As a blogger I can’t tell you how many spammy link requests from “link builders” that I get on an ongoing basis. It’s just way too many. You certainly don’t want to hire the kind of link building firm that sends out such spam link requests using cheap third-world labor. It’s these same sorts of […]

I have to say, I am impressed with Wolfram Alpha. I think it’s a game changer. It provides a powerful new way of interacting with the large repositories of data available on the Web. For instance, instead of googling for “number of google employees” (incidentally, it isn’t until the 4th result down that you get […]

Using Google engineers’ terminology will help you look like a search industry insider. For example, talk about “signals” rather than SEO “factors”. Describe weak, undifferentiated content as “thin” (as in a “thin affiliate”). Work “canonicalization” into a sentence at least once every 5 minutes. Share your enthusiasm for “shingles” (yeah, NOT the disease). Speak in […]

I’m a big fan of the new canonical tag (er, element, to be more technically correct). It’s a powerful tool for dealing with duplicate content. But it’s not exactly reliable yet. Google wants us use it as if it were. Unquestionably, it’s a signal. But it can be ignored, even when it should clearly by […]