Google News Inside

SEO Tips: Image Naming – Round 3

This is a follow-up post from SEO Image Naming and SEO Image Naming Round 2. The previous two articles were written two years ago. This article is proof that the methods work. Comparing traffic from two years ago, image traffic has grown quite a bit. I have done a few things to keep the traffic [...]

Links in the Footer May be Treated Differently

Matt Cutts recently published this video talking about how links in the footer may be treated differently than links in-paragraph.

How to Get Backlinks, the Whitehat Way

Matt Cutts recently published this great video about how to get backlinks, the whitehat way. Worth your time to watch it. Incoming search terms:how to get backlinksget backlinkswhite hat backlinkshow to get back linkswhitehat backlinksget backlinkhow to get backlinkHow to get backlinks?how to get edu backlinksbacklinks white hat

Domain Extensions Matter

There has been and continues to be talk about whether your domain extension matters. Debates going back and forth about .edu, .gov, and .mil extensions being “trusted” more in the search results and on the flip side, other people saying that extensions don’t matter at all, only backlinks matter. As part of Google’s recent push [...]

Control Your Googlebot Crawl Rate

Google introduced a new crawl rate control panel into the Google Webmaster Tools. These settings will give you more control over how quickly and how frequently Googlebot crawls your site and pages. In most cases, you will want to keep it at the recommended setting, default, but in a rare circumstance — such as you [...]

Video: John Battelle Speaks at Google NYC

About John Battelle Co-founding editor of Wired and founder of The Industry Standard visits the Google New York office to speak about his book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (12/7/05). Without further ado, check out this hour-long video of John Battelle speaking at Google [...]

The Art of Choosing an SEO Company

Choosing an SEO company isn’t an easy process. Which company is trust worthy? Which company has integrity? Which company has a proven track record? This is how not to choose an SEO company. I received an email from a LinkedIn group and this is what the discussion said,

SEO: Dashes or Underscores?

Dashes, dashes, dashes. This is what the official statement from Google says. (link) Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs. So when you’re thinking about using dashes or underscores in your [...]

SES San Jose 2008: Video SEO

I attended this session in the afternoon yesterday, so I want to highlight some of the key points which I took out of the session. # Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR YouTube accounts for 98% of all videos viewed on Google properties If you are still trying to optimize for Google Video? Don’t bother. [...]

Google Doesn’t Hate ALL Paid Links, Just Yours

Yet another post about paid links. I know, I know, will the madness ever stop? No way! Why would we want to not have something to talk about? Today’s topic is paid links, search rankings, and sitelinks. I’ve known about these paid links for a long time and so has Google I’m sure. In this [...]

Hear me speak at SES San Jose

I am speaking at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose next month on the Vertical Search panel. If you aren’t already going, I strongly recommend that you get your expo pass as soon as possible. It’s going to be yet another amazing conference. Some highlights include the Google Dance party, which is a must, every [...]

Funny Ads Friday: Ugly SEO

Welcome back to Funny Ads Friday! Today’s great topic is Ugly SEO. So how can SEO be pretty or fun or…ugly? Well not just that. The copytext is pretty funny too. “We write & post a 400 word article to 125 sites and provide proof” I’m failing to see how that’s useful to anyone. Writing [...]

Forbes on Microsoft’s aQuantive Acquisition

Forbes published an article this morning that talks about how Microsoft’s acquisition of aQuantive, made a year ago, could have a serious conflict of interest in the industry of search and paid search. I do not believe it will. Microsoft is a very silo-ed company. They are made up of many different entities, companies within [...]

The SEO Factor

Wow, an amazing write-up with some great industry-expert insights.
Wiep wraps up just about every question we can think of for SEO.
Here are a few specific questions and responses which I found most intriguing. Well, rather, these are some responses which I found that are worth noting, in my opinion.

