Seo Blog - SEO Tips and Tricks - Search Engine Optimization and marketing

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2007-01-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

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2007-01-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

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Apogee Search Marketing

2007-01-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

Today I found a really great blog over at apogee search marketing.

The apogee blog talks about search engine optimization and marketing. Some of the recent post's are " The Hype and the Reality of Link Baiting" and " Google and Duplicate Content". I have read these post's and I had to blog about them as they are a great resource to webmasters and seo's like me and YOU!

Check out Paid Search Management at apogee search marketing.

Apogee Search Marketing

2007-01-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

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technorati tag

2006-12-16T14:55:00.000-08:00

Technorati Profile

Technorati tag

2006-12-16T14:53:00.002-08:00

Technorati Profile

Technorati tag

2006-12-16T14:53:00.001-08:00

Technorati Profile

Technorati tag

2006-12-16T14:53:00.000-08:00

Technorati Profile

Text Link Ad link calculator looks like it inflates it's own link partners worth

2006-06-02T14:49:00.000-07:00

Today I was going through all of my text link ads I have through text link ads and I was curious to see what TLS's paid link calculator thought of its own sites.

I was very suprised to see that they are grossly misrepresenting their link partners paid link worth. Whats funny is that they are misrepresenting it but the true price is much MUCH less.

Here is an example. I am interested in hearing what people think on this!

go to there tool at
http://www.text-link-ads.com/link_calculator.php

Then use the website:
http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/state/alabama.html

Then use other for the type

Then click on one text link ad.

make sure you choose the right fold.

They charge me $26 which i think might be a little to much.

Article distribution - is it really worth it?

2006-06-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

Is article distribution really worht it??

I am just going to jump right into this one. No bullshitting ok.

After 4 months we only had around 20 real websites pick up the article after submitting these articles to MANY different article sites.

The problem is most of these site that pick up these articles are not worth mentioning AT ALL.

As far as article distrubution for less competitive words I think aritcle distribution is very effective.

In conclusion if you think you are going to get these great SERP results just because of article distribution you are WRONG!!!!

it seems to work more effectivly with smaller less competitive keywords.

Till next time.

Google aims to take over your TV screen

2006-05-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

I found this information at the business online

Threat to traditional broadcasters

GOOGLE is planning a new version of its search engine – designed for TV screens – that the company’s co-founder and its chief executive believe will rival traditional broadcasting.

Chief executive Eric Schmidt told The Business: “At the most people currently have access to only around 500 television channels,” said Schmidt. “They should have access to everything – that is where we are heading.”

As they prepare to make the move from the PC to the television, internet service providers and broadcasters are trying to develop electronic programme guides (EPGs) that will enable viewers with a broadband internet connection to choose from a far wider range of video and film entertainment than is currently available. And Google believes it can offer a world-beating EPG.

By Tony Glover -
28 May 2006

What Google knows about your domain name

2006-05-30T10:28:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of speculation about the information that Google has about domain names. Last year, Google became a domain name registrar but they haven't offered domain registration services in the meantime.

There must be another reason why Google decided to become a registrar. What does Google know about your domain name and what do they not know?

Why did Google become a domain registrar?

It seems that Google doesn't intent to buy or sell domain names. It's much more likely that Google wanted to have greater access to domain information.

As a registrar, Google has access to the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) of other registrars. While Google doesn't have access to the customer records of VeriSign or other registrars, they can now easily query their WHOIS records.

What can Google do with that information?

Google probably wants to analyze domain names. By regularly checking the WHOIS information of a web site, Google can track the history of a domain name.

That allows Google to find relations between different domains names and changes in ownership. If a domain name has a new owner, Google might reconsider the value of the domain name in the ranking algorithm.

Some people buy old domain names to avoid the Google sandbox effect and to benefit from existing links. If Google can detect the ownership change of a domain name, it might become more difficult to benefit from old domain names.

What can Google not do?

Google cannot access the customer information of other registrars. They only have access to the same information that you get when you use a public WHOIS service.

That means that Google cannot access your data if you use the domain privacy services that some registrars offer. However, this could also lead to problems.

