I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting spam emails from my Gmail inbox. If my email is public and scraped, Gmail should still block the spam people send me. Since they’ve been horrible at stopping this for at least a year, and probably more like three years, I’m going to start posting these emails here and hopefully Google will improve its spam filters as a result. As I get more spam emails, I’m going to keep posting them here. And maybe these people will see their own emails scraped and rendered useless by their fellow spammers…

Up to May 22:

Two from this person:

Hi,

This is Jenni.

I own many websites across various categories where I am currently
providing Ad space and would like to know if you are in need of the
same. I can offer Text links, In-content links, Banner Ads, and full
page Articles for your advertisement needs.

Kindly let me know if my offer interests you,

Thanks,
Jenni.
jennicaseo@gmail.com
Skype: syl_mike

Hi,

This is Jenni.

I own many websites across various categories where I am currently providing Ad space and would like to know if you are in need of the same. I can offer Text links, In-content links, Banner Ads, and full page Articles for your advertisement needs.

Kindly let me know if my offer interests you,

Thanks,
Jenni.
jennicaseo@gmail.com
Skype: syl_mike

Up to May 20 2012:

Subject: Hi
From: Paul Keyes webguypaul@yahoo.com
Hi! I was checking out your website — you have an awesome website! However, I see you’re not ranking well on Google, which means customers can’t find you! I can fix this for you by getting you better rankings and a ton more traffic to your website — fast! If you’re interested, please let me know.

Ironically this next one got marked as being a priority message by Google. #Fail #SpamInYourEye

Subject: Partnership SEO proposal at 20% discount
From: sales@kanhupanda.com – KPI – SEO Team

Hello,

How are you, i hope you doing well.

We are very keen to build a long-term, working relationship with you and your company and provide you with an excellent SEO service at massively affordable prices. All our plans involve an offer of 20% off our listed prices.

Some background information

We have resellers from the USA, UK, CANADA, SOUTH AFRICA, & NEWZLAND but we are always looking to partner with more resellers who can provide us with regular SEO projects. As you know we are INDIA based seo company with a worldwide customer base. Our team of over 200 SEO professionals serve a vast portfolio of clients and have transformed their businesses by improving their ranking and the number of visitors to their site.

Some links of interest about our company

About us : http://www.kanhupanda.com
Our SEO Team : http://www.kpipl.com/secure/client-base/kpi-team.htm
Top 10 Ranking we Achieved : http://www.kpipl.com/secure/client-base/top-10-ranking.htm
SEO Packages : http://www.kanhupanda.com/seo-packages.htm
SEO Reseller Plans : http://www.kanhupanda.com/special-seo-reseller-plans.htm

We look forward to hearing from you and sharing a long and mutually beneficial business relationship with you and your company. If you interested in our services we can share you more informations like “Live access to look our employees”, “Client testimonials”, “Weekly SEO Report”.

Feel free to email us sales@kanhupanda.com or alternatively you can provide your best time and phone number to call you.

Thanks

Luvin M
Sales Manager
Kanhu Panda Infotech Pvt. Ltd.
India’s leading online marketing agency
Subject: Cheap Contextual Link and One Way Link
From: info@seoremoval.com

Hello sir,

I’m link builder services specialist, I have some blogs network, and have some
blogs list with different IPs,

I have company my own site, you can check http://www.seoremoval.com
I want to work together well for long-term with you.

Pricing per blog posts :
PR1 = $7
PR2 = $8
PR3 = $11
PR4 = $15
PR5 = $20
article provide by our team, 200 words based

I will give you :
* Articles authenticity guaranteed passed Copyscape
* Each article is made of at least 200 words
* Every article has a maximum of 3 links to your blog
* Each article will be placed on a related category
* Each article will be published on a different blog IP
* Each article can be Picture or Video (If you want)

Check our Price One Way Link http://www.seoremoval.com/services/one-way-text-link-building

I hope we can work together well for long-term
If you have any question or doubt please feel free asked me
I provide several my site list, so you know where I can placed your links
I’m waiting your good response

Thanks & Regards
SEO removal

Subject: Work Smarter, Not Harder For Top Talent
From: icims@active-hire.com

If you are having trouble viewing this email click here

Are you spending your morning sourcing top talent? Are you using your lunch break to sort through resumes? Are you working after hours tracking applications?

Work smarter, not harder with the iCIMS Applicant Tracking System. With this easy-to-use recruitment software, you will increase your efficiency and quality of your hires…without missing breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Use iCIMS to:

Automate resume collection by electronically screening and ranking applications
Get your jobs in front of more eyes with 1-click job postings to job boards and social networks
Track your candidates’ application process to see which forms they did and did not fill out
Quickly search and report on all candidate data stored within iCIMS’ centralized system

Call 1-800-889-4422 or view a demo here.

iCIMS, Inc. | 90 Matawan Road | Parkway 120, Floor 5 | Matawan, NJ 07747 | p: 1.800.889.4422 | e: marketing@icims.com
© 2012 iCIMS, Inc.
ActiveHire occasionally sends messages about our own products and services or on behalf of our advertising partners.
ActiveHire, Inc.
1705 S. Capital of Texas Highway, Austin, TX 78746

To end email offers, discounts and news, please go to http://www.active-hire.com/end.html

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Google is cutting the ROI on ecommerce SEO and has been for 8+ years. If ecommerce merchants don’t understand the changes below, they’re going to lose market share to savvier competitors.

Read on for what you need to do to survive and thrive.

Google has reduced the traffic and ROI available to SEO-ed sites by:

• - Publishing sites’ content directly in search results as stock quotes, movie times, flight times, sports scores etc.
• - Creating “universal” search results that make sites compete with Youtube, Google News, Product search etc
• - Taking away keyword data for up to 30% of sites’ SEO traffic

And that’s just the more obvious things. But don’t take my word for it, Google proudly say so in this video:

Smart SEOs are already transitioning out of relying on SEO traffic for profit. They’re using it to acquire customers, period.

