The new link disavowal tools seem to create a unique, certainly unintended opportunity for SEOs to get short term AND long term results via “link laundering.” This is a new algorithm loophole it seems, spam which resembles the mafia’s (and Russian and Iranian governments’) money laundering tactics. I’d love to hear your comments on this. (more…)
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, (more…)
Fellow Canadian SEO, Melanie Nathan, recently wrote an interesting guest post for Search Engine People on the reciprocity approach to link building. This method is the traditional approach of pointing out 404s, links going to malware-infected sites and so on.
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I recently read Rhys Wynne’s interpretation of John Mueller’s comment that it’s better to add content on your own site than to add it elsewhere. I disagree strongly that this is the right reading of John’s comment. There are numerous other readings of it:
- A bunch of links to a thin site (e.g. without valuable content) doesn’t make that site a positive user experience. So don’t guest post at the expense/neglect of your own site. (more…)
Legal fictions can be used by greyhat SEOs to overcome Google’s nearsighted paradigms on buying websites and buying links. While Google is trying to pass off its guidelines as law – and is succeeding in convincing some people of that fact* – the facts are otherwise, and my two-post series on the topic will show that the law can actually enable people to skirt Google’s techniques and expose its faults. (more…)
Google killed former SEOmoz CTO Matt Inman’s widgetbait because some Guardian reporter didn’t like it and wrote his negative opinion up. Then Aaron Wall was unlucky enough to trust a jerk who asked Matt Cutts about Aaron’s affiliate program based linkbuilding.
The question is: Will Amazon get a beat-down too? For their (more…)
A question I’ve been asked a lot recently is “Can SEO be automated? Can I just get some software or hardware that’ll do the job automatically and get my site ranked at the top of the SERPs for my keywords?”
No, you can’t automate it.
First of all, search engine optimization’s foundation and core is about building links. Take the example of Google-bombing, where many people link to a certain webpage with the same anchor text, in a concerted attempt to have that page rank for the words in the anchor text, even though that page is not trying to rank for those keywords. This technique was succesfully used on several occasions and serves to demonstrate the power of link-building.
Now consider how you go about building those links. (more…)