Cog SEO Blog - Search Engine Optimization

SEO Copy Writing for Online Success

2009-03-20T07:15:00.006-04:00

Find SEO Copy Writing on our new home....

How to Write a Landing Page that Converts

2008-07-08T11:08:00.006-04:00

We have moved.... Find this SEO post here.

Spamming for SEO Clients - What a Way to Make a Living

2008-03-18T21:27:00.012-04:00

OK, so if you have a web site you are most likely party to scumbags that will call you, email you, and yes... even spam your blogs and forms with their promises of top ranking and top marketing skills. So I am generally pretty crabby about the spamming part, but when a company spams a one of my customers with NO company url, company name, and a GMail address I get pretty torqued up.

This customer, is actually my best friend, and she is not so Internet savvy... So her email spills in to my box with the zillion others, so that I can call her with anything important. Like I said, she is my best friend.

Her site is very simple, mechanically sound... Hell, the pages even validate. Now while its not the most spectacular web site in the world, its exactly what Lisa (my bud) wanted. So anyhow, this little web site gets care when I have the time as its not a top priority for Lisa, but none the less is on page one for nearly all of its "small pond" niche keyword phrases. So everybody's happy, right?

Guess not... Check out this spamming scum bag's email to whom he thought was my client...

Dear XXXXXX

Your website looks like IT would get a lot more visibility and traffic on the search engines if it is easier to locate. For no cost to you we will analyze your site and your web placement and show you how. Email
us today at XXXXX@gmail.com Our free review comes with no
strings

Sincerely,
Akim Tracy
Scout Marketing

So, seriously what the heck is this guy doing? No web site, no proper contact information, and no real business associated with "Akim" and "Scout Marketing" that I can locate..... But he sure as hell has time to spam my customers. So Akim, about that review....

Lisa's Concessions
Google Rank
food concessions #6
mobile concessions #6
food service concessions #3
great mobile food #6
Concessions food #7
mobile food catering #5
mobile food service #29
mobile event catering #2
ohio food concessions #1
ohio mobile food service #2

So the site is clean, easy to navigate, ranks decently, the customer is happy... Yet you think otherwise. So Akim, consider this an opportunity to enlighten me. I will tell you right up front that the site lacks back links, but as I have already stated Lisa is not at all in to developing it, as the pool is very small and she only provides services in Northeast Ohio. Yes, you have indeed pissed me off, but at least your spam mail has no spelling errors.

Bring me this free report and show me how, I would be so grateful and even post it here for you to demonstrate your prowess to the whole world!

Peace and SEO ooooooooohh I hate spam,

Melanie Prough

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Top 5 Ways to Screw Up an Online Store

2008-03-09T14:20:00.011-04:00

Find this great post and more at our new home..... SEOCOG.com

January 2008 : Top 10 US Market Share Search Engines

2008-02-26T12:06:00.009-05:00

The Nielsen Netratings January 2008 search engine market US share data report is out and we have the data and historical analysis ready for you. Buckle up!

In January there are some interesting results for the search game in the US. You might even be a bit surprised, or relieved even. We track these results here at the Cog SEO Blog every month and provide a historical bit of data along with the raw statistics to help you better understand the search market here in the US. You can find past US Search Market Share results in the left menu for review.

Might as well start at the top.. Google continues to climb. As America's favorite search engine, Google has steadily increased their overall share of searches since we have been tracking the results; April 2007. In January Google has gained back .6% of the small 1.4% loss they clocked in with last month. Truth of the matter is this, smaller shares have an easier time increasing their numbers. Simple math here, with percentages, the larger the divisible number (in this case searches) the harder it is to effect that number, as you need much larger numbers (increases) to do so. So the reality is this, Google grew their number of searches about 24,375,216 over their December 2007 searches.

Yahoo has made some progress amid controversy, operational distress, and general limelight. Yahoo search had been really struggling until last month (December 2007) when the lodged a small .2% month over month growth. I even predicted they would decline in search volume for January 2008, due to the bad press and issues within the company. However, Yahoo made a fairly strong move in their market share for January 2008 with a 1.3% month over month growth. Fact is this is very impressive and goes to a subject I have noted before, Yahoo has history and some very loyal searchers who want to come back. Yahoo is a very strong brand, they have only, in my opinion, to recover that brand ability to really make a dent in the market.

I was really very surprised to see that MSN / Live has lost some reasonably significant ground in January 2008 search market share. Honestly, MSN and Live have been crawling my web sites like crazy, and they seem to be sending more traffic than ever. MSN / Live loses 1.7% in their share of the search pie for January 2008.

The remaining top ten engines I haven't really much to say about, except that Ask.com just continues to sit there and make no apparent move to grow their market. They are up .2% over December 2007, but they really never hang on to any month over month growth historically. I don't know; we see the Ads, the Eraser, and all the "Hoopla"... None of which seems to be getting the job done. I would say in my honest opinion, people just want fast, easy, and relevant.... Which are all metrics Ask could be schooled on from any of the top 3 search engines.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

**We Require a Link Back Please.

December 2007 : Top 10 US Market Share Search Engines

2008-01-29T04:50:00.000-05:00

The Nielsen Netratings December 2007 search market share data report has been released, and you are going to be a bit surprised at the results. We post this search market data every month, and have been doing so since April 2007. This data can have some very interesting trends and twists. If you would like to view the past results we have posted, just use the "US Search Market Data" link in the left menu for all of the reports.

Most people will be interested to know that Google lost some ground. I guess I am a bit surprised as well. After coming on strong in November with a 2.2% growth over October's share of searches, Google for the first time in a long time lost some market share in December 2007. Google clocks in with 56.3% of all December US searches falling from November's 57.7%. Where did Google's share make off to? You might be surprised.

Actually, there is no single culprit who swept away some of Google's market share. Rather, MSN / Live, Yahoo, and AOL all took a bite from Google's pie in Dec. 2007. MSN / Live sneaks away with a 1.8% market share increase for December. Most webmasters are not likely to be surprised about this.. We have been seeing the traffic, indexing, and crawl rates of MSN / Live coming up steady for a couple of months. MSN / Live checks in at 13.8% of the US searches for December, and that's right back up to their October 2007 share mark. No one can dispute, MSN / Live is really doing a nice job all around.

Despite all the troubles at home Yahoo was up .2% and trending positively once again. I personally think with 17.9% of the market share, this "red haired stepchild" has the best shot at giving Google a run for their money.. If they could just get it together. We will likely see Yahoo's share fall a bit in Jan. 2008 due to the bad press and complete lack of effort on the companies part to improve their position. It almost feels like they have thrown in the towel.

Yes, we all realize AOL delivers Google results, but has anyone noticed the steady and solid increase of their search market share? Check this out.. October 3.7%; November 4.5%; and now December 4.7%. Agreed, AOL is not back to it's September 2007 share of 6.0%, but they are trending up in a very solid way. AOL made big changes in 2007, and clearly they have been positive ones. AOL's following is very loyal, and tends to use the AOL browser for everything. It is not at all uncommon to find regular AOL users who do not even know how to operate Internet Explorer, or even realize they have IE on their PC.. Much less any other browser.

Ask.com made some progress in October 2007 increasing their market share by .7% over the previous month and a share of 2.9%. They have however, been giving that share right back ever since. Ask lost .2% in November, and now for December 2007 gives up another .5% versus Nov. Ask's market share of searches for December 2007 is 2.2% which puts them right back to their September mark. I really don't think Ask has the stuff to ever grow their market effectively. They have spent a ton of cash on advertising and tried to scoop on Google's privacy problem with the "Ask Eraser", but nothing changes the fact that they have outdated results, do not crawl enough, their index is too small, and their search pages are entirely too slow. Ask's issues are very fundamental in nature, yet seem to escape them entirely.

Check back next month to see how the big dogs stack up and how they are trending, we publish this every month.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google me the Value of an Authority Site

2008-01-11T08:29:00.001-05:00

Find Google me the Value of an Authority Site at our new home.

November 2007 : Top 10 US Market Share Search Engines

2007-12-28T07:13:00.000-05:00

The Nielsen Netratings November 2007 search market share data report was released yesterday. We post this search market data every month, and have been doing so since April 2007. This can be very valuable data for your SEO campaign strategy. If you would like to view the past results we have blogged, just use the "US Search Market Data" link in the left menu.

Chart legend: An estimated 4.3 billion search queries were conducted using Google Search in the US, representing 57.7 percent of all search queries conducted in November 2007. Click to enlarge data image.

Google is still coming on strong with a 2.2% market share growth over October 2007. I think a great deal of people think this continued growth will likely lead to a search market monopoly, but "if" that is in the cards, it is still a long way off. As in any market achievement, the final leg of the race always proves to be the most difficult. Google has shown great prowess and sustained growth in 2007, and I suspect barring any mishaps they will continue to trend their market share upwards.

Yahoo continues to struggle with its "come back" plan as their market share continues to trend negatively. In October 2007 report they lost .7% of their market share, and in November they lost another .9%. I gotta believe if you are Yahoo, you need to be considering a far more aggressive plan for growth and market share. I am curious to see December's market share, as Yahoo is very commonly known to grab a high amount of commerce / shopping type searches. If this remains true, which I suspect it is not, we will see a boost in Yahoo's share of searches come December's data. Data has already been collected which shows Yahoo Shopping with a solid 84.3% of "very" satisfied shoppers for the bulk of the 2007 holiday shopping season. We shall see how this affects their market share for December 2007.

MSN / Live gave up a bit of its share in November's report as well, losing 1.8% of the search market share. If I had to guess, I would say this is temporary for MSN / Live. They have been crawling and indexing very feverishly, and I believe we will see them begin to trend up in the coming months.

Ask.com is only down .2% for November 2007. This eats up a bit of the .7% growth they collected in the October 2007 market share, but its not a terrible amount. Last month was the first time Ask.com has had any discernible growth since May 2007. If I were in the marketing department at Ask.com, I would be looking to change the strategy, as the ROI (return on investment) seems to be pretty low for the amount of marketing dollars they are spending.

While I certainly do not advocate "putting all your eggs in one basket", if your website is not performing well in Google search then you need to concentrate your optimization plan on achieving better Google search position. This will only grow more and more important as Google trends its market share up.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google Me the Supplemental Index?

2007-12-20T08:07:00.001-05:00

Find this post -- Google Me the Supplemental Index? -- at our new home!

Top 10 US Search Providers - October 2007

2007-12-04T22:53:00.000-05:00

It's that time again.... Nielsen Netratings has released the top 10 US search providers for October, 2007. We have been posting these market data releases since the April, 2007 report. In the left hand menu you can click "US Search Market Data", and view all of our past market share posts.

There are some interesting developments in October's market share report. Honestly speaking, I lost a bet as well! Another SEO and I disagreed about Yahoo Search and it's ability to reclaim it's once strong brand loyalty. So, what about Yahoo? I suspected that they would begin to initialize the road to regaining their "claim to fame". Let's face it, Yahoo is also a household word. The data for October certainly doesn't speak to their recent efforts. Yahoo Search lost .7% of US searches month over month from their 19.5% September, 2007 market share. I realize .7% doesn't seem like a great deal, but it really reflects a great deal of actual searches for October.

The top 10 search providers make up 97.3% (7,713,994 searches) of all US searches for October. That's not much room for any search provider who didn't make the "A list". The top 3 are Google 55.5% (4,400,561 searches), Yahoo 18.8% (1,490,129 searches), and MSN/Live 13.8% (1,093,696 searches) make up 88.1% (6,984,386 searches) of the search pie for October!

So the next time someone tells you not to optimize for these engines, you can probably guess this person doesn't know their SEO. Clearly, your optimization efforts should be prioritized for the wealth of searches Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live can provide. There are, of course additional factors. For example, search engines tend to attract a certain kind of crowd. MSN/Live tends to attract the "tech and gadget" crowd, while Yahoo is traditionally the home of monster commerce. While they are only going to provide the traffic inherent to their search volume, the search volume for your theme keyword phrases will generally be greater as well. Investigating your potential per a search engine's general audience, and targeting your SEO is quite effective.

Google continues on it's quest to overthrow the entire search world, with another steady increase in their market share. Google is looking like this for their trend: April-55.2%, May-56.3%, June-52.7%, July-53.3%, August-53.6%, September-54.0%, and October-55.5%. If you're working hard on your SEO, then you clearly have to be thinking like a "Googler" with your optimization strategy. No one wants to be left out of their share of 4,400,561 monthly searches!

MSN/Live is making some progress in their plight to become a notable searching platform again. In September MSN/Live captured 890,685 searches for 12.0% of the market share. In October, they have increased that "take" to 1,093,696 searches and weighs in at 13.8% of the market. That's a force to be reckoned with at 1.8% month over month growth!

I continue to be disappointed with Ask.com. From a marketing perspective, they should be really growing their market share more.... But the "proofs in the pudding", they are not seeing the return on investment for their creative marketing efforts. Last month Ask.com showed up with 2.2% of the market share, and this month 2.9%. September and October, showing the first real growth since May. Up until last month they were riding a roller coaster of very negligible ups and downs. I think Ask.com is going to have to try some more traditional methods if they plan to grow. No matter which engine users are searching with, they (in my opinion) want some things to be relatively standardized. Searchers are outside of their comfort zone in Ask's current interface, and webmasters are seriously disappointed overall with their indexing and caching performance.

The largest drop, from AOL, comes at the hands of their decision not to promote their brand any longer. AOL lost 2.3% of their market share in October with respect to September's 6.0% share. SEO Food: re-branding hurts!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google World - Buying and Selling Links

2007-12-03T08:48:00.001-05:00

Find the post here http://www.seocog.com/google-world-buying-and-selling-links/

Black Friday Sales Growth 2007 - Did You Get Yours

2007-11-27T06:30:00.000-05:00

Nielsen Netratings released the incredible year over year growth data for Black Friday Internet sales 2007. On 11/2/2007 we blogged here about the things a webmaster should know and do to prepare for the "Holiday Rush". I really hope you were on this, and got your share of the Black Friday push on sales. Yesterday, another traditional and historical push in your sales...Cyber Monday. This is the day historically reported as a very large increase in sales, especially over the "lunch" hours of the work day. This has historically been an increase of sales numbers well over 50% for the day. Oh yeah!

2007 Black Friday Traffic Increase

*Click to enlarge the data chart.

Nice! 120 online US e commerce web sites are represented in this data. The web sites pulled an astonishing 21.2 million unique visitors, compared to 19.2 million last year. Last year the growth over 2005 Black Friday sales grew 12%, this year we add another 10% over 2006, to that explosive retail growth. This is an average of the venues you see above.

One of the things I had warned about was preparedness, and as you can see, with week over week unique visitor growth of up to 235% (electronics).....This was a genuine concern. Reportedly many sites experienced down time, and cart failures. Even sites smaller than Best Buy (reporting a week over week unique visit growth of 292%), for example were up well over 22% week to week. We are truly an electronics hungry society!

The next category, relative to electronics is computer hardware and software. The PC commerce was up 121% week over week! For example Apple Computer showed an incredible 111% growth over the previous week in their unique visits. Dell reported the smallest top 10 sites increase in uniques, with only 29%.

While these numbers are clearly astounding, please bare in mind they are not due to peak until early January! Preparedness is the key to grabbing your share. Be looking to your stats for vulnerabilities, and continue to clear the way for heavy traffic in the coming months.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Live Search Webmaster Tools Review and Information

2007-11-17T08:19:00.001-05:00

Find Live Search Webmaster Tools Review and Information at our new home!

Google DMCA Search Page Removal Notice

2007-11-11T11:47:00.001-05:00

Find Google DMCA Search Page Removal Notice at our new home!

Return of the Google Glitchy

2007-11-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

Over the last week or so, I have been spending a great deal of time in Google's Webmaster Tools. I am working on the finishing SEO for new sites, and redesigns pretty intensely. Unfortunately, Google has been a pain in my optimization. Back in Mid September, you might remember when the "Google Glitchy" was wreaking havoc in Webmaster's Tools. SEO Scoop kept a pretty close watch on it, and reported it fixed on Sept. 19, 2007. The official explanation was an "issue on Google's end", reported by SEO Scoop.

So recently, I am seeing some of the same...Ugh. I currently have 15 sites in my tools, and 5 of them for no apparent reason have required revalidation in the last week. Some sites, this blog for example have no crawl stats showing anymore. I have has 3 sitemap errors, for sitemaps that were in place more than 5 crawls previous with no changes. I wasn't even able to resubmit them, I had to generate new ones. It's odd, because I use the same program for all 15 sites, and only 3 were erred. I have had 3 pages reported "404" in my summary, that were allegedly blocked by robots.txt. However, every one of these sites is using an untouched robots.txt for more than 3 months now. I even checked, on my server and Google's copy in tools....These pages are not blocked. Not a big deal, as long as they are read correctly, on next crawl. I am also seeing freaky "unreachable" pages. For example, one of my site's main pages was "network unreachable". I run tracking software, the site was not down. The main page is a full CSS / XHTML page, that loads quick as hell. So, I can only assume with the other issues, that the "Google Glitchy" has returned to the SEO world.

I don't mind Google's "FREE" Webmaster Tools might have some data issues, or related bugs. However, I don't like having to re validate sites and jump through hoops checking robots.txt. There just aren't enough hours in the day. I really don't rely on Google's SEO data, but clearly using the tool set is an advantageous decision for any webmaster. Let's hope Google gets "Glitchy" back in the cage soon, and the problems get resolved.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Googlefied SERPs

2007-11-07T21:07:00.000-05:00

We pretty much all can tell, Google has been flogging the index recently. I must say right off, I am so glad to see the plague of MFA (Made for Adsense) and spam garbage go away. Won't miss them even a little bit! I wanted to take a minute to bring up a couple other things I noticed in pouring over my new SERPs (Search engine positions).

Firstly I noticed, the "fresher" content, gets the worm. The hit was not big for the sites I have, but sites that have long periods between updates, dropped a bit. The longest period I had was 3 months without an update. I still make new sitemaps every couple of weeks, whether the site is updated or not. So, Google's fresher index is gaining authority.

