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The First Three Reasons Your Website is Failing!
I’ve just been revisiting some great older blog posts on some other sites, to give myself a bit of a nostagic overview of SEO. While doing so, I re-read this one from Ian Lurie at Conversion Marketing, so I thought I’d share it all with you and cover some of the points he makes in a bit more detail. First of all I guess I should say that I agree with every point he makes, although some of the content of the points have changed slightly in the context of what has happened in the SEO marketplace since Ian posted this. So for now,...
read moreUsing JavaScript Effectively
I just read yet another misleading article from yet another “leading” SEO writer explaing why JavaScript is bad for your navigation. And yet again (yawn) it showed a complete lack of understanding of the capabilities of search engines (quite aside from the fact that Google understands some aspects of JavaScript now, but that’s another story). The essense of the piece I read was that if you use JavaScript to “pop-up” sub-menus, then your site navigation won’t be indexed by search engines. You’ve...
read moreWhy cloak for search engines, and how to do it
The video response by Matt Cutts to a question about cloaking for Google got me thinking that it’s a long time since I wrote anything on the subject. I guess I kinda fell into the trap of thinking that everyone had dismissed the idea of cloaking because everyone I personally discussed it with agreed that it was a bad thing. However, if people are genuinely asking Matt Cutts of Google’s spam team how they should go about cloaking then clearly there is still a school of thought that doesn’t acknowledge the dangers First...
read moreShould I serve Googlebot content-only pages optimized for load speed?
Google announced page load speed matters for ranking. Should we be doing content-only pages for Google bots? (By removing images and loads of CSS & JS) Remiz Rahnas, Kerala, India (Someone in all seriousness asks Matt Cutts should we all be cloaking!)
read moreDifficulties with scientific method in empirical SEO
SEO is not smoke and mirrors or a black art, as some SEO companies might have you believe. Far from it, SEO is the application of best practice, taking advantages of fixed logical rules and algorithms to achieve best-value results for effort. The problem for SEO strategists is that these logical rules are not public knowledge, and more so that they differ for diferent search engines. The headline to this article refers to “empirical SEO” which is a term I have coined for the process of determining best practice using what is...
read moreWhy Google does NOT prioritise .EDU and .GOV domains
For every SEO opinion one can read on the Internet, there always seems to be a conflicting, sometimes directly polar, opinion preached elsewhere. Sometimes, it seems like one particular opinion is treated like fact. Often it is “proven” by supposed SEO empiricists (I’ll cover why it is difficult to maintain the scientific method for SEO in another post in a few days) that one particular opinion is fact. Sometimes, these facts even fly in the face of common sense. Sometimes, they seem to tie in with common sense. ...
read moreButton Color Test: Does Red Beat Green?
In the course of researching my new employment (which I am really looking forward to!) at Storm ID, I read this article by Performable that was higlighted in their Facebook page. It makes an interesting read and I encourage all of you to read it. However, the argument it presents does have one fatal flaw, even though Performable have followed a reasonable scientific method in the way in which they have gone about their experiment. Before I discuss the flaw, I should describe the experiment. The guys at Performable set up an A/B split...
read moreWhy doesn’t Google Places allow access by multiple users?
“It’s not good for security when I have to ask clients to share their Google credentials with me so I can help edit their Google Places listings. Why doesn’t Google Places allow access by multiple users, like Google Webmaster Tools does? Jonathan Hochman, Connecticut”
read moreSearch Engine History – Yahoo
Two Ph.D candidates named David Filo and Jerry Yang created Yahoo in 1994 at Stanford University in California; it was started for recreation for the creators but soon became full time work. It was initially known as ‘Jerry and Davids guide to the World Wide Web’ but after the creators randomly chose names from the internet was then dubbed Yahoo as the creators wanted smarter, catchier name. Yahoo recently became a more powerful organisation by the acquisition of Inktomi and Overture, the pioneers of their specific fields.
read moreSearch Engine History – Webcrawler
WebCrawler went live in the Spring of 1994 and was a Search Engine that originally started off as a research project started at the Universtiy of Washington by Brian Pinkerton. It was bought over in 1995 by AOL and was then bought by Excite.
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