Matt Cutts on SEO
This video has been getting a good deal of press in the SEO community. Matt Cutts is certainly the most visible and well recognized Googler in the webmaster community. Officially, he is head of the webspam team at Google. Matt is an early on Google employee who loves what he does. If you have the opportunity to see Matt speak, you will usually take something away from it that you can use, or stop using.
If you have 45 minutes….
A Clever Link Builder
If you own a website, it is almost certain that you have received a request to swap links, or add a link to someone else’s site. Generally, the link request will come from the site owner, their SEO, or a pure link building company. If you haven’t already, you will ignore most requests. Occasionally, there will be a request that comes across that makes you think it would be a good resource for your visitors. I received one today. If I hadn’t recognized the name of the site they were generating links for, I might not have looked any further.
Some of the request will open your eyes to creative techniques that you can use to benefit your own site(s). I wouldn’t recommend an outright lie like the offender below, but clever use of domains can help.
The sender claimed to be an assistant at a library and was finding resources for an “educational series”. The “local library” is either brand
The real Rhode Island Library System is located at oslri.org: http://www.oslri.org/libsites.html
The supposed Rhode Island Site resolves to a hosting company:
Fake Rhode Island Library
A couple other signs that will tell the story
- The site was registered May 18, 2009
I would think that the R.I. lilbrary system probably had their act together prior to then. - The domain registration is private
Probably not something that a public entity would do. In fact, the real Rhode Island library system has their registration information available:
Rhode Island Library
=================================================
Subject I wanted to suggest a resource for your page.
hide details 4:35 PM (2 hours ago)
Hi!
My name is Helen Carter, I am an assistant at a local library, I am responsible for finding resources for our educational series. This week we will be discussing mold and the dangers it may pose. While searching for articles I found your page (http://www.wnyhandyman.com/mold-removal.php) which was very helpful. Thanks so much 
I noticed you missed a great page on mold: http://www.gardenbuildingsdirect.co.uk/Article/the-fungus-among-us. It looks like a fairly good resource, which includes a lot of supplemental resources. I really like this page because it is a simple read, and doesn’t use a lot of technical terms like the medical journals do. I certainly plan on using it in my discussion
Have a wonderful day
-Helen
===================================================
No thank you, Helen!
Page Ranking Factors
There are many folks that will ask questions of search marketers. One of the common ones is what affects how a page is ranked. Well a great list was compiled by SEOMoz. SEOMoz created the first and second comprehensive search ranking factors document.
Thanks to HuoMah.com, we have a revised document that is spot on and more concise. Take a look at HuoMah.com.
Here is the list without details on each topic. Keep in mind that these things are not just black and white. Some matter more than others and the relevance of each factor will vary based upon the site.
- PageRank (or relative nodal link valuation)
- Link text (internal and external)
- Link relevance (global and page)
- Also see Temporal, Personalized PageRank and Phrase factors.
- Page TITLE tag
- Meta-description tag
- Document inception/age data
- Link velocity
- Link age
- Viral/Current news (QDF)
- Time of year (niche trends)
- Content update rate
- Domain history
- Inbound links (global)
- Outbound links
- Named entities (products, brand, author)
- Contact information (also important for geographic signals)
- Location of client device
- Location of webpage hosting
- Contact / location information
- Inbound/outbound link geo-factors
- Linguistic indicators (language and nuances)
- Heading (H1-5)
- Bold
- Italic
- Lists
- Font attributes (size, color)
- Related phrase ratios
- Categorization of content (clusters)
- Occurrences (probabilistic)
- Duplication dampening (filters)
- Personalization (phrase based)
- Link analysis (inbound)
- Global site relevance
- Term proximity (for multi-term queries)
- Image tagging (in content segment/related terms)
- Search History
- Web history (pages/sites we visit)
- Query revision (and analysis)
- Search intent (informational, navigational)
- Explicit data (favourites, reader,wiki)
- Interaction with advertising
- Surfing frequency/ time of day
- Personalized PageRank (yahoo and google)
- SERP and document interactions
- Duplicate issues (structural/content)
- Link devaluations (segmentation, link text, recips)
- Poor architecture/coding
- Reviewer penalties
- Redundant meta-data (such as meta-descriptions)
- Canonical / URL issues
- Server reliability (can be de-indexed)
- Phrase based detection
- Cloaking
- Boilerplate
- Domain history
- Query analysis
- Network proxy detection
- Link based (link spam and excessive recips)
- Client type (browser, mobile)
- Toolbars and browser (Google Suggest, web history)
- Application focus (email, instant messenger, RSS etc..)
