SEO

What kind of links can you safely build for SEO benefit?

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So it’s been about 6 years since I’ve posted on this blog.  Wow!  Well I’ve been busy running a growing agency and had other priorities.  Hence the default WP template here and lack of general direction and purpose.  Anyhow, I’ve recently (mid-2013) sold my ownership in the agency and will be serving as an advisor/consultant moving forward, which means I have more free time in my day-to-day to provide verbal discourse such as the below.  Enjoy!  🙂

Question:  What kind of links can you safely build for SEO benefit in 2014 and beyond?

Simply put, none.

It’s depressing to say that, and I think just a bit “unfair” too, but just because I don’t like the situation doesn’t make it less true.

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Categories SEO

Google Now Indexing URLs with ID Parameters???

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I just posted about Teleflora’s site design, and in doing a little digging I noticed they had t I found their page for “A Dozen Premium Red Roses” and “Two Dozen Premium Red Roses” and was curious how they ranked for terms like “dozen red roses”, etc. Interestingly, their pages use an ID parameter, which … Read more

Categories SEO

Indexing New Pages on Existing Domains – Google, Yahoo, MSN

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I thought I had written a post about 6 or 7 months back about the speed of indexing a newly-designed site with new page URLs on an existing domain – comparing the speed at which new pages were added to the visible index in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I just spent ten minutes looking for … Read more

Categories SEO

A Few Words About CSS and Indexing Pages

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From an email I just sent out… Getting pages indexed is not usually a big problem. Typically if you have issues w/ it its due to either complicated URLs with way too many parameters (common on e-com sites) or lack of good basic text-link navigation and/or site map. A hugely unpopular site might also have … Read more

Tips for Online Press Releases

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I’m by no means experienced in syndicating online press releases, but I do know and understand the value of the topic. I’ve picked up a number of tips through a little bit of modest experience, as well as tips I’ve heard and read from others. Today I was asked by a client: What is the … Read more

What is SEO?

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I was just asked this question. Its sort of a tough one for me to answer – b/c I almost don’t know where to start – its such a huge piece of what I do, yet I need to realize that its still a fairly niche/specific idea that is not by any means as widespread … Read more

Aaron Wall Interviews Matt Cutts

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Aaron Wall of SEO Book (who BTW, happens to be a great guy and really cares about helping out others) recently interviewed Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google who is pretty well-known in the SEO community. In particular, I’d like to highlight one Q&A from the interview: Is all SEO spam? Absolutely not–I need to … Read more

Organic “Quality Indicators”

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Andy Hagans has a nice post on Threadwatch about Quality Indicators in on-page optimization. I agree with him in that as this data is useful, its likely that it either does or may have some sort of impact. IMO a search engine should use anything (legal) that it can to determine quality. Obviously link popularity … Read more

Categories SEO

SEOmoz Article – Search Engine Ranking Factors

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Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz wrote a nice article outlining search engine ranking factors. In reading it, a few things seem to be repeated a few times – but as they are important, and as the article is aimed at being at least reasonably comprehensive I see no harm in that.

Categories SEO

Google Page Removal Emails – A Welcome Initiative

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A post at Threadwatch discusses a new initiative being tested by Google to notify webmasters when Google finds certain “black hat” type techniques being used that are against its guidelines. In essence, Google would send an email to the webmaster notifying them: 1) that the pages have been removed 2) what pages and generally what … Read more

Categories SEO

Copyscape and Content Stealing

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I’ve seen the “protected by Copyscape” images before, but never bothered to check it out. I always assumed it was some code-related method to prevent people from being able to copy and paste or something of that nature. You know what happens when we assume 🙂 http://www.copyscape.com/ – per Willie Crawford’s blog Anyhow, their site … Read more

META Tags… Seriously

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If you’ve followed the search engines for any reasonable period of time you’ve likely seen a number of very old articles about META tags. Perhaps even more likely, you’ve probably seen dozens more articles since roughly 1997 or so proclaiming that META tags are dead, useless, etc. Honestly, I don’t know exactly how big a … Read more

Categories SEO

What I KNOW about SEO

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Many SEO specialists will tell you that SEO is part science, part art. I’ll skew even more to the art side of things, but perhaps I’ll classify it and maybe call it “practical art” or something like that. In the quest to gain high rankings and relevant traffic, some spend many hours conducting research, collecting … Read more

Categories SEO

MSN Showing Less Organic Listings

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Until recently I’ve not followed MSN Search very closely. For that matter, I take the general philosophy that one should spend the bulk of their time focusing on their own site, rather than the engines… but that’s another post. Anyhow, I was doing a product search and noticed something quite interesting. I then went to … Read more

Google Not Recognizing Capital Letters in File Names?

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I just noticed a little something in Google related to file names that I don’t believe I’ve seen mentioned much (read: at all). It appears that while there is much in the way of advice and recommendations about including your targeted keywords in the file name of a page file, Google does not seem to … Read more

Categories SEO

Msnbetter Thangoogle Polish SEO Contest

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Apparently another SEO contest has sprung up. It seems to be within the Polish community, and this time the search phrase is “msnbetter thangoogle”. I would argue that statement in many cases (though not all), but oh well… Some people have got alot of time on their hands, to be creating sites for imaginery search … Read more

New MSN Search Now Live!

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I heard rumors that it was supposed to be 90-95% live yesterday or even the day before (these were predictions over the weekend) and I had noticed some stats on some of my sites that indicated more visitors from MSN – visitors who searched on terms that the sites were significantly more highly ranked on … Read more