Every so often I hear an idealist talk about ranking without links. Evidently Google has the ability to algorithmically determine what is quality content and what is not. (I, too, believe they have that ability, I just believe they look at linkage to determine what is quality and what isn’t.) It is disturbing, however, when …
Can Wikipedia Run Without Advertising?
I’m sure many SEOs would respond “I certainly hope not!”. The case-for-and-against Wikipedia advertising: “Though Wikimedia has less than ten full-time employees, it has real expenses. Bandwidth in 2007 is expected to cost up to $100,000 a month, and the group now runs more than 350 servers. Will the necessary money continue to flow in …
Jason Vs SEO (Cond…)
Jason Calacanis had a few words to say about SEO a while back: “90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman…SEO is bull…” Heh heh. Danny Sullivan came up with some facts to counter the vitriol. Now Jason wants to carry on the conversation, and wonders “who with”? Greg Boser would …
Help! My Site Is Not Being Crawled By Google
I was chatting with John, who was telling me about an ex-client of his. The client had a site re-design, and had done a lot of link building, but wasn’t ranking anywhere. His site wasn’t even listed in Google. Was the site banned? On inspection, John found the designer had put a robots.txt file on …
Social Media Marketing Primer For SEOs
Search engines solve a problem. Finding relevant sites can be difficult. Search engines make that process easier. The problem with search engines is that they return a long list of sites. The searcher must then wade through sites in order to find the most relevant site. In theory, the most relevant site is #1, but …
The Google Minus 30 Penalty
There’s been a long running thread at Webmasterworld concerning a theory about a Google penalty. The penalty is called the -30 penalty. What is it? The minus 30 penalty is when a site drops from a previously high ranking to #31. i.e. the site dropped beneath a level where most people will see it. This …
SEO For Social Causes
Think about it. Somebody does a search for “divorce attorney” and instead of some scummy attorney web site, the result is this. Somebody does a search for “child protective services” and the result is Seattle PI’s Power to Harm. Somebody does a search for “IRS” and instead of the IRS home page, they are confronted …
