Site after site that I visit lately has been showing a tendency for using footer links to run their internal SEO link structure and anchor text optimization. While this practice, in years past, held value, today I rarely ever recommend it. Here's why: Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically Footer links are often not the first link on t...
I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again: in my opinion, the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I'm going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases 'site' or 'information architecture' interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)
A few days after new content shows up in Google, it will sometimes flicker out of the SERPS for a few hours. Apparently, this is common knowledge to some SEOs. This is not common knowledge to programmers like me, and I nearly made a tin foil hat in preparation for the googlicopters when I learned the project (Linkscape) that I'd worked on for months had disappeared from all SERPs on th...
Thanks to the SEOmoz Q+A, we get to monitor a lot of the hot button issues that hit the SEO world, and as Jane noted to me during a meeting today, they always seem to come in waves. The latest buzz (and flurry of questions) comes around the practice of PageRank Sculpting. We've discussed this topic in some detail previously on SEOmoz (...
Google's got a blog post out today (and SELand covers it) about how they now recommend that webmasters and site owners DO NOT rewrite their ugly dynamic URLs to be clean and static. What's the reasoning behind this? ...
Rand recently debuted his new series of Headsmacking Tips (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), which comprise of "Why didn't I think of that?" SEO suggestions, tricks, and recommendations. Today I came across a headsmacking revelation, but it wasn't of the "Why didn't I think of that?" variety; rather, it was more like "Why are they DOING that?!"
The Internet, as fragile and infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly has some great features that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in reality. Redirecting phone numbers. When I moved to Seattle (two years ago last Saturday), I acquired a local number. In the days before Facebook became microchipped into everyone's forehead, I had lit...
Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. ...
Lots and lots of people sign up for SEOmoz's PRO membership, and I have to tell you that on a personal level, every single one makes me feel honored, humble and yes, even a bit guilty about reading comic books last night instead of working on new tools/q+a/tips/etc. One of the big frustrations PRO members have, though, is that they can't find (or don't even know about) a lot of the cool st...
I know, I know. Google's indexing Flash and Flash developers can rejoice now that their content is SEO-friendly. Sorry - I don't buy it for a second. Flash content is fundamentally different from HTML on webpage URLs and being able to parse links in the Flash code and text snippets does not make F...
The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project. The following list may not be groundbreaking but then SEO often isn't. I think the following all fall under the heading of advanced common sense...
A quote from Google's Guidelines on Cloaking: Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. ...
It's been a big month for false positives and getting caught with spam, and I've never been one to break up a theme. Short post, but an important one that every dev team should be aware of. The story starts with a smart SEOmoz member, Per Svanström, getting stumped by a perfectly legitimate, white hat subdirectory, with plenty of ...
Did you know apple.com doesn't rank in google.co.uk with the "pages from the uk" flag checked? On further inspection this is because Apple uses Akamai which dynamically changes the dns settings to ensure the best user experience. Given that Googlebot always crawls from the US this means that the dns always returns a US based ip address, even though there are Akamai servers serving apples website in the UK.