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.
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Well, I never noticed that - having naturally been with Firefox since it was Phoenix and used to explode your machine with great regularity I don’t often need to touch other fine browser products….

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SEO_WordPress Plugin is interesting in the context of Google’s increased (over the last 2-3 years anyway) use of their supplemental index. The plugin is another method for reducing crawled duplicate content - however, with the use of a robots.txt as well standard noindex… time will tell.

I was looking at some of the recently released plugins, particularly this stock data one and also something for media content - which adds a noembed section to any embedded content that does not already have one - very handy for people reading a site in an RSS reader.

It was the <noembed> tag which was the clue. Continue reading »

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.

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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.

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Just came across this ridiculous piece of hubris - which would have been a reasonable, if typically heavy-handed, April Fool’s Joke - had it not been published on the 14th.

Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:
- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

It is not possible to separate “links sold for traffic” from “links sold for PR” - Google themselves have made sure of that, it recurses to the very basis of their original existence as a search engine (unless you reckon that “traffic” and “authority” have no relationship whatsoever).

Interesting and wise from Strange Duck Media - the issue being the duplicate content penalty again.

I would still maintain that the occasionally-quoted “WordPress is bad SEO” is an overreaction - I’ve built CMS sites that churned out 8 discrete pages for every data chunk, plus .txt and pdfs and they survived on the SERPs ok - without disappearing to supplementals.

The point about being made to feel a criminal is well-made. Large US corporations, doing evil or otherwise, are not arbiters of law, and as for how non-US citizens might feel about this…