If you hide too much information about your domain name, your domain name could be flagged in Google's ranking algorithm and Google's trust in your domain name might be reduced.

Its impossible to know what google is going to do with this information. Stay up to date with my SEO tips and tricks to find out ways to integrate new ideas and search engine techniques so you dont get banned!

Google Page Rank truly NO BIG DEAL

2006-05-25T10:40:00.000-07:00

Many webmasters are still obsessed with the green PageRank bar in Google's toolbar. Last month, marketing expert Mike Grehan interviewed Google's Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who knows exactly how the Google ranking algorithm works. He confirmed that PageRank is not the only important factor for Google.

PageRank is not a big deal

Matt Cutts made a clear statement about PageRank in the interview: "There are over 100 factors in ranking. And PageRank is just one of them. It's an important factor, but it's by no means the be-all and end-all."

The green PR bar in Google's toolbar doesn't mean much. If you want to get good results with search engines, you should not get obsessed with that value.

What can you do to get your web site listed on Google if PageRank is not a big deal?

As Google's Matt Cutts explained in the interview, Google uses many factors to rank web pages. The problem is to find out which factors exactly influence the ranking of your web site.

WEB CEO is a program that can influence the ranking of your web pages. That allows you to find out which factors exactly you have to tweak and how you have to do it so that your web site can get top rankings on Google.

Google (and other major search engines) basically want two things:

good web page content that can be crawled by search engines
Good inbound links from reputable web sites

If your web site has interesting content that can be crawled by search engines and good inbound links than it is difficult not to get high search engine rankings.

What should people pay for a text link on your site??

2006-05-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how much to charge people for text link ads on your site??

Text link brokers has built a program that can help you determine what to charge.

Check out their tool!

The Effect of Co-Citation

2006-05-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

The effect of co-citation is often overlooked by search engine optimizers. The other web sites to which your link partners link can influence your search engine rankings.

Here's an example: web sites 1, 2, 3 and 4 all link to the web sites A, B, C and D. Although A, B, C and D don't link to each other, search engines think that A, B, C and D are related to each other because the same web sites link to them:

If A, B, C and D are all linked from 1, 2, 3 and 4 they might be related to one another, even though they don’t directly link to each other. If A, B, C and D are all linked by many other web sites, they have a strong relationship. The more web sites they are linked by, the stronger the relationship.

If your web site is web site A, you should make sure that web sites B, C and D are related to your site.

Co-citation and bad link pages

Suppose you have a web site selling shoes. If you are listed on a web site that links to gambling sites, viagra sites and your shoe store then search engines might think that your web site is related to gambling and viagra.

The search engines look at the link pages and check to which other web sites the pages link. If the other pages are gambling and viagra sites then search engines think that your web site is also related to gambling and viagra.

That means that it might be difficult to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

Co-citation and good link pages

t's important that the other links on the web page that links to you are related to your site. If you're listed in the "Shoes" category of a link directory then all web sites in the same category are usually also about shoes. When search engines look at this page and check the links to other sites they will think that your web site is related to shoes.

That means that it will be much easier to get high rankings for search terms that are about shoes.

What does this mean to your link campaigns?

When you exchange links with other web sites, make sure that the link to your site is on a page that lists related links. It's not necessary that the complete other web site is about your topic. It's okay if the other web site has a single category page that deals with the topic of your web site. The link to your web site should be listed on that page then.

The more pages of the other site are about your topic, the better. Make sure that the link to your site is in a good neighborhood and that the other links are related to yours.

If you want to find out which web sites Google considers related to your web site, go to Google and enter related:http://www.your-domain.com/ in the search box. Replace your-domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no space after the colon.

Yahoo new patent "link based spam detection" in use with PageRank and TrustRank.

2006-05-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has filed a new patent with the name "Link based spam detection". It's another attempt from Yahoo to improve the relevancy of their search results by detecting links from link farms and other shady link sources.