The other thing I noticed is that the new Geo Targeting tool in your Google Webmaster's Tools, has kicked in. I must say for the sites (5) I used it on, the results are quite dramatic for the short time elapsed. I would strongly suggest you DO NOT use this tool, unless you really want to stick your site to a certain area! The sites still rank for non-location oriented keyword phrases, but the location phrases are very "exact match". If you do use it, try maybe just State, Zipcode, etc. Leave off the street address and City.

All in all, nice work from Google. I see a cleaner and more effective index. I was beginning to feel depressed about being killed in the SERPs, by spam and illegible languages on Google.com. Feeling better about the SEO today!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

What Does Your Main Page Say?

2007-11-06T21:02:00.001-05:00

Find What Does Your Main Page Say? at the new SEO Blog Home

What if ICANN Cans the WhoIs Database?

2007-11-05T20:38:00.001-05:00

Find this ICANN post at our new home

Do You Really Exist?

2007-11-04T20:57:00.001-05:00

Do You Really Exist? ... This post moved to our new home.

Got Accessibility? | Cog SEO Blog Does

2007-11-03T11:50:00.000-04:00

Today the Cog SEO Blog drags it's sorry butt in to the realms of accessibility. We will from now on, for every post, offer an audio version. I would like to say that I will personally read these posts to you, but that's not the case. We have chosen a clean speaking, computer generated, male voice. OK, I know....I am a female. We chose a male voice, as it is just clearer and easier to understand.

The posts require a little tweaking, for translation. Things like "SEO" and such, just do not translate. Also, the audio posts are in wav format, so that most readers / users will be able to listen to them. I am compressing the audio posts, so that there will not be a terribly long wait to begin to play. With every effort in this area, we all know my posts can be quite lengthy at times and this may still upon occasion present an issue. Please, just be patient....Every wav file will be compressed to it's smallest size possible without data loss. So realize, the audio version of the posts will be a few minutes behind the text post.

A bit ago we added the Alta Vista Babel Fish language translation widget (down and to your right). This has really been a nice tool, and I would recommend it for any web site or blog. It gets much traffic and good use here.

SEO and Accessibility

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Have a Money Making Winter

2007-11-02T20:52:00.000-04:00

Well campers, the busy Internet season here in the US is creeping up on us. My question today is, are you ready? Your redesigns should be launched, your optimization should be under control, and you should be ready for a rise in your traffic.....And your conversions with any luck!

As the outside gets colder, and the yards get cleaned up...Folks will be making their way to more inside activities. Many of those activities will include the Internet, via many available platforms now. Ideally your USA based traffic should already be on the increase, statistically they say it will peak in January....Then begin to trend down once again. Of course, your increase will depend highly on your United States, or other "colder" seasoned areas this time of year...And by all means your ability to get them to your site!

Have you considered optimizing to increase your share of this growing "pie"? If you for example have a non - US commerce site that does International sales...It might be a good time for a targeted US SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign. Organic results for Google.com will obviously be more precious to you as well, if you can muster some American appeal. If there are more fish in the pond, you are likely to have a better fishing trip!

Web designers, developers, and SEOs are probably seeing an increase in their own business right now. People are thinking more about those "inside" activities. Savvy business owners realize this opportunity, and now have a summers worth of cash flow to work with as well.

Then consider the holiday season, do you have a plan? New products, good supplies, and have your worked on all the reasons to bail from your cart? Now is the time. Consumers shop from work, their phones, school, the local cafe, and just about anywhere. Last year Internet holiday sales were over 39 Billion...Again, are you ready? Navigation, stock, planning, specials, marketing, and of course my favorite...Optimization.

Just some food for thought. Now you can go finish raking your leaves.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Geo Targeting in Googles Webmasters Tools

2007-11-01T07:00:00.001-04:00

Read about Geo Targeting in Googles Webmasters Tools at our new SEO Blog Home

So You Want to do Your Own SEO?

2007-10-31T09:24:00.001-04:00

See So You Want to do Your Own SEO? on our new SEO Blog.

Google's PageRank Slap | Immunize your Site

2007-10-30T06:36:00.000-04:00

Last week, Google executed a "PR Slap" if you will. The entire webmaster / SEO community has been up in arms about this bold move by Google. On 10/24/2007 Web Pro News posted a list of sites "slapped" and their associated PageRank reductions. There are some pretty heavy hitters in the list, such as washingtonpost.com, forbes.com, problogger.net, andybeard.eu, and seroundtable.com, just to name a few. As you can imagine many of the site owners are pretty upset. Many rumors an theories were flying around, but with a cool head Andy Beard reported that while many of the sites penalties appeared to be link commerce related...There were others that just didn't look to be participating in and link selling or buying.

Many of the reputable sources that have received a penalty are part of extensive blog networks, and they have one factor in common. They have massive interlinking between their network sites.

Now yesterday 10/29/2007, we have Search Engine Journal reporting an email from Matt Cutts on the matter. Matt says this...

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site. Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

So Matt confirms the selling of links, and adds that they have considered "forward links" of sites. This says to me, that it does not have to be a site selling links to get busted. You may just be lending PageRank to a neighboring site. I would think that this is how the PageRank system is intended to work, but apparently Google has some means of determining a level of "malice" with your outgoing links. I am very concerned that the whole world with have a "fear of linking" epidemic. As you can see above in Matt's comments Google will be looking at more sites.

So what of these sites that were penalized? I checked several, and many are cleaned up already. However, there are many in the list that have used what I will call "unsafe SEO practices". I did find some link selling, some hidden text, obvious link selling "buy a link here", sold links hidden away in Java Script, affiliate labeled link lists not "nofollowed", some traffic widgets, and as Andy pointed out some pretty serious interlinking. I did find some sites that in there present state show no signs of a valid reason for the penalty....But only a few.

Have we learned nothing? Has Google not been telling us these things for some time? Why would any site STILL have it's blogroll or advertisers labeled as: Sponsors, Partners, Affiliates, or Paid Ads? Additionally, why would anyone think it would work to use such labels and then hide the links in Java Script, with the label...Usually bold or a heading tag right out in the spider-able open? Do we not realize this is hidden links? Hidden text...Most of the time this is just a coding error in my experience....But clearly if you have violated other guidelines, you would seek to avoid raising suspicion for such a simple mistake.

Some of the issues are not so easily analyzed, nor repaired. Sites and blogs that are part of huge networks have clearly been penalized as well. I take issue with this, at least partially. In my opinion, if a webmaster doesn't own these sites or there is a huge amount of reciprocal linking afoot...Then this is how Google's ranking system is intended to work. Just like above, for the sites still getting Google's attention with those obvious "Look at me I am selling links" words...Then natural or not, you are asking for trouble.

So, if you have no idea why Google has giving you a PR drop.....You have only to look at your links, Ads, and forward link profile. This not new information. I have said it before, and I'll say it once more...If you are spending more time trying to "beat" Google, than you are trying to follow the rules and move forward....You are making a huge mistake. Google appears to be quite serious about this, they warned us, they gave penalties...And still many webmasters think they are somehow immune or have found such a means to "beat" the system. Google has not even spared the large authority sites, what would make you think your site will be exempt? No crying foul when you have broken the rules and got caught.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"
**Disclaimer: The sites mentioned in the first paragraph are not necessarily the sites used to gather the information regarding "unsafe SEO practices". I checked a great deal of sites, and the findings are general for all of the sites inspected.

**We Require a Link Back Please.

SEO - Screw Every One? | Unethical SEOs Rant

2007-10-29T19:57:00.001-04:00

Get this Rant at our NEW Home!

Is This the Dawn of a New PageRank Algorithim?

2007-10-28T08:42:00.000-04:00

Putting all the recent slaps and toolbar PageRank aside.....In looking at the "verified" PageRank of sites that were updated, I am seeing what may I believe may in fact be a new algorithm (or changed algo) for PageRank computation. Below are my observations...

For reference this is Wiki's definition of PageRank:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

As we can see PageRank has ALWAYS been a link algorithm. But, many of the sites that were updated clearly have been weighed with other factors as well. Mind you this in assuming there is no GLITCH afoot here. So lets have a look at what I have seen...

I used SEOLogs fake PageRank detector, TextLink Advisor's Tool, Live PageRank, Smart PageRank, and Ask Bee PageRank verifier. Even though we know there is some issues with Yahoo's displaying of IBLs...I used it for the links...As it is still fairly accurate if you are signed in. I also snagged the following directions for verifying PageRank from SEORoundtable.

Best way is to check manually on IP which shows updated PR.
info:domain.com
If results are nothing or url(s) which doesn't match original then something is fishy if only 1 url is returned and its same then its 100% ok.

Case #1 YouTube
Smart PageRank-PR3 resolved in all data centers except Google English.
Live PageRank-PR3 on the majority of IPs, 4IPs still showing 8 (belonging to Google English), and 11 showing 0PR, but the IPs do not resolve...Apparently old data center IPs.
SEOLog Fake PR-We can't verify this pagerank. Google says its a PR "8", but an info: check doesn't return any info, which is suspicious.
TextLink Advisor-Sorry, we cant verify the pagerank for this page.
Ask Bee-Page Rank Analysis www.youtube.com/ : 3
Info command-Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.youtube.com.
Yahoo IBL-Domain only IBLs 15,179,790
***EDIT 10/29/2007 6:44AM YouTube's PR appears to have been adjusted back to a verified 8 for it's domain url.

Case #2 OurWeddingForever.com
SmartPageRank-PR3 resolved in all data centers except Google English.
Live PageRank- PR3 on the majority of IPs, 1IPs still showing 2 (belonging to Google English), and 11 showing 0PR, but the IPs do not resolve...Apparently old data center IPs.
SEOLog Fake PR-ourweddingforever.com matches Google results url:ourweddingforever.com This Pagerank is valid PR 3!
TextLink Advisor-Check Url : http://www.ourweddingforever.com Status : Valid Pr!
Ask Bee-Page Rank Analysis www.ourweddingforever.com/ : 3
Info Command-1 url returned www.ourweddingforever.com/ (indicating nothing fishy)
Yahoo IBL-Domain only IBLs 89

Case #3 SEOCog.com
Smart PageRank-PR3 resolved in all data centers except Google English.
Live PageRank- PR3 on the majority of IPs, 4 IPs still showing 0 (belonging to Google English), and 5 showing 0PR, but the IPs do not resolve...Apparently old data center IPs.
SEOLog Fake PR-seocog.com matches Google results url:seocog.com This Pagerank is valid PR 3!
TextLink advisor-Check Url : http://www.seocog.com Status : Valid Pr!
Ask Bee-Page Rank Analysis www.seocog.com/ : 3
Info Command-1 url returned www.seocog.com/ (indicating nothing fishy)
Yahoo IBL-Domain only IBLs 2,244

So as you can see, there are some odd things afoot here. According to the relative chart we have grown accustomed to using, which is only an estimate....These domains above do not match their expected level of PR related to their IBLs.

Case #1 YouTube...We can assume there has been no manual penalty here, yet according to the chart YouTube should be a PR 9. Having said that we clearly have no way to decide what IBLs Google has credited to any site...Their weight or otherwise.

Case #2 OurWedding Forever.....Was a PR2 before the update. According to the chart the site should be sporting a PR 2 still, and that is IF every single link has been credited. This site misses the PR3 mark by almost 100 backlinks.

Case #3 SEOCog.....Was a PR0 before the update, a fairly new site. However, the cut off on the chart for a PR3 is 900 IBLs then onto PR4....SEOCog should be a PR4, by the chart. I would not think that Google has disallowed or devalued over 1300 backlinks, which is what would take it to the top of PR3 range.

So check a few sites if you are curious....Nothing can be said with any certainty at this early point. Hell, the whole update could be flawed and we will see a correction update....Who knows. I do think however, IF Google has re-evaluated and changed the PageRank algorithm...That first of all it is a good move, and secondly it may help them in their efforts to reduce the amount of PageRank manipulation through links that has occurred, and they seem so incredibly sensitive to. So time will tell.......

*****Disclaimer I do NOT pretend to know what is going on with Google's PR, I am only making an observation. The information provided in this post can easily be verified using the tools I provided to be referenced.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Wait to Check your Yahoo Backlinks

2007-10-27T10:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Yahoo posted an "alert" of sorts on their Yahoo Search Blog concerning the results we have been receiving while checking links via the Site Explorer lately. To summarize for anyone just catching this...Yahoo has been displaying 2 sets of link results for sites dependent on whether or the the user is logged in. I actually did not consider that this was a glitch, but rather a depreciated result for non-members. Apparently however, it was in fact a bug and is already being repaired.

What you need to know is that even though the counts were apparently inaccurate, the displayed results were unharmed. So if you we looking for a specific backlink and found it...It does in fact exist, no worries. There may be some that were just not displayed.

Yahoo has stated that link data counts from 10/11/07 through next week (so like 11/03/07) should be disregarded. This brings to mind an important rule using SEO tools, if the results are not what you have historically seen for the page or site...You might just do a manual check or verify with another tool. When checking a new site or one you have no history with it is definitely better to use at least 2 methods of measuring SEO metrics. **NOTE: Watch for sites utilizing the "same" protocol, database, or program for their tools. It is quite common for SEO tools to be branded and distributed.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google Slap Is Coming To Town

2007-10-26T16:30:00.000-04:00

I am taking a blog "mulligan" today...As my phone has not stopped ringing since 8am, and I still have about 3 hours of hardcore SEO to do tonight with a new launch. Anyhow, a friend sent me this cute video by Randy Pryor....And while it's early for Christmas, I think you will like it as well.

I guess your were expecting a long drawl on the recent PageRank issues...But I have decided it has already hit epidemic blogging proportions and since their SERPs were not affected...It really matters little anyhow.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

Google Has Pickled SERPs Now?

2007-10-25T00:05:00.000-04:00

What were they jealous of Yahoo's pickled SERPs? It wasn't that long ago I was blogging about how Yahoo has screwed up their SERPs with mechanical issues and non English sites in an English search...Which they have NOT resolved. Now we have Google following suit with a bug or glitch in their SERPs as well. I have been following this for about a week, and I have checked it with others from across the big pond to be certain my local data center was not playing tricks on me. I even checked from another IP at my office, within the same data center.

So here's the deal. If you search either Google or Google UK for seo blog, you will find some very odd happenings. There are sites repeated for the same url which in fact resolves to the same page. The strangest occurrence of all is the fact that for the time I have been watching there has been a site listed in the last result position on SERP pages 7 through 26 and sometimes up to page 33...That is the same site and page. This has not been the same listing in this oddity for all these days, in fact there have been many different ones.

I have made a page displaying the most recent SERPs, screenshots that I just took for you to have a look. What you will see is "directory.sootle.com/directory-weblog/" as the last result on every SERP page 7 through 26. You will also see that "seo2.0.onreact.com" has at least 2 appearances for the same page and url, only in different positions. Before you get those SEO juices flowing........I did not find any redirects in these site's listings.

The result listing information for these sites are all completely the same. Google UK as I stated earlier has the same problem, only the numbers are a little different. These results do not change whether you are signed in or not....Or even whether you clear your temp files and cookies.

I have not identified this issue in any other queries, but I am willing to bet it exists...My logical mind would find it hard to believe a "manual" screw up has been made here. Additionally, I would have trouble swallowing the algorithm making such an isolated mistake. I checked 20 additional queries and could not reproduce these glitches for any other query. IF any of you find this in another query, I would like to hear about it.

So between Yahoo and Google I sure hope you like pickles! I guess these matters are to be expected when advancements are made and challenges are taken on. I for one hope this particular "pickle" gets worked out soon.

Peace and SEO

MelaniePrough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Directory Submitting | Can You Read?

2007-10-24T09:27:00.001-04:00

Find this post here at our new SEO BLOG Home

Where Has My Wife Gone, Did Google De Index Her?

2007-10-23T20:13:00.001-04:00

Find Jack's Rant at Our New Cog SEO Blog Home

How Stupid is BlogRush?

2007-10-22T05:52:00.000-04:00

You may remember my problem trying to be removed from the BlogRush system. It was in fact screwed up. It began on 9/22/2007, when I did my own research and review of the BlogRush system...And was completely unimpressed. After reading the terms of use very carefully an realizing they in fact had phrases indicating they could in fact use my content in terms that I do not wish to see happen...

By submitting Content to Income.com for inclusion in our Service, you grant Income.com a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Income.com will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Service, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

So continued my ordeal to get removed from this potentially content thieving system. I became especially pissed off in this process, after receiving threatening emails from BlogRush for not displaying their widget....Even though I had ALREADY asked to be removed.

Yes, I have been receiving a few referral page views from a BlogRush url...But I didn't think much of it....Until today. I assumed it was some sort of linked referral from a blog using the widget. The address resolves to an empty page.

s1.blogrush.com / referral (last visit 10/6).

Have a look at the email BlogRush sent me. So clearly BlogRush will do whatever the hell they want. If you are a BlogRush member and your blog got dumped, you might be upset. Apparently even though I do not wish to participate, and have jumped though hoops to be withdrawn from the program, this blog was accepted......Unless the email is BOGUS...Link bait? A PLOY?

-----Original Message-----
From: BlogRush [mailto:system@blogrush.com]
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 3:03 AM
To: Melanie Prough
Subject: Special News For You

An Important BlogRush News Update...
- Congratulations!
- 10,000+ Blogs Removed From BlogRush
- Phase 2 Being Deployed
- Busy Week Ahead!
-------------------------------------------------------------
Congratulations!
-------------------------------------------------------------
You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict Quality Guidelines and criteria -- we believe you have a high-quality blog and we are happy you're a member of our network!
-------------------------------------------------------------
10,000+ Blogs Removed From BlogRush
-------------------------------------------------------------
We've just completed a massive SWEEP of our entire network. We've
removed over *10,000* blogs (Yes, ten thousand) that did not meet our new Quality Guidelines. We have done a huge "quality control audit" of our network and have reviewed all the blogs one-at-a-time. We will continue to review each NEW blog that is ever submitted to our network. You will notice the HUGE DIFFERENCE in the quality of blogs that now appear in your widget. This major *sweep* of our network will also increase the click-rates across the entire network and you will start to receive more traffic. But we're only getting started. We've got LOTS of amazing improvements in the works to help you get more daily traffic from
our network.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Phase 2 Being Deployed
-------------------------------------------------------------
We're in the process of rolling out our massive "Phase 2" upgrade to BlogRush. In the next few days you'll see an all-new Dashboard, advanced statistics reporting, and much, much more. We're introducing tons of new sub-categories to help with content relevance (which will increase click-rates and traffic). We're also introducing a "Thin Widget" option. Many of our members cannot use the standard widget because it's too wide for their blog.This new widget format will solve this issue.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Busy Week Ahead!
-------------------------------------------------------------
We have a busy week ahead as we will start rolling out all these fantastic changes. Thanks so much for your patience! We will continue to work very hard to help drive more quality, targeted DAILY TRAFFIC to your blog.
Best
Regards,
John Reese,
Founder of BlogRush

So, returning the favor...In BlogRush likeness...I have sent BlogRush a very strong email in return. For any that are interested, the email address is support@blogrush.com. I certainly don't care what they want to do, or how they run their site...But if I want to be excluded, then I have the damn right. I will not party to a pyramid system of traffic building, whose founder signs threatening emails, writes clauses to retain and license my content for itself, and whose members cannot leave of their own free will.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google Pumps Up the Tools

2007-10-21T19:31:00.000-04:00

Wow, Google is really getting their tools in order! Seems lately like their is am improvement or new feature every week. On Oct. 18 Google's Webmasters Blog posted a fabulous little bit about our Top Search Queries data.......Which they have extended to include the previous 6 months! SEO just got Googlized. From 7 days to 6 months....Now you can trend your own search data in Webmasters Tools.

