There have been comparatively few articles written in the mainstream SEO blogs about creating content based on formulas – the only folks that seem to cover this topic tend to be from the seedy underside of affiliate marketing, under the term “article spinning”. David Leonhardt’s recent article (more reputable I think), gives some good examples of what the practice entails.
There are various tools available for “spinning” content, but depending on the business Read on »
Scotty Setting Up Alternate Content For Romulanbot
I am not a fan of the million tiny SEO tools which barely do anything, that can be found on site after site, but every so often someone puts something out that does some heavy lifting and is extremely useful. It is important for a digital marketing company to find a great free SEO tool that’s worth looking at I’ll do a rundown here. One old-school, great SEO tool that has been around for awhile is Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.
It allows you to examine a single page’s HTTP header (or headers, if it redirects in a chain), and see what is returned Read on »
Are domains like a fine wine, improving with age (from a SERP ranking perspective)? Contrary to what you may have heard previously, the answer is a resounding – YES.
[***Note – this entry was composed a few weeks ago, as part of my process for queuing up sufficient content for this blog. But today I saw that Rand Fishkin does some debunking of domain age in a Whiteboard Friday today – so I decided to push this posting out – sorry Rand, I must disagree! ***]
First, some background. Google filed a patent application in 1995 which was granted in 2008 titled “Information retrieval based on historical data”. It talks about scoring a document based on the document’s inception date which could be determined in a number of ways Read on »
Houston, We Have a Problem!
I was examining backlinks for a website today and noticed that it had two backlinks from the same page (names obscured to protect the innocent):
http://www.foo.com/index.html
http://foo.com/index.html
That’s neither here nor there for the site I was looking at, but it indicates a huge problem for the “foo.com” site where the backlinks are coming from.
A user can type in either Read on »
Lunar "Site Map".... *** Click here for larger size ***
With all of the other products besides its search engine that Google has branched out into, some aspects of SEO are actually important to Google itself, ironically. It may be surprising to some that Google itself has a sitemap so that search engine spiders can properly index their empire, located at http://www.google.com/sitemap.xml
It’s fun from time to time to check this out and see what Google is up to. Surprisingly, there is a TON of junk in there – Firefox plug-ins that no longer exists, products that Google has discontinued, individual entries calling out various JPG images which seems really odd, and so on – in fact, a number of Read on »
Does fresh content rank better? Google filed a patent application in 1995 which was granted in 2008 titled “Information retrieval based on historical data“. It talks about scoring a document based on a number of factors, including a documents “freshness” which could be determined in a number of ways.
Does Google use this approach however? Well, in the most shockingly short video by Matt Cutts I have ever seen, he gives a resounding Read on »
Students who study Latin commonly translate some of Caesar’s account of “The Gallic Wars”, where he begins by saying “All of Gaul [now France] is divided into three parts.” The three parts he named were Acquitania, Belgium, and “those who call themselves Celts or Gauls”. Yes, I know that last part wasn’t really a “part”, it was “people who call themselves something”. Clearly Caesar was a better general than he was a writer. 😉
Similarly however, Caesar may just as well have said “all of SEO is divided into three parts: Content, Architecture, Read on »