Everyone knows that repeat customers are easier to sell to and buy more. So make an initial low-profit sale to search visitors, so that you can add them to your email list and make more sales and profit later.

In fact, in my previous email to people who got a free advanced SEO book chapter, I went so far as to advocate selling at cost -i.e. at 0% profit – to maximize your conversion rate on SEO traffic.

Then wouldn’t you price everything – since you want search traffic on all your products – at 0% profit?

How will you ever be profitable then?

There are two parts to making long-term profit off of search visitors.

Part 1 – Dividing products between customer-generation and profit-generation
Part 2 – Segmenting traffic on the fly to personalize the products you show

Part 1 – Divide products between customer-generation and profit-generation

The reason for cutting into margins is that SEO traffic is decreasing, and price-comparisons are a click away.

The thing is … what if there wasn’t search traffic in the first place?

Challenge the assumption that all your products want/depend on search traffic!

Surprisingly, that’s the case for many products. For example, any new product doesn’t have existing search demand. (See sidebar.)

1) Acquisition products. These low-margin products are meant to draw visitors into the store, to be either immediately converted and/or upsold on products with higher margins.

In offline retail this is known as a “loss-leader” – a product that is sold at little, no- or even negative-margin.

It leads visitors into the sale that is then made profitable with crosssels and upsells.

2) Profit products. These are higher margin products that allow the business to grow and thrive.

Popular examples:

• - Candy-and-magazine display at the checkout counter
• - Accessories for your electronics, such as cases, memory cards, insurance
• - “House” brands – if you manufacture the product, customers can’t get it from competitors, eliminating price-competition

So how do you make sure that your existing customers will see profit-generating products when they return to your site?

Part 2 – Segment the traffic and personalize

Have you visited Youtube while logged in to your Google account? Notice that it recommends videos specifically for you?

Or notice how Amazon welcomes you by name and shows you recently-browsed products? (Retargeting of a sort.)

You can use a free tool like BTBuckets (hattip Daniel Waisberg at SMX Israel) to show these visitors custom content. It’s called behavioral targeting (BT).

Why not just send existing customers to targeted landing pages? Why resort to fancy technology?

It’s not an either-or choice. You can do both.

Most products aren’t sold on the immediate first visit, though. So it’s useful to have this segmentation in place for when users return, potentially on a different URL than your targeted landing page.

They might visit your homepage instead – but fortunately you’ve got them cookied and IP-logged so you know to show them the profitable merchandise, not the acquisition merchandise.

To conclude:

Show SEO traffic your cheapest products – but don’t keep showing them flat-margin products once they’re customers.

Create your own products.

Differentiate them.

Bundle products.

Scrape Amazon’s “customers who bought X also bought Y” recommendations.

Show products that require a higher-degree of trust. Ask for Facebook-connect logins to gain demographic data so you can buy Facebook ads to keep increasing your email list.

Increase that average order value and those profits!

If you liked this post, you might also like:

How to Find Competitors’ Keywords
Brand Building Online – It’s Not Just Colors
Remote usability testing beginner’s guide
How Inhouse Ecommerce SEOs can add value
4 Advanced Ecommerce SEO Tactics

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Manish Pandey, an SEO expert I’m familiar with, recently published a large article listing and describing all the phases of Google Panda. Check it out!.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Steve recently got a warning from Google that a number of pages were returning soft 404s, and the next week, his traffic dropped 10%.

The following week, another 30% was gone. What are these dramatically harsh “soft” 404 errors? How do you fix them?

What is a soft 404? It’s when your content is no longer what was there but you return an http status code other than 404 or 410 (i.e. you don’t return an error code). For instance, you might return a 200 code. As Google says in describing such errors, you can label a giraffe a dog, but it’s still a giraffe.

If Google detects such errors, you can expect them to index less of your pages and to eliminate the rankings those pages might once have had. In Steve’s case, this was probably partly to blame, but an additional server crash certainly did not help. So don’t worry about as drastic drops as Steve experienced, but be aware that you can see traffic drops due to soft 404s.

The difficulty this client experienced is that contrary to the more common soft 404 situation where 200 status codes are being served, we had established 301 redirects.

Here’s my analysis of the problem affecting this client’s site, all of which essentially stemmed from a recent redesign.

With the redesign, the client also implemented search-engine-friendly URLs. Great!
The trick of course is how do you maintain the rankings? Standard SEO best practice is to 301 redirect the old URLs to new URLs. Great!

What about when some of the pages on the old site won’t exist on the new site? This client has a dynamic classifieds site, so products are constantly being sold and delisted by the merchant who advertised it.

During the transition from old to new site, a number of product detail pages became useless because that merchant sold out his/her inventory.

We couldn’t leave the pages in place and just label them as sold, with links to other merchants’ identical-product listings. While good for users and Googlebot, it would burden the server heavily given the size and volume of this site.

Instead, we had to redirect these expiring classified listings. The priority list for 301 permanent redirects was as follows:

1. Exact-Product overview page that links to listings from several merchants. So an expired Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s Shoe product listing would send visitors to the Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s product overview page.

2. If such a page didn’t exist, a redirect to the deepest subcategory (i.e. from breadcrumb navigation) would be shown.

3. In the absence of a subcategory, a category page would be the redirect’s target.

4. In the absence of a relevant category, the general “Pick A Category” page would be shown.

Google showed us three URLs that it said were soft 404s, and indeed they were right with regards to two.

Those two redirected to the Pick A Category page. While that used to be acceptable and even widely advised SEO practice for the sake of maintaining traffic, Google’s realized it’s not an ideal user experience.

So Google tells you that such redirects (in their example, to one’s home page) are no good.