Just click a site, then "statistics"....And choose "Top Search Queries". Bingo, it should already be there for you! The options for sorting data by time line are: 7 days; 2 weeks; 3 weeks; 1 month; 2 months; 3 months; 4 months; 5 months; and 6 big months of productive search queries for your site. Is it Christmas? My data only goes back 1 month for my sites right now....But they say they hope to improve that.

You will also notice, you also have the percentage of the top 20 search appearances for each phrase now...Instead of just the position. Of course you can break it down in to image search; web search; and mobile search. This will definitely improve your vertical game now...Trending vertical search queries, very nice for your SEO campaign. If that's not enough...Break this data into regional Google search platforms, as well. How about regional and vertical at the same time? No problem.

Just like the rest of the webmaster's stats, download this data in a .csv to play around with in your favorite spreadsheet program. If you select the "Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)"...You can even see the data directly related to each directory. Would be neat if we got pages, but maybe next time.

Google claims in the blog post that.."Statistics are being now updated constantly. Top query results and clicks may visibly change rank a lot more often now, sometimes daily." Does this mean we can have a peek at that flux now?

Top it all of with a fine sense of humor from Sahala Swenson of the Webmaster Tools Team...The final paragraph....

So enough talk. Sign in and play around with the new improvements for yourself. As always we welcome feedback (especially in the form of beer), so feel free to drop us a note in the Webmaster Help Group and let us know what you think.

I'll second that! Great post and awesome improvement in our tools. Do you still really think Google hates SEOs?

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

US Search Market Share September 2007

2007-10-20T06:47:00.000-04:00

Nielsen Netratings report on the US search market share for September 2007. The results are in....Let's have a look at the top performing search engines and their metrics compared to past reports.

Click to Enlarge the Market Share Chart Image

Google remains top dog in the search game, showing a very small increase over August 07 market share results. Their year over year (YOY) growth is 41.3%, showing a slight increase over last months 39.8% as well. Google checks in with a falling 3,994,158 searches in September, a small decrease from last month of 205,337 searches performed. However, despite Yahoo's effort and innovation Google had 63.9% more searches in September. This is still increasing, as they grabbed 62.8% more of the total searches than Yahoo in August.

Yahoo, still losing market share and has lost .4% market share compared to the August report. They are showing 19.5% of the search market share for September...While last month they came in at 19.9%. This is in fact a negligible amount, but I expected to see an increase here. Yahoo is actually down 118,658 (7.6%) total searches from last month. Their YOY (year over year) however, is up over last month showing 9.3% growth.

MSN / Live is looking pretty stable with a 12.0% of the search market share, which has fallen from last month...But only a very small .9%. MSN / Live was able to grab 890,658 of the total searches for September, which is a loss of 120,713 total searches. That number would not make much of a difference to Google, but for MSN / Live it is a 11.9% loss. MSN / Live is showing a gigantic 71.5% growth in YOY (year over year). Which is up from last months YOY growth by 1.7%.

AOL search continues to out do Ask.com, checking in at 6.0% of the search market share, a .4% share growth from August reporting. At 444,493 searches for September, they are genuinely killing Ask.com. Showing a dominating 285,524 (64.2%) more searches than Ask.com.

Ask.com gained a little market share this month with 2.2%, which has grown from 1.7% last month. This number is not very reflective of their efforts, if you are Ask, you would at this point have to be looking to change your plan a bit. Ask's total searches for September were 158,969, up 22,116 (13.9%) from August. The curious thing here is that is only 15,456 (9.7%) more searches than July's report. YOY (year over year) Ask the report reflects a small increase of 4.5% for Ask, which is much better than the flat line growth of 0.0% from August.

My Web, Comcast, Bell South, and SBC Yellow pages are all showing little or no improvement in the market share over last month.

So, some surprises this month....Yahoo is not a healthy as we might have expected, and Ask.com continues to fail in their efforts to join the lead engines. Google leading the pack and continuing to show sustained growth in their market share is becoming a harder target for Yahoo to hit. Yahoo is really going to have to pour it on to gain any real ground here.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google's Word on Sitelinks in Your SERPS

2007-10-19T09:09:00.001-04:00

Find Google's Word on Sitelinks in Your SERPS at our New SEO Blog.

Google Bait - Checking Link Numbers

2007-10-18T07:43:00.000-04:00

4 days ago, I wrote about Google's post to instruct webmasters about how to keep their Google Webmaster Tools data fresh and up to date. They were very clear and brief in describing exactly how to get the most up to date data from their tools. I was in fact happy to see them address the issue.

Back on 10/14/2007 Yahoo Site Explorer (signed in) was still reporting over 1100 more links for this blog. Today, that number has declined to reflect a gap of 951, which is still 36% of our links...Which Google fails to report. I really want to believe that Google takes this seriously, but 40% is a lot of missing links! We need this data to properly SEO / optimize our sites, and since links are clearly "no joke" to Google, you would think this issue would bear a certain priority.

There has been a great deal of talk regarding Yahoo Site Explorer reducing the number of inbound links it displays when a user is not signed in to Yahoo. I did my own little checking, as I have more than one Yahoo account. It matters not if the user is signed in to Yahoo, what appears to matter is that the user is the user of record for that account. So it would appear, that only the account holder can get the "real" numbers. I verified this with 10 sites.

So how big exactly is the gap? I can offer up a few "real data" case examples pulled from my own sites. Mind you, these sites are in all different ranks of what Google requires for "fresh data" to be displayed. I think obviously, the most accurate reflection is the backlink numbers for this blog...As it is indexed, ranking OK, gaining links at a good rate, and published everyday.

Please click to enlarge data table image.

These sites range in size from 135 indexed pages to 255 indexed pages. All of these sites are crawled at least weekly. I really think Google is going to have to get after this. I don't understand the point of displaying half ass-ed data. It has been said that Google is preserving server space, why muck it up with useless data then? I mean site 3 with a 4 day old cache date, and weekly crawls...Should certainly NOT be reflecting a gap of over 50% missing data. That's just outrageous. The site is fairly new, only launched July 31st, 2007. However, it is pulling data in all areas of the Google Webmaster Tools....So I see no reason why the link data should suck so bad. Pages are added to site 3 several times a week, and it is in fact beginning to rank in Google's SERPs (search engine results pages).

I say this to Google....Put up or shut up. Creating guidelines / suggestions for webmasters to increase their data freshness, which equates accuracy in this case, without delivering the goods...Is a very fine way for you to attempt to increase the "freshness" of your own index.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Wasted Effort and Wasted Time

2007-10-17T23:42:00.001-04:00

Check this post at the new SEOCOG

Why Blogger? | Trafficking the Decision

2007-10-16T06:50:00.000-04:00

I get asked this question quite a bit, so here we go. "Melanie, why did you choose a Blogger Blog for this?". Honestly, in the beginning it was a VERY simple answer, I was positively new to blogging, I like the platform, and it is easy as pie to SEO. This of course hardly ever fails to beg the next logical question, "Why, don't you self host or move it now?". That's a little more complicated to answer, but in fact I have considered it.

When you self host a Blogger blog, you lose a lot of the great built in perks that I grown so lazy and attached to. Like widgets built in to my panel, many installed hacks, the cool new Blogger templates, and some less important platform features. In essence, some "bells and whistles", I have grown to appreciate. So, IF I ever move this blog it will most likely a manual move to a different platform. (an SEO friendly one!)

When I set this blog up, I had a thought that perhaps being a member of a thriving community such a Blogger would in fact be beneficial to the SEO and promotion of the blog. Well, in fact it is. You notice the top of this blog still bears the "Blogger Bar"...Sure I could remove it, but why would I not feed this huge community and benefit from it as well? OK, I know...You want proof. This blog's Blogger.com referral traffic is running 7.92% of total referral traffic, and has been steady throughout it's life. Even in the beginning, Blogger provided this blog with it's "meat and potatoes" traffic while it grew stronger. So you say that's not a lot, but consider this....These visitors have the lowest bounce in my top 4 referral sources (excluding direct), and are the highest quality visitors to my blog....Statistically speaking. (see below) It is not always about the quantity, so much as the quality.

(All blog statistics are for the last 30 days)

Google / Organic - 21.19% of total referral traffic. Time on site 2:40. Pages viewed 2.04. Bounce 71.28%. 65.74% new visits.
Sphinn - 17.38% of total referral traffic. Time on site 1:16. Pages viewed 1.34. Bounce 77.22%. 81.43% new visits.
Blogger - 7.92% of total referral traffic. Time on site 5:27. Pages viewed 2.86. Bounce 55.56%. 18.52% new visits.
Digg - 7.4% of total referral traffic. Time on site :35. Pages viewed 1.21. Bounce 89.11%. 80.20% new visits.

These statistics are taken from Analytics, and the numbers are out of 82 current (ha ha) referrers for the past 30 days. I will say this about the bounce....I don't buy it. I realize the bounce for this blog is high, but I suspect as many before me have said...Analytics reports this metric incorrectly. However, that is not the point here. If you take the above statistics and apply them to 1000 visitors, then Blogger traffic tops Google traffic with visitors viewing 2860 pages in 90.83 hours (per 1000 visitors)...Compared to Google with 2040 pages in 44.4 hours (per 1000 visitors). Which is 28.7% more pages viewed and 51.1% more time spent on site. To me, this boils down to more quality from the visits...More opportunity to attract links, more opportunity for conversions, and certainly more opportunity for the blog's reach to be extended in many other ways as well. (and NO, my posting page url is not a url from this blog, it resolves to Blogger.com)

Yes, as you can see above....Recently Yahoo hates me! I know there is the curiosity factor, so I will help you all out with that. I have only myself to compete against. Stumble traffic is 3.81% (not including other stumbler's urls). Live organic is 1.47%. Technorati is .81%. Del.icio.us is .37%. Yahoo organic is a sore ass .29%. Ask.com is not even on the radar...This blog is in fact partially indexed, but refuses to rank for any relevant terms....I will not waste any more time with Ask.com. You might find this humorous, that Ask.com in all their infinite wisdom has chosen to rank me for "habits that piss me off" #1 result. The serp (search engine result page) listing is referring to this post, regarding blog habits that irritate me. I would think they could find some better queries for this site. Some of my other sites are in fact fully indexed and ranking in top positions for their terms on Ask and seeing such small traffic from them compared to Google, Yahoo, and MSN / Live....That it is hardly worth the effort. Too many kids and tasks to waste time for little or no return.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
Thomas A. Edison

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Yahoo's Pickled SERPS

2007-10-15T17:50:00.000-04:00

On October 1st, 2007 I first blogged about the various results from the Yahoo update which had taken place over the weekend. While, the thrust of Yahoo's direction is so very positive and I am very impressed with their progress....I had noticed a problem immediately following the update with the SERPs (search engine position results). At the time, I was conservative and hopeful that there was still work to be done on Yahoo's part. Now, 2 weeks later that prospect has definitely faded.

Initially, I noticed 4 very distinct things which I pointed out.

The first still remains, whether I am signed in or not....If I query "SEO blog", I get a suggestion for "china seo blog". The "seo blog" being the only direct keyword hit in the list, every time.

I'm not really sure where Yahoo is going with this. I don't see the relevance, at least compared to other relevant suggestions....Such as: SEO information - offered up by Ask.com or SEO software - offered up by MSN / Live. Maybe Yahoo intends to capitalize of Google's troubles in China?

The second issue I noticed was a lack of descriptions or snippets displaying for the search results. It was reported all over that Yahoo had stopped using Meta descriptions...However in searching the Yahoo Search Blog, ALL of the posts with the Yahoo team referencing information regarding this issue seem to be displaying the same page now. See text below as well.

Fourth Weather Report: Yahoo! Update Tonight
We will be making changes to the ranking of our index tonight. I would expect that this update will be mild and quick compared to recent ones but will impact the ranking of some sites.
If you have any feedback for us about the new index please email: ystfeedback@yahoo.com.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search

However, the post dates remain the same...This one is actually 11/01/2005 (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000208.html). This issue is this, originally it was reported they would be using snippets or a similar process. That does not seem to be working out for them. The search results are littered with pages that although they clearly have textual content have no description displayed in the search results...Here is an example you might all recognize...But there are many.

The 3rd thing I noticed and posted previously was blatant irrelevance within the results. No more Russian dating in the "SEO Blog" results. The Russian dating content has been removed, and....I hope you are sitting, the site has moved up in the results from #37 to #33.

Finally, the 4th and final thing I noticed really pisses me off when I am searching Yahoo now. Before I hit this, here is my big, fat disclaimer..........

I am American, I speak English. I think if you speak another language you should have every right to access every bit on content you can...Thus the translator to your right-->>. However....If I am searching in English, in regular Yahoo or Google, then I should not be bothered with results I cannot read nor translate. This applies to all languages..Not just English.

Yahoo just like Google, and many other search facilitators have other platforms intended for other languages. That surely does not mean any person should be stuck searching for information within the confines of that language either...But on the other hand, if I open Yahoo search I should be able to find English text-ed sites without the splattering of sites written in languages I cannot understand, and did NOT search for. We are talking about sites with NO translators, and SERP descriptions I cannot even read to even begin to decide if I may wish to visit the site. Guess what, I can even sign in to Yahoo....Providing them with my information which clearly establishes my English speaking tongue, and get the same damn results! Have a look..

Click to enlarge these search result images

If you think these are sparse, then you would be mistaken. I didn't spend all day doing this, but below are just a few results I pulled from my own browser using Yahoo search. Please note once again, the results do not change whether or not you are signed in.

Query = "SEO Blog" 4 non English text-ed pages listed in the first 10 pages.
Query = "Tech Blog" 1 non English text-ed pages listed in the first 10 pages.
Query = "Webmaster Blog" 18 non English text-ed pages listed in the first 10 pages.

So, I checked some regular sites as well...they were not very bad at all. So Yahoo has a Blog problem?

Just in case you are like me, and you were wondering...If you go to Yahoo China and search "SEO Blog"..........You will find these problems exist in that platform as well. There are in fact English text-ed sites with NO available translation utilities ranking within the SERPs...Very, well I might add.

So, Yahoo.........If I want to learn another language, besides the 2 I know, I will take a class....Thanks, anyhow.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Our Voice to Google | Call to Action

2007-10-14T07:47:00.000-04:00

I was reading the recent post in the Google Webmasters Blog regarding data freshness with relationship to our own data within the Webmaster Tools. The post makes perfect sense to me. Google has always been very savvy with regard to their server space and bandwidth, why use unnecessary resources. I can totally get behind this. So here is how it boils down...If you are not adding data in some form, backlinks or content. Or in other words, not giving Google a reason to crawl your site more often, then your information within the tool set will not be as fresh..Duh. They have stated in the post that they have kicked up the crawl rates a notch for verified sites, but once again....Nothing new for any sustained length of time will bring the crawl rate back down, and thus your data within the tool set will once again not be up to date. Like a dog chasing it's tail? << Isn't that the definition of SEO? =-) I will tell you for example, the link reporting between Yahoo and Google for this Blog (which is posted everyday) is still lacking over 1100 links in Google. That's still not very helpful for any SEO campaign, but in fact improving.

Within the post was a clear invitation for webmasters to continue to post suggestions and feature requests. Now, I cannot say how or when...If ever they use this information, but if you have that great idea...Get it in there. I was trolling through the posts, and I thought I would share some of the ideas with you folks. There are some very interesting thoughts going on in the Webmaster Help Group. Whether you are a webmaster with one site, or an SEO with many clients...These things matter to you. I would not think Google would openly solicit input they have no intention of at least reading, so get in there.

Suggestion to list a referring page for 404 crawl errors. Nice, but shouldn't we already be doing this?
Drop down lists for the dashboard instead of the regular list. Nice idea, but then sitemaps and verification have to move to another page...Ugh redesign.
Directory removals in addition to url removals...Good idea, but dangerous tool.
Displaying ALL of our backlinks. Matt Cutts has told us in the past this has gotten better, but it is done to conserve space. Will Google continue to let Yahoo out do them here?
Re-submit option for removed urls. I don't know about this. I suspect it would be abused, as it would most certainly by design have weaknesses to be exploited.
Alternate means to verify free hosted sites/blogs that cannot upload the html file, nor edit their template code. Hmmmmm, then MySpace profiles will be verified...I am quite sure!
A suggestion to let us see the dates on the crawl rate tool graph. For sites like this one that would certainly be convenient in many SEO applications.
LOL...A request for Google to get Xenu and tell us where to find our broken links. Same as above, but cute.
Categorization of inbound links...I think this one is a bit much to ask of Google.
Put the Google Bot last visit on the dashboard list. Hey I like this one!
Suggestion to rewrite dynamic urls such as Yahoo. I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand I feel it is the webmaster's responsibility, on the other there are many sites that cannot effect these parameters within their hosting environment. Hmmmm.
Downloading link data tables not working. Mine works...So is either fixed or user error.

OK my suggestions........I will add them to the blog / thread in a few, but here first...As I am on a roll.