Yahoo uses PageRank and TrustRank to rank your web site

Yahoo mentions both PageRank and TrustRank in the patent application. That's interesting because both terms are trademarks of Google:

"PageRank is a family of well known algorithms for assigning numerical weights to hyperlinked documents (or web pages or web sites) indexed by a search engine. PageRank uses link information to assign global importance scores to documents on the web.[...]. The PageRank of a document is a measure of the link-based popularity of a document on the Web.

TrustRank is a link analysis technique related to PageRank. TrustRank is a method for separating reputable, good pages on the Web from web spam. TrustRank is based on the presumption that good documents on the Web seldom link to spam. TrustRank involves two steps, one of seed selection and another of score propagation. The TrustRank of a document is a measure of the likelihood that the document is a reputable (i.e., a nonspam) document."

Although Yahoo uses the terms PageRank and TrustRank in the patent application, it's likely that the algorithms are not identical to the algorithms that are used by Google.

How Yahoo tries to identify spam sites by using PageRank and TrustRank

In the patent application, Yahoo explains how they want to find spam farms with the help of PageRank and TrustRank:

"A spam farm is an artificially created set of pages that point to a spam target page to boost its significance. Trust-ranking ("TrustRank") is a form of PageRank with a special teleportation (i.e., jumps) to a subset of high-quality pages.

Using techniques described herein, a search engine can automatically find bad pages (web spam pages) and more specifically, find those web spam pages created to boost their significance through the creation of artificial spam farms (collections of referencing pages).

In specific embodiments, a PageRank process with uniform teleportation and a trust-ranking process are carried out and their results are compared as part of a test of the "spam-ness" of a page or a collection of pages."

What does this mean to your web site?

Search engine engineers are not stupid. The search engine algorithms are evolving faster than ever. For that reason, it is important that you don't use "quick fix" solutions to get links to your web site.

If a service promises hundreds of links to your web site with no work or efforts on your part, then chances are that these links are from a link farm. Search engines don't like link farms and some web sites even get penalized by participating in a link farm system.

Golden Search Triangle

2006-05-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how visible your natural organic search results are. Well a company called Enquiro has put together a study and eye chart that shows what portions of googles search engine results page are looked at the most and what parts are not.

Whats interesting is how much attention the top 10 listings get.
organic rank visibility

Rank 1 - 100%
Rank 2 - 100%
Rank 3 - 100%
Rank 4 - 85%
Rank 5 - 60%
Rank 6 - 50%
Rank 7 - 50%
Rank 8 - 30%
Rank 9 - 30%
Rank 10 - 20%

To check out more go to http://www.enquiro.com/eye-tracking-pr.asp

Colbert Speaks to Bush and Press

2006-05-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

I dont normally post anything about politics and or famous people but Stephen Colbert is one of the funniest people on TV. I love watching his shows and he was recently invited to speak at the white house correspondents dinner. I found this on blogscopped.

Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report managed to speak at the White House Correspondents Dinner yesterday. Main target of the satire was a biased press who stopped questioning government decisions, and press conferences where certain critical questions stay unanswered. Editor & Publisher comments, “As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling, and left immediately.” (Does anyone have a hi-quality version of this?)

MSN, Google Most 'Relevant' Search Results

2006-05-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

I found this whiel doing some online research today and I just cant believe this at ALLL!!!!!

There is no way MSN bring's relevant results to me. They only have ever brought me the freshest spam sites. That is probably why MSN brought on Steve Berkowitz who is the chief executive of rival Internet company Ask.com, to head Microsoft's own Internet business.

You need to make your own opinions out of this but MSN is known for only bringin in results of web pages that are just created, spammy, worthless results. This is not sitting well in the SEO community.

Do a comparison on these searches and see for yourself

- http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=condoleezza+rice

- http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=auto+loans

- http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=payday+loans

put the same searches into google and compare them...... You tell me what engine pulls more relavant information..

Here are the articles I found.

http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=36700

http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2006/05/03/study_msn_google_most_relevant_search_results/

Hidden Input Fields for Google Analytics

2006-05-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

I was on bloggscope today and found out that you can type into certain fields for your google analytics.

Check this out!hidden input fields for google analytics.

Google to notify some webmasters of penalizations!

2006-04-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

I found the following information while checking some other Major SEO blogs recently.