Fair enough, we’ll change that to 410 errors and hopefully make up the lost traffic on any specific rankings with increased indexing and longtail traffic to other product detail pages.

But the third page was perplexing – it redirected from a product detail page to a page that listed classified ads for exactly the same product. It wasn’t clear why Google thought this was a soft 404? A false positive from Google, clearly.

This lead me to write the following analysis for the client:

Hi Steve,

I looked around, checked out SEOmoz Pro and Google help and used my noggin. Here’s my analysis:

1) Generally, soft 404 is when there’s a 200 response even though the content isn’t there.
2) Google’s help pages also talk about redirecting to the home page as being a soft 404 – so we know that it’s not just 200 responses but also 301 that can cause soft 404s.
3) How does Google detect that there’s a soft 404? It checks if the content of the page says that the file is not found or otherwise says that an error took place.

ALSO – It seems it can look for content that is too different – as in 2). So probably it’s looking at title tags, headers, images, and content similarity.

If you look at the first soft 404 page (— edited to protect the innocent—), it’s more surprising because that category/search result shows exactly the products someone is searching for.

However, if you look at the html code, neither the title nor the headers (h1 h2 etc) reflect the product searched for. So for a robot, it’s not clear that the page it gets redirected to is about the same topic as the page it tried to fetch.

Therefore, the solution I propose to fix the soft 404 errors is:

—–Part 1—–

For products that are gone and redirect to perfectly accurate subcategories or model pages, to edit pages of that type (is it search results? something else? product-overview page?) and include the keywords in the important areas for SEO: title, h1 and let the on page content take care of the rest.

On a related note to the above, I suggest changing the css/coding around so that on category pages, not just product pages, the product name is in a large-font size h1. Currently they’re not in h1s at all. And other things that are not really important (e.g. non-category-specific sidebar headings) should not be h2.

Ex.: “Brand” “Color” etc should not be in h2, because that tells Google the wrong message about the page’s topic. They can still be in a larger font via css, but preferably not
h2.

Another benefit of making the category keyword a prominent h1 heading visible on the page is that this should hopefully help reduce bounce
rate.

—-Part 2—–

For product pages that are currently redirecting to the pick a category page, or a regular category page, let’s eliminate the 301 and just do a 410 gone .

In any case, Google is not treating them like 301s, so we may as well try and do what Google’s asking and show 410. On the 410 page, we can still show links to the relevant category page as well as the pick a category page.

For product pages that are currently redirecting to product-overview pages, let’s make sure the model pages have h1s set up right.

For product pages that are redirecting to subcategories, can we prioritize the same exact same product to show up first?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Use Advanced Segments in GA to Discover SEO, Social Media and Ecommerce Insights

Google Analytics (GA) is a tool that, while very useful to basic users who just want a quick look at their site’s statistics, is meant for power users that can take advantage of all of GA’s hidden features. Advanced Segments is an example of that hidden power.

Advanced segments are a tool that few GA users take advantage of but one that can help you understand any change or troubleshoot any issue, including SEO problems.

But before we delve into using Advanced Segments, we first have to understand what they are and how they can help you better understand your SEO ups and downs.

What Are Advanced Segments?

Advanced Segments are simply filters for the content you’re looking at in Google Analytics. It’s a way to look at only a segment of your traffic that you define.

There are several segments pre-defined in GA including search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic, etc. You can find these, as well as others, by simply clicking the “Advanced Segments” drop down in the upper right hand part of your Analytics report (upper left if you’re using the new version).

You can compare segments side-by-side by putting multiple segments in the same graph, and you can also see how well they are converting, what their bounce rate is and generally how well they are performing. So a simple way to use advanced segments is to produce easy-to-understand charts that show clients or others the best performing traffic.

Q: So how do you use advanced segments to hone in on your SEO issues?

A: Start with creating a new segment.

Setting Up an Advanced Segment for SEO traffic

Creating a new segment is very simple. Just click on the “Advanced Segments” drop down and then click the “Add New Advanced Segment” button to get started.

What you will find is a criteria “tree” with the different criteria connected by and/or statements.

Each criteria has a dimension (a variable tracked by Google Analytics), a condition and a value. To create a criteria, simply drag a dimension from the left-hand side of the screen to the slot, select your condition and then enter or select your value.

If you want to understand your SEO traffic better, drag the “Source” dimension to your first criteria, set the condition to “containing” and the value to “google.” That will show you all of the traffic that came to your site from Google.

You can include all of the search engines by using the regular expression, “google|yahoo|bing .” The “pipe’ character works as an “or” between the words. However, if you use the pipe character, you need to set the condition to “Matches Regular Expression” so Google Analytics can interpret it.

To test this, simply give the segment a name and then click “Test Segment.” You should see a number of visits beside the criteria’s line.

You can then hone your segment even further by eliminating non-organic results.

This can be done by clicking on the “Add ‘AND’ Statement” link, dragging “Mention” to the dimension slot, setting the condition to be “Matches Exactly” and then selecting “organic” from the value drop down. If you test the results again, you should find that you’ve reduced the number of results in the second criteria (unless you have no non-organic search visitors).

You can further refine the search by excluding keywords, such as keywords related to your brand, or include only certain keywords, to see how a particular keyword is performing. Simply drag “Keyword” to the dimension, choose your condition and choose the correct value for whatever you want to do. For example, if you wanted to look only at traffic that came from the keyword “windmill” you would set the condition to be “contains” (or “Matches Exactly”) and the value to be “windmill.”

This lets you include and exclude keywords as you see fit. Just remember, if you use pipes to include or exclude multiple keywords, be sure to set the condition to “Matches Regular Expression.”

Further Testing to Find SEO Problems

The learning curve with Advanced Segments can be a bit steep. However, once you do it a few times, it becomes second nature and the power that it offers you as a Google Analytics user is incredible.

