Eli wrote about desert scraping, which is the practice of digging around expired sites on archive.org, grabbing their content and reposting it on your own sites. Cloning expired sites is a similar idea that (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…)