As of late I'm sure you all have been made aware of the publicly called out Domain names and respective companies who have been BANNED from google like traffic-power.com.

Well I found this post from threadwatch.org and they reference something MATT CUTTs from google had to say about new rules implented with the google service for webmasters.

Apparently, if you sign up and implement Google Sitemaps onto your site you will then receive warnings before being banned from google if you are not in accordance with their Webmaster guidelines.

Here is the article.

Matt Cutts today announced that Google is starting a trial program to notify some webmasters if their sites have been penalized. To be eligible, one must register for the Google Sitemaps service.

From reading his blog entry on the notification service, it sounds as if they do not intend to notify black-hats of penalties, but only white-hats or people who are guilty of relatively benign or minor infractions.

I think this is a really great move by Google! Obviously, they're also seeking to increase registrations with their Sitemaps service, but this additional feature offering is making that overall program look increasingly worthwhile to me.

I met Vanessa Fox from the Google Sitemaps team at SES in NYC this spring, and I told her I was impressed at the new features she presented for Sitemaps: they are now providing webmasters with reports on various errors and impediments to spidering pages as well (errors are reported such as invalid formatting of robots.txt, etc). Previously, I hadn't seen a lot of benefit to using Sitemaps.

I think that we're in the midst of an ongoing sea change wherein the SEs are no longer considering SEOs to be pesky irritants, but beneficial collaborators. The white-hat SEOs, of course. I really hope this trial program is successful, and that more visibility might be provided for SEOs and webmasters.

This is good news for any black hat'rs out there and very useful for new webmaster and SEO beginners. Finally!!!!

Googlebot and Mediabot - Can you get in trouble?

2006-04-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

On the PubCon Publishers Search and Marketing Conferences in Boston, Google's Matt Cutts revealed interesting information about Mediabot and how it could influence your Google rankings.

What are Googlebot and Mediabot?

Search engines use software programs (so-called bots or spiders) to index web pages. These bots follow all links they can find on the Internet to index web pages for their search engines.

The name of Google's bot is Googlebot. If you see an entry with the name Googlebot in your web site statistics then Googlebot has visited your web site.

In addition to Googlebot, Google also operates another bot with the name Mediabot. Mediabot is the bot that is used by Google to index web sites that display AdSense ads. Google indexes these pages to find out which ads Google should display on these pages.

What's the problem with Mediabot?

Until recently, Google has denied that displaying AdSense ads on your web pages has any effect on your Google rankings. However, some webmasters noticed that web pages that have only been visited by Mediabot and not by Googlebot showed up in Google's search results.

Google's Matt Cutts confirmed at the Boston PubCon 2006 that the MediaBot pages can also be used for Google's main index:

"Pages with AdSense will not be indexed more frequently. It’s literally just a crawl cache, so if e.g. our news crawl fetched a page and then Googlebot wanted the same page, we’d retrieve the page from the crawl cache. But there’s no boost at all in rankings if you’re in AdSense or Google News. You don’t get any more pages crawled either."

How can this get you in trouble?

If you serve different pages to Googlebot and Mediabot then Google might ban your web site because you use cloaking on your web site. Cloaking means that you're showing different pages to users than to search engines.

As Mediabot analyzes the web pages you serve for your visitors it's easy for Google to find out if you present extra pages for Googlebot. If you do something special for Googlebot then Google knows that you're cloaking.

What does this mean to you?

You shouldn't use cloaking or any other unethical search engine optimization method for your web site. Search engines will detect it sooner or later and they will ban your web site from their indexes.

Do hackers hijack your search engine listings?

2006-04-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Are your search engine rankings still yours? Other people might hijack your search engine rankings and they might steal your web site visitors. The worst thing is that you might not even notice it.

Are you losing visitors without knowing it?

Imagine your web site URL is listed in the search engine results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Most people that click on your URL in the search engine results are sent to your web site.

However, some people that click on your web site URL are sent to a totally unrelated web site that has nothing to do with your site.

Although your web site URL is displayed in the browser, people see a totally different site that has nothing to do with you or your company.