However, the real power of Advanced Segments is in how it lets you play around. For example, using the above segment, you can try different keywords to see how traffic has changed, you can exclude any branded keywords you have to look at only non-branded queries and you can remove your best keywords to see if your performance with long-tail keywords is improving or declining.

Other Examples of Actionable Advanced Segments

However, SEO isn’t the only use for Advanced Segments, here are a few other ways that you can use these tools to improve your site’s peformance.

Social Network Monitoring –

If you use the “Source” dimension to track only inbound traffic from the social networking sites you’re actively involved with, you can see see easily how much traffic is coming from them and which ones are providing the best results. You can then focus your energy on the networks that your readers are actually using and cut out ones that are just wasting your time.

Twitter Traffic –

It can be difficult to track traffic from Twitter since much of it comes from 3rd party apps. However, the “Source” dimension isn’t just for domains, you can also put in keywords such as “tweetdeck” “hootsuite” and the popular URL shorteners. This way, you can look at all of the traffic coming into your site from Twitter and decide how much of an investment Twitter is worth to you moving forward.

Follow Your Buyers and Window Shoppers –

If you operate an ecommerce site and configure Google Analytics to track how much visitors spend, you can segment out the people who spend a lot of money from those who leave without buying anything at all. This lets you see which sources of traffic are delivering the highest returns and invest your time and money in building the inbound links that matter.

Find the Questions on Your Visitors’ Minds –

Finally, if you are curious as to what questions your visitors are asking to get to your site, you can set up an advanced segment to look only at the questions that people are asking. By using the “Keyword” dimension and looking at question words such as “Who,” “Can,” “Why,” etc. you can look at only in the inbound visitors who are asking questions of Google and, from there, you can answer them directly in future blog posts.

Conclusion

With Advanced Segments, you can build almost any test you want when it comes to analyzing SEO traffic. That makes it easy, through a bit of trial and error, to diagnose virtually any SEO problem.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing adviser for a shipping company that offers inspection pre-shipment services in China, and who also works for a custom neon signs store.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.

Want to fight the scrapers outranking you with your own content post-Panda?

Google is losing the war against content scrapers and we’re the ones paying the price. It has gotten even worse since Panda, despite efforts to fix the problem. I know of several dozen websites that are being outranked by scrapers.

While Google might hope we’re going to do their job for them with tags like rel canonical, and rel author, this problem isn’g going away any time soon. You know things are bad when powerhouses like TIME.com are outranked by sites like this.

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep sites from scraping your content, including easy ones like simply asking them to remove it, or bureaucratic messes like filing a DMCA complaint and reporting it to Google. But neither of these options is practical when your’e dealing with more than a few sites or a few dozen pages of content.

In looking for an effective strategy to combat scraper bots you should consider a multi-faceted approach that is scaleable, and then pick up any that get through the cracks using cease and desist letters and reports to Google and/or their host.

The Multi-Faceted Approach To Fighting Scrapers:

#1 – Due Dilligence
First, make sure your message is heard loud and clear. Have your copyright visible in the footer of every page, and include something like the following on your Terms page, as well as in an area commented out within the body copy code:

<!– COPYRIGHT NOTICE: The content of this page is owned by MyWebsite.com and is protected under copyright law. All rights are reserved. Using this content in any way is forbidden, except when permission has been given explicitly in writing from MyWebsite.com. Any use outside the given permissions constitutes copyright violation and will be prosecuted within the full extent of the law. All access to this website is logged. –>

While that probably won’t stop a lot of scrapers, it provides you with the first line of defense and shows that you have done your due diligence from a legal perspective should you have to file a DMCA report.

#2 – Robots.txt
Disallow any bots that you don’t want accessing your site from your robots.txt file. While a lot of scrapers will ignore your robots.txt file (more on that later), many of the popular tools used to scrape websites do respect this file. As an example, you might consider these two lines:
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: /
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0 Disallow: /

Disallow a specific file and then record any traffic that accesses the file, which should also have a robots noindex, nofollow tag on it. For example…
Disallow: /do-not-open.html

#2.5 – Bait the Trap
Now link to the disallowed file from within the body area of every page on your site. It can just be an href tag, or you can put the link around a 1 pixel image if you like. All of the “real” search engines will respect your robots.txt file and not visit that URL. If they don’t respect that file then you can bet it’s a rogue bot, even if they are “spoofing” Googlebot’s user-agent.

#3 – Htaccess (Or your Windows server equivalent.)
You should be recording which IP addresses, referrers and user agents access that do-not-open.html page, whether with a script or just by viewing the log files. The next step is to block all of those from accessing your site. You have some options here. For instance, you could deny them access, send them to a custom page (like ScrewYou.html), or get a little tricky and redirect them to their own IP address, which has the benefit of crashing some bots by sending them through an infinite loop. Eventually they’ll get the point and just stop coming to your site.

You can try and get a head-start on the process by blocking the scrapers that are already on blacklists like…
Referrer blacklist by Perishable Press
User Agent blacklist by Perishable Press

For more technical instructions, including the code to use in your htaccess file, see this great post on PerishablePress.com: Eight Ways to Blacklist with Apache’s mod_rewrite

There are probably as many ways to deal with content scrapers as there are ways to scrape content, including several WordPress plugins that mostly just ensure the scrapers give you a link by embedding them into your RSS feeds. What are your favorite methods and why?

[Editor's footnote: Conversely, if you have legitimate uses for scrapers, here's an article on three web screen scrapers for SEO. And if you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader! ]

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by Phil Golobish, Senior SEO Consultant at Slingshot SEO. When he’s not writing posts for Gab, Phil helps Slingshot achieve digital relevance for deserving brands. You can follow Phil at @saintphilip or +Philip Golobish.