XML + XSLT = Good SEO? Let’s Find Out

Here is the thread that I created in the Google Group of Crawling and Indexing. I’m hoping Matt Cutts or Adam Lasnik will be able to touch on the subject a bit. We have a few sites that rely heavily upon SEO. We also have a lot of sites on our server, so we want to minimize load time and maximize efficiency. With those key components in mind,

[Myth Buster] Virtual Host vs. Dedicated IPs

There have been long debates about whether virtual hosts or dedicated IPs are the same, better, different, or whatever you want to call it.
Barry’s gathered some more evidence that it doesn’t matter. Do whatever you want to do. Google, in this case, will treat any outbound link as the same.
Matt Cutts touched on this subject over a year ago.
“I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.”
More recently, another affirmation coming from Google Groups.
“Lots of sites are hosted on shared IPs. If this had a negative effect on ranking, it would harm most of the sites on the web–and that’s not good for small webmasters or for our users. So, understandably, sharing an IP should not have an effect your ability to rank.”
Which does indeed make sense.

Credit Cards, SEO, and Your Wallet

As SEO has become is a huge part of search engines and how results appear, watching trends is also just as critical. Heather Hopkins takes a look at the “credit cards” search data for the last four weeks.
The market share of US Internet searches for “credit cards” nearly doubled (+98%) in the past four weeks and were up 20% year on year last week. Searches for “credit cards” experience a fairly predictable pattern with spikes in August and in November with the November spike being the greater of the two. The likely reason for this is anticipation for holiday spending.
Alright, that makes enough sense to me. But what about SEO? Who cares about SEO since we’re just talking about credit cards? Google’s results, Yahoo!’s results, and Live.com’s results all show different data. This is natural, but let’s take a look at where it really differs.
We will look at this from the search engine optimization (SEO) view and from the financial view.

I got a PR8 linkback for $20,000!!!

Well, honestly, I can get a PR8 linkback for $20,000. As I was browsing around the web early yesterday, I realized that Apache.org had a sponsorship page. After digging a little bit further, I found out some more details about these sponsorships. Platinum Sponsorship Donation level: $100k / year Your logo (max size: 250×125) on our ASF Thanks page with link Logo Location: top section

Bring Out Your Dead…Bring Out Your Dead Links

Old school Link spamming building is dead. You can no longer simply put up completely irrelevant links and hope you get link love for them.

As illustrated in the comic above (which is thanks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail [one of my favorite movies]), we can see how traditional old school link building is dead.
The old style of link building was “Hey! You have a PageRank 8 site, that must mean it’s [uber] trusted by all the search engines! I’ll give you $100 if you put my link there. K? thx!” That is no longer the case. Search engines have been smarter and better.
But from what I can tell, a lot of people are still stuck in the 90s and think that irrelevant linking still works. Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about.

PageRank, Link Building, SERPs, and Grandma

There has been a lot of chatter going on around the blogosphere seophere today about the PageRank update that is supposedly going on. There is even more chatter going on about whether or not paid links can hurt your search engine results [pages] (SERPs). Loren touches on the PageRank update a bit and goes more in depth than SERoundTable does. Moving on from that, Aaron Wall discusses

Google’s Ban on Web Directories

The recent buzz around the blogosphere seosphere has been about the recent “ban” on web directories. It has been mentioned at Webmasterworld, DigitalPoint, and SearchEngineLand, just to name a few of the places.
As a recap for you, Google has manually added penalties to many of the web directories out there. Let’s take a close look at two in specific. We will be looking at Site Sift (http://site-sift.com) and Alive Directory (http://alivedirectory.com).

SEO Tips: Be the First, Be the Best

Maybe this is an obvious point for some people, but this is something worth mentioning. Be the first, be the best. As my friend Michael Hampton has repeatedly told me, in my early days of blogging, “content is king.” So what else could be better for a search engine than to be the first with the content? I’m involved with the music lyrics industry and I run my

SEO Tips: Alexa on the Down-low

A brief background on Alexa:
Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users.
…
In 1999, following Netscape’s lead, Microsoft built Alexa into the browser. Alexa popularity was reaching an all-time high with over 3 Million downloads. In June of 1999, Amazon.com purchased Alexa Internet.
Alexa has rankings, so what?

