Sorry Rand, Domain Age does matter!

We will seo no page before its timeAre 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 Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Architecture | 12 Comments

The Highest-ROI One-Line SEO Change You Will *Ever* Make

houston, we have a problem

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 Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, SEO Architecture, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Fun with Google’s own Sitemap

Lunar Site Map

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 Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, SEO Architecture, Uncategorized | No Comments

Does content freshness matter? Answer: Definitely!

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 Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Content | 3 Comments

“All of SEO is Divided Into Three Parts” – Caesar

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, Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, SEO Architecture, SEO Content, SEO Linking | No Comments

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