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By Lewis Wolfe, Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
So Google springs a minor surprise, with an update of public PR after approx 2 months, rather than the 3 months we had become accustomed to. This after the rather wayward schedule of 2007.
And so the (conspiracy) theories come out of the woodwork.
Continue reading »
By Lewis Wolfe, Saturday, May 10th, 2008
I’ve got a WordPress blog, should I go to the trouble of setting up a (Google) sitemap for it?
No.
Why not?
The clue is in Google’s “locate web pages our spiders might not otherwise find…” - that’s what a sitemap does, and WordPress, if and when set up properly in its permalink structure will do the job just as well. Continue reading »
By Lewis Wolfe, Saturday, April 19th, 2008
There’s a new Alexa rank algorithm out - we previously knew Alexa rank to be meaningless except when it came to people like Text Link Ads using it as part of their calculation.
The main point appears to be less reliance on toolbar stats - as Alexa puts it, data is now gathered from a variety of sources, whatever they may be…
Continue reading »
By Lewis Wolfe, Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Pros in the SEO business will laugh hollowly at this, but don’t forget about the related site search function - it’s in the webmaster tools, or just type it in.
http://www.google.com/search?q=related:www.mysite.com
It does no harm to try out some different TLDs
http://www.google.nl/search?q=related:www.mysite.com
Continue reading »
By Lewis Wolfe, Thursday, March 27th, 2008
So, Technorati has left the Dashboard - not many tears to be shed for that, I have never quite understood the allure that Technorati exerts (exherted) - to be replaced by Google Blogsearch, with an interesting _GET url.
By Lewis Wolfe, Thursday, May 24th, 2007
We live in frightening times. The average blog gets 80-90% of its organic search traffic from Google - and there are enough horror stories about being suddenly dropped from the results, to be left hanging and hoping…
So why not boost your traffic by paying attention to other search engines and their results?
There’s actually not much point. Basically, what works for Google will work fine for Yahoo and MSN, and the time and effort could probably be spent more profitably on other things.
By Lewis Wolfe, Saturday, May 19th, 2007
The “voted on by users so it must be good” idea is due to be tested to destruction.
Not only the semi-publicized plan of Wales/Wikipedia to produce a community-fuelled search engine, hinted at here and here - but also with SquidOffers:-
The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.
Leaving aside the semantics of ad vs. offer - and with the usual caveat of unless I’m missing something - the question remains: why would people vote to receive more ads?
Folksonomies are born, not built by artifice - I don’t know whether that’s a law or not…
By Lewis Wolfe, Monday, May 14th, 2007
The discussion concerning sponsored links in WordPress themes has a relevance to the wider question of buying links, and how it plays with the algorithm used by the current market leader in search engines. Google, through their vicar on earth, have set out their position in the usual partial fashion. This seems to be how it is as of now…
It’s vital to note that this applies only to paid links placed, in the opinion of Google, for SEO purposes and not paid links.
Will Google penalise sites who buy links? No Continue reading »
By Lewis Wolfe, Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Invent the hyperlink and you have invented the WWW.
Links are the lifeblood of the web, the reason for its existence. Links aren’t sexy and oh-so-very Web2.0 like mashups or collaborative videoblogging, they’re just what it’s all based on. So when you start messing around with hyperlinks (and you happen to be a large corporation based on the hyperlink) you are taking your life in your hands…
First, there was the nofollow business, detailed shortly after its introduction in this article which still holds true today. The nofollow attribute applied to a link would instruct a search engine spider to (largely, but not entirely) ignore the linked page and its content.
We now have the eccentric situation where referrer spam comes complete with its own nofollow attributes already supplied. But, worse, nofollow is proposed to be used as a sign of link sponsorship as opposed to pure, organic links generated by honest endeavour.
Have your paid links by all means, but don’t assign any authority to them - like a TV ad with a celebrity gushing on about their chosen product, but holding up a sign saying, Don’t actually believe a word of it!!!
Taken together with the enhanced “denounce a competitor” scheme, detailed in our previous post, the situation becomes bizarre.
