Think about Link Equity and Content Value

Link Equity
SEO’s used to talk a lot about preserving PageRank - I used to think of PageRank as like water, and building a good site archtecture was about funneling this into the right sections of the site in the right manner.
PageRank as a useful SEO term is pretty much redundant, but Aaron Wall now speaks [...]

Losing out by not using PPC?

The backbone of my business is SEO, but I’ve come to realise that I am completely missing out by not having embraced PPC.
For example, I started my first real affiliate program recently. I can sit and wait for leads via SEO. Or I can push traffic in via PPC and generate instant revenues, and tweak [...]

Tip: Google indexing faster via Google Blog Search pings?

Marketing Pilgrim reports - and says it has confirmed - webmaster chatter suggesting that pinging Google’s blog search service will get your blog indexed faster.
This sounds remarkably similar to last year when it was demonstrated that adding your blog feed to “my yahoo” also expedited indexing.
So if you’re using Wordpress and/or vbseo, there’s a new [...]

Looking to the future of SEO - great article recommendations

There have been a number of complete gems posted around this week which all look to the future of SEO.
I saw Danny Sullivan do a presentation on the future of Google at SES London in 2005 and it was frightening - but as Matt Cutts points out in one of the following articles, SEO’s are [...]

How long before SEO hacking goes mainstream?

I had to look twice when writing the following story at Platinax News: New Storm Worm inserts links in user messages.
The short of the story is that this is a worm that - after infecting a user’s PC - embeds links in messages the user posts to blogs, forums, and other online communities.
I had to [...]

Now is the time to have a business plan for your websites

The First Age of The Internet is fast coming to a close, and with that comes the removal of early opportunities and low-hanging fruit.
That means if you have a serious plan for a website, you need to push on getting it out now, and fast.
If you have a website without a business plan, you need [...]

Complacency: the bane of competitive webmasters

It’s really annoying to suddenly remember I have a few domains of 2-3 years of age, that I actually set up links for - but never had any real content on.
Reason being: complacency.
I bought the domains for an early client, with the aim of setting up a small network for link benefits for them.
However, early [...]

Some hot free authority links you may like to look at…

A couple of interesting stories via Threadwatch:
1. Google: We Said Take More Notes
Look at the story again - it’s telling you the Google Notes are publically viewable on Google.
The links in Notes are *not* nofollowed, and are not blocked in robots.txt…
So - free Google.com links from Google Notes? :)
Expect this loophole to get closed [...]

Buying links for mindshare, not search engines

After Aaron gave notice that ReviewMe was going to be offering half-price posts this month, I figured I should give the service a closer look.
We already know Google wants to devalue paid links, and for once I’m not looking at buying ReviewMe posts for direct ranking benefits - instead, I’m looking to buy mindshare.
One of [...]

Pros and cons of working for clients vs working for yourself

When I’ve chatted with more experienced SEO’s, the one thing that becomes clear is that SEO’s start working with clients, but many drop these to work for themselves.
The argument goes that if you’re good at making someone else money, you should be good at making that money for yourself - and much more than you’re [...]

Link buying tips for link development

I’ve recently been on a particularly aggressive link buying spree.
Although as a SEO I know buying links means buying some degree of placement on search engines, and Google is the main target.
However, I’m buying for informational sites - communities and blogs - with no real revenue streams.
So instead of trying to link bomb for money [...]

SEO for vbulletin - simple how to and tips

When I first bought vbulletin it was because it was the most search-friendly forum platform out there. It’s also very powerful and is the most effective at handling spam.
But as a SEO the optimisation of vbulletin for search engines has always been my primary concern.
Heck, it was how I learned SEO - how do you [...]

How many subdomains does eBay need?

Hopefully I’m not the only one noticing eBay listings clogging up the Google UK rankings.
Come on, eBay, just how many subdomains do you need?
Let’s see - here’s a few prominent ones:

cgi.ebay.co.uk
[keyword].search.ebay
[keyword].listings.ebay
members.ebay
myworld.ebay
pages.ebay
pulse.ebay
search-desc.ebay
search.stores.ebay
stores.ebay.co.uk
wantitnow.ebay
wantitnow.listings.ebay

Of course, no point just doing all that on a single domain - especially when Google can allow eBay to clog up the SERPs using [...]

Google focus on anchor-text variation?

An interesting report at SEL points out that “miserable failure” no longer brings up the Whitehouse site.
My immediate thought is that this is an anchot text issue - that Google have modified the alogrithm so that too much of the same anchor text is likely to be ignored.
This is because the whole miserable failure was [...]

Why on-page SEO is a service in demand

To many SEO’s, having a search-engine friendly website is a concern from the start.
When we build or develop sites from scratch, it’s usually there as a priority. Because of this, on-site SEO isn’t usually a big issue to work with.
We can appreciate the commercial benefits of helping search engines find and read our content. [...]

A little Google humour

While redeveloping Platinax I found a couple of pages I hadn’t published before.
I had intended to write a humour section, but only wrote a couple of SEO humour items before deciding it wouldn’t fit with the site.
Anyway, figured I’d publish them, so see if anyone like’s them:
The Four SEO’s (after Monty Python)
Presidential Speech Against SEO
A [...]

Examples of why businesses need SEOs

Todd Freisen continues the defence of SEO as a valid and important specialist service for businesses, underlining the points Danny Sullivan made previously that just because a specialist finds their specialist skills easy, doesn’t mean to say everyone else does.
What a lot of people are over-looking, though, is that SEO’s - good SEO’s - are [...]

A Google quote worth highlighting

Michael Gray make’s a long post at Threadwatch about Google, which ends with a comment that just demands highlighting as a quote:

to you Googlers who are out in the trenches every day looking for issues and interacting with the community, and solving problems I salute and thank you. To you the faceless all consuming Google [...]

eyeOS a threat to Google and Microsoft?

I’ve already mentioned before that Google is trying to turn the internet into a customised OS - and that this directly competes with Microsoft’s attempt to focus on remote file hosting.
It seems the future is already laid out - allow internet users to remotely host files online and wall them off in a suite of [...]

Content development for links needs to be remarkable

Last night something hit me - the logical conclusion of Google’s anti-spam drive is that individual pages with rank according to the quality of their link profiles.
In other words - pages will rank best if many people are linking to them.
I know - that in itself isn’t a revelation - but it’s not the [...]