Eric Enge

John Musser at ProgrammableWeb writes an interesting commentary on a Forbes article by Quentin Hardy titled The Google Industrial Complex. The Forbes article opens with the statement “Everybody works for Google”, and ends with “See, we all work for Google”. A provocative thought. Every day, when we do a Google search, we provide them with […]

Barry Schwartz reports that Yahoo is on the verge of adding support for the NoODP metatag. This emerged from an interview with Yahoo’s Tim Mayer. This is a good step forward, as Yahoo does use the descriptions for sites found in the Open Directory Project on some occasions, and sometimes these descriptions are not that […]

Recently, Daniel Dessinger did a post about SEO Scam Artists. Given the nature and tenor of this post, it is not surprising that it’s drawing a reaction from some well know SEO bloggers. You can read the reaction from Rand at SEOMoz and Lisa Barone at BruceClay.com at these links. Honestly, it does not surprise […]

It’s always a big surprise to me when major companies get into the business of selling links. It’s more amazing still when they blatantly state that the primary reason is for Increasing Page Rank. But this is exactly what United Press International is doing. The shame is that people will come to this page and […]

Barry Schwartz has a good post today about trust and falling off the wagon. He references an ongoing discussion at WebmasterWorld as well. His main point is what can happen when you start with a white hat strategy for your site, but drift into grayer area strategies (such as buying links or swapping links purely […]

I often get asked about our white hat stance. We talk about why we take this stance a bit in our post about the White Hat Kool-Aid Test. People will still challenge the idea and tell us we don’t see the advantages of “the dark side.” Truth be told, we did not start white. In […]

Matt Cutts did another update on Page Rank recently. This started the usual firestorm of questions related to Page Rank, and blog posts by others. One excellent post on the topic was made by Jim Boykin. Jim makes the point that Page Rank has a minimal direct impact in rankings. There are two things that […]

Shari Thurow wrote a report on a session at Search Engine Strategies San Jose about search engine patents. The session focused on the merits of mining the patents for SEO gold. Shari correctly identifies the problem. Patents will contain ideas that are not being put into practice. From a legal perspective, it is to the […]

Google looks at the age of your domain name as a small factor in your site’s ranking, and as a factor in evaluating how trustworthy it is. The reason they look at it is that spammers tend to look at their sites as throwaways. So they are very likely to buy a domain site (www.black-hat1.com), […]

Link baiting is a very popular term these days. It refers to the grand art of viral marketing. Success at link baiting requires that you know how to create content that will be popular enough that people will want to link to it. The concept is a great one. It’s simply the latest iteration of […]

We live in a world where it’s increasingly common that other sites will copy your good content and re-publish it. This causes concerns that you will be flagged for publishing duplicate content, or that the search engines will not correctly recognize your site as the original author of the content. So what can you do […]

It’s common advice in the SEO world that if you want to check a site’s backlinks that you should use Yahoo to do it. It’s excellent advice. Yahoo provides the most complete list of decent links you can find. But did you know that Yahoo’s list of backlinks includes links that have the “nofollow” attribute? […]