BOTW local. Great lead in
Best of the Web has been a top notch operation running since 1994. They are slowly overtaking DMOZ in terms of reach and attention. Their model has progressed so much that the listings they provide are well worth the value.
BOTW now has a local product http://local.botw.org. It is in Beta, and free, so you should get your listing there while you can. Boost your local profile. BOTW.org has proven that they can build a product properly and ethically.
Are Paid Links Really Evil? Of Course…
NOT!
Shouldn’t the bottom line be about relevance? I am not completely sure that I understand the point of a paid link being considered as something as evil and taboo. If I am running a shoe store and I have the opportunity to pay for a link in a blog about basketball shoes, should I? Of course I should. It is relevant and useful for the visitor of the basketball shoe blog and for the visitor to my site.
Instead, the search engines like Google feel it is “better for the user” if I create some B.S. link bait to get other sites to link to mine. How can you say that me creating a silly “throw the ball in the basket game” and getting other sites to link to mine (many off topic) is better than me spending $20 a month advertising via a link purchase. I just don’t get it. How is the more value to the user by generating link bait? There isn’t.
Greg Boser brought up this point at SES. He asked why coming up with irrelevant link bait is rewarded while purchasing a relevant ad on a niche site violates Google’s guidelines.
Google, please get your head around this one. At the very least, lay out your reasons.
301 Redirect – Apache
I would consider this one of the first steps that you should take when establishing a new web site. If you are searching for “301 redirect” you probably already know why. Here is a simple .htaccess file that you can use to do the redirect. You will also find this referred to as a “mod rewrite”
- Create a new file in your favorite editing program. Notepad is an easy choice.
- Paste the following:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursitenamehere\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursitenamehere.com/$1 [L,R=301] - Save the file as .htaccess
- Upload to your server
- Test by going to yoursitenamehere.com. This should redirect you to the URL www.yoursitenamehere.co
- Check the server header response to be safe. Should return “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”
If you are using a web design program like Dreamweaver, it might tell you that it can’t find a valid editor for this extension (it doesn’t have one). Simply right click on the file and select “open using Dreamweaver”. You can also open/edit, in notepad.
If you are on a windows host, you can view the following method to handle an ISAPI rewrite using IIS.
Webcast Online Publicity and Link-Building 2007
Webcast Online Publicity and Link-Building 2007 (2/15/2007)
Presented by: Eric Ward, President EricWard.com
This is a summary of the webcast. The topics were a bit basic, but informative. The Q&A could have been a little longer and would have had more value if the question submission took place in advance. Eric Ward did a fine job and offered some good advice.
Google Backlinks
For those of you who have always wanted Google to open up their back link check (example “link:www.example.com”), the time has come. Well, sort of. Google isn’t going to display every single backlink to your site, but they are at least getting better. This is especially helpful since the last update to the links that could be viewed using the “link” command dropped dramatically. Some were complaining that it was 1/10th of the previous data. Depending on the quality of the links, that was sometimes the case, sometimes even less than that number.
Read more about the backlink update here: Google back link update
The new tool is found within Google Webmaster Central and can only be viewed by the site owner (in theory). Remember the little issue that Google had when they released sitemaps? I have faith that GOOG will be able to keep this one secure. In fact, I like the fact that this will be a private tool. When you put a lot of effort into building some nice links, you hate to simply give that list of sites to a competitor (Are you listening YHOO and MSN?).
I wonder if there will be a day when Google doesn’t display any link information to the public. Can you think of a reason why they should or shouldn’t?