Recently in Search Engine Optimization Category
One easy way to recover lost link authority is to 301 redirect broken external links to relevant pages. But, if you’ve got a site with hundreds or thousands of URLs, and dozens of broken external links, doing that correction can be a real headache. Enter Levenshtein Distance. That’s a fancy name for a simple concept: You can find the closest match for a word or phrase (or URL) by calculating how many edits it will take to get from that word or phrase to another test phrase. Levenshtein is used a lot in spell checkers. If I type teh instead
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Continue reading Fixing broken links using Levenshtein Distance: A PHP tool
Does it makes sense to move a blog from a http://domain.com/info/ subfolder to a http://domain.com/blog/ subfolder? I like this idea...under the right circumstances. If things are going well, don’t bother. If your blog already has lots of links from different domains or if you receive truckloads of visitors, you have little reason to change your blog’s subfolder. In fact, from a pure SEO perspective, changing the location may have negative SEO consequences. When you switch subfolders, old URLs must be 301 redirected to their new locations. These 301 redirects ensure that visitors will land where they are supposed to. They
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Continue reading Changing a Blog's Location
And so it begins... You may have heard that soon Bing will provide all the paid and non-paid search results in Yahoo. Or you may have heard some twisted version of this because the whole thing is so complicated. Personally, I like the Frankenstein imagery. Although it’s kind of cool to think of a Bing biting a Yahoo and the Yahoo becoming a Bing beneath the full moon. The good thing is we knew this was coming. Yahoo! and Microsoft signed the deal a year ago. In February, the European Commission and US Department of Justice Approved it. Yahoo and
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Continue reading A Flavorful Blend, Yahoo! Organic Search, Now With 25% Bing
Just a quick note, I hated Shakespeare in school. Once I was done with school, it became a fascinating series of life lessons and twisted, timeless comedies. In the battle of sub-folders vs. sub-domains I always fight in the name of sub-folders. Sub-folders have that magical power of creating a unique URL and inheriting the authority of the root domain. Sub-domains on the other hand, do not always inherit the authority or the full authority of their root-domains. Think of it this way, a sub-domain is a child of the root-domain. The children get the benefit of having a parent
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Continue reading To Sub-Domain or Not to Sub-Domain? That is the question.
I just got back from SMX Advanced and boy are my arms tired. Actually, it’s my brain that’s feeling overwhelmed with lots of fresh insight and illuminating data. The cast and crew over at Third Door Media and Search Engine Land produced an exceptional event; they outdid themselves. Except, I left Seattle’s Bell Harbor conference center with a ravenous bugblatter beast gnawing at my brain. Let me explain. Speaker after speaker kept saying that Search Engine Optimization should be guided by User Experience Optimization. For example: Instead of chasing after the search engines, chase after the user experience because the
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Continue reading SEO Is Not User Experience Optimization
I’d like to start by saying that this is my first time doing this. I take notes at conferences. Incomprehensible and very short-handed notes that even I fail to decode from time to time. None the less, I will not fail you. Here we go. SEO For Google vs. Bing Starring - In Order of Appearance: Janet Driscoll Miller - Search Mojo Rand Fishkin - SEOmoz Matt Cutts - Google Inc. Sasi Parthasarathy - Microsoft And Matt came with his hair. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it’s nice to know he has a
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Continue reading SMX Advanced Live Blogging Post 1
Many websites try to create perfect brochure content for their markets and prospects. Then they optimize those pages for SEO. After all, you want people to land on the perfect page when they arrive from a search engine query result, right? If only life were so Type-A. Except in this case the A stands for atypical. Search results are rarely neat and tidy. Many times people click on results that look hopeful, not ones that look correct. If yours is the best result, even if it’s not perfect, people will click. Search engine programmers know this too. At night they
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Continue reading The Myth of Perfect Content
Recently, I’ve heard about startups that want to automate enterprise SEO for large websites. I suppose they theorize that if Google, Bing and the other search engines can gather Internet content, categorize it and rank it, then it’s possible to write software that will recast your content as a perfect website. I do not believe enterprise SEO software can optimize a complex website without large amounts of critical thinking or decision making from real people who are familiar with your business and have a deep knowledge of SEO. The research, evaluation, recommendations necessary for good SEO are fraught with endless
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Continue reading Enterprise SEO Automation
On Sunday, Rand Fishkin posted a great heads-up piece about how personalized search, branding, and leveraging your current rankings can make for an interesting marketing strategy. His mention of the 2007 Pontiac commercial brought up a particularly interesting idea. In the commercial, the viewer is instructed to “Google” Pontiac as opposed to going to a website or calling a toll-free number. This commercial was one of the first to demonstrate the power and universal influence of search. By having your consumer access your site through a keyword search you increase your sites traffic strength, branding, and likelihood of getting personalized
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Continue reading Personalized Search Strategies & Video Games
It appears that Google’s new infrastructure, code named Google Caffeine, is rolling-out live to data centers. Why is this important? Expect to see ranking changes. Don’t freak-out. We’re not talking 2012 or Alderaan upheaval here. That said, expect disturbances in the force. While most well and legitimately optimized websites should remain unscathed, it’s likely that others could experience some organic ranking unpleasantness. What is Caffeine? Caffeine is an infrastructure change. Think of it like upgrading from XP to Vista or from Vista to Windows 7 or from Snow Leopard to Windows 7. Google seems to make infrastructure changes every three
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Continue reading Google Caffeine - Don't Let It Keep You Awake at Night
