SEO For Real

Post about Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, a cool article about search and the web from 1945.

I had a chat late last night with Gary Price of ResourceShelf. He shared some sites that provide information that will make your spine shiver and your blood turn cold. Just look at what’s available:
First off, there’s the relatively innocuous, but fun, FlightAware, which enables you to track the comings and goings of every flight in the United States (Canada and the rest of the world aren’t available). For flight junkies (of which there are more than a few); this is essential to the addiction.
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I thought it would be interesting, 24 hours after we launched the new domain (0awards.org) yesterday, to see how many search engines had us indexed (along with the few thousand links & mentions that popped up). Here’s the results:

Google - 1 mention from a few weeks ago on Kat’s blog
Yahoo! - 98 mentions around the web, including the domain itself
MSN - …

I rarely watch the “v7ndotcom elursrebmem” contest (despite promising to do so) simply because so many other folks in the SEO sphere are keeping a much more careful eye on it than I have time for. However, I was passed along information noting that of the top 20 sites at Google, a full 75% are newly registered domains.
By all rights, those puppies should be in the sandbox; yet there appears to be no sign of domain age penalization. It could have something to do with the uniqueness of the phrase, or it could be a manual situation, but either way, the new domain are out and playing (among 6+ mil results). With the number and low quality of most of the links pointing t…

Donna’s got great coverage of a WMW post that discusses the problems with the recent gain in notoriety of big AdSense earners (Shoemoney being foremost in my mind).

For two years, I did my time. I never did find a “real” job, and the two years I spent juggling bills and avoiding creditors was not fun. However, I also wasn’t sitting on my butt, watching soap operas all day. I wasn’t making much money, but I was learning HOW to make money, and I was working hard t…

This post is geared towards newbies, but even experienced web entrepreneurs may get a spark of inspiration. And while the forum thread that I am referencing is targeted towards making money via Adsense, the wisdom can be applied throughout the broader spectrum of Internet business, or business in general.
The thread I am referring to […]

As you may have figured out by now, Yahoo! recently had an update, which a lot of people have noticed.  The Yahoo! blog has a weather report (a little late, but better late than never).  You can expect to see some rank shufflings, and increased crawler activity.  They also tell you how to comment on […]

The latest blog post of Matt Cutts of Google is a Questions and Answer post.
There he answers a lot of questions including the RK parameter and gives a lot of valuable info for an SEO:
Here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/q-a-thread-march-27-2006/
Thanks Matt.

There have been some major marketing initiatives recently using traditional offline advertising to drive traffic to a website, portal, or search engine. Ask.com has unveiled some new TV spots to get people to try their new technology. This past Sunday,…

There has been a discussion going on for well over a year about “Google Bowling.” This is a theory that discusses the potential to negatively impact competitor search engine rankings by creating “unsavory” links to said competitor’s pages. Google publicly…

This tip is simple: don?t bury words in an image, especially if those words don?t appear in normal, index-able text.

Okay, let?s try tackling a few questions from the Grab bag thread. Just a hint for next time: if your question takes three paragraphs to ask, your odds of getting an answer go down.
Q: ?Is Bigdaddy fully deployed??
A: Yes, I believe every data center now has the Bigdaddy …

A funny WebmasterWorld thread named house has forum members discussing the type of home they have purchased from their Google AdSense income, if they have purchased a home at all with it. Many just use a portion of the AdSense…

A new thread at DigitalPoint Forums polls members on the number of hours they spend with AdSense. That includes your advertising time, your content writing, your coding and your account management. The time slots are broken down pretty broadly, and…

John Battelle reports on comScore report that shows Ask.com gaining in market share from Q4 ‘04 to ‘05 by 32.8% and Google growing over the same time span by 24.7%. Yahoo dropped in market share by 0.3% and MSN dropped…

Press Release optimization for search engine purposes has been a growing segment of the SEO industry. One of the first companies to catch the wave is SEO PR, by Greg Jarboe. They have a service that will take your press…

In our continued Ask The Moderators thread, the next question we explored was by Viggen. He asked our roundtable of moderators the following question on what he calls; “private search engines.” what search engines are you using for private searches…

Post about doing drug research for SEO purposes.

The process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has many different associated tasks, as many of us know. The subject of linking has been discussed in great detail on many forums and blogs, and the importance of using keywords within anchor…

The Yahoo! Search Blog just announced that they have updated their index. We completed an index update over the weekend. As a result, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are…

I ask those of you for whom the phrase “Web 2.0″ is an anethma to refrain from judgement while you read this post and browse the site we’ve created. Afterwards, when you’ve had time to process it, I invite you to comment with as much passion (for or against) as you like.
My first order of business with this post is to congratulate Kat Ortland. This young woman, who we hired less than 6 months ago, has proven her mettle. The amount of time, energy and thoughtfulness she put into what was orginally just a pet project of mine is truly astounding. Bravo Kat.
Without further ado:
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I have to admit I almost gag every time I read a forum discussion that starts out with a variation on the following: I have a (insert topic here) Web site with a couple hundred quality links. The site is (insert number of months) months old but it still seems to be sandboxed. My competitors all have (insert some number here) backlinks and their pages are (spammy/unprofessional/incomplete/duplicate content/icky). But they rank higher than me. Why is that?Yeah, that’s a tough one. I’ve seen people blithely reply, “Keep building links. You’ll get there.”Sorry. That dog won’t hunt.  Most recently, someone wrote a simi…

RFPs (Request for Proposal) are industry standard in marketing, communication and other consulting service-type organizations in the business world. But lately, as I’ve looked over a dozen or so that have been sent my way in the past few weeks, I’ve discovered something intriguing about them…
They’re evil.
The RFPs I’ve gotten (with the exception of a few wholly reasonable and respectable requests) typically follow a structure designed to grill and intimidate smaller companies and individual consultants while rewarding needless paperwork and excessive self-promotion (an area where many of the worst large firms are particularly skilled). Here’s some traits of a few RFPs w…

Aaron Pratt has a question about the timing of a site buildout at Cre8asite forums. The question he asked, which, at its core, is about how to make a site’s internal and external feaures appear natural to the search engines, prompted me to think about the same subject. What does a “natural” growth profile look like?
My opinion is really that organic growth can’t be faked effecitvely. Over the long term, a site that has updates on a normal, human time schedule (even if that schedule is relatively erratic) and grows links on a natural schedule, with newer links pointing to newer content a…

Sunday night before the Simpsons (a new one written by Ricky Gervais of the original, British version of “The Office”, FYI), we’re flipping channels and I catch the tail end of a segment 60 Minutes is doing on Tiger Woods. At the very end, there’s a promotion, showing Yahoo!’s search home page (not the usual Yahoo! home page) and telling viewers to search for “Tiger Woods” to get exclusive access to more footage produced for the show that was not put into the hour segment. Sure enough:
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