I would very much like to see some type of duplication reporting in webmasters tools, even if it is just canonical information. With the removal of the supplemental operators, it can be very challenging to determine the nature of a supplemental page. With the widespread problem and inherent concern, if it was only offered to verified sites I would think it would increase the number of verified sites and thus enhance and strengthen the community as a whole.

I would also like to see Google offer some sort of "first publication" or "content" rights to verified site owners for their unique content. This doesn't even have to be a legal issue. Give webmasters the ability to properly label or sign their content to avoid the supplemental problems caused by a site republishing which has greater PageRank and or Authority, thus plummeting the original owner and author in to the supplemental index. Like a V-Key or similar, that would ensure the proper page's ability to survive in the serps (search engine results pages), even if it was just weighted or delivered authority or links (votes or credit forward) to the verified page supplying the "original" content. Yes, I agree this would be difficult..But do the filters not already exist?

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Adsenseless for SEO Blogs - Giggle

2007-10-13T13:46:00.001-04:00

Get this Giggle at our new home

How to Kill an SEO Campaign

2007-10-12T17:52:00.001-04:00

Read "How to Kill an SEO Campaign" at the new home of the COG

SEO and the Relevance Factor - Get This?

2007-10-11T06:09:00.001-04:00

Find this RELAVANT post at the new home of the COG

Adsense Video Ads

2007-10-10T09:30:00.000-04:00

Adsense announced a cool new tool on it's blog yesterday 10/9/07, Adsense Ads for YouTube Videos. This is a very nice step for Adsense, I think. There are some specs you should be aware of...But all in all I think this can add to your marketing advantage very nicely. It is recommended that you sync your YouTube and Adsense accounts, and you have to await approval to start displaying Ads...But mine took less than 2 hours. See the example below. You need to have YouTube account to use this Adsense feature.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

The Ad unit displays a top banner "companion Ad" and in video "text overlay" Ads in video covering 20% of the bottom viewable area, but can be closed by the user. You can adjust the color scheme in the Ad editor to a limited number of choices, and there are 3 sizes available: 400 x 415; 500 x 510; and 780 x 560.

Content choices are automated content based Ads, just like regular Adsense...And you can add hints (keywords) to help them along. Additionally, you can choose from an array of categories to display content from....As well as individual providers.

Ads are paid cost per click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM). The reports will be displayed separately from your regular Adsense reports in a "Video Units" heading on your custom channels reports frame. Correction 10:01am 10/10/01

Currently, this Ad unit feature is only available to US, English language websites.

Peace and SEM

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Unnatural Linking and the Perils

2007-10-09T06:25:00.001-04:00

Unnatural Linking and the Perils is at our new SEO Blog home

Penalties for Inbound Links? Fact or Fiction

2007-10-08T06:06:00.001-04:00

Find the answer at our new SEO Cog Blog home

SEO Sales Pitching and Status Symbolism

2007-10-07T17:02:00.001-04:00

SEO Sales Pitching and Status Symbolism moved to the new Cog Home

What Color is Your Market?

2007-10-06T06:41:00.001-04:00

Find out What Color is Your Market? at the new home of the Cog

Blog Habits that Piss Me Off

2007-10-05T05:24:00.001-04:00

Read Blog Habits that Piss Me Off at the new Cog home

The Uncommon SEO of Nofollow

2007-10-04T06:33:00.001-04:00

Read about The Uncommon SEO of Nofollow at the new Cog home

Boost Your Traffic with Image Search Optimisation

2007-10-03T06:44:00.001-04:00

Find this Image Optimization Information at our new home.

Supplemental Pages Checker?

2007-10-02T08:40:00.000-04:00

I recently came across this tool, which was given as a means to check supplemental pages within Google's index. I was obviously intrigued, and checked it out. Since Google stopped labeling the supplemental results, and killed the operators many webmasters struggle to determine which pages may or may not be supplemental. I blogged a method to research and determine potential supplemental pages, which I still highly recommend you do. I have however, checked this tool against all of my sites and have some information to provide on it's possible validity.

In checking my sites with the "Supplemental index count per DC" at OYOY, I found that it seems fairly accurate. I would not rely on it totally, as I said do the research first...Then you might attempt to verify your data with this tool. The tool check supplemental page counts per domain in each unique Google C-class data center. It most definitely checks sub domains separately, the results are not included in the parent domain's results. Specific pages are not given, which is an excellent reason to still do your research. You may in some cases be able to surmise that a given domain has a huge number of supplemental pages, which can cause site wide ranking problems.

There are several other tools on site, I have not played with them all...But the "WWW or not? Domain check" seems to be a very nice tool also. It queries the indexing strength either www or no in Google and Yahoo, and also link strength www or non in MSN and Yahoo. Returning a final result of the site's overall www or non indexing strength, and a recommendation of which a webmaster should be using. Note: The page is a little funky, if the tool you wish to use is not a link....Just click a different tool then the link will appear.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Yahoo Update or Upset?

2007-10-01T05:16:00.001-04:00

Wow, I have been checking in on the Yahoo update that I blogged on 9/27/07. They haven't announced completion, but they had stated it would take a few days. I certainly hope to hell they are NOT done. I did 5 searches, ones I am familiar with so that I would have a feel for the new algo or ranking terms. I searched over 300 pages of results...Some many times over. I checked pages, and I made every effort to determine some sort of pattern. I was unsuccessful. So I picked one of the queries that you guys might be most interested in....As most of you are not into home health care, and satellite equipment to present some information. Here's the disclaimer part....Check it out, I cannot believe what I saw...There is not guarantee they are done, so no real worries yet. The query I am using for this is "SEO blog", as I am very familiar with it, got a little race going with a friend.

On page 1 right away you will see Yahoo looking a whole lot more like Google. You will also notice Yahoo is pushing "china seo blog" in the also try area, first line, even before search engines and search engine marketing....That's odd...I am American. Note: Result here was the same even signed in...Is Yahoo trying to capitalize on Google's China troubles? Next in the top 6 results you will see only 2 descriptions. 3 pages do not have them, the other does but it is not displayed even though it is formatted properly and cached.
(Click to enlarge)

Next I was shocked to Chinese, French, and Hebrew (I think) languages in the serps. These occurred in the same place whether I was signed in or not..No I didn't click the "china seo blog" link! (Click to enlarge)

Then on page 4 in the # 37 position is a blog ranking for the terms "SEO blog", but it's a sign in page for "Free Wordpress hosting", the main page for that blog is on page 5 and it's content includes things like "Russian dating" and such. Mind you this site is ranked above Bruce Clay's main blog page, Dave Naylor, and SEO-Scoop. So, I continue searching for my blog......and searching.....At this point I do a damn site search to make sure the friggin' thing is still indexed...Whew it is. I searched to page 70...3 times, no dice. I am on page 17 in Google and I know that means squat...Except I WAS on page 16 in Yahoo...UGH. So, yes I am a bit disappointed that I blog every day and non-English and irrelevant sites outrank me! Incidentially, I am not even in the top 50 for my longer tail, "daily seo blog" which I rank page 2 for in Google. I also checked out "search engine optimization", it's no so good either.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

What's GEICO Got?

2007-09-30T08:54:00.001-04:00

Find Out What Gieco's Got at our new SEO Blog Home

Google Singing the Meta Song

2007-09-29T01:13:00.000-04:00

Wow, I popped open the Google Webmasters Blog and see a post where Google is recommending webmasters use Meta descriptions. I personally do this for many pages, for the exact same reason Google cites in the post. Recently, I was involved in a forum thread where another poster very strongly believed otherwise. He believes Google does a great job with the snippets and I would be "screwing" myself out of that by using a Meta description. I tried to present some examples of cases where the snippet, just sucked. However, he felt that was a coding issue, and using the Meta was only putting a band aid on a bigger problem. I don't totally disagree with his position on this. If I have a page that I cannot accurately describe with a Meta description, because it has to many topics (sometimes by nature)...I will generally go with the snippet. Otherwise, I am most likely to go with a good old fashioned Meta description. Google says:

Why does Google care about meta descriptions? We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve click through, they won't affect your ranking within search results.

So lets run through some basics necessary to write a good convertible Meta description. Firstly, the most important thing is your mindset...This tag is for HUMANS. It is in essence a summary and sales pitch for the page. Now, you don't want to get overly promotional in your language and grammar...But you are seeking conversions here.

Avoid repeating title information.

Spell check please.

Keep the fancy grammar and symbols out. Regular grammar expression only.

It is not a keyword list, you are seeking clicks from surfers.

Describe the page, not the site.

Each page should have it's own unique description. I believe this helps to avoid duplication for those "cookie cutter" pages as well.

Google suggests product description, manufacturer, and price is good too for product type pages.

Your description should be no more than 256 characters including spaces, but Google only displays 140.

I treat them like a newspaper classified Ads. Get the information out in limited space with the intent to sell.

So, 2 schools of thought here...But Google has made it's position known. Additionally, if you want to use the Google snippets, you need to just remove any Meta descriptions you have. If you have no Meta descriptions defined, but have used and editor...You might peek at your serps and code to make sure you aren't displaying some garbage like "page description here". Yes I have seen these for descriptions, and titles.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

BlogRush Breakup Update

2007-09-29T00:37:00.000-04:00

A quick update to my Blogrush saga, which began on 9/22/07 with this post "BlogRush is a Blog Bust". Since then I have been trying to leave or unenroll from BlogRush, to no avail. Well today I finally received a response to my second request to BlogRush support.

Hi,
I apologize for the delay in responding. We're doing our very best to provide solutions for our members as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I have passed your request along to technical support.
Please allow up to 48 hours for your account to be removed.

Thanks for your patience through the early stages of this project, and please rest assured that we'll be improving our service as we move forward.

If you have any further questions, please visit our FAQ page at http://www.blogrush.com/faq, and if you can't find the answer to your question(s), you can email us at support@blogrush.com, anytime.

Warmest
regards,
Andy Hussong
http://www.blogrush.com/

P.S. Visit http://www.income.com/blog for
continuous BlogRush updates!

You will also find this now in the FAQ section:

How do I cancel my BlogRush account?
Although we hate to see you go, if you wish to cancel your account, simply send an email to support@blogrush.com with "Cancel My Account" in the subject line, and we'll remove your account from our database. We may choose to allow users to manually cancel their accounts in the near future.

I for one am not so sad for this to have ended. I just checked, and I am now longer a BlogRush member! Wooohoooo!!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Now That's Backlink Analysis

2007-09-28T07:06:00.000-04:00

Jim Boykin reported on their new tool "We Build Pages Backlink Text Analysis Tool" recently. I have spent some time checking this out, as I am a fan of many of the other We Build Pages Tools. Earlier in release they had some issues with the tool, that Jim reports are cleared up. He also states they took the opportunity to update the tool while working on it. So if you tried this tool early on and had problems I suggest you revisit it, its a very nice tool.

The tool doesn't check sub domains, but rather the parent domain when they are entered. It can take a quite few minutes (up to 15 Jim says) to run, be patient. You only use your root domain url, no page or directory in the url. The tool will only gather 1000 backlinks, so if you have more they won't be collected.

When it's complete the first part of the report will provide the url the backlink is from and it's anchor text, if any. The second section of the report contains the anchor text sorted by frequency. The third section called the "Ninja Choice Summary" are links removed on the basis that they are most possibly worthless links, the example Jim gave was "scraper sites". The fourth section is dubbed the "Ninja Word Summary", which is how often words are used to link to you.

Why is this tool different? In my opinion, if you have more than 1000 backlinks which alot of folks do...It's still a worthwhile tool. You get a peek at what you are looking at as far as your variation of anchor text. You also may find the answer for that search query you are hitting, that you have been unable to track down. It only takes one good link with anchor text to get you ranked for an oddball phrase.

I will be adding this the the Cog's tools page, as soon as I finish up here.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Yahoo Update | How's Your Weather?

2007-09-27T08:09:00.000-04:00

On 9/26/2007 Yahoo reported in the "Yahoo Search Blog", that they would be doing some updates to the crawling indexing and ranking algorithms in the next few days. They also stated they were making some index changes with "fresh web data". I was doing a little serp surfing last night, and I can see some pretty drastic changes. My serps for the most part have so far fared well, except for this blog. Anyhow, it's most likely too soon to tell.

In the blog post they went over the benefit of the new dynamic url rewriting. I really have to give Yahoo kudos for this one, what a great addition to their tools! Essentially, your sites will be crawled better, and of course end users benefit greatly from static & clean looking urls. If you didn't get in there and rewrite them, them Yahoo has done it for you..Might want to check that out.

I think Yahoo is making every attempt to retain it's "brand" loyal users and reclaim it's margin users. It would most likely be some time before there was any "real" competition, but anything can happen.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

DMOZ is Back Ending the Search

2007-09-26T22:44:00.000-04:00

I was just getting ready to chase the monsters off to bed, but checked my email first. I had anonymous comment to be moderated....and this is what it says....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Google
Gone Mad? Where is DMOZ": Please see http://blog.dmoz.org/2007/09/26/the-search-for-dmoz/ for an explanation of what happened and how it was rectified. Thanks.

I checked 2 or 3 times today, but saw nothing...So now I see a post from 9PM this evening explaining just how DMOZ "went missing". According to the post on DMOZ's shiny new blog, entitled "The Search For DMOZ" they were changing the canonical url from dmoz.org to http://www.dmoz.org/ and apparently it just took some time to work itself out. They noted that Google was in touch and that everything was smooth sailing now.

Good deal DMOZ!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Great Domain Names - Got One?

2007-09-26T09:03:00.001-04:00

Read Great Domain Names at the new home of SEO Cog

BlogRush to Busy to Shut me OFF?

2007-09-25T07:16:00.000-04:00

****Updated 9/26/2007 8:15AM See Bottom
As much as I really hate to do yet another BlogRush post, I did in fact promise some folks I would follow up on my original post. Apparently, couple of folks who emailed me are also interested in getting the hell out of BlogRush. So here is the scoop. On 9/22/2007 I sent the following email to: customersupport@blogrush.com which was the most appropriate email address I could locate. I was forced to do this, as you CANNOT unenroll yourself from BlogRush in any way. A one way ticket folks....

I wish to have my Blog…http://seocog.blogspot.com/…..Its feed…http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoCogNews and all of my content completely removed from your program. I have searched and found no way to do this. I do not want to participate. My login is XXXXXXXXX.

Thank You
Melanie Prough

Now, 3 days later....I have not received any response. Maybe that is not long enough? In my opinion they might have at least sent a confirmation that they has received my email by now.

I am still accumulating impression credits, even though I have no widget installed. Today, I was digging around in my stats looking for something else, and I found absolutely that they are displaying some of my titles/posts as well.

Google Slaps Tim Nash Paid Link Penalty?
widget.blogrush.com (pv) 1 (upv)1 (time on pg)00:00:00 (bounce)100.00%

There are a few others, but stats are the same...low page views, high bounce, and zero time on site. One note here, I post everyday and have credits to spare..But only the most trafficked posts have been displayed. So this also leads to to believe what Tim Nash and others have said, without traffic...You will not gain any substantial traffic. I think this is not only true, but on a page/post level as well. Which is why, I have a backlog of credits even though I post everyday maybe? I dunno.

I will give them another shot, write another email today and give them til the end of the week, and them I have an idea what to do about this. So, if you are trying to get out, or you emailed me about this...Stay tuned.

UPDATE: So just like every other BlogRush member, this morning I found a email from the dupes at Blogrush promising big changes. In all their glory and tact, aparently in order to apropriate these changes they have gone offline to fix "some real 'goofs'". They claimed at 2.28AM that:

"We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes."

Now, I won't beat them up too bad on this, except that...webmasters everywhere are displaying Ads, that they may not get any prescious credits for. This is just a guess, of course, as I figure the dashboard is whats not availiable...So.

As far as my concern of getting the hell out.....They make some pretty serious threats in the letter for abusing the Blogrush system. Then, after resolve to say 1st time offenders, which I guess will be me, are advised to do this:

IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I'm going to give you ONE opportunity... quit now and we'll pretend it never happened.

HOW IN THE FLYING HELL CAN I DO THAT WHEN YOU CANNOT UNENROLL AND BLOGRUSH WILL NOT ANSWER IT'S GODAMN EMAILS! MAYBE I NEED A F***** LAWYER?

Then if I continue.....

BUT... if you continue after this point, all bets are off. We WILL eventually discover what you're doing, where you're trying to send traffic, and we will prosecute you. I GUARANTEE IT. Sorry, but WE HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.

Who heck does this guy think he is?

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google Gone Mad? | Where is DMOZ

2007-09-24T06:56:00.000-04:00

EDIT: 9/26/2007 6:05pm DMOZ is back #1 result for the query DMOZ on Google in my data center.

In my travels last night there was some rustle and bustle about DMOZ ( The Open Directory Project). I really cannot say what in the hell might be going on, but.....DMOZ also, no longer ranks for it's own name with it's original Domain ( http://www.dmoz.org/). They have created a sub-domain "search.dmoz.org" which ranks and redirects back to the original. This I find interesting, it tells me suspected penalties of this nature are absolute....Thus not including subs. Well, unless the big "G" decides, this is another "hand edit" reason. I emailed DMOZ, and told them I would be blogging this today...Asked them if they had any information or anything they would like to express on the matter.

So let's see what we have here. If you perform a regular Google search for DMOZ, you get only the "new" sub-domain. In the site command you find many pages still available, except the "main" domain url http://www.dmoz.org/. However, if you stroll on over to the Google Directory...You will still see Google's relationship with DMOZ. Although, there are no links to DMOZ's main page...Not sure if there were or not, but the "Open Directory Project" link points to DMOZ's "About Us" page. DMOZ's Page Rank is intact, internal also.

I have read, just like everyone else, about DMOZ editors soliciting bribes and such.....I even read about Shoe being extorted. I certainly believe every word Shoe wrote. However, this is certainly an inevitable human pitfall of such a undertaking as DMOZ. We talked a bit yesterday about Rand's list of relative parameters for directories that might, or would most likely invoke penalties....I don't honestly see DMOZ hitting much of that list. Here's some food for though....If DMOZ has been penalized, then is the Yahoo Directory next? And if not, then why not? I would say in my opinion, that the selection process at DMOZ is set up more for reference and has more stringent guidelines than Yahoo, and DMOZ under normal circumstances is free as opposed to Yahoo.