In 2006, AOL accidently released a ton of Google click through rate data. Clever marketers then used this data to estimate traffic a site could receive in any ranking position, and to forecast SEO ROI.

Since then, Google has made countless algorithm changes, incorporated personalization options, and blended results with images, videos, news, etc.

Given these changes, are the AOL CTR numbers still relevant? More specifically, what impact has blended search results had on CTR? The study Slingshot performed after the jump!

To answer the questions above, Slingshot SEO’s Research and Development department decided to do its own Google click through rate study using 2010 – 2011 non-branded keyword analytics and ranking data from its portfolio of clients. Enquiro and Optify have done similar studies and their much-appreciated results are overlaid in the graph below.

The graph above is incredibly useful for making current CTR estimates for ranking positions. However, analysis of Slingshot’s client data suggests that in some cases CTRs on traditional organic listings can vary wildly specifically when a non-branded query triggers a blended SERP that contains images, videos, news, etc. See the graph below for details. Note: Only the Optify study was included to simplify the comparison.

Aside from position one, the most significant change in CTR in a blended SERP is between positions two (2) and three (3). This difference between the two proposes an interesting SEO strategy question:

Should SEOs target keyword phrases that trigger blended results over like-volume keywords that do not, in order to win more traffic?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer and sample data is still being collected. We should have more conclusive data come August. However, savvy SEOs should be mindful of the different spreads of CTRs and should consider blended results during keyword selection for every search engine optimization campaign.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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In a thought-provoking article, Russ Virante of Virante SEO asks whether, instead of manually checking through competitors’ backlink profiles, it’s perhaps possible to automate the analysis, at least to dig for paid links. He suggests that by using SEOmoz‘s link index, and comparing the numbers on some backlink profile metrics against those of Wikipedia [which has never manipulated its backlink profile], it’s possible to get an idea o how natural a site’s backlink profile is.

I think the idea is brilliant, but there’s another caveat beyond that listed: not all categories of sites build links in the same way/pattern. Nor do all industries.

In fact, Wikipedia is quite unique in that it’s reasonable to expect that more of its links go to deep pages than the home page.

Conversely, for SMBs (for one example), it’s much likelier that most links will go to the homepage. Think of the basic directories, mentions in local press, BBB etc.

I get that the idea was to find a site that hasn’t manipulated its backlink profile intentionally, but the choice of Wikipedia still has several other difficulties.

The fact remains that this automated analysis of link profiles is a pretty clever notion. Perhaps a better alternative would be to use the tool on competitors in the niche and thus appraise what they’re doing at a glance, in contrast to oneself/one’s agency.

Check out Russ’ tools.

• Link Proximity Analysis Tool
• Source Link Depth Tool
• Multiple Links Analysis Tool

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If you’ve read about Panda, you’ll know that the quality of your writing and editing is a key notion targeted by Google’s update.

So why not try a tool that will evaluate your readability?

This is in a similar vein to Brian Patterson’s recent post suggesting a grammar checker, but the tool I just linked to evaluates what level your writing style is at. Are you writing for the plebeian masses or for the elite?

On a related note, I saw a sweet, original tip by my friend Ann Smarty on querying Google by author. Helpful for hiring writers, for example…

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This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

The Google Panda Update hit many webmasters like a freight train, leaving a long line of quality websites as collateral damage.  While the Panda update did have the noble cause of weakening the grip that content farms had on the SERPs, many high-quality, content-rich websites were cleaned from Google in one fail swoop.  To address the outrage found across the blogosphere, Google has provided a list of questions to ask yourself if you want your rankings to return.

From the list of questions Google provided, I’d like to propose 3 cheap solutions that could help get you back in Google’s favor.

1.  Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

I think it is a little ridiculous of Google to even consider this as something to base rankings on, but I won’t get very far arguing with them (I’ll leave that to Aaron Wall).

The question is, what could we possibly do to have Google think the answer for this is ‘yes’ for our website?   Remember, they are doing this via algorithm, so it’d be pretty hard for them to analyze our design or look for other superficial indicators of trust.

However, there are ‘tangible’ items that they can check for to indicate trust, and  what makes the most sense to me is for Google to check for the ‘Verisign Verified’ seal.  It’d be pretty easy for Google to look for this, and if it is there, the website gets the box checked on this question.  At ~$19/month, its a minimal investment if your website was previously making a great deal of money but took a big Panda hit.

2.  Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

This question does have merit, but I really doubt Google’s sophistication to check for deep stylistic and grammar errors. While the built-in Microsoft Word grammar check is ok and probably on par with what Google would be able to do (my speculation), Apple’s built in grammar check is atrocious.

Rather than rely on these built-in tools, my preference of late has become a very comprehensive ‘cloud’ grammar check tool called Grammarly.  This tool grades the grammar of an article, performs comprehensive content reviews, and offers rich suggestions for improving the quality of an article.  At around $10/month, it is well worth the investment and I’m pretty confident it’s much more comprehensive in reviewing content than Google could ever be (because grammar isn’t the space Google operates in full-time).

3.  Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

The recent ranking correlation data gathered and analyzed by SEOmoz is nothing short of shocking. Of all of the metrics they track, Facebook Shares (not ‘Likes’) have the highest correlation to rankings.  Google’s question on ‘sharing’ here, plus this corellation data, leads me to believe that Facebook and other social shares could be a critical signal in the Panda algorithm.  There are hundreds of tools to help in this space, but I’d like to point out a few of my favorites… and the best part is, these are free!

• ShareThis – Put this button at the end of your article.  It’ll give people an opportunity to easily share your content across a number of social and bookmarking sites.
• fbShare.me –  Facebook is making it more difficult to do ‘sharing’ and instead favors their ‘Like’ button.  Sharing on Facebook means that it can show up in another users ‘Top News’, whereas just ‘Liking’ a piece of content will not show up in one of your friend’s ‘Top News’. This handy little widget does all of the work for you to get ‘Share’ on your site.

