Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

Some directories have recently been removed from Google's cache, while others are not crawled very deeply. Additionally, some of them have not had their cache dates updated in a great deal of time. Google might be trying to slow the growth of directories by not counting the links from many of them. Make sure you check the cache before paying for a listing.

Some of the directories will have a greater effect on relevancy in MSN or Yahoo! than they do on Google, so even if a directory is not counted by Google, the link price might still be cheap for its effects on other search relevancy algorithms.

Many directory owners are building multiple related directories. Some search algorithms such as Google Hilltop are likely to automatically filter out some of the relevancy score from a second directory if it is easily identifiable as being related to the first directory.

The one-time listing fees make directories exceptionally appealing, but expect that many directories will eventually be ignored by some of the search engines. In my perspective, that cost is factored into the listing prices. I average out the link costs for links from a number of sites. If I can spend $1,000 and get a dozen or two dozen well-trusted links, then that is going to be a good buy for launching a site.
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Originally posted 2008-02-29 13:15:32.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Most directories are not of amazingly high quality, listing many lousy websites. Martinibuster, a link building guru, often emphasizes avoiding being heavily located in known SEO circles.

For example, common SEO strategies for a new site might be to list a site in a bunch of directories, write a press release or two, trade links with many low-quality sites, get a few links from signature files from SEO forums, and submit a few articles to various article banks.

If your link profile matches that of most SEO websites, then it may be harder to rank than if you can come up with creative ways to get links from places that few other SEOs are listed.
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Originally posted 2008-02-29 12:45:11.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Since different search engines weigh different parts of their algorithms differently, they can all have similar relevancy while having significantly different search results.

Some people are quick to ask how their sites are being penalized in one search engine because they rank well in others. While many sites do get penalized for aggressive spamming techniques, most sites that do not rank well usually just fail to satisfy the specific ranking algorithm for that specific engine in question.
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Originally posted 2008-06-25 02:39:30.

Popularity: 8% [?]

This is an effective SEO tool which can help you add the Meta tags to your site. These Meta tags hold a lot of importance in optimizing the web pages. The Meta tags turn the site into a more visible one to the search engines. Whenever you submit the site many of the popular search engines prefer to go through the meta tags to find out whether the site is useful for their visitors or not. When you are up to create the Meta tags this tool will help you out with a form which you need to fill and submit to get the Meta tags generated for you.

Originally posted 2008-09-10 06:05:14.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Yahoo! supports a robots-nocontent attribute, which you can wrap around the unimportant parts of a page to tell Yahoo! to ignore it. The code could be applied like so:

<p class="robots-nocontent"> This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site</p>

I wouldn't recommend using the robots-nocontent attribute on site navigation as well structured local navigation tends to be rather rich in keywords that help support the current document. Rather than using robots-nocontent I would be more inclined to add more original useful content to the page and limit boilerplate code as best you can.

Yahoo! offers tips on using the robots-nocontent attribute here: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000444.html

Originally posted 2008-06-18 18:51:23.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When the supplemental index was first launched Google labeled the supplemental results. SEOs came up with hacks for figuring out how many supplemental results different websites had, and after they got popular Google disabled them and removed the supplemental results label.

Google has an auxiliary index where it stores some documents it may not trust enough to include in its regular index. Supplemental search results are used to provide search results when not enough regular search results are available. Why do sites get put in the supplemental results?
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Originally posted 2008-05-29 00:12:06.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Myth 1: Web Content Theft & Other Internet Copyright/Trademark Violations Are Hard to Pursue

Actually, for written web content, search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! make internet copyright violations easy to resolve than printed content.

It's pretty easy to shut down a content thief of copyright violator and there is no need to waste money for an attorney. You can just file a DMCA Complaint. Usually after filing a complaint, you will get a response within 48-72 hours.

Myth 2: Search Engines Will Penalize Sites with Duplicate Content

Actually, major search engines will not impose a duplicate content penalty to sites with duplicated content. But you WILL be penalized if you have duplicate content in the same site/domain. If a shared content were to be penalized for being a duplicate content, then distributing shared content to other websites would not be a very popular marketing technique.

Myth 3: Content Theft May Destroy Your Site's Value to Visitors

No it wont. Content Theft will not completely destroy your site, it will just erode the links of trusts. The world wide web is just so huge that even if your content does get duplicated to hundreds of other sites, it does not mean that people will find that your site is not original and not worth visiting again.

In conclusion, web based content theft is bad but it will not destroy the value of the web.

**September 12th 2007 UPDATE!
- Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you

Originally posted 2007-06-25 00:01:32.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Google uses the click parameter to rate the ranking of the ads. For normal search results also the same procedure applies where the top ten results have been produced due to the clicks. A good amount of visitors click on the 1st result and a little less click on the second and this continues with subsequently lesser clicks on each result in the descending order.
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Originally posted 2008-08-26 04:22:51.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Lots of people will tell you to create lots of quality content without ever giving a legitimate definition of what quality content is. The web is a big social network, and the trick is to get your messages to spread further and faster than your competitors. Usually, creating more pages does not do this as well as creating a
better idea.

The Web was designed to save people time or give away useful information. The closer you can align a portion of your business model or website with those concepts, the better chance you have at achieving extreme success.

While many SEOs hold back their secrets so they can profit from them, I give this e-book free to charities and post most of what I learn to my blog. I not only help people, but my syndicated network grows. I have been found by prospective customers from word-of-mouth in forums I have never heard of. One day I got a thank you e-mail from a person from a religious forum and about ten minutes later got a thank you from a person from a pornography forum.
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Originally posted 2008-02-09 10:20:21.

Popularity: 6% [?]