For a long time, if you asked me about spamming the search engines, whether with hardcore black hat tactics or merely gray hat link acquisition, I'd say that in the long run, neither was the right move. Building a great site and a great brand through hard work, white hat links, solid content and marketing strategies has always been my path of choice. It still is today, but my faith is definitel...
One of the most common complaints I've heard from webmasters and SEOs in the past 18 months has been around Google's inaction on spam reports. While the web spam team has been aggressive about asking webmasters to contribute via their spam report form (though they prefer the version in Webmaster Tools as this ...
Ok, so you've all read about The Best Spam Submission Ever which was illustrated ever so eloquently (and if you haven't read it, please read it now... uhm well ok after you read this - it's awesomely funny!). As the post mentions, we sift through many YOUmoz entries every day determini...
Common Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines -------------------- Unfortunately, over the past 12 years, a great number of misconceptions have emerged about how the search engines operate and what's required to perform effectively. In this section, we'll cover the most common of these, and explain the "real story" behind the myth.
Today, between meetings at the office, I had a brief IM chat with Jane, whose globetrotting ways have taken her to the UK for SMX London. Jane noted that our website - www.seomoz.org - was up for review on a search engine panel today, and received generally positive feedback from the engineers. One notable exception, however, was the fact that...
What happened was that their past had just caught up with them. They had previously engaged a local SEO firm with tactics that were a bit past their sell-by date (mainly consisting of a huge link network of sub-domains off the SEO company's own site and some other properties). There was not only a question of tactics here, but also of plain common sense - not only was part of the link network on the SEO company's site, but so were proud links to "our clients" (all of whom got slapped, we believe).
Yesterday afternoon, as I was at home recovering from a form of black death known as the common head cold, I came across Danny Sullivan's piece on Search Engine Land about his dealings with a lazy link broker. I recommend reading Danny's post, which details how he questioned a person who wanted a link on the Sphinn.com homepage with the anchor text "search engine optimisation." The person represented a UK-based SEO firm. I'm not saying that reading or even acknowledging the status of Sphinn is necessary for success in our industry, but one should probably avoid trying to buy links from a site SEOs and search engine employees read with regularity.
For a long time, I've held the personal belief that to be a the best search marketer you can be requires knowledge of a vast information set. From web crawling and algorithmic...
Today at SMX Sydney (which I'll have a more detailed post about this weekend), Danny Sullivan and I sat together on a site review panel in the late afternoon. One of the sites we were asked to review was DiscoverTasmania.com. During our investigations, we stumbled across some remarkable cloaking f...
Let's try a little excercise... Common features of spam domains include: Long domain names .info, .cc, .us and other cheap, easy to grab TLDs Short registration period (1 year, maybe 2) High ratio of ad blocks to content Javascript redirects from initial landing pages Use of common, high-commer...
Biased manipulation runs wild on Wikipedia and the extent to which it influences the pages of that site will probably never be known. In the field of SEO, where every link counts, Wikipedia's reference links at the bottom of articles and their external links in the body text of articles was once considered gold in terms of value for driving up search engine rankings. Early this year, Wikipedia ...
This morning brings news from around the web of losses to the Google Toolbar PageRank (the little green pixels displayed in the toolbar) for a myriad of sites. I've gone through many of the threads and tried to pull together an accounting of websites that have been "reportedly" affected by the update. Hopefully, by collecting this data, and combining it with reports in the comments, we c...
This morning, Andy Greenberg wrote an article for the front page of Forbes' technology section - Google Purges the Payola. The article focuses on the ongoing battle between search engines and paid links - a battle that most see as unlikely to ever end: ...
I'm barely qualified to bring up this subject, as SEOmoz has certainly had our fair share of asking a friend to submit something to Digg, give us a boost on Reddit or add a tag at Del.icio.us, but I was pretty surprised to see the level to which social media manipulation has been taken:...