In addition to these two tools, increasing your overall engagement in social media will ensure that your content constantly stays in people’s various social streams.

So there you have it, 3 tools that can help you beat the Panda update.  Matt Cutts has indicated that the Panda algorithm is not run daily, so it could take some time to bounce back after implementing all of the various changes being suggested.

This is one of the most sweeping updates Google has performed, and sites caught in the cross-fire can expect numerous tweaks and adjustments by Google as time goes by. By focusing on what Google is saying publicly about the update, we can attempt to make educated guesses on how to satisfy the various pieces of the algorithm.

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I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.

A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that…

and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text… nice number of footprints.)

Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page’s keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don’t want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda’s filter. They’ve got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original…).

So I’m thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.

Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I’m considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I’m open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.

What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?

p.s. Good answers get dofollow links .

Add #1:

Stever is a local SEO Consultant
Miguel is a organic SEO Consultant

p.p.s. Related note: I’m looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for this blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you’re interested.

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Google’s promoting scrapers over Time magazine. Seems Google’s exception list isn’t as robust as one might have thought, or perhaps it’s that the news business just ain’t what it was…

Ideas why this is happening?

Update: 1 idea is that it’s tied to the latest algo change. See also Mashable’s status.

One guess I’d have is a high ratio of surrounding junk to the main body of content. That would fit under the layout/design/user experience angle targeted by the latest algo update.

If you have a legitimate need, read this review of three web screen scrapers?

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This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, an SEO at Virginia based SEO & Reputation Management firm MangoCo. You can follow Brian on the Twitter at @brianspatterson.

Many businesses may be confused or worried with all of the changes that have been happening in Google’s local SERPs lately.  Google literally turned local search on its head about two months ago, and as the dust settles, many of the long-term effects are becoming clear.  One specific change which I’d like to cover here has many of our clients filled with pride, and has helped us close some new local SEO client deals.

The change has to do with local listings being more aggressively inserted into queries that previously did not trigger a local 7 or 10-pack.  To illustrate my point, lets take the phrase ‘roofing’?  What is a visitor’s intent when they type ‘roofing’ into a browser?  It could be a few things:

1. To find out information about different types of roofing materials
2. To look for roofing supplies
3. To find a roofing company
4. To learn the skill of roofing
5. others???

Until recently, Google assumed it was everything except #3, and they displayed whoever was best optimized for the word ‘roofing’.  Now, however, local results are included in the mix.  See the image below (with my location set to Washington, D.C.) for the current SERPs:

You’ll notice that the local 7-Pack is inserted after the third listing.  Effectively, ‘National Roofing Contractors’ now ranks for the term ‘Roofing’ when that is searched in their locality.

What are the client implications of this?

Is this a particularly surprising behavior to SEO’s?  Probably not, but clients absolutely love this.  We’ve noticed that many of our clients love to have a keyword they can ‘show off’, and this result in the SERPs scratches that itch for those that are local-focused.  

We’ve had referrals call us saying, “Jenn told us that you were able to get her on page #1 for XXXXX” where XXXXX is a head term like roofing. Although we do compete for some really competitive terms straight-up, in this case the calls were coming from people referencing the local insertion we’re detailing here.

Because we’ve had multiple clients react in such a positive way as they are now starting to see head terms in their SEO reports, we’ve adapted our sales pitch a bit for local clients to include information on this.  

The main piece of this is educating the client on how this works and what it means.  

Teaching a client about the search engine results is tricky enough, so explaining local optimization and inclusion is even more tricky.  We try to explain everything in the most simple terms possible and use a lot of analogies to help them understand the concepts.

But ultimately, a potential client is interested and excited about the prospect of being on Page 1 for a head term in their locality (which is all that matters to them).  This added benefit makes selling a local-oriented campaign even easier.

So, how do you optimize your local site to rank in this way for head terms?

Optimizing for this behavior is pretty easy – just do exactly what you would for any other local SEO campaign.  Consider the screenshot below, which is a search for ‘Roofing Washington, DC’:

You’ll notice that the blue boxes in each of the images are identical.  The 7-pack did not change at all.  So, ‘roofing’ triggered the same 7-pack as ‘roofing washington, DC’.  Thus, to optimize for a head term that triggers local results, you just need to optimize for the ‘head term’ + your location.  If you need some resources on local SEO, here are a few to get you started:

1. Local Ranking Factors
2. The Local SEO Guide (blog)

When are the local results being triggered on head terms?

Google is getting more aggressive in including local results in non-local search queries.  In taking a closer look at what they selected to include local results in, it seems as if they are pretty simplistic in their implementation.  It’s as if they just chose the most obvious head terms where local results might help, the surface if you will, but did not dive any deeper (yet).  For example, the following obvious head terms return local results:

• Landscaping
• Moving
• Packing
• Stationary
• Picture Frames

The above terms are pretty straightforward words with local companies in almost all localities that provide related services and products.  Now, lets dig into some other markets that are also present in near every location, but are of a more complex nature:

• Executive coaching consultant
• Trade show exhibits
• Pressure washer parts
• Infrared hair straightener

Given Google’s track record of including local results in more and more queries, I think its just a matter of time before they get smarter and include local results for more complex terms such as these.  As they do that, local SEO will become even more important.

Conclusion

Local results seems like an active experiment for Google, with ranking factors and displayed results constantly being tweaked.  Staying up to date with the changes can mean the difference between the success of some local businesses and mom-and-pops, and the death of them.  What are some other interesting local changes you have seen in the SERPs and the resulting client reactions?