I cannot see the basis for a penalty here. Would Google really penalize a site and remain partnered/associated with them? Have a look at this...I seemed to remember a long time ago that DMOZ (Open Directory Project) was a suggested directory in the Google Webmaster Help Center...The page is there, and the text seems as I remember it...So Google still suggests the Open Directory in the guidelines. Just odd.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Google Slaps Tim Nash | Paid Link Penalty?

2007-09-23T06:52:00.000-04:00

Well folks, I have a bit of discerning Google news to scoop you on today. You might remember a few weeks ago, a friend of mine Tim Nash did a great article here "psst Want to buy a Link?". Well, Google has assessed a "John Chow" caliber penalty against Tim. So you see, Tim Nash no longer ranks for his own name...Just everyone else...Including me. Some things to consider, first of all this is most likely a manual edit. More than likely there is a whistle blower involved here, and Google...without trial nor inquiry assessed a penalty against Tim's personal Blog. In other words, they decided there were most probably paid links, and assessed the penalty without jurisprudence. OK in all fairness, Google is NOT a government body and does NOT have to enact such policies....But seriously in this age one sided disciplinary processes are not part of what we commonly call the "SOP" (Standard Operating Procedure) in America.

Don't mistake me, I really have ZERO issues with Google administrating the quality of their index as they see fit...As long as the apply the "standards" (HAH) equally and fairly. A perfect example is paid directories...In this post in SEOmoz you can see a sampling of the great number of paid directories that were penalized in the same manner as Tim Nash and John Chow...They no longer rank for their names. Rand did an excellent job of pointing out the problems which most probably led to the penalties. However, many directories of this caliber...Generally smaller still exist in Google's index. Google, excluded some and failed to include some smaller less obvious ones. This is just not how I would expect the "mighty Google" to behave.

This penalty of sites not ranking for their own name is really quite small, mostly boils down to a pride factor. Head games, even if you will. We have even seen it basically blow up in Google's face, as in the case of John Chow. He gained so much exposure from his penalty, even more than Google would have even provided him organically.

So Tim, his personal space...Not so much for business, but rather a place to hang his hat is now cannot rank for it's own name..HIS. Maybe you can find a paid link ? timnash.me.uk. With the serious spam, malware, and pop up porn still remaining in Google's index I find it a bit hard to swallow that time and effort was taken to impose such a stupid penalty on a harmless site. Isn't that like putting out a 5 alarm fire with a garden hose?

For the record, I do not buy, nor sell links and I have been trying to tell people the same. However, linking with a paid or reciprocal link for advertising or traffic is OK IN MODERATION, and with the proper precautions....I HOPE. The fact is, right now as you can see, piss someone off and they will turn you in..Maybe you don't even have to piss anyone off at all...Just climb them in the serps. Then, no judge....No jury....No protocol that we can discern you get (hopefully) investigated and judged. Someone who knows NOTHING about your site, or it's links makes a decision whether or not to screw you. I won't go as far as to say Google owes these webmasters a "day in court", but I do believe there can be extenuating circumstances that some programmer viewing a site for the first time will not see, or may miss. I was a restaurant manager for 20+ years, when I was at the unit level I hated when my district manager came in on a bad day and took a "snapshot". Many times, he/she would think this was the "SOP".....People need to be smarter than that! When was the last time you did anything, that some damn thing didn't screw up?

As far a Google, I support what they are trying to accomplish....I do however think they need to sink some manpower into supportive services and protocols for the execution of penalties and investigations. The penalties, if applied manually should be under only the most serious of situations....It in all honesty makes Google look bad, even if they are trying to do a good thing.

EDIT: Here is Tim's Blog's PR 4 checked with Smart PR I originally had PR0 on my toolbar, I am still not sure why it was messing up but...I edited this post @ 6:44 pm EST. I guess I certainly should have checked the datacenters earlier..Duh. However, I uninstalled and reinstalled...So hopefully it will work OK now. Apologies....

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

BlogRush is a Blog Bust

2007-09-22T08:35:00.000-04:00

BlogRush is billing itself as "The fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers to you Blog...absolutely FREE". Well, hell ya' it's free. Let me tell you why....First of all the only folks that can really see any substantial traffic from this widget are the folks who already have traffic. You need to supply widget referral (affiliate) sign ups and visits to your Blog to earn exposure for your own post titles to be displayed. So here is the formula BlogRush supplies...

Syndication credits are earned based on the following formula: You earn credits on your own traffic using a 1:1 ratio. (One credit for each time the widget is served.)
You then earn credits based on your referrals traffic (and their referrals traffic)through 10 generations of referrals based on the following ratios: 1st and 2nd generation (i.e. your direct referrals and their direct referrals) 1:1, 3rd - 6th generation = 1:4 ratio, 7th - 10th generation = 1:8 ratio.
After all the math is calculated, there is a surplus of 1 headline space (5 spaces in each widget load) for every 10 that are served. So 10% of all the headline space is reserved for BlogRush itself to sell or use.

Here's the kicker.....1 Syndication Credit = having one of their recent blog post titles served inside the widget on another member's blog. My thing here, is there is no mention of they quality, content match, nor traffic volume of the Blog that they will choose to run my one precious headline on...Nor which headline they will run. Also, you will notice that apparently in the referral flow in the latter generations they seem to serve the same formula but with more Blogs...So even if you are kicking butt with sign ups you still may be displaying you headline on Blogs that will never convert for you. I would also be interested to know, does your headline rotate in a queue, or does it hang in a Blog until someone views the page? They make no mention of this process...So I am curious if my headline is slated to display on a low traffic Blog, if it takes 12 hours to display does it still get served or move to a different Blog...Or maybe they will serve my next more recent headline to the same Blog? These are possibilities...I am of a curious nature. =-)

And then there's this...While they do in fact call themselves a syndication network, did you all get this?

By submitting Content to Income.com for inclusion in our Service, you grant Income.com a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Income.com will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Service, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

Let me tell what that means to me....BlogRush could conceivably build it's Page Rank up pretty quickly. So, at some point it might decide to provide a feed or site with posts, or large excerpts.............Now if their PR is higher than mine, boom all of my posts which they use go to the supplemental index. I don't know about you, but I prefer to syndicate my own content!

I am also very disturbed that such a huge undertaking would violate one of the biggest webmaster rules (at least in my book) and be released "under construction".....As it remains, still the reports feature is under construction. Not to mention they are already reporting "cheating" in the dashboard section, and attempting to move to a manual selection process. Now, for the first time we actually see that all important word "BETA".....HMMMM. Still, not when you sign up, or even in the header...way down in the bottom of the dashboard.

I signed up to check it out. I am with Tim on this one....The damn thing is UGLY. Not to mention I cannot re-size it to fit in my 3 column layout.....So what good will it do at the bottom with it's already lowly 0.05% click though rate reported by some bloggers? OK, so now they have color...errr I mean "flavors"....But one size fits all!

Want to know how badly you're getting screwed? I signed up, as I said to check it out...I installed the widget.....played around with trying to size it. Moved it to the bottom, watched the damn video....then removed it.......maybe 2 hours. Alas, I have no clicks, but many impressions still accumulating everyday and credits as well. Low and behold............

widget.blogrush.com / referral
2 Visits
1.00 Pages
00:00:00 Time on site
100.00% New
100.00% Bounce

Now, mind you...my intention was not to screw anyone. I would also say this is probably not exactly targeted traffic either....My site averages are:

2.21 Pages
4.11 Time on site
54.8% New
65.16% Bounce

So their traffic clearly doesn't fit my profile. So now I appear to be somewhat trapped in BlogRush hell, as there doesn't appear to be a way to unenroll. I don't want them to be duplicating my content, so I guess I will have to send a email. I cannot even change the Blog address without replacing it with another, and the feed...cannot be changed at all. True pyramid style! What a CROCK!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Dump Your SEO Software

2007-09-21T08:43:00.000-04:00

Optimization - optimisation software is a "cookie cutter" approach to a market that requires uniqueness and usability. I have been spending more time in the forums lately, and I am hearing queries from webmasters getting started in SEO who are clearly trying to make use of junk software like Web CEO. Things like, "I have to mention my keywords 3x", or "my keyword HAS to be exactly the same in my heading tag". There is NO way to effectively automate your site's SEO and still maintain the needed uniqueness and quality of content needed. So a webmaster writes great content, then loads it up in Web CEO...and basically destroys it! I actually tested it, my site which is ranked top 10 for most of it's terms, was considered very poorly optimized by Web CEO's standards. If that wasn't enough possible damage, then the damn thing wanted to do auto submissions too! To some really oddball engines, and some others that will surely be rejected as the information you enter will not meet their guidelines anyhow. I will say however, I found the keyword tool to be very efficient and useful. I will also caution anyone using this software, DO NOT use the recommended "Meta Refresh" technique, this is SEO suicide. Meta refreshes, are not just refreshes...They are 301 redirects when set to 0, and spammy 302's otherwise. If your concern is caching, then use the proper "no cache" or "no archive" tag. Let's face it, doesn't it piss you off when you are reading a page and it refreshes all on it's own?

So, I suggest this...Read Google's Webmasters Guidelines. Then do your optimization - optimisation the right way, the first time. I have blogged most of these topics already, so I'll just give you the appropriate posts (In case you need them).

Optimization starts with good, unique, usable content (text). You really should try to shoot for 300 words or more per page for the best results.
Pay close attention to your navigation.
Optimize your Meta information so it's unique and relevant for each page.
Server side URL canonical issues can cause duplication problems, don't ignore this.
Don't buy links without a "nofollow". If you swap links for traffic, keep the number of these reciprocal links low. You might even consider using a "nofollow" for them, if they are for traffic.
Manual directory submissions are still a valid tool for building your site's backlinks, and some minor traffic.
Link out to relevant trustworthy sites that your visitors will find useful. Check out the sites you are linking to...They say a great deal about how Google see your site.
If you use a keyword tag (Which I think you should), use it correctly.
Make use of the search engine tools available to you for sitemap submissions and indexing help.
Make a sitemap using the current accepted protocol by all top engines, and include the map's URL in your robots.txt for auto-discovery.
Last but far from least, continuously build your backlinks and update your site every 30 days or so for the best indexing and ranking potential.

So really is this stuff so hard that you need a program to do it? No it's not, at the end of the day you'll have pages that you built, and you got ranked..Because you learned a thing or 2 about SEO, instead of mindlessly following the directions in some program. Sure, there is alot more you can do with SEO...But just these basics will deliver a far better level of success than any "cookie cutter" optimisation program can deliver. I find it useful to generate a checklist for new sites...So I don't forget anything. But then I am a Virgo...................................

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

August 2007 US Search Market Share Report

2007-09-20T01:14:00.000-04:00

Nielsen Netratings report August, 2007

It's that time again...Check up on the search game. I called Google right last month, they have leveled off a bit showing a very trim .3% growth over last month. I do think this has some to do with bad press, and some to do with an overall decrease by most big hitters this month..So I won't be too hard on them.

Yahoo is not exactly showing the type of growth their shareholders are looking for! Losing .2% from last month, when they surely should have been up. Lots of people have got to be wondering at this point if they are just buying up stuff in order to beef up their portfolio and thus sweeten a possible deal.....And if so who?

MSN / Live lost .7% from last month, and thats to be expected. Really what have they done for search recently? You can only ride your "brandwagon" so far until the gas runs out. Yes, they are up big over last year, but they REALLY sucked before Live.

Aol is UP, only .4%..But accomplished what the top 3 failed to do. They have been making big structural changes all year. Honestly, I am getting decent Aol traffic on my sites. Their share of searches has been pretty good and they are delivering a dcent product, for free.

Ask.com, is spending the big advertising bucks to be FLAT. If i had their stock I would be pissed. They are basically flay for month over month, and Year over year. Their share of searches is very small and in danger of being swallowed up by the fast mover My Web.

My Web appeared top ten in June with a 1% share, and clocks in this month with .9%. The reality of this is they are 65,129 searches from spanking Ask.com. They seem to be kinda flat right now, but as any good competitor knows...Watch the new guy, you don't know when they are going to throw a "no hitter".

Everyone else is about the same. There is alot of potential is these lower ranks, and they could just explode at anytime. Players like My Web have huge potential to swallow up under performers in a easy swipe. A little capitol and some marketing would seal the deal on the fate of Ask.com, and Yahoo if they don't get on the stick.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Jimmy Wales for President

2007-09-19T07:18:00.000-04:00

Good Morning, I have blogged this project before...But today some juicy new updates and information. Seriously, I love Jimmy Wales....He is such a common sense guy. For those of you who may not know, Wales is the mastermind behind Wikipedia. Really quickly, lets recap some of the highlights of the upcoming Wikia search project. They have 4 operating principals to which they are forming the entire project around...

Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:
1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

These may seem like tall orders, but the implementation has already begun in the selection of open source software to define a truly community driven search. The crawler / indexer "Grub" will be run from volunteer's PCs all over the world. The index will be totally "Wiki" style and community edited. Searching is completed through another open source program called "Lucene" which is an Apache Foundation release. (Before when I blogged this I was unable to locate any information on the indexing software reported as"Lucerne", I believe that software to be Apache's "Lucene". Perhaps, one source made a typo that was replicated..Or they have renamed the software. However, the programs specs match what I have managed to find on the software. ) Lucene is Java based open source indexing and search technology, capable of full text, vertical, and advanced searching.

Looking over the program information I am lead to to believe the hand edited algorithm will be quite suited for the current Internet usage and trends. They look to be blending in the ability to rank and classify pages based on reputation and "Popularity-aware" ranking. There will of course be editors to assure accuracy and relevancy among the indexed pages. Ranking will be a combination of the programed algorithm and hand editing.

Now, Grub is really cool. As I mentioned before the crawler is run by volunteers from home PCs. Now, they are reporting a means with which to run it server side to crawl your own sites, with priority I might add! It is noted to respect your robots.txt, but not the robots Meta tag. The user agent is "grub-client", but remember the IP can conceivably be different every time. You would block Grub from directories in your robots.txt the same as other user agents, by name...Then command. If you wish to control how often Grub visits, you have to sign up for local crawling. Local crawling boils down to a text file called "Grub.txt" in your top level directory with enables your sites to be crawled locally.

So whats new with the project? Wales has finally announced a launch date for December 2007. So as I have said in the past.......The time is now. There are few times when an opportunity arises of such magnitude, that is so easy to complete. I am not going to be filing this under "things I should have done sooner"....Are you?

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Building Blocks | Local Marketing SEM

2007-09-18T08:09:00.001-04:00

Find the Building Blocks of Local Marketing at our new Cog SEO Home

The Meta Keyword Debate

2007-09-17T07:33:00.000-04:00

Many of you have very passionate opinions on this subject, and I respect that. I am going to give you some some very common sense reasons to use a Meta keyword tag. First of all I will totally agree that Google does not use this tag in it's intended fashion, however is does add to the page's overall relevancy score. There are still many engines out making some use of this tag. Yahoo and MSN have been known to use this tag, and I strongly suspect Ask is making some use of it also. Additionally, there are many smaller engines using it....Some even making full use of it, like the Meta engines. Meta Crawler for example, Mamma.com, or Vivisimo(Clusty). Dogpile is also a Meta engine, but the uses results from Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask. Agreed, these types of platforms individually are not going to amount to much...But why would you screw yourself out of any qualified traffic source and together all of these engines as your site ages could amount to a great deal of traffic.

There are some things I see people do with this tag however, that are actually counter productive. Some webmasters think this is a cool place to stick words you failed to include in your content, but would really like to rank for......Ummmm no. What you want here is 10 or so keywords or short phrases separated by commas, that amount to way less than 256 characters and are relevant to your content.....100% relevant if you really want to make the best use of the tag. I have heard, from some folks that I trust, that you might consider sticking 1 non contextual keyword in there and once in awhile Yahoo will pick it up and rank it. Note this though, even though its only one word, it is diluting your relevancy...And it's a long shot, I would advocate adding that keyword and its supporting information to your text. I have an easy system I sometimes use for really big pages to help me get the keywords, and for all pages when I started. It will at least help you decide if your page sends the message you intended when you wrote the copy. Ideally you would want your keyword tag to be 100% relevant. The order is title, description the keywords...Some editors will mess this up, so check it.

Never use any variation of a word more than 3 times or next to each other. I suggest you avoid the capitol letters and any punctuation (except your separating commas). I have not found it necessary to include both the plural and non-plural versions of MOST words. It really depends on the search volume, if it is a very low searched term you may need to. Every page's keywords should be somewhat different.

Some points to make here. A 500 foot illegal keyword tag is spam, it WILL NOT help you...It may in fact harm you. It is not helpful to try misspellings in your keyword tag if they are not supported textually. Would you really like to be ranked in the Meta engines for misspellings? Get it out of your head, the whole world is not Google...There are many other places you will get traffic from, do not shut them out. I picked one of my better ranking sites and did a quick count and it gathers roughly 500 visits of Meta engine traffic a week, yes I want those 500 visits and more...You? I have many sites of my own and other peoples, and if I am checking serps I find it very helpful to view the source and see the Meta information to help me recall what exactly I am trying to hit for that particular page. Additionally, this is just one more step in clarifying uniqueness for those cookie cutter pages.....Remember duplication is bad!

So take 10 minutes, create some keyword tags, optimize your title tags and then submit your sites to some Meta engines. Traffic is traffic, and Meta engines are a far greater source for the work involved than many others. Here is a handful to get you started.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

The Hottest New Niche | Mobile Browser Pages

2007-09-16T07:59:00.001-04:00

Does your site have a mobile or handheld version? All this talk of the iPhone has got me thinking, is this not niche? A great deal of sites are available online, yes that's true...But how many are actually designed for a handheld browsers? Generally Google will index your pages for mobile browsing if they find them to be acceptable upon transcoding them to a mobile browsing size and format. I guess, what I am saying here is we may just be missing the boat. I think, with minimal effort we could get Google to treat our websites more like a website designed for mobile/handheld technology...Thus giving it better vantage. Want to know how?

Well first of most everything if functionally the same as your regular web pages, so it's really very easy. The first this you need is a mini-site coded for handheld in either XHTML Basic 1.1, XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML, WML 1.3. I would use a sub-Domain. Remember, this can be as easy as you like or as detailed and advanced as the time you would like to spend on it. I think for the sake of extreme safety, as I am a true Virgo, AVOID using the exact same content as your other site....Besides we are going to work the double whammy out of this little min-site later =-). Now, make sure you have linked well to your main site's main and inner pages.