How do these hackers steal your visitors?

The hackers exploit a flaw in the software of some domain name servers (DNS). The hackers send incorrect information to these DNS server so that the server redirects the traffic for the URLs to another site.

If the DNS server does not validate that the information has come from an authoritative source it will send visitors to the wrong pages. That means that people who enter your URL in the web browser will be sent to the hacker's pages instead of your pages.

How can you protect your web site?

It's important that you use a reliable host that does not use an open DSN server. Go to www.dnsreport.com and enter the URL of your web site. You should see PASS in the Open DNS servers line. If your domain name fails the test, you should contact your web host.

Using a secure DNS server is crucial if you don't want to expose your web site to hackers. If your web host cannot fix the DNS problems, you should use a new web host.

Note that a secure DNS server only makes sure that no-one hijacks your search engine rankings. To get high search engine rankings, you must make sure that search engines can parse your web pages and that you have many inbound links that tell search engines that your web site is important.

The war between the SEM and Search Engines

2006-04-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

A figurative war is going on right now ! It’s a war between the cavalier SEM’s who fight for site awarness and the Giant Search Engines. It has been a long ongoing saga that unlike star wars see’s no end!

The relationship between the Search Engine and the SEM are co dependant on each other for existence. On one side, you have the SEO professional, whose main goal is to use all SEM techniques, skills and knowledge of how the search engines rank sites to manipulate a site into a top ranking, ethically. On the other side you have the search engines who's job is to provide their users the highest number of most relevant results.

Somewhere along the line the SEO professional turned into the figurative (darth vadar) in the search engines eyes as they now look at the SEM as “Spammers”. A good example is when Inktomi accidentally left their
Spam Database open to the public. Virtually making aware blackhat techniques and calling out close to a Million URLs for spamming.

Inktomi’s main purpose of implementing these types of filters is basically to limit the amount of spammy sites you might see. Sites like porno sites, spammy sites and domains, affiliate sites and SEO companies.

Since then all major search engines have picked up some sort of way to filter out techniques used by SEM’s. I’m not just talking about black hat techniques either. I am also talking about White hat techniques! The use of normal SEO tools any SEM would use have become under attack as well. For example, take a look at the Google back link checker. Have you ever thought why does MSN and Yahoo show hundreds of links tracing back to my domain but Google only shows a few? As this question is still being debated, it is pretty obvious that this tool is just being manipulated by the Search Engine because the only people checking back links are SEM’s and the less information a search engine can give us the easier it will be for them to control their results.

The hunt continues with the recent call out and
ban of Traffic-power.com and some of their client sites. It is not a policy of Google to confirm or deny these things but as of late they have been changing their policies in hopes of educating webmasters of their guidelines.

Building a conservative link campaign is something 5 years ago us SEM’s didn’t have to really worry about but this too has been filtered in the search engines. I was building a link campaign for a car site and it was about 300 inbound links gained within a month and my site was banned from Google’s index. Now 300 inbound links might not be that big of a deal to an older more known site but for a site no one has heard of before I think it raised a red flag back at the Google camp! I was able to get re-included back in their index about 3 weeks later but now I am going whit hat with the site to prevent this from happening again.

Recently we have seen evidence that
“hand jobs” are being done as well. So not only do SEM’s need to worry about algorithmic filtering but also people sifting through SERP’s to find anyone not in compliance with a search engines guidelines.

Where does this leave the SEM’s?

As new filters are created they are also detected and broadcast through forums and other SEO and webmaster community sites. The use of the nofollow tags can be utilized to make spiders not follow and index pages you DON’T want the SE’s to see. Like I said before, Search Engines and SEM’s are co-dependant so as long as there is a Search engine there is a need for a SEM although our techniques are ever changing, they will have guidelines which allow us the ability to see what it takes to get rankings for them. Through the use of forums, blog’s and enthusiast sites we are able to discuss what has worked through trial and error. This is our only line of defense since the Search Engines don’t normally broadcast what they are doing and their intentions.

Till next time stay connected to whats going on in the SEO world and fool around with some test site’s and experiment with different techniques to see what effects you get!