Brian and his team run SEO campaigns for their clients as well as a number of their own online properties, including niche sites such as a Vibram Five Fingers Review site, a roofing jobsboard, and even a hair straightener site, among a bunch of other random stuff

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Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO

Fastcase is a new legal research tool that is bringing cool lateral thinking to the traditional problem of serving up legal search results. The results are some highly impressive innovations both in the algorithms that sort and rank the results, as well as in how the results are presented.

Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, gave me an interview to describe their process.

1) You found that legal research has a three way tension between cases with the most citations, cases from the highest courts, and recency of the decision. How does your algorithm solve that problem?

For me, the problem with traditional approaches has been almost the opposite – there was no tension in results. They were always served up in a one-size-fits-all order, usually highest court first, then most recent case to oldest. That ordering makes sense sometimes, but more often it doesn’t. One size fits almost nobody.

So we did two things. First, starting way back in 2003, we gave users the tools to order results in the way that was most useful to them – more than a dozen options. We don’t resolve the tension, we let users resolve it for themselves, depending on the type of research they’re doing. We’re big believers in empowering people with smarter tools.

And some of these options were the first of their kind – like integrated citation analysis. We show the number of citations to each case in the search results – it’s like Shepardizing each case automatically, and no other service does that, even today. You can sort the most cited case to the top, and when the first case has been cited 4,000 times and the second has been cited 8 times, that tells you something very important that you wouldn’t know without Shepardizing every case in the list.

Second, we resolved the tension by building an Interactive Timeline view of results – a 4D map of all of the results plotted over time. You can see at a glance how the results plot over time, which ones are the most relevant, decided by the highest court, most cited anywhere else.

You have to see it to believe it – when you see search results represented graphically, you can see how they score on each metric instantly [emphasis added] – so the tension between the different measures is resolved, and the right answer literally jumps off the page.

2) The idea of using citations the same way search engines use links – as a key ranking factor – is simple, yet the devil with any programming project is always in the details. What obstacles have you overcome so far in developing the software?

One of the biggest challenges was to give context and meaning to the citation analysis. When you run a search about a standard of review, you might get a case like Brown v. Board of Education in the search results, and if you sort by how often cases are cited, Brown would be at the top of the list. But Brown is a desegregation case, not a case about the standard of review.

So we built a tool that shows how many times each case has been cited only within the set of super-relevant search results. “Cited Within” shows with a click which case is most cited within your specific topic (and on your point of law). Again, this kind of citation analysis is only available on Fastcase.

The super-relevant set of results is basically the search results returned by the user’s search. When the user runs a keyword search, he or she gets back a set of search results (say, for example, 408 cases). We show how many times those 408 cases are cited anywhere else in the database in general – but some of those cases may be frequently cited for a different point of law. (Therefore) We also show how many times they’ve been cited by the other 407 search results – and most often that’s what the user cares about.

It’s a heuristic – that tells you not only which case has been cited most, but also which case has been cited most by the other cases you care about. And it’s custom-built into each search.

3) How do your visual search results make life easier for researchers?

Fastcase logo

Some people are just visual learners – for them, long lists of text results don’t tell the same story that an elegant data visualization does. Instead of viewing 20 or 100 results at a time, you can see all of the results on a single map that you can customize, zoom, and craft.

It’s beautiful – it’s also a ruthlessly efficient way to find what’s most important. For a visual learner, there’s really no way to be happy with text-based search results after viewing results on a visualized Interactive Timeline map.

4) Free legal research sites like CanLII give you the option to sort by most-cited or most recent. How does your search engine provide greater value (imagining you offered it in Canada)?

I love CanLII and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute – they’re terrific services and leaders in the field. We share a common goal of democratizing the law. But where the goal of an LII is to make the law accessible to everyone, at Fastcase we’re really trying to build the smartest, most powerful tools for lawyers (although there are nonlawyer subscribers, the vast majority of our more than 500,000 paid subscribers are lawyers).

So we focus on things that are more important to lawyers, like our Authority Check that shows later-citing cases, powerful search syntax that works whether you use traditional Boolean-style keywords or free-form Google-like searches. We focus on things like dual-column printing in PDF, Rich Text Format, and Word *.doc format, batch printing for multiple documents at once, customizable search histories and libraries for saving documents, and of course, data visualization and integrated citation analysis.

I’m really excited about Forecite, a feature we just rolled out, as an example of smarter tools for research. When you run a search, Forecite automatically reads all the cases in a search result and builds a table of all the cases that are cited. If a case is frequently cited by the search results – but doesn’t appear in the search results – Forecite automatically suggests it.

Forecite only suggests additional resources where the citation analysis says there’s something important that you’d otherwise miss – but you’d be surprised at how often that happens. If the seminal case is outside your jurisdiction, or uses older terminology than your more modern keyword search, Forecite acts as a safety net and delivers the seminal case you’d otherwise miss. It’s like magic – you can see more at www.fastcase.com/forecite.

5) When you started the company, how did you keep up your motivation? What were the hardest parts of building the business?

The biggest challenge has been assembling the legal information – from thousands of sources in many different formats. That’s why we’ve worked hard in the Law.gov effort, working in 2008 with Public.Resource.org to create the world’s first public archive of U.S. Supreme Court cases and cases from the Circuit Courts of Appeal. In 2011, we’ll launch the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) with Public Resource, which is a weekly collection of cases decided in federal and state Supreme Courts and Courts of Appeal.

Getting access to public domain law shouldn’t be the hard part of this process – everyone should have that. Publishers should be competing on who can build the smartest tools, deliver the best service, and at the highest value. That’s a competition that we’ve geared up to win, and we’re proud to work with the Law.gov effort to make that a reality.

If you liked this interview, check out other posts in the interview, legal or algo categories. Also, add my RSS feed to your reader so you can stay up to date with the latest posts as I publish them, or get my latest posts by email.

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Trying out Google instant, I saw a particular query on which Google blanked. Notice the size of the below screenshot.