Now lets make a sitemap and a robots.txt for our new mobile niche machine. These work exactly the same but with some different variables. Now, very important....All the pages in your mobile sitemap URLs must be coded in XHTML mobile profile (WAP 2.0), WML (WAP 1.2), or cHTML (iMode). Standard HTML has to be in a separate map. Additionally, all XHTML pages in one map, and all WML pages in another for example. The robots.txt is going to be very similar to your regular sites as well. List your site map in the same manner. The user agent for Google mobile crawler is: Googlebot-Mobile or Googlebot. Don't forget to verify this little doorway to new technology with Google Webmaster tools and add your sitemap.

Now the really cool part, a pseudo 301 for just mobile browsers. Now that you have created your mini-site you no longer want Google mobile to transcode your regular page(s)...So you place a link in the "head" to tell Google to send just the handheld visitors to the mini-site. Pretty cool! Click to enlarge...

Make sure you check out your site in a handheld device or 2, and I recommend Openwave also. Easy on the animation. Absolutely ALWAYS us "alt" text for your images, many browsers are either not image enabled or it is turned off. Heading tags are OK, but will generally display the same size. Fonts will usually all be the same size. I would avoid unnecessary Java, as it is not broadly supported yet. Clear type fonts only, lets face it many of these screens are very small. Clicks count....Keep your navigation really easy, too many clicks is a real pain. And the nuber one tip...Just like any other page DESIGN FOR USERS.

I really use this analogy alot. probably too much...But hell with it I love to fish. The more lines in the water, the more fish you can catch! Just a quick note out to designers and content/promotion type webmasters this is a GREAT marketing vantage. Customers are looking at the marketability of the mobile Internet as an industry. I do realize that mobile browsing in itself is not truly a niche, but it is a very booming environment of fairly untapped niches. Google mobile search is going to be a big player in 2008, just like many of the things we see these days...Getting in early and doing it well may very well mean big success for you.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Do Your Own Thing

2007-09-15T07:38:00.000-04:00

Maybe I am the one who is wrong, so be it. I will give you all some life advice here, ingrained in me from my dad. DO YOUR OWN THING. I visit tons of forums and Blogs covering a vast array of subjects, some I participate in...Some I don't. I never fail to be amazed at the people who will advise others to do as their competition does. "Study their keywords and fix your content to hit the same ones". Do you really think for one split second that Google cares to have 2 pages with the same keyword density on the same results page? Besides isn't that the peak of lame and uncreative?

I rarely ever use Google search to search my links or indexed pages for example......But alas when I opened up Analytics this morning the site and link command were a VERY highly searched keyword for my Blog. Now, it's really not that I care at all. I'm kinda flattered. I do believe people should research their competition to some extent, but many people spend too much time and energy on what someone else is doing. I don't. Simply put, I spend time on what I am doing. I am not a tightwad with the outgoing links, if credit is due I damn well give it. I don't deny anyone in a forum or comment any help I feel I can deliver (if they are amicable), and I publish here to try to help others.

OK, off the soap box now...Some quick rules to webmaster by....

Don't set out to copy your competition, instead research new ground in the same line. You will find that an untapped oil well has far greater potential.
Seeking links from the same places as your competition is lame too, find your own road. Develop your own content stream within your niche and link within it.
Maintain traffic while ascending the mountain. Yes everyone wants to hit those great big search terms, but they do not happen overnight. Incorporate smaller terms to maintain and build your authority, credibility, backlinks, traffic, and PageRank while you are aging and climbing.
Watch YOUR stats, give your visitors what they want...Not what you assume they want. I know that sounds stupid, but it is a reality.
Do you even know what your site should be hitting for? What are your keywords? Find out and if you're not happy with it change your content.
Fresh content will help you out a great deal, but please keep it all in the scope of your theme. If you want another topic, get another site...Don't dilute your content.
Take this or leave it. I optimize for long tails one or two at a time. When they are hitting well, I choose another. They are also great link bait. The traffic can go either way, depending on the strength, competition, and popularity....But they are highly relevant and have a great bounce and conversion rates.
Last thing...Marketing. Seeking advice is great, don't ever let anyone tell you "that's dumb". Some of the "dumbest" marketing ideas have been the most highly successful.

HAVE A COKE AND A SMILE!

Disclaimer: I'm not the least bit offended that people are looking into my site, I really am flattered. This was actually sparked off last night by advice given in a forum of the nature described above.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Session IDs are Duplicate Content Too | Not New

2007-09-14T08:02:00.000-04:00

Google me this..Yahoo Site Explorer tools can fix ugly dynamic URLs, but Google can't even handle some session IDs. Now, I have been looking into this for a couple of months with 2 of my forums....Running a test actually, and I understand the logic. I mean has Google not publicly denounced their hatred of spam? Yet session IDs can be a very valuable tool in a user generated environment for fighting spam, among other uses. Ideally in the post on the Google Webmaster Blog what happens it that there are many different versions of a page or URL, so Google decides which one is best and uses it. Additionally, they claim:

3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Yet I see these split in my Google Webmaster's tools....So I am not so quick to believe this. Maybe they do, age old question here....Why the hell to they provide soooooo much information to us in our tools and NEVER anything on our possible supplementals or duplication issues.....Damn wouldn't that be valuable!

They suggest this as a possible solution:

2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap's URL in search results, it's helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

I venture to guess that this will NOT work....Here's why, you list this URL in your sitemap http://www.nice-url.com/board/viewforum.php?f=1, just like Google says, so next they attempt to crawl that page.......But they get http://www.nice-url.com/board/viewforum.php?f=1&id=547815622. Now, yes they found that page, but the session IDs kicked right in...Does Google notice this? When they follow links out from that page do they use the sitemap URL referrer or the actual page URL? I really think this would just screw up. Most of all, what about post pages, hopefully you have a nice busy environment...So are you going to create a sitemap 5 or 6 times a day?

I said in the title this is not new, Vanessa Fox said in 2006:

Minimize the number of redirects and URL parameters [Ed. Note: I’d keep it to 1-2 parameters if possible]. And don’t use “&id=” in the URL for anything other than a session ID. Since it generally is a session ID, we treat it as such and usually don’t include those URLs in the index.

I know that has changed, because my test forum session URLs are indexed. I just don't understand why Google can't get their head around things like this. So my suggestion to you is to kill your session IDs. There are many platforms you should consider this for: many forums and community board software, Zencart, Drupal, and many more. Just make sure you back up before you make any changes, and I would create a new sitemap, especially if you use a generator. At least check to see that the generator has picked up the internal pages that will now be index-able, and that it didn't by chance grab any session IDs before. Wouldn't hurt to ping to!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Dealing with some Dark Side Webmaster Issues

2007-09-13T07:48:00.000-04:00

There are some things that happen behind the scenes that many newer webmasters have never experienced. Unfortunately, the Internet, while providing a relatively open format for expression and movement, also opens doors for people who would use this very nature for wrong doing. We'll call this the dark side. There are many types of sites that are more prone to be problematic. Then there is the case of jealousy, or simply pissing someone off to deal with. In any case, education and detection is the best defense.

If you are a webmaster just getting started and using free hosting, I strongly suggest you look into some professional hosting. You aren't going to learn much of any real value from a free hosting environment. You traffic is slowed by the Ads, and you probably have bandwidth restrictions as well. The ability to see what is going on in your sites environment is limited to the http access, if you are even able to run Analytics. There are some great, really inexpensive hosting options available. I would recommend checking into IX Webhosting: For 3.95 a month you can host 2 Domains with great options and full controll, 300GB space and 3000 GB bandwidth/transfer. Host Monster is 4.95 a month for unlimited Domains, great options, 300GB space and 300Gb bandwidth/transfer. (No I am not making any money on either of those links!) These are both shared hosting, which means you are on a server with other sites and the hosting company balances the load to deliver the best performance to everyone. This should be more than adequate for getting you going. I would strongly recommend you choose a Linux environment. Even if you have no prior Linux experience, you will be very happy you chose it. It is far more powerful for the web environment. There are tools, and techniques easily accomplished that are nightmares on a Windows server...If they can even be accomplished at all.

OK, back to the dark side. Like I said, some sites are prone to problems. Forums, Blogs, image sites, etc. Some of you who have been here before, might have seen me say "fighting back" is a personal decision. Well, it is....However, you may find yourself in a "have to" situation. You may get the wicked duplication filter applied to your site as a result of a dark side action, and cease to rank for your own terms. How can this happen? Simple...You content has been syndicated on another IP/Domain with a high enough level of duplication to spark the filters into action, at which point the filter program made a "choice" based on PageRank. If your PageRank is lower your pages are sent to the supplemental index. So now lets look into some ways you might determine there is a problem with your content and protect it.

First and foremost, I highly recommend you leave one absolute URL in each page of your site. This mean a link your site complete, ideally the ,main page. So, instead of "/" , or "/index.html", use http://seocog.blogspot.com/ . You see scrapers and such tend to try to be as automated as possible, and this helps you keep a line on your pages.

Sign up and use Google Alerts. Use and alert for your URL or site address. Also choose a phrase completely unique to your site, a 7-10 word excerpt from the mid section of 2 or 3 of your site's pages, including the main page...Which includes like half of one sentence and half or all of the next. When you enter this alert into the field in Google Alerts, surround it in "quotes". Chose how Google will deliver results you choose to your mailbox, if and when this content pops up on someone else's site and you are done.

If you want to check your pages on a larger scale, then there are a couple of nice tools that will even detect partial content theft. Copyscape searches the entire web for copies of your page, but limits the results unless you pay. Webmaster Labor, only searches Google, but gives you individual phrases and the percentage of duplication. I usually just add any unique ones that are highly duplicate to Google Alerts (in quotes) to get the URLs. You see, this Blog was recently scraped by a automated program that changed every single URL to point internally to the scraper site...So "inurl" and "link" operators would not have found my content. Since this site was a PageRank 6, if I had not gotten the Google Alert, my search position surely would have tanked. We'll go over what to do, closer to the end.

So, you saw me mention the "inurl" and "link" operators. Here is a very good thread over at Webmaster World covering thier use. The deal with the inurl:seocog.blogspot.com command is this, they said you should be looking for other sites listed with the EXACT description and title. When you click these links, the site will look just like yours...This is a 302 hijack. Some time ago (2006) they were rampant, not as popular now....But I disconnected one 2 weeks ago. The link:seocog.blogspot.com, while I think it would be good to use it for verification, I would not call it at all accurate. Here's why...Firstly, I just told you to make an absolute link. Secondly, permalinks are absolute by design. Thirdly, Google throttles or holds back a great deal of the links in the links command....And they are very slow to add links sometimes. Yahoo is much better to scrape links. Just pop open Yahoo search and the operator is like this: link:http://www.example.com . Yahoo doesn't display the description, but the titles and URLs are intact, so this can be helpful and is more complete.

The reason I was talking about the hosting up top, is this....One of the quickest, easiest ways to nab a scraper is your logs and server side stats. Even though many scrapers automate the whole process, for sites with images, codes, and other remarketable type material they will just scrape for the content to add to or develop their own sites. There is no easy way to track down these types of materials, codes maye be a little easier...The can sometimes be bugged, or tracked. Images, and backgrounds, and photos, videos, sound files, are nearly impossible. Yes, by ALL means, IF you actually own the content you can watermark or digitally sign them...But it is a very big legal expense to enforce this. Google is probably not going to make a webmaster remove this type of content with just a watermark or digital signature....You will have to pay for a valid copyright. Additionally, dealing with 90% of the ISPs for this type of things is a total waste of time, a necessary step....But generally fruitless. So these people come in steal all of your files, system files and all...Chew up your bandwidth, and most times they will return regularly for updates! Well you can find them in your stats...They will be top of your lists! They have very distinctive characteristics. Generally they will have chewed up a massive amount of bandwidth, just a few (VERY, DAMN FEW) visits, TONS of hits, and a huge number of files. Now, before you act on anything...There are some things to check out and consider. First of all, have you seen this IP/Host before? Check them out. How many files are on that Domain? If they have taken almost all or more files than the Domain has, then you can safely move to step 2...If not log the stats and wait until next time. Go into you logs and find that IP, if you don't have a built in reader for your logs the download the logs open the file with Excel and choose delimited, then space. Once you have it open select the top of the row with the IP addresses, so it select the whole row...Chose Data in the menu bar, then sort, then continue with current selection, the either ascending or descending. Now look for that IP, you want to see what kind of files they were hitting and how often. Here's why. First of all, an automated program is going to have access to files that humans do not, as it is designed to generally scrape the whole site. Additionally the time between requests is important, because, humans for example do not generally request files every second for 20 minutes. If you are still unsure, you might consider the time line vs the location on a few. For example, access form.php then one second later a file or image 3 clicks away...Not possible for a human. One quick note, I have a site like mentioned above. Lately I have a crafty scraper, he doesnt show up in my top list...Only in my logs. Like this:

50 files xxx.xxx.xxx.123

50 files xxx.xxx.xxx.124

50 files xxx.xxx.xxx.125

So, now the decision time. I guess, while initially the decision is personal, there may come a time when it becomes necessary. So, understand first of all many ISPs still rotate IP addresses...Like AOL for example. There is not much point in blocking most IP addresses for very long, as these types of individuals tend to move on or change IPs frequently. Blocking too many will slow down your site. Also, when you get into blocking these type of folks do them one at a time....DNS is a complicated matter, and you cannot accurately predict where your own Internet connection is routing through, so you might just block yourself. Anytime you block an IP, it is always best to block just 1 address and not a range, you are always risking blocking an innocent user. In Windows servers you block IPs in the IIS configuration: Website; Properties; Directory security. In the Linux/Apache environment you use your htaccess file. You will space a line above and a line below any other commands. The spot after the ## is not read, its a comment, I use them to help me keep track of the blocks.

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ##note

So what if your site has been ripped, and republished or 302'd. If you need to take action, then the best way to proceed...In my own personal experience. Is to first of all, out of respect send the webmaster an email, if you can locate one. Tell him/her to remove your content. The next thing I do is a spam/duplicate report with Google if the ripper's site is indexed....Time is of the essence. Google is pretty quick on these. Then I call the offending site's hosting company. I will send them what they need in email, but not until I talk with the correct department and get a REAL persons name.

One other quick note, the first time this happened to me I thought this guys just had "really big kahunas"...But after I stopped laughing I had a more cynical thought. I banned a guy for a grab bag of offenses, including some hacking attempts and scraping ventures. Well this guy emailed me, and wanted to know why the hell I banned him. Many of you may not realize that when you send email from your computer based email programs that your IP address is in the header. So, if this happens, do not respond. If you feel compelled to answer for whatever reason, copy just the message into Yahoo mail and send it from there. So, what if I had just stupidly sent this guy my home IP? DUH!

Well, I hope this trip to the dark side has not put a rain cloud on your day. Do you have great tip? Advice or question? I would love to hear it!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

How to Park Domains for Cash and Aging with Relevance

2007-09-12T07:34:00.000-04:00

Even if you don't make a habit of parking Domains like me, most webmasters have picked up juicy Domains on a whim, or ahead of schedule on occasion. Why should those valuable pieces of real estate collect dust when they can make a little money and begin to simmer in the index pot? I am not talking about some of the terribly spammy link infested user traps many of us have seen. I believe there is a high road here. With a very small amount of effort, and little or no maintenance, you could easily produce a relatively useful mini-site that may very well be profitable and will season your new Domain for future projects.

Aged Domains still have more power and trust than newer ones. So especially if you are not ready for this project it makes sense to start the aging process. Relevance is going to be the key here. I think the easiest way to accomplish this is to throw a Blog up on this brand new Domain. You should probably start with 6 or 7 unique (not someone else's) posts. Do all the normal indexing work, to get it indexed nicely. I wouldn't worry about an excessive amount of plug ins, unless the Blog will be part of the future plans. Concentrate on any security issues, and troubles with URLs (IE: SEO URLS). Make certain you have handled your server side SEO. Supplemental pages aren't likely to make any money for you. Now monetize this new Blog, or don't...It is up to you. Most Blogging software has pretty easy means with which to accomplish monetization through normal channels. Ideally, if you really want this project to be successful, add some fresh, unique content to it at least once a month.

This is really pretty easy, and you are accomplishing much more than you would otherwise. The time involved here, if you have done this before is probably 2-3 hours max....A worthy investment for the yield. There are certainly other creative ways to accomplish the same results. I just chose a Blog, because they are so universally available and used at the moment. Rate your time, effort, and availability against your project and do what works for you. Again, the key here really is for the content to be relevant to the future content of the Domain...It will really give you a leg up.

When it comes time to move forward with your project, you can take advantage of any backlinks, PageRank, and traffic by 301 redirecting the old URLs to their most appropriate new URLs or categories. So your choice....Traditional parking, or building a future?

Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.

Napoleon Hill

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

GEOTargeting and Local Business Vertical Search

2007-09-11T07:53:00.000-04:00

GEOTargeting is the king of vertical searches. There are more independent directories and engines out there to do the work for you than you could have ever imagined. Many will pick you up without you doing anything except properly announcing your location! Even if you intend to do your business on a global scale, ignoring your local flavor can be a huge mistake. So today we are going to cover some easy submission and mechanical things you can do to elicit a better local response. I even have a few cool tools from some great places to help you along.

Lets start with your hosting and Domain selection. It's hard but not impossible to rank well in say the US with a German Domain. If you already have this situation, just purchase the .com for example and use a 301 redirect to the existing site..This should definitely be in English, if it's not then go ahead and make an English version on the new .com Domain (this is NOT duplicate content). When choosing hosting, you want to be in the same region as your business ideally. The same country for sure. So in a situation like I used above, just contact a US hosting company and procure some US hosting. This is going to have it's limits when it come to physical address later if you do not have a US operations location, however.

Meta tag GEOTargeting. I really cannot say for certain how effective this is or isn't. I really see no harm in it however, as there are still quite a few smaller Meta engines out there.

You'll notice in both the state and country code you want to use all versions of the name. Don't forget to close these for other markup languages, this is a HTML 4.01 example.

