – if done well. I’ve seen a few commentators calling this an attempt by Google to go the Social Media route. And it is, at first blush, out of the Social Media canon. Facebook and Twitter both have [...]

  June 3rd, 2011

• SEO: Tell Me About Keyword Density Analysis, Again?

  I’ve been recruiting some SEOs recently. One of my differentiator questions for the phone interview, has been to ask candidates if they know what “Keyword Density” is, and whether it is important to search engines. The most common answer that people give to the question on keyword density, is that it used to be important, [...]

  September 27th, 2010

• Google Sidewiki Made More Obvious – But Still a Tech Not A Benefit

  The Sidewiki, introduced almost a year ago, looked like an interesting tool and a way to allow users to interact with a site without on-site commentary enabled. Accessed via an unobtrusive button in the Chrome browser or via a Google Toolbar, it was all but completely invisible to most users, and rarely used. This new [...]

  September 5th, 2010

• SEO Ranking Insights From Troubleshooting Web Site Problems

  I look forward to phone calls from companies with an organic ranking problem. Sometimes these companies have a strange set of conditions that would be impossible to ask a client to reproduce, because it would damage traffic to their site. However, fixing existing problems can yield insights into how fast Google does things, and what [...]

  August 11th, 2010

• SEO: Close Reading Of Search Results

  Looking closely at Google’s search results can be informative – at least, if you take some inductive leaps, and apply knowledge learned in other activities. Take a look at the graphic, showing these early April 2010 search results for Matt Cutts’ web site. Notice that the same articles appear several times, wIth slightly different URLs? [...]

  May 17th, 2010

• Non-news: Malformed URLs don’t pass Anchor Text.

  I’ve started another burst of postings about web server log file analysis and what it tells search engine optimisers about search engine spiders. Web spider behaviour often lies behind issues that I find on other blogs. For example, Dave Naylor has a couple of recent articles that are interesting. A good one to read is [...]

  April 9th, 2010

• Googlebot and Search Visitors

  I’ve been interested in the behaviour of Googlebot, the robot that Google uses to crawl the web, for years. It’s a topic that seems largely unaddressed by search engine optimisers, yet the behaviour of Googlebot should be extremely important. After all, uncrawled sites tend to have problems with ranking many pages – the best you [...]

  April 8th, 2010

• Blog Spammers Target Blogs

  Hardly news, but people who spam blogs, use search to look for them. So is there anything that can be done to reduce the attractiveness of a blog to spam? Have a look at this recent sample of keywords that lead to this blog, taken from Google Analytics. Spot anything? Yup, a large fraction of [...]

  April 8th, 2010

• SEO: Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate

  I’m going to take issue with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. I think his most recent White Board Friday video is just plain wrong. Normally, I have a lot of respect for what SEOmoz does, but I think the advice and implications are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. How Does Google Rank Results I don’t [...]

  March 26th, 2010