It’s no secret that this auberge de jeunesse in Montreal, the Auberge de Paris (I realize the name is unusual), is a client of mine. For a while now they’ve had issues with their reviews being merged with their sister downtown Montreal hotel’s reviews.

The problem is that (more…)

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At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google - which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search - makes the rules.

This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”… (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…)

I’ve been asked the question recently in connection to business blogs: Should I blog on the company’s official site/domain name, or should I blog on on a fresh domain name? Each approach has its advantages, but with current search engine algorithms, my advice is to have the blog on (more…)

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

If you live in Montreal, you’ve probably seen Silver Star print ads. But you’d be a lot less likely to see them in search results on any major search engine because their search marketing effort is nonexistent (well OK, maybe MSN might return them). Not only is their SEO (What is SEO?) non-existent, it’s a near-100% duplicate of Mercedes-Benz Canada’s site!

If you’re Google and some random Canadian searches for “Buy Mercedes Benz car,” would you rather return the more authoritative Mercedes-Benz website or a total copy on a subdomain?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. (more…)

Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to (more…)

Just as Google loves data, so should SEOs. I love country code domain names and domaining (NamePros is a great community to learn, if you’re interested). As I was conducting some keyword research to buy new .ca domains, it occurred to me that I could use Google Trends (notice the nofollow on that link ) data to help me with my selection. There are also other uses for Trends data in SEO that are equally interesting. (more…)