On page GEOTargeting has some very vast reaching possibilities. There are many things you can do to help this along. SEOMoz suggests your address should be in the header or the footer, I agree after giving this some thought. Not because it cannot be found anywhere else, but rather because it has become universally expected there. There is a way to make that address pop, however. I credit this little trick to a friend of mine from the UK, Darren Lovelock owner of Munky Online Web Design. He taught me to wrap addresses in a CSS or HTML address tag. I don't think it's at all necessary to list your complete street address if for example, you work from your home.

Using maps and directions for GEOTargeting. This is a very good thing to do if you have a place of business. It provides a useful service to your patrons, and generally good GEOTargeting content for the search engines. Remember to include some textual content surrounding the map or directions to receive the greatest benefit from this option.

Targeting your region or metro area. Regional and metro area names can be very powerful longtail and local vertical search components. For example, folks in the Detroit, Michigan area might use a little "Motor City" or "Downriver" in their content, title, and some heading tags. I am in Northeast, Ohio. So I might target "NEO", and Northeast, Ohio", they hit pretty well vertically. If you are just getting started, without making an 80 foot long Domain name, targeting your region might be a good option for you also. You might try this on a state level, many successful "Buckeye" businesses out there, but the broader the spectrum the longer and harder the climb in the search ranks. I am in no way saying it is not worth the effort, just noting it so you are aware.

Local directory power and phone book type listings. There are a few local directories you really should look into.

Yahoo Local: Your business must be in the US. You must have/get a Yahoo ID. You must include, but can hide your street address. Site must be in English. Cannot sell anything illegal. They have free and paid listings.
Google Local: Your Business must be in the US. You must have/get a GMail ID. You must include street address and cannot hide it. You will be required to validate a phone number. A bonus here is the ability to make coupons for your business.
Yelp: This one is suggested by SEOmoz. I have personally not used them. So we will learn together. They are a social business reviews and search able database site, a very large one at that. I would highly suggest you read this page and follow their instructions.
Citysearch: This one also from SEOmoz. I don't know if this one will be in your budget. They are advertising 30$ off for your first month, while they are showing a PR 8 on my TB...That's alot of cash in my eyes. Seems this also covers a local Yellow pages listing...Which can be very expensive also for a premium listing. So if your were looking into a Yello pages deal you might consider the bundle.
Other Directories: There are many local directories you can search for and find. Submitting to these follows the same guidelines as any other directory.
411 and Yellow Pages Sites: These are very costly investments for a deluxe or premium listing....Some are 250$ a month. I personally will NOT pay it. The ones I have had experience with refuse to disclose anything but rounded off page views and their sites are some of the worst examples of SEO you may ever encounter. I have not found any with a "put up or shut up" guarantee for traffic, and as a matter of fact they have ALL tried to sell me hosting too. OK, maybe I'm a little to cynical, but this straight pisses me off...For 250$ a month I should A) get real verified stats, and B) have some expected return on investment. So, they almost all have a FREE basic, listing...which will be most likely "nofollowed", but it may bring you a visit or 2 if you are interested. If you really seek a true Yellow pages listing, call your local telephone company.

Many local newspapers are online now, and this can be a great local marketing tool for your site. Be aware though that most newspapers and other news sources only keep links active for a couple of weeks. Try giving something away on a radio station. Many times, people will hear/see your business name and remember all or part of it...Or enough to search for, with a little vertical help.

Links from local sites will very much help flavor your local appeal. The very same rules apply to these links as any other. Here is a little guide to help you determine the value of incoming links, so you might know better what you seek. Remember, backlinks are NOT the whole story, picking up a great traffic link is just as good...If not better.

SEOmoz has a new tool to help you evaluate your GEOtargeting strength. Thanks to the folks at SEOmoz for today's inspiration and cool tool!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

How to Interview an SEO for Hire

2007-09-10T13:31:00.000-04:00

At some point you may find yourself, small business, or company in need of optimization if you are not able to effectively administrate it in-house. Today I am going to cover some things you might ask, look for, and snoop around for concerning any potential SEO. I highly recommend that you attempt to educate yourself about some basic search engine optimization - optimisation principals and perhaps language. An educated buyer stands a far better change of negotiating a better, and more targeted package for themselves.

85% of your customers are searching for products and services online, so ideally you want to be in the handful of sites they find. SEO is a lengthy and ongoing process, you need to be able to commit to it. I suggest you make a list of ALL your expectations for your site, large and small. Then prioritize that list in to the top 10 things that you most want to see accomplished. Please, be realistic, you will be a very long time and it will require intense work and investment to try to be found for a highly searched broad terms like "sports cars". So chose your battles wisely. Once you have selected a couple of prospective SEOs, they will help you "optimize" this list. There will likely be things you cannot see with your eyes, that are highly necessary for your site. So lets interview some SEOs....You really want this to happen in person, or at least on the phone, kinda hard to read someones intentions in an email.

It is not a bad idea to ask for some example sites that they have done SEO for. Even better to ask for a customer referral or recommendation. Check these out..You might even have another SEO check them out. Lets face it, if you are going to buy a used car...you take it to a mechanic, right?

I spent over 20 years as a restaurant manager, and I have interviewed tons of people. In that time the most effective question I ever asked was "what are your 5 strongest skills?". This question begs the person to talk about themselves, which opens a door to and inner personality you might not see otherwise. To quick to answer, can be the indication of a cocky overconfident personality. To slow, can indicate lack of confidence and unsureness. Ideally in an SEO, I don't think you want either of these. In using this question so much I developed a time frame for evaluating responses...It should take no longer than 5 minutes, no less than 2. If this prospective hire comes back with ALL SEO skills, that's probably a good salesman, but not necessarily a great SEO. Many will try to change the subject too, I usually try one time to get them back on track...Then I consider them to be un-confident. This is just a way to get people to open a door, not a make or break the deal tactic.
Ask them what they think your site needs. Sit back here and let them talk, listen to what they say and how they say it. Are they selling or reporting? I personally don't believe any decent SEO should not have to "sell" you his/her services, they should provide you with the problem, the solution, probable results, time frame, and cost.
Ask them what stats program they use and if you will have access to it. You don't want them to ONLY prepare you reports, you want to be able to access and analyze the metrics yourself.
Ask them how long they have been in business, and when they started working with SEO. If they are in fact a bona fide business, then I recommend checking them out with the Better Business Bureau, even if they are not a member they may be listed and have complaints.
Make your intentions very clear about how you would like your optimization carried out. There are 3 terms in the industry Black Hat SEO, Grey Hat SEO, and White Hat SEO. The Black Hat SEOs will break recommended guidelines and do things to manipulate the search engines and their filters to obtain their results. The White Hat SEOs provide results within the acceptable guidelines. The Grey Hats, will provide a mixture of black and white techniques. I personally don't care which you choose, only that you know what you are getting and the risks involved.
Optimization has some very quick results, but most take 2-6 months to start showing an impact. It is not a bad idea to ask this SEO what they believe the time frame for your project to be. Be very aware and careful should they promise you page 1 results in 24 hours or a week. See guarantees below...
The search engines are constantly changing, or evolving if you will, the algorithms and filters. Does this SEO have a plan for such things...Back up traffic?
Guarantees....An SEO with a guarantee is like a slight of hand trick. I don't care who they are, no one can predict the search engine fluxes and honestly make a guarantee in these matters of position rank. However, if they want to make you a money back guarantee IN WRITING, then you might just let them. Guarantees for quality, completion time, and price, those are great!
This SEO may try to sell you SEM (Search engine marketing), while I agree you need this...I would honestly suggest you get a different company to handle it. My reason is simple, most SEOs know some bit of SEM...And vice versa, why not cut down your checking up time by them checking up on each other?
Is this SEO reachable by phone? When and how long before he/she can return you call. If you wake up one morning and your site is gone from Google, you want them...Right now! Do they possess a proper sense of urgency?
Do not let this SEO talk you in to transferring you Domain registration to him/her...Yes I have seen this. Ideally if your hosting is adequate, they should not be selling you new hosting either. Do you want them to change content without your approval, discuss this before it happens.
How often should an SEO report? My rule of thumb is to report tasks completed and any progress weekly for the first 8 weeks, and then I drop to monthly. Whatever, they do you should feel comfortable with it.
How much should you pay? This is really all over the board. Ranging from 50.00 a month to 5000.00 I have seen. Many will also charge hourly. If the rate is hourly, there is NO good reason they cannot provide you with a estimated amount of hours per week/month. I would not sign with an SEO charging hourly rate that does not send an itemized and timed bill...But, that is for you to decide.
Contracts are very popular with SEOs. In their defense, many times without a contract a customer will become impatient and skip without completing the plan, only to have the next SEO pick it up and produce results in a quicker fashion. The getting started or beginning work is by far the most labor intensive. Whether you sign a contract or not give your new SEO at least 6 months to strut their stuff.
Lastly, evaluate how this SEO spoke with you and how they made you feel. When you asked questions, did they talk down to you. Did they make a grand effort to make the information they were giving you easily digestible? Did they make time for you? Use your common sense and trust your gut...And no matter what "sleep on it".

While I don't consider this to be a "written in stone" manner of interviewing an SEO, I think there is a great deal of beneficial tips here to assist you in your quest. I really cannot stress it enough, use your head....If someone makes you feel uncomfortable before you hire them, how will they make you feel after? If you have any questions, or need help...Just comment and I am glad to help any way I can.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Writing, Ripping, or Reporting | What Kind of Blogger Are You?

2007-09-09T17:36:00.001-04:00

Writing, Ripping, or Reporting | What Kind of Blogger Are You? Find out at the new Home of the SEO Cog

psst Want to buy a Link?

2007-09-08T05:06:00.000-04:00

My name is Tim and I’m a serial link seller, I have said it I buy and sell Links!

Now don’t go looking at me like that it’s not like it’s a crime or anything, yet as an industry we are approaching the subject of buying links like it is, indeed I cannot think of another subject that so polarises an industry.

The arguments put forward by both sides get bashed down, we fight it out in a struggle with one side never quite convincing the other and ultimately it was going to come to a head. The first victim of the war of the links was John Chow but was he a victim? Did he deserve to no longer rank for his own name? Does it damage him or his business model?

Ultimately John will be forever known as the guy Google removed from the index, from an outsiders point of view this would seem a rather petty act after all John Chow is hardly a top search term is it, as penalties go not ranking for your own name seems quite mild. Let us ignore the personal branding issues and the idea that the act was petty it certainly sent a warning shot across the bow of many SEO’s ships, Google was making a statement that they controlled the index and they could delist or penalise anyone at any time. I think for many the message may not have gotten through and so Google adopted plan two the battle of PR

Public relations is something Google is good at they are one of the few companies in history whose motto is almost as well known as their name. They are also experts at turning negatives into positives, a good example is when a Google user wrote to Google to complain that while using their ‘beta version’ of Google transit (a public transport route plotter) he was left on the wrong side of a multi lane highway. Google response; send him a Superman out fit. So you would expect a charm offensive instead we get to see Matt Cutts again, and again lashing out at the community now Matt is a charming guy and he has helped many people out just think what the web spam unit would be like without him? Did you just shudder?

But why is any of this important why is Google so worried about paid links are they destroying the web are link buyers no better then email spammers?

The humble hyperlink has come along way since its first appearance in the 1960s now it is the central part of the web infrastructure its also a critical method for search engines to collate, analyse and determine relevancy of pages and relationships between pages and sites. Gone are the days where if you wanted to link to a page you just did, now you are making a statement!

Googles’ algorithms rely on links as statements the presumption is that if there is a link on a page then their must be some relevancy, a reason it was there. Googles’ algorithms are smart, and Google quickly realised people don’t always link to relevant things so it created ever more complex mathematical pattern detection systems to weed out irrelevant links to discounting any weight that they parse. Paid Links present a problem because a good paid link (i.e one that’s worth paying for) are exactly that relevant to the page that the link is on. After all the aim of the link is to generate leads and traffic it’s unlikely a knitting web site will generate to many leads for a sports car company!

But the real problem for Google is it doesn’t matter if the person is out to game the system or to just increase the potential clients, they are both looking for links that are on target and relevant and if the links are on target and relevant can they really be spam and if we presume for the sake of argument they are not spam why should there relevancy not be counted?

Now this is the point that you say but Tim not all people are out to get relevant links some just buy links for search engine traffic or links on high Page Rank sites and of course you would be right but and here is the big ‘but’ Google already has a method of discounting these links, remember that clever algorithm they have designed to pass juice only to relevant content if the page contents are not relevant to each other then Google will discount it, so either Googles’ system does not work in which case they need to be putting their money into getting it working not hounding SEO’s or it does work and there is another reason that suddenly highly relevant links are now spam?

What is Google – it’s a simple question ‘what is Google’ the answer of course one of the largest advertisement companies in the world, if not the largest. How does it make money? Simple it sells sponsored links on its search pages, now go back a moment and think that through, how does Google make money? Paid links are as much a part of its business model, its links are not considered to be spam because they pass no weight which of course they don’t need to yet those bought and sold by others are?

So why is Google fighting a battle it cannot win? Two reasons 1 to put the genie back in the bottle, you see Google has a dirty secret when it released the Google Toolbar it included a little green bar suddenly the world didn’t care about traffic stats when linking or paying for links now all they cared about was the green bar. Page Rank or rather the publication of page rank for sites meant a whole industry was set up around the idea of enhancing, and promoting a green bar almost cult like in its fever to find ever more of the green stuff. Google effectively caused the purchasing of off topic irrelevant links with the Google toolbar now it feels it must put the genie back in, though to be fair most of these links already we’re being discounted. This hard stance then is more about education then retribution, hence the recent penalties handed out to leading directories again hardly anything more then hand slapping but the message I think is slowly getting through. The second more problematical issue is PPC campaigns are becoming more expensive while link building is becoming cheaper which will big companies the sort Google relies on choose?

Google cannot stop paid links, no one can, I’m sure by the time you read this at least 1 US state will have on its books a law to prevent paid links but even legislation is not going to stop it happening. Branding those who practice link purchasing as part of a larger strategy spammers is not the way to encourage us to stop all you do is alienate your potential allies. I think Google has to do something about page rank I like many directory owners have profited from naive people looking at high ranking directories as some great tool I won’t lie and say I wasn’t pleased when a PR update saw my directories go from 5s to 6s not because I was a member of the green bar club just the dollar one. My sites got high PR from a mixture of interlinking good link baiting both paid and non. My clients continue to provide highly relevant information to countless hundreds of blogs and sites and I challenge Google to say otherwise!

Tim

p.s At least one of the links in this article was paid for so Google can you tell which one? (sorry Melanie only kidding honest)
no links were paid for during the writing of this post!

Thanks Tim,
What a great write...funny guy too!

Visit Tim's sites
Venture Skills Blog
Site reviews from SEO Forensics
Affiliate and Internet Marketing

--Melanie

Sphinn This
**We Require a Link Back Please.

The Secret of the Title Tag | Optimize for Search Rank

2007-09-07T06:51:00.001-04:00

Find The Secret of the Title Tag at our new home

How Not to Suffer Under Google's New Goals

2007-09-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

I can remember when I was younger, my mother would bring home the groceries and it was our job to carry them up to the house. My brother and I got started immediately, but my other brother would spend an hour trying to figure out how to make it easier on himself. I can see some of this in many of the webmasters today. Google has not kept their plans for their index and where these guidelines are going a secret. Yet, many webmasters have failed to heed the warning and are now starting to be hurt by the penalties and filters.

On 7/31/07 Google made the announcement that they were doing away with the supplemental labels, and over the summer would be working towards being able to query the supplemental index for every query. I am seeing supplemental pages popping up in Analytics in sometimes top spaces, and sometimes not. Although the terms are pretty obscure, this looks to be still a work in progress.

On 6/7/07 Google announced specific enhancements to their quality guidelines. Again, they did not keep any secrets, and were only responding to the plea of many webmasters to make the parameters more clear. So they named specifically many examples of things NOT to do:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

How many webmasters ignored these directives? The better question is, how many worked so hard at getting around these simple requests, that now there are in hot water? These are not unreasonable things for Google to ask of the sites who wish to be listed in it's index.

Duplicate content is a big one, I Blogged the other day about some of the sites I looked at that had "lost" pages in Google's index. Many of them had duplication issues. We may never know for sure the exact cause of these site's being dumped, but duplication can't have helped. Google has not been quiet about duplication or it's move to a unique index at all...this is no surprise either.

Here is the big one, paid and reciprocal links. .....

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A
site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those
sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of
measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.

This can be done in several ways, such as:

-Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the "a" tag

-Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is

-blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such link exchanges and purchased links. If you see a site that is buying or selling links, let us know. We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.

So, everyone should have known this information already. The simple way to handle this rule in my eyes, and what I have been telling people is this....2 things. First of all, everything in moderation, if you pick up a good reciprocal link or even a few for traffic, "nofollow" or not...Its OK. Keep your reciprocals under the percentage of your other outgoing links, substantially under is best...Don't expect to get a juicy backlink score for these, they might just get devalued. If you pick up a paid link for traffic or advertising, this is most likely going to be devalued as well..I really think you should avoid these. However, if a paid link is "just" for advertising or traffic, ask the webmaster to 'nofollow' it, then you will definitely be OK. There are so many other organic means to build links, and this area.....As Google has demonstrated in the past few days that paid links are very volatile.

I think Google has demonstrated it's intention to follow through on these directives fully, and if after the months of information and added tools... You still choose to use avoidance as your course of action..You might just get burned. Don't misunderstand me, I do realize there will always be times when the rules don't fit the project, but you must clearly choose your battles. Google is not public domain, they have no responsibility to list your website. You on the other hand, have a responsibility to meet their guidelines in order to BE listed.

I don't agree with everything Google does, for sure! The reality however is, Google is in the driver's seat, not me. Yes, I believe, we as webmasters, have a voice with Google to get improvements and help....But they have chosen their path, and we are going to have to follow or be left behind.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Cog Blog 100th Post | Top 10 Posts

2007-09-04T14:02:00.000-04:00

100 days ago this Blog began... A post a day will keep the sleep away! The mission then, remains the mission today.... To provide news and SEO information suited for even new webmasters. Many Blogs and forums offer plenty of information for experienced webmasters, but fall short when helping the less experienced. When I started, this was a hurdle for me too. I decided to provide a place where a new webmaster or an experienced webmaster could find helpful information that was more easily absorbed than commonly found. No judgements or limited explanations, just the facts as best I could explain them.