SEO Tips: Image Naming – Round 2

As I was reflecting back on some SEO articles I wrote last year, I thought it would be a good idea to do a follow-up review to share what techniques I have used that have actually worked. This follow-up SEO article is on my SEO Tips: Naming Images. Naming Images – Round 2 Taking a look at the comparison of my traffic results, you can clearly see that

On Paid Links

Something that was mentioned last week at SES NY was Paid Link advertising. Matt Cutts wrote up an article on the matter. So what actually is happening with paid links? Google is ‘asking’ that people report sites that are either buying or selling links in order to start to clear up the index. I happen to completely and whole-heartily disagree with this move by Google. Normally

SEO Tips: Getting Your Site in the DMOZ

Almost everyone knows about the DMOZ Open Directory, but if you don’t, go take a look right now. So what benefit does having your site in the DMOZ Open Directory actually have? Linkbacks and a little bit of traffic. Google’s directory uses — or at least used to use — the DMOZ listings for their own. A lot of sites also syndicate the listings

SEO Tips: Communicate with the Blogsphere

As I’m looking at some of the traffic data for this site, ginside.com, I saw some keyword searches for “google tv beta” already and I thought to myself, “that post has only been active for 10 hours…how is it getting so much traffic already?” Then it dawned on me. So I went to look at my recent visitors and see where they were coming from. I had

SEO Tips: Drive More Traffic

Some sites do this on a regular basis and other sites don’t really care. But do you care about whether or not a search engine caches your website? This article might change your mind about it. On one of my high traffic sites I realized that a lot of my traffic was going to a cached page that Google or MSN have sitting around. So I

SEO Tips: Enforcing WWW

Something that I’ve been using for almost a year now is something very simple yet very effective. Enforcing the sub-domain of www. While some of you may consider this to be a basic principal while running your site, others may have not known about it. Enforcing WWW First, before being able to use this code, you need to make sure your webserver (normally Apache) has mod_rewrite compiled

PageRank Update 01/09/2007

SEO Tips: Image Naming

Every so often I’m going to have an article with SEO tips straight me, Jonathan. This is the first of many tips. Today we will be going over something that is critically over-looked for webmasters. Image naming. Image Naming The blog you’re reading right now is still decently new — 4 months old. I’ve been writing on it everyday almost and I try to include

PageRank Update 09/29/06

Today, Google’s team has released another update to the public PageRank for sites across the Internet. I have seen quite a few of my sites stay the same, but this site did jump to a PR5 which I’m happy about.

Google Treating www and non-www the Same Now

Christian talks about how Google is now treating www and non-www domains the same with how they relate to the link:domain.com syntax. Seems to be working properly for me when checking the www and non-www search for linkbacks.

Will You Be at SES Next Week?

The Google Blog has a little write-up about what’s going on next week… Monday, Aug 7th 12:30 – 2:00 Lunch with the Google Sitemaps team 2:00 – 3:30 Social Search: Up Close With Google, Shashi Seth, Product Manager 4:00 – 5:30 The Search Laboratories, Peter Norvig, Director of Research 4:00 – 5:30 Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic, Hal Bailey, Strategic Partner Manager Just as a little preview to what will be happening at Search Engine Strategies next week, Monday through Thursday. I really wish I could have gone this year, but my employer didn’t see any benefit in me attending it. Hopefully next year it will be a different story and I will be able to go. The keynote speaker I really wanted to hear was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.

07/13/2006 — Another Bites the Rank

PageRank Explained PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts

Struggling to Fight Off KinderStart.com

As many know, KinderStart.com sued Google quite a while back over having their website PageRank set to “zero”. This drop in traffic caused the company to lose a lot of money, therefore wanting to sue Google to gain that traffic back. As many also know, PageRank is given to most sites, not all. It takes a very bad site to not be indexed by Google or