Yeah, Google ain’t got nothing. (And I got double negatives and great grammar.)

p.s. Wonder how many searches (percentage wise) come from browser search bar, where Google Instant doesn’t apply.

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While googling around to help my sister Dahlia because her Gateway PC broke down (again … I think she got that 1/1,000,000 that makes it through QC when it’s a lemon), I saw the following search result. It’s entirely made up of forums, which is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing (at least, when not searching for forums or info about them).  Screenshot after the jump.

A few thoughts come to mind.

1) This is a response to longtail queries. Forums have traditionally been a great place to learn subjects in depth, online. The first social media I really got into were forums around 2002-2003, when I was really into hiphop and Counter-Strike. Both had some amazing forums around where you could soak up information to your heart’s content.

2) I think this is part of the May Day update. It’s interesting to see how effective the update probably is in some cases, as I explained in point 1.

It’s also interesting how ineffective it can be.

- I still have no idea what the hell a RAID access failure is, except that it’s something to do with the motherboard, graphics card, or hard drive. And that’s virtually the whole computer, so not narrowing things down much.

- I’m also not sure really how to fix it. I got some idea it’s to do with the drivers, so I had my sister get the latest ones, but the other points were about reconnecting SATA cables etc.

- All these forums are by techies – for techies.

It’s like expecting my mom to come here and understand this post.

I don’t blame the forums mind you – they claim to be for an advanced audience and that’s fine.

- Any search engine that directs a non-techie to them, however, has some important questions to ask.

“How technical is a particular page?”

“Does this query need a more technical or more generalist response?”

3) I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Nvidia’s #1 ranking is [mostly] because they have the most posts/authors and thus the richest discussion. By extension, that would often make it the most authoritative thread.

Two arguments suggest that other ranking factors may be predominant, here.

a. From reading other forums, I think this is something that specifically has to do with Nvidia hardware, so it may be some kind of brand association. I could be totally wrong on that – please correct me in the comments if I am wrong.

b. The PC Help Forum has more posts and authors than HP’s forum – yet it ranks lower.

(The counter argument to “b” is that HP.com has both a load of link juice and brand factors pulling for it, which overcomes the lower post/author count.)

3.2) Recency also does  not seem to be the driving factor in rankings here, though Google does seem to find it important enough to display.

My guess is because this is not a query that deserves freshness, though some people may have a slight preference for it.

Consider the low – and constant – search query numbers – a newsy item would have seen a spike in searches.

This also supports my earlier suggestion that this is to do with solving the constantly refreshing long tail …

Raid access failure doesn’t even chart on Google Trends…

What do you guys make of this search result?

Have you seen it before? If so, how long?

What explanations for it do you have, and do you think it ties into May Day?

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Jimmy writes,

“I saw someone write to be careful or use the ilb in moderation to avoid getting penalized or something like that.

What are your thoughts on best practices?”

I think penalization due to overuse of my WordPress plugin, Internal Link Building (ILB) is a mis-expression of a user design concern.

The consequences of overusing ILB is just that your audience may feel a bit overwhelmed if the same words are linked 5 times in one post. Bing and Google will not penalize you for that.

That said, you can have multiple different words linked in a single post.

Imagine you write about laptops. Your latest post is about a new laptop bag you bought.

‘Laptop accessories’ is mentioned and links to that category on your blog.
‘IBM laptop’ links to your review post
‘TigerDirect’ is an affiliate link
‘Add my rss feed to your reader‘ links to your feed.

Bang – 4 links, 1 post, and it’s just fine.

If you thought this SEO FAQ for using my internal link building plugin was useful, add my rss feed to your reader.

Related posts:

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Just saw this piece via the ever-industrious Bill Slawski: Google’s Acquisition of MetaWeb & its Named Entities technology.

Myself and others have noted how exact match domain names were getting impressive boosts just for being exact matches.

I asked Aaron Wall about it, and apparently their SEO Book private forum’s got some good discussions on it. One idea Aaron favoured from those discussions was the idea that Google has trouble distinguishing between legit brands and entities with generic names. Hence boosting exact matches, to help small brands out.

From what I understood of Bill Slawski’s overview, a Named Entity is basically a proper noun.

Remember Grade 2 English class? Yep, the interweb’s g33k3d out proper nouns with full-on algos to better index data about them and so forth. Check out Bill’s post for more, and share your thoughts there or here on what this acquisition means for future ranking fluctuations.

(Related post: Online Brand Building)

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Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is to show humans one thing (the non-main-line phone number) and search engines another thing (porn, viagra, and all the good content [read: auto-generated] search engines love).

“But that’s evil blackhat, Gab!” Actually, all I mean is to recommend mediocre usability and coding in this exceptional case.

How?

In a image-editing/creation program, you type the phone number that you don’t want search engines and local listings publishers using. And then you post it – without alt text – on your site.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Step 1: Create an html frame.
Step 2: Block search engines from accessing it with Robots.txt and any fun cloak-and-redirect set up you want.
Step 3: Place the image of the phone number in the frame.
Step 4: Embed the frame wherever your phone number needs to appear.

If you liked this local SEO / greyhat seo tip, you’ll probably enjoy my upcoming advanced SEO book, which teaches the principles of such creative/critical thinking and offers 30 advanced tactics. Download a free chapter here. (There’s also a link to the download page in upper left, if you browse away from this page.)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In response to Google’s efforts to block access to Latma’s We Con The World parody, which is another proof of Google’s political bias and unreliability, I am going to go a month without Google search. I look forward to seeing how this works, and will report back. If you want to make a widget to this effect, or do the same, please feel free, and do let me know.

Again, this censuring of Latma shows the problem we have with Google’s dominance in search. If you rely on the information highway for access to information, and people put roadblocks up on certain branches of the highway, the highway’s very essence is undermined.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.