It's about the pool player, not the cue

This morning the most wondrous Ann Smarty posted a exceedingly groovy list of tools that rock!

Not to be left out I thought I would take this opportunity to mention we have a pretty good list here on the trail as well…. See our SEO Tools section for more (80+ tools in total).

It is important to note that tools are only as good as the practitioner using them. What that means is your methods and theories of SEO dictate which tools and how you use them. A tool alone cannot make your programs better – that is up to you.

I would also note that I advise using more than one tool for any part of your research and development as trusting a single source for data is often a recipe for failure… now go and start playing!!

L8TR

Another rant to all those SEO Jokers

You know what?…. I feel a rant coming on, either run screaming now, or hold on for the ride.

Ok…. Now listen up my little SEO apostles, stop looking for the secret sauce and the magic bullet. I am getting so damn tired of reading so called ‘tips’ of how you can get a leg up on the competition. I am talking everything from black hat to (so-called) keyword sniping and the LSI bandwagon. Stop creating garbage sites with the hope of monetizing it with some crappy thin affiliate schemes, PPC arbitrage or whatever the get-rich-quick flavour of the day is. Cease and desist with the 3 way links and arrest the development of your satellite sites. Just give it a break!

I am so tired of people posing as marketing professionals writing about how to game the system to make a few bucks. They are not marketers… they are snake oil sales types; so get a grip. The world has always had such hucksters and they have never really been considered savvy marketers. You see dear reader; you must learn to recognize the difference. If your SEO efforts are merely a preface to gaming the search engines for short term gain, your days are numbered. This is not a long term viable business model… I guess that’s why it is getting rich ‘quick’.

Understanding historical ranking factors for content creation/management plans

Does your content creation and management plan consist of merely a fire-and-forget-it perspective? Then you may be missing out on ways to not only strengthen existing rankings but bolstering new ones. You may be making costly mistakes without even knowing it. Today, we’re going to look at how historical ranking factors can come into play with your content plans.

A while ago I discussed historical ranking factors for link builders and at the time felt there was more within these patents to be discussed…. So let’s jump right in and look at how some of these factors can be mined for content development and management perspectives.

Microsoft on link spam; using temporal tracking

A recent Microsoft search patent came out for a system which detects spam websites by looking at the changes in link information on a given page/set of pages over time. We recently covered some potential ways of going about this with some analysis of Google in ‘Historical ranking factors for link builders’ – be sure to give that a read as well if you’re in the mood to saunter down some related journeys. This time we have;

Detecting web spam from changes to links of websites
FiledDecember 14, 2006 : Published June 19, 2008

As we know from the last excursion, link activity over time can unlock potential spam signals for search engines to use. This can be done by looking at a variety of features of the associated link information. As with any analysis the system uses a probabilistic model to judge what is and is not considered to be a spammy link profile.

This is also not limited to inbound links, but to outbound links as well (because a link profile is more than just inbounds right?).  The main problems that web spam creates for a search engine are the obvious lack of meaningful search results, but also bandwidth/spidering resources spent crawling/indexing spammy sites. So some yummy SERPs and good for the bottom line as well!!

Link spam temporal footprints

“"Spamming" in general refers to a deliberate action taken to unjustifiably increase the popularity or importance of a web page or web site. In the case of link spamming, a spammer can manipulate links to unjustifiably increase the importance of a web page. For example, a spammer may increase a web page's hub score by adding out links to the spammer's web page.”

Some examples of tactics link spammers may use also included;

1. create a copy of an existing link directory to quickly create a very large out link structure.
2. a spammer may provide a web page of useful information with hidden links to spam web pages.
3.  many web sites, such as blogs and web directories, allow visitors to post links. Spammers can post links to their spam web pages to directly or indirectly increase the importance of the spam web pages.
4. a group of spammers may set up a link exchange mechanism in which their web sites point to each other to increase the importance of the web pages of the spammers' web sites.

 By looking at the link profiles of spam sites the search engine can create a template of it's linking activity to enable further algorithmic seek and destroy adaptations

As with many probabilistic systems, a set of training documents/websites can be used to train valuations of a spammy link profile. These can come from inputted sites that received a manual review and were deemed to be a spam website. These become the base set used for teaching the algorithm(s) what look for when crawling.