Search Engine Optimization

Below are links to articles posted in Search Engine Optimization.

The Case Against Link Exchanges

I have never liked link exchanges, you won’t find a “links” page on any of my sites, nor have I ever recommended doing traditional ones, in fact I have often said I can count the number of traditional link exchanges I have done on one hand.
There are a few reasons I do not like traditional [...]

Behind the Scenes at Google, the Human Reviewer Playbook

You can optimize your site for search engine algorithms perfectly, but if a human working for a search engine comes in and makes a snap judgement that your site looks spammy or isn’t useful, and you’ll suffer.
I think, many of the unexplained rankings we see are a result of these human reviews and it [...]

How I do Directory Submissions

Submitting to directories is one of the most straightforward ways to build links to your websites, however such a practice is not without problems, there is a prevalence of small directories and directory operators who mainly exist to swindle you. For instance a directory operator may constantly launch new directories, focusing all the PageRank they [...]

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for 44b

Read it up here.
Honestly, I don’t understand this move.
Yahoo sucks. Their search engine sucks, their advertising service sucks. Who here doesn’t think Microsoft Adcenter is better than Yahoo Search Marketing? I believe until just very recently YSM didn’t even allow you to opt out of their syndicated results, so to advertise on their search results [...]

Google and Meta Tags

For years I’ve taken the stand that Google doesn’t use meta tags for ranking purposes. Going back to 2001 I’ve always said that Google will sometimes use the meta description tag for generating a site abstract for the SERPs, but not for ranking, and the meta keywords tag is not used at all.
Not only [...]

Using Google Alerts to Monitor Your Business

Google has a very nice, yet I think unsung feature, called Google Alerts which makes it very easy to monitor aspects of your web business. It isn’t a new service, and if you’re a dedicated reader of this site and forum you’ve undoubtedly heard it mentioned before, but I don’t think I’ve ever spotlighted it [...]

A Reminder on Link Buying

If you read Matt Cutts’ blog you’re no stranger to the knowledge that Google is cracking down on link buying & selling, and Danny Sullivan recently wrote a decent summary of the entire issue for those who haven’t been keeping up with things.
I thought this would then be a prime time to remind people the [...]

An Endorsement by Google of Cross-linking

In this recent Google blog post they mention that it is okay to cross link multiple sites you own so long as they are related in topic (the links appear organic), and that you merely want to avoid cross linking dozens or hundreds of unrelated sites in your footer.
This seems to be in agreement with [...]

Underscores are now word seperators at the big G

Matt Cutts apparently made a lot of interesting comments at a Wordpress seminar, blogged about here.
He said a lot, but the big news is that Google will soon be treating underscores as word seperators in URLs.
This is long overdue, the underscore was always the traditional word seperator in formats where spaces were not allowed. [...]

New SEO Guide

I’ve been slowly going through my successful website guide and rewriting all the articles to update them to 2007. They were first written in 2002 mostly and so many were outdated.
I have just completed the rewrite of the SEO section and have decided to break that out into a separate guide all it’s own. So [...]

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