So here we are 100 posts later, and the Blog is coming along OK. I have no plans of slowing down, so you will be able to come here in the future and find helpful posts and ask questions. While I certainly do not have the answers to everything, I can generally find out. This Blog was described to me by a friend who has no webmaster experience as "being very easy to understand", so on that note I'll call it a success. Thanks to everyone who has linked, stopped by, emailed or commented....I hope you found something helpful!

TOP 10 POSTS

Freshest Google Results - How to be the Most Recent Results - Keeping it fresh as Google moves to a fresher index. Making the freshness indicator work for you.

How to get New Sites Indexed Quickly ~ Guide to Google Indexing - Try my plan for fast and big indexing results for new and older sites. This is a process I have been tweaking for 14 site launches.

My Favorite SEO Places on the Web - My list of favorite SEO sites that I frequent. Also a few added from a my friend Tim Nash.

Google's Search String Guide List of Search Parameters - A guide to Google's search operators and their use. It was updated on 8/1/07.

Successful Site Launch Making a Plan - Step by step guide to successfully launching a new site. Avoiding commons problems, before they are problems.

Google User Stats Recipe for Success - Part 3 in the demographics and statistics study. Google's user stats, and how to take advantage of them.

Search Results Page Real Estate - Distribution of Clicks - Click percentages by page and position...And a few surprises. Sometimes less is more!

Web Syndication Article and Content Distribution - Syndicating and establishing ownership of your content. Building authority with articles.

User Generated Content Liability and Marketability - Making use of user generated content with a mind to it's management and inherent liabilities. Marketing your user interactive sites.

SEO Small Touches With BIG Results - Small changes and additions for your pages that pay off well. Some of the little things you can do, when you are on the shorter end of time management.

If your favorite is not here, comment and I will add it for sure! Thanks to you all for stopping by!

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

John Burroughs

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

De - Indexed by Google Recently?

2007-09-04T07:36:00.000-04:00

There is a trend lately of pages and whole sites being de - indexed by Google recently. These sites and pages are new and old without prejudice. There is a good work up of the probable dump / update here. I just want to remind everyone, Google has been moving towards this for some time. They have told us on many occasions that they are moving to a fresher more unique index. I think from looking at the affected pages I found this is exactly the case.

First lets determine if you are a probable candidate for this issue. Check your Google Webmaster Tools message center to see if you have a message, although I suspect you do not. You want to go to Google search, your local Google if you like. Sign out! Execute a site:www.domain.com/ command and note the pages, this should ideally be your total indexed pages. Next, execute a site:www.domain.com/* this should be your pages in the main index...Note this also. Finally, there is much debate, but it appears to be functioning in my data center...At least my numbers are right. Execute a supplemental operator site command site:www.mysite.com/& and note these also. Now, how do these compare to your pre-August numbers and each other. You are likely to find discrepancy between the supplemental pages in the main index operator and the supplemental operator. Look at them and determine which is most likely to be most accurate in your data center. Lastly, if you have the ability....use this page flow tool to verify your findings.

Some, of the pages / sites appear to have been experiencing some new kind of sandbox effect...But totally de - indexed. Some, just lost pages that haven't returned. I think we should be looking for the normal culprit here...Spam. Spam can be many things to Google, but the 2 cases I found were duplication / not unique, and too many reciprocal links. I also read about one where the inbound links were accumulated to quickly, it was de - indexed, and then bounced back. So, lets concentrate on the basics of fixing these issues....Because even upon return to the index many of these pages appear to be supplemental.

Fist we will cover duplication. The number one rule is unique content, this absolutely includes different meta titles and descriptions for every page. As a matter of fact, if you have pages with small amounts of content, you meta can really make a difference. There is also the issue of canonical problems. This is a great tool to determine if you are having a duplication issue. you can read about how these server side redirects work here. If your site is already established then getting these pages out of the supplemental index is generally believed to require links to then, preferably quality links. Or, you might try blocking them in your robots.txt for a bit. If the site is brand new, the quickest way is probably just to rewrite the URLs and start fresh.

Reciprocal links are OK, in moderation. The site I looked at had over 30%, I suspect that is too much. My advice here, disconnect them. If you really have to have them for traffic, then use a "nofollow" on them. Try to keep your outgoing links to a percentage that is smaller than your own internal links, at least for the time being. Lastly, you might consider submitting a re-consideration request via your Google Webmaster Tools. Here is a great tutorial by Tim Nash to really help you with that. Ideally, even if this isn't really necessary you have done the CYA. If you don't read Tim's tutorial, make sure you include what you found and what you fixed.

Have you had pages de - indexed? Want to share? Comment or email me, anonnimity is OK too.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

How to be a Writer & Blogger | Visual Writing Skills

2007-09-03T07:37:00.001-04:00

Read this great blogging post at our new Cog SEO Blog home

SEO is for Meat Eaters | Hungry for Traffic?

2007-09-02T08:17:00.001-04:00

Read this post at our new SEO Cog Blog home

User Generated Content | Liability and Marketability

2007-09-01T07:44:00.001-04:00

Read User Generated Content | Liability and Marketability at the Cog's New SEO Blog home

To Follow or Not to Follow | 6 Reasons to Use it

2007-08-31T07:19:00.001-04:00

Get the 6 Reasons to Use "Nofollow" at our new SEO Cog Home

Suplemental Index | Developing a New Plan

2007-08-30T07:37:00.000-04:00

Many of you may have noticed that supplemental operators aren't working. Well, I found one last week that was working, and has since stopped. They have been on again off again for some time. Google reported back on July 31st, 2007 that they were seeing a more narrow distinction between the supplemental and regular index. That supplemental pages were "fresher and more comprehensive than ever". At this point I think they have fully executed their plan to stop labeling supplemental results.

Here's my problem....Google claims to be placing fewer restrictions on sites, by as they say "indexing URLs with more parameters". However, one of the major mistakes that lands a page in the supplemental is duplication, and that is NOT addressed in this move. Many seasoned webmasters full know how to determine a probable supplemental page. The thing is, not all webmasters, have the knowledge, tools, or experience to do this. I think Google makes good effort in other areas, and before they removed this tool, they might have considered a addition to Google Webmaster Tools for duplication. I know what many are thinking reading this....who cares about the newbs. Well, everyone is a newb at one point. Since the search engines change the criteria so often, it is only logical that they supply, at least verified site owners, the tools to be successful in their index. Not doing so can breed even more spam and black hat techniques. Most people when faced with a dilemma will look to the most logical place for an answer, then most will continue to other resources for a fix...After many will give up or cheat.

I also think part of the reason Google's supplemental index has grown to be fresher and better is due to the serious attention it has gotten in the last year. Webmasters were easily able to locate information on how to check their supplementals, reasons for supplemental, and how they might fix these pages. Now, that will all be a little greyer. OK, so you might be wondering, how you might know a page is likely to be supplemental. Well you will rely on your stats and some search rank comparison for this. The page might be coming up short on traffic, you will have to weigh in what you suspect to be that page's traffic power compared to the other site's pages. You might find that page's Google traffic is a much lower or zero percent as opposed to your other pages. Yahoo traffic for that page, for example, might be OK...But Google is practically non-existent. If you have server stats, you might notice that Google doesn't crawl that page very often...For example every 3 or 4 months. Something else to consider is if all of your Google traffic is failing to perform and you have decent traffic from the other engines, you could have too many supplemental pages and Google has assigned your site low authority/credibility as a result. Lack of reasonably frequent crawls to your site would be a big indicator of this. There are some things you can do to pull it out, it takes time, planning and work.

SERPs will be a verification tool for a page you have determined to be probably supplemental. If the page was ranking well for specific keywords or phrases, and now it's not, that will signify a problem. Factor in any recent Google updates. Realize that your feeds, html sitemap pages (with no content), contact pages, and other minimally important pages to you...Google probably sees them the same way. So for example, you have 2 pages; one for product A, and one for product B. Product A is ranking well, good Google traffic. Product B is not. You have already determined that product B is not getting crawled much, and is a probable supplemental. I suggest this....Run a keyword density scan of the page and search Google for the most dense keyword phrases you can find from the page. Make sure you turn off Google customized search, or use a tool like this. Check some different data centers also, so you have a good picture. The reason I say this, is I have come across many customers and webmasters alike that have no idea what terms their site should be ranking for, their page is all about bicycle parts, and they are hoping to rank for Mountain biking. Google will only use the contextual information in the page, anchor text from backlinks, Meta title & maybe description, possibly "alt" tag text, and Domain/URL name to index you for queried keywords. I have heard ramblings about the text around your page's link on another site, but I do not believe it to be true, as it would certainly have some terrible black hat repercussions.

For folks who do not have server side access, this will be difficult. I use Analytics, as many other webmasters do. Maybe I am just to confused by the new layout, but I cannot find a clear path from my Google traffic to each page. So I offer a challenge, does some one have a free program/script that will supply referrer visits to individual pages, that does NOT have to be installed server side. Or can someone figure or already know how to get this information out of Anayltics. I would gladly publish an article written by this person, or link to such a program/script or article. Don't send any spam...I won't do it. I don't think the folks on free hosting or cheat hosting just trying to get started should be excluded from the ability to be marginally successful as they build their skills. I guess I am just a "blue collar" webmaster.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

SEO | Small Touches With BIG Results

2007-08-29T07:27:00.001-04:00

Read Small Touches With BIG Results at the NEW Home of the Cog Blog

Successful Site Launch | Making a Plan

2007-08-28T00:10:00.000-04:00

Today I am going to cover a highly overlooked area of launching a new site. It seems to me everyone always wants to talk about what its going to look like, or some cool new software. In the end, it will be your hard work, planning, research, and of course content that will yield the results we all seek. There is a logical order to try to stay with when planning a new site. It has natural beginning, but no end. If you are like me that natural beginning happens at 3am when you wake up from a dead sleep with a killer idea. Word of advice here, get up and write it down. Dang, if I never remember it right in the morning. So I'm going to kinda go through this in list form...Just because it feels more natural to me. These things are certainly not set in stone and the elements and the order will vary from project to project, but I think it does help me stay on the path. Maybe, you also will benefit from it.

Idea! - Write it down, summarize a scenario and the theme (not too broad). Put it away for a day, then look at it again and edit it.

Research - While I do a good bit of this, I neglected it in the original post. Thanks "mortgage company" for bringing it to my attention. When I research I look at the size of the pond. I mean, how many fish, and how large the pond are huge factors for how hard I will have to work, how long it will take, and how competitive it will be. If its going to be a really big job, I don't move away, I just spend more time on a intense strategy using long tails, pay per click, local advertising, and I try to NOT be like the others at the top of the search position ranks. I know that seems strange. Think about this, when you search for something are you like me, you check the first site...then maybe the next 3. If the following 3 all appear to have the same content upon your initial 10-20 second scan...boom, you're outta there? Well, that's why, I want them to stay.

Input - Ask at least 2 people (anyone but my husband) what they think, how they would use such a site. Then, maybe edit again.

Domain - You will have to decide which is the best option, brand or keyword strength. Either way keep it easy to type, snappy, relevant, and avoid a lot of hyphens. This is a good article to help you out. This Domain suggestion tool is addictive! Lastly, if the other aliases of a Domain you like are taken, pick another...Or you might just have to give it up, usually at the most inopportune time.

Put a quick, coming soon page up with some proper Meta, and some relevant textual content..............NOT SPAM, and no Ads. If you want to use your web host's or registrar's holding page, that's fine...I just think if someone is going to gain visibility from it, it should be you.

Begin site construction - Whatever kind of site you are doing, there are some common elements to be observed. Take care to include proper navigation, heading tags, anchor text, and watch the load time. I have a previous post here on page mechanics, if you need more information. Remember robots do not read Flash or Java in menus or presentations.

Meta - It is positively imperative that each page have unique title and description tags. I know some people don't use description tags, but they are missing an opportunity to avoid duplication. I believe Meta information is making a comeback. Besides, many of the smaller engines around still rely heavily on it. Here is a post with some Meta examples you might use.

STOP - I know you are getting excited, but don't launch that site just yet. This is a big mistake many people make, including myself. Launching a site prematurely can cause duplication errors, because you haven't protected the proper directories and files yet. People can be very frustrated when they think they have found what they seek, but instead find yellow construction signs.

robots.txt - It is very important that you get this right. If you are developing this site using software like Wordpress, phpBB, or phpLD then you will probably need to do some research. Hit the forums for the software, ask about the duplication issues. Here are some resources: phpBB Forums; Wordpress; VBulletin. When you have completed your robots.txt validate it.

Canonical Issues - For static pages this is pretty simple, 301 redirect your www to non www, or vice versa. This keeps the search engines from indexing both versions, and thus a slew of supplemental pages. Secondly, set up your directory default indexing. For non- Windows servers this is accomplished in htaccess. Check out these htaccess examples. Here is a post explaining server side SEO in more detail.

More htaccess - Its a good practice to include "Last Modification" date in your server response. Additionally, you might like to keep snoopers out of your htaccess file. Custom error pages are a very good thing! There is code for all this and more in this htaccess document.

Checking pages - You are going to want to check your pages for errors, spelling, load time, and overall SEO strength. I have stumbled across some free tools you may find helpful. Site Reportcard; Sitening; and SEOWorkers. I suggest you check the W3C to see if you validate or not also. If you are having Doc Type issues, have a peek at the list of Doc Types.

Meta relevance - Your title and description will do very little for you if they do not match the content of your page. This post has a pretty clear cut method to execute relevant organic link baiting. In any case, you really want your title to be at least 90% relevant and your description 80%. This tool will help you check it out. Remember unique titles and descriptions for each and every page.

We are ready...I think, to launch this site. The beauty is everything is done, and there aren't any duplicate pages already, or URLs that you scrubbed and need to be removed! Nice, isn't it?

Sitemap - I know there is some controversy here, but I suggest you create a Google sitemap. I promise it will improve your crawl if you do it right. Also check out this post about adding a html version to your pages.

Search engines - Sign up for Google Tools; Yahoo Site Explorer; and ping Ask.com with your sitemap.xml.

Directory submissions - Doing some manual directory submissions in tune with your launch can be very beneficial. Check out the directory...Avoid directories that: have the listings alphabetized, more that 15-20 on a page or are numbered, do not display anchor text, or have been banned in Google. Reciprocal links aren't going to help you any, at least at this point. I personally don't do reciprocals, and I don't think you should either unless there is a good relevant traffic reason for it...Even then limit it to just a few. Read the guidelines, there are almost always rules for length and format of your listing submission.

I do hope some of your have found this to be helpful, when I started...I would have for SURE! It seems that the information is there, but the framework for the understanding is so hard to come by. They will generally tell you what to do, just not why, or how. That's really my focus here at the Cog, to make sure you have the why and how to the questions you may even be to shy to ask anyone. I know how it can be, so if ever you are reading and I lose you...Feel free to ask. If you are too shy to comment...Click on the "Cog Home" button in the menu and send me an email from the contact page.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.

Navigation Structure | Deeps Crawls and Long Visits

2007-08-27T07:04:00.001-04:00

Read Navigation Structure | Deeps Crawls and Long Visits at the new home of The Cog Blog

My Favorite SEO Places on the Web

2007-08-26T06:39:00.000-04:00

SEO forums and Blogs, most of you read a bunch just as I do, so today I am publishing my list. I read probably an average of 3 hours of Blogs and forums everyday. Sometimes as much as 5 if there has been a shake up or update, such as Yahoo recently. I have often been asked where I hang out. Should a great resource not appear on this this, it could just mean I haven't discovered them yet. However, there are some places that I have checked out and received far less than a warm welcome, and left regardless of the information available. Because in the end, if I am going to spend time somewhere, why would I spend I with people who treat others poorly. So here we go....

Blogs

Matt Cutts Blog - I think there is some insider type information to be had here and the discussion in comments is priceless.
SEOmoz Blog - Powerful authors and first cut reporting on events and information.
Beanstalk's SEO News Blog - Dave Davies sees things in a way that others do not, and tends to see things that others miss all together.
Shoe Money Blog - I love Jeremy Schoemaker, he is my hero...I try to be frank and honest, but this guy is the king of "tell it like it is". He is also highly intelligent and insightful.
SEO-Scoop Blog - Donna has a way of getting my inspiration going, she makes me think about things in a way I wouldn't normally consider them. Donna's Blog is top quality.
SEO Chicks - The ladies at SEO Chicks have a way of delivering their message so that you forget you are reading about SEO. You are having fun, usually even a giggle or two.
Venture Skills Blog - This is Tim Nash's Blog. I met Tim in a forum I frequent (you will read about later). Tim is a IT and SEO Consultant in the UK. Read this Tim knows his stuff.
Google Webmaster Blog - I read the Google Blog so I don't miss anything just in case.
Andy Beard Blog - Added by Tim Nash. Looks to be a good read! Thanks Tim.
Cornwall SEO Blog - Another Tim addition. Tim say's "particularly for link baiting articles and suggestions".

Forums

TIP Forum - The TIP is David Castle's Forum. I hang out here the most. The folks in here are the nicest I have found anywhere. This is where I met Tim and many other highly skilled people of all sorts, always willing to lend a hand.
Warrior Forum - I don't visit here much...Not for any particular reason. They really have a nice forum. I go here when I am developing a plan, the posters here are very strategy orientated..I like it!

This one isn't really a Blog, but rather an online magazine, I read the Linux Magazine. You will find stuff here to use in your Linux server you never dreamed possible. I have found more solutions for problems one this one site than any other single site. This stuff goes way beyond htaccess, to things like SSH, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Cool Apache configurations, mod rewrites, and even optimizing SQL. So while this stuff is written for geeks and you might have to read it a few times, it is the authority for information on your Linux server.

So maybe today you found something helpful, or a bit of information you have been seeking...I hope that is the case. I am quite sure there are many more resources out there that I don't read, but guys seriously.....So many Blogs have the same information as everyone else! Realize this too, I have 6 kids and a husband that need some attention too, so the 3 or 4 hours a day I set aside to read has to be quality information packed with the stuff I need. So don't beat me up too bad.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"

**We Require a Link Back Please.