Stories about ‘SEO’

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James Farmer at WPMU.org wrote a very interesting Penguin-related article, which doesn’t make the update look too great, despite its apparently honorable intentions.

The update hit WPMU.org, sending it from 8,580 visits from Google on one day pre-Penguin to 1,527 a week later.

According to Farmer, the Sydney Morning Herald spoke with Matt Cutts about the issue (which may or may not appear in an article), and he provided them with three problem links pointing to WPMU.org: a site pirating their software, and two links from one spam blog (splog) using an old version of one of...
Commentary:

As webmasters continue to investigate how Panda works (or doesn’t) some new evidence indicates two things:

  1. Before Panda, Google must have given extra spammy sites more link juice than seems practical to anyone
  2. Theme Creators (such as WPMU.org) who have links in the footers of the themes they sell or give away may have been hit hard after the Panda update

 

The conclusion for theme designers is to remove those footers links or put a nofollow on them and hope that Google gets their act together with Panda 2.0 soon.

...

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By Brett Bumeter

If you are wondering why the recent Microsoft and Facebook agreements are so relevant, consider a couple things.  Facebook membership and usage grows at leaps and bounds.  Facebook is becoming one of the primary places for people to go on the internet, and while they are there, they search for things and people.  More people and groups right now than anything else, but that might change soon.

Bing web search is now integrated into Facebook search.  Perform a search in Facebook and if there is no direct search result within Facebook itself, you will see the top 3 results from the...

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By Brett Bumeter

I found this cool looking plugin recently that helps you optimize keywords within a WordPress Post or Page.  It doesn’t help you find keywords, but once you know the keywords that you want to emphasize with a <strong> tag for example, you can type in the word into the admin panel and the plugin will automatically place the keywords in bold for you, helping to emphasize to search engines that a give post is more about the keywords highlighted, which is more effective than using keywords in a meta tag list.

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By Brett Bumeter

I have been expending a great deal of effort testing plugins that offer some form of management over nofollow links on a WordPress site.  I’m looking for something that will enable me to specifically select a page or Post by the Post ID and mark that page or post to always receive a nofollow tag whenever I link to it within my blog.

There are several plugins that help to provide nofollow tags for things like Categories, Tags, Archives etc. 

The only one that seemed to do this reliably was the tool that came with Headspace( author homepage),...

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By Brett Bumeter

Over the years, I have accumulated a handful of blogspot blogs and blogspot domains that are miraculously worthy of not throwing away.  There is much talk about the low quality of blogs in the blogspot domain area, but the truth is that the blogger engine is not that bad, and that there are many very good blogs in the system.  Unfortunately, the proportion of very bad blogs in the system, makes the neighborhood a bit of a tragedy, a blog slum if you will.  I do not want to be the equivalent of a slum lord by keeping a few...

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Starting today with English language users who are signed in to the site, and expanding soon to all English-language queries, Google will serve up a concise summary box on the right side of the results page with key information on many queries.The company says there are already 500 million people, places and things that will trigger a Knowledge Graph-based summary box; Google expects the boxes to show up in roughly the same number of queries that now trigger Google Maps in search results.
Commentary:

While reading this article by Forbes, I couldn’t help but envision who on the web would suffer the consequences.

Content Farms, all those websites that hoped to provide the answer a click past a google search, the About.com’s, the Wikipedias, the Yahoo! Answers and many millions of blogs.

How are content owners at risk?

Well Google’s Knowledge Graph is simply going to provide the answer in the search window before anyone every visits a primary source.

Google has just farmed content from sites all around the world and claimed ownership as the primary source!

Sure it took them over a...

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The new Google Penguin update was a big change that has been very unsettling to SEO’ers, both blackhats and whitehats. It seems that everywhere you go, people who had previously considered themselves to be “professionals”, are now dumbfounded as their stable authority sites have moved from ranking in the top 5 for competitive keywords, to not ranking at all.

What Did This Update Do and How Do I Recover? (By Reading This Post. Duh!)

Microsite Masters is in a unique position; we have historical ranking data for thousands of websites. We have data on sites that are still...
Commentary:

MicrositeMasters has offered up 5 good points for navigating the new Google Penguin updates. They also provide some convincing evidence for why your site may have been hammered during the latest Google update named Penguin. There are lots of good details and insights in this article, but for the average website or business with a website, I think the third and fourth methods they outline are the most likely to be used.

Most companies do not have the time to (waste) creating a bunch of micro sites that diffuse the message of their own website, so microsites are not the answer...

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By Brett Bumeter

Didn’t attend PubCon 2009?  Get the best Insights gathered up from the conference at Managing Greatness.  Even though on the surface this looks like a cliff notes version of Pub Con it is more of a linear mind map or outline of some of the key items.  (frankly I’m impressed there’s some useful stuff in here) like the reference to the Matt Cutt’s interview by GeekCast.fm. 

here’s a screen shot of the article just to...

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By Brett Bumeter

From time to time, I will write a comment on a blog that is so damned long, that it just doesn’t make good blogging sense to publish the thing as a comment.  I say if your comment grows beyond 1000 words (for me) or maybe 1 quarter the length of the original article for your average person that is more sane than I am, then you should publish it on your own site!

So today, I read this great article by Jon Payne titled

Online Marketing MLM Schemes & Scams, iJango & Over-Hyping

You should read it.  Its a great article. ...

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By Brett Bumeter

Are you famous on twitter?  Are you heading there quickly?  Then make the right SEO play and insure that you put a realy hyperlink in your Twitter account for your web address. 

Just because every other link on Twitter gets shortened, don’t forget the rest of the world outside of twitter mostly uses real and complete hyperlinks still.  That includes Google and Google is important for your other internet activities.

I’d like to hold up my good friend Warren Whitlock, one of the authors of the Twitter Revolution as a bit of an example.  Warren has over 17,000 active followers on...

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