They forgot "Be"

There is a company that has been doing content scraping on a level that’s really unimaginable, to the point that it can be regarded as a completely different business model than most others that do this.  Like many of the sites you’ve seen out there, its approach is to spider the web and copy other people’s content, then subsections of content are “mashed” together and presented to end-users – essentially auto-generated web pages.

The difference between this company and the myriad of other scrapers our there is in the “mashing up” process Read on »

Buried away in a Google patent application from 2006 entitled “DOCUMENT SCORING BASED ON DOCUMENT INCEPTION DATE“, there is a somewhat obscure reference to using the “entropy” of a document.  “Entropy” used in this sense is not simply as it’s defined in the field of physics, where your daughter’s room tends towards a maximum state of disorganization; instead, it refers to its definition in the field of Information Theory, which applies it to information rather than atoms.

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on this,  but you can think of Shannon entropy as essentially measuring how much information is in a document.

If you have a 20,000 word document that simply consists of “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” repeated 2,000 times Read on »

I fight for the users!

I’ve seen a number of postings about Google sitelinks, how you can influence them, how Google likely decides whether to assign sitelinks to a website’s entry in the SERPs, etc.  Ultimately these Sitelinks are, I think, a terrible thing  for Internet Marketers, and the LAST thing you should do is try and influence Google to add them for your site; here’s why.

If your website has come up in a search, then the name of your website is either a brand term, or Read on »

There have been  comparatively few articles written in the mainstream SEO blogs about creating content based on formulas – the only folks that seem to cover this topic tend to be from the seedy underside of affiliate marketing, under the term “article spinning”.  David Leonhardt’s recent article (more reputable I think), gives some good examples of what the practice entails.

There are various tools available for “spinning” content, but depending on the business Read on »

Scotty Setting Up Alternate Content For Romulanbot

I am not a fan of the million tiny SEO tools which barely do anything, that can be found on site after site, but every so often someone puts something out that does some heavy lifting and is extremely useful.  Every so often when I come across a great free SEO tool that’s worth looking at I’ll do a rundown here.

One old-school, great SEO tool that has been around for awhile is Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.

It allows you to examine a single page’s HTTP header (or headers, if it redirects in a chain), and see what is returned Read on »

Are domains like a fine wine, improving with age (from a SERP ranking perspective)? Contrary to what you may have heard previously, the answer is a resounding – YES.

[***Note - this entry was composed a few weeks ago, as part of my process for queuing up sufficient content for this blog.  But today I saw that Rand Fishkin does some debunking of domain age in a Whiteboard Friday today - so I decided to push this posting out - sorry Rand, I must disagree! ***]

First, some background. Google filed a patent application in 1995 which was granted in 2008 titled “Information retrieval based on historical data”. It talks about scoring a document based on the document’s inception date which could be determined in a number of ways Read on »

Houston, We Have a Problem!

I was examining backlinks for a website today and noticed that it had two backlinks from the same page (names obscured to protect the innocent):

http://www.foo.com/index.html

http://foo.com/index.html

That’s neither here nor there for the site I was looking at, but it indicates a huge problem for the “foo.com” site where the backlinks are coming from.

A user can type in either Read on »

Lunar "Site Map".... *** Click here for larger size ***

With all of the other products besides its search engine that Google has branched out into, some aspects of SEO are actually important to Google itself, ironically.    It may be surprising to some that Google itself has a sitemap so that search engine spiders can properly index their empire, located at http://www.google.com/sitemap.xml

It’s fun from time to time to check this out and see what Google is up to.   Surprisingly, there is a TON of junk in there – Firefox plug-ins that no longer exists, products that Google has discontinued, individual entries calling out various JPG images which seems really odd, and so on – in fact, a number of Read on »

Does fresh content rank better?  Google filed a patent application in 1995 which was granted in 2008 titled “Information retrieval based on historical data“. It talks about scoring a document based on a number of factors, including a documents “freshness” which could be determined in a number of ways.

Does Google use this approach however?  Well, in the most shockingly short video by Matt Cutts I have ever seen, he gives a resounding Read on »

Students who study Latin commonly translate some of Caesar’s account of “The Gallic Wars”, where he begins by saying “All of Gaul [now France] is divided into three parts.” The three parts he named were Acquitania, Belgium, and “those who call themselves Celts or Gauls”. Yes, I know that last part wasn’t really a “part”, it was “people who call themselves something”. Clearly Caesar was a better general than he was a writer.

Similarly however, Caesar may just as well have said “all of SEO is divided into three parts: Content, Architecture, Read on »