Today, I’d like to share an observation I made after analysing new back links acquired from guest blogging on Search Engine Journal and getting promoted to the main blog at SEOmoz. It’s really interesting how the more popular, high authority domains get copied (scraped) so frequently by other sites that have pagerank or are sometimes even functioning companies in their own right.
Could these scraper sites pass any value through their outbound links and as a consequence, can the process of guest blogging on well scraped sites be levered to work positively for your SEO?
Blogs get scraped Read the full post...
There are a lot of different Firefox extensions, plugins, scripts and more for doing SEO, but which ones really make a difference? Here’s my list of “must haves” for doing SEO with Firefox.
My SEO “must haves” for Firefox
1) Firebug
Firebug is a powerful web development tool that helps you to “see” your HTML, CSS and Javascript as you browse around your webpage. It’s perfect for checking the semantic HTML structure of your site is exactly right. Clicking “Inspect” will show the exact code for the section of the webpage you’re mousing over. Really powerful stuff for making sure the changes you’ve asked for have been implemented! Read the full post...
Over the last day or so I’ve been tweaking SEOgadget to load a little faster on page refreshes. It was getting quite slow with all of the conditional routines and server requests in this theme. The Ubuntu category targeted adsense blocks were the final straw, with the entire sidebar being such a dog that the rest of my page load performance was terrible. Most of my performance optimisation work focused on improving the sidebar and header but there are still lots of other areas to improve. If you’re interested, check out Joost’s excellent tips on how to speed up and clean your WordPress.
Dynamic title tags Read the full post...
The “robots-nocontent” class attribute is a non robots.org standard supported by Yahoo only and launched in May 2007. The sole purpose of this attribute is to allow the webmaster to highlight areas of content that are considered irrelevant to the main subject of the page to Yahoo’s crawler, Slurp.
There hasn’t been much noise (if any) about the use of robots=”nocontent” since it’s launch, but I thought I’d take a look at this “class” attribute as part of my SEO research and do some tests on my site to see if it made any actual difference.
Why would a search engine ask webmasters to use a class attribute in their on-page SEO? Read the full post...
You’ve probably seen (and read about) the “fix incorrect marker location” functionality offered inside the Local Business Center area of Google Maps. What I find amazing is how easily this map location can be positioned incorrectly regardless of the registered address.
Take this ranking for “SEO Consultant London” taken from Google.co.uk.
“W6″ is not located anywhere near Picadilly Circus. Is the incorrect marker skewing the result in the SERPS? If this got corrected, would the ranking disappear? I’ve contacted the site owner to see if we can get a test running.
Check out these weird serps page results we found yesterday. A brand owning nearly the whole page for its own brand related query. I’ve not seen anything like this for a long time and now we can’t repeat the same results. If anyone saw the same thing yesterday I’d love to know what queries you used!
A recent thread at Sphinn became even more interesting when Matt Cutts dropped a comment that Google do not use bounce rates as a variable in their ranking algorithm. Here’s what he said:
Without reading the article, I’ll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like “Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don’t you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?” I just don’t even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life. Read the full post...
Just incase you haven’t heard, we’re heading towards a nasty global recession. While you might feel reassured by the news that many companies are increasing their SEO spend in 2009, it can only mean one thing – SEO is going to get competitive in 2009. So, if you’re thinking about recession proofing your site in the near future, here are a few things you might want to consider doing soon:
1) Review your keyword strategy Read the full post...
