Content from users can provide real value. This post will arm you with tips to help increase your user comments by more than simply "having a call to action" or "writing compelling content."
This tactic is so simple and obvious, it's probably illegal somewhere. Every day, the web produces millions of pieces of content. Several thousand are almost certainly of interest to folks in your niche - those who might be reading your blog or sharing the content you produce. Creating unique stories requires creativity, research and time that many in the field don't have. Bu...
Do you have what it takes to become a superstar blogger? While anybody can set up a blog…not everyone can take that blog and turn it into a world-renowned blog that ends up on Time Magazine’s best blog list or Ad Age’s Power 150....
When you look around at successful blogs -- whatever industry or topic -- there are several undeniable basics to success. And it starts with blog posts that kill it…rather than get killed. But what kills a blog post? Here’s a list of 12 things. Ignore them and you will have a tough time being successful.
I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the...
Recently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I've seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral. He touches briefly upon the importance of your title for click through rate and sharability, but in this post I'd like to take a more in depth look at titles and how they help spread your content.
In years past, I'd occassionally post about various aspects of webspam - manipulative links, cloaking, thin content, etc. In these posts, I'd use examples I'd seen - sometimes particularly egregious ones, other times more subtle offenders - both to help illustrate the points and to provide concrete evidence. It's hard to say "link spam is a big problem and Google's su...
Understanding the basics of link based spam detection can improve your understanding of link valuation and help you understand how search engines approach the problem of spam detection, which can lead to better link building practices.
I step back from the black-hat/white-hat debate to look at the broader picture of marketing ethics. Bonus: 5 crudely drawn illustrations.
I hate webspam. I hate what it's done to the reputation of hardworking, honest, smart web marketers who help websites earn search traffic. I hate how it's poisoned the acronym SEO; a title I'm proud to wear. I hate that it makes legitimate marketing tactics less fruitful. And I hate, perhaps most of all, when it works. Here's a search for "buy propecia," which is a drug I actua...
In the past few months, I have been watching a very unsettling trend unfold in very competitive ecommerce search results on Google. It appears that huge amounts of money are put into place to systematically and successfully manipulate highly competitive search terms in order to sell fake merchandise of almost every bigger brand out there. Some of these sites even...
First off, let me just say that there are a lot of people smarter and more experienced in scalably attacking web spam than I am working in the Search Quality division at Google and specifically on the Spam team. However, as a search enthusiast, a Google fan and an SEO, it seems to me that, all due respect, they're getting played - hard.Word is, the Spam team's key personnel had some time...
I recently heard a story about a local SEO shop whose customers, overnight, almost ALL lost ranking in Google. Apparently, the shop had been engaging in “black hat” techniques. I’m pretty sure the teller of the tale made a “tsk tsk” sound at the end to help emphasize this as another instance where people who do evil get their just desserts.
During my first few years in the SEO field, half of the sites I'd visit - those my SEO brethren in the forums or over email owned - were what today we'd call "over-optimized." They tended to have features like:Keyword after keyword stuffed into the title element of every pageOverly-lengthy and keyword rich URL stringsPage filled with "SEO'd" con...
