Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com
february 2011 by keithly
You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that he’s in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.
So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?
“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”
To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.
google
seo
search
So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?
“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”
To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.
february 2011 by keithly
Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google
january 2011 by keithly
In 2010, our mailboxes suddenly started overflowing with complaints from users – complaints that they were doing perfectly reasonable Google searches, and ending up on scraper sites that mirrored Stack Overflow content with added advertisements. Even worse, in some cases, the original Stack Overflow question was nowhere to be found in the search results! That's particularly odd because our attribution terms require linking directly back to us, the canonical source for the question, without nofollow. Google, in indexing the scraped page, cannot avoid seeing that the scraped page links back to the canonical source. This culminated in, of all things, a special browser plug-in that redirects to Stack Overflow from the ripoff sites. How totally depressing. Joel and I thought this was impossible. And I felt like I had personally failed all of you.
google
search
seo
internet
advertising
spam
january 2011 by keithly
Piwik - Web analytics - Open source
april 2010 by keithly
Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) real time web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.
Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
opensource
webanalytics
webdesign
seo
Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
april 2010 by keithly
Canonical URL links - Yoast - Tweaking Websites
february 2009 by keithly
If it did, in "old times", this would mean you'd have a duplicate content issue: the same content indexed under two different URL's. An issue SEO's have been trying to solve on web pages for ages, which sometimes created huge limitations. This is where the new tag comes in. You add this code to the <head> section of your page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/"/>
And now, Google will suddenly count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL anymore. Simple, yet effective.
webdesign
SEO
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/"/>
And now, Google will suddenly count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL anymore. Simple, yet effective.
february 2009 by keithly
Andy Budd::Blogography: Heading Elements, Semantics and the Spec
february 2009 by keithly
thoughts on heading elements, see Roger Johansson comment
webdesign
accessibility
semantics
SEO
february 2009 by keithly
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