I’m here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Today (actually yesterday now that it’s after midnight) I sat in on the SEO Workshop being presented by Todd Friesen (“The Oilman”) and Greg Boser (“WebGuerrilla”). This session turned out to be a lot of fun. It was reminiscent of their “SEO Rock Stars” radio […]

Wow, what news eh! That Google is acquiring DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. What a windfall for the private equity firm that bought DoubleClick for a little $1.1 billion dollars in 2005. This is no ordinary acquisition though, at least from an SEO consultant’s point-of-view. That’s because of what comes with the deal: the DoubleClick subsidiary […]

As you know, title tags are the most important on-page factor. They are given the most weight out of anything on the page as far as the search engines are concerned. So it is a huge weakness in WordPress (and most other blog platforms for that matter) that the post title is used as the […]

Microsoft blogger Eytan Seidman on their MSN Search blog offers some very useful specifics on what makes a site crawler unfriendly, particularly to MSNBot: An example of a page that might look “unfriendly” to a crawler is one that looks like this: https://www.somesite.com/info/default.aspx?view=22&tab=9&pcid=81-A4-76&section=848&origin=msnsearch&cookie=false….URL’s with many (definitely more than 5) query parameters have a very low […]

My latest SEO Report Card addresses the mythical monster that continues to rear its ugly head… the “Google Sandbox.” No I’m not going to get into a debate about whether it exists or not. It does. End of discussion. 🙂 What I am going to do is try to render some assistance to some nice […]

It’s getting a bit ridiculous how often Wikipedia shows up on the first page of Google for just about every search imaginable. Micropersuasion has noticed it for brand searches. Google’s getting a bit lazy I think to give Wikipedia carte blanche access to page 1 of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Often times Wikipedia […]

I blogged last month about Wikipedia and SEO. There are a number of considerations when making edits, creating entries, and passing the “Notability” test — practices to avoid so you don’t run afoul of their guidelines and so on. Well folks, the game has changed. Wikipedia just instituted nofollows on all external links. This had […]

You may or may not have heard of a blog carnival. Blogging colleague Toby Bloomberg first introduced me to the concept and I must say, as a link building afficionado, my eyes lit up at the potential these traveling columns have for building links. A blog carnival is, in effect, a column on a particular topic that is passed […]

I always enjoy ranting about the dangers of black hat SEO. Gray hat SEO too, for that matter. But what I enjoy most is the challenge of disecting sites that are using black or grey hat SEO techniques (Fresh Pair, for example) and peeling away the layers of the onion. I feel like a detective… […]

This Thursday I am presenting a webinar, “Search Marketing Essentials for Online Retailers,” along with George Michie of Rimm-Kaufman Group, for MarketingProfs.com. It starts at noon Eastern. It is free for MarketingProfs Premium Plus members and $99 for others (although it is a better deal if you just sign up for Premium Plus membership for […]