SEO

SEO is not a report generating business. It’s a roll your sleeves up and dig in kind of activity. What’s sparking this post is that a few times recently I have been shown the large formal reports that some SEO firms offer. Very pretty. Glossy. 80% to 90% completely filled with non-unique content (i.e. not […]

Duplicate Content is one of the most perplexing problems in SEO. In this post, I am going to outline 15 things about how Google handles duplicate content. This will include my leaning heavily on interviews with Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik. If I leave something out, just let me know, and I will add it […]

At 11:00 am today, Third Door Media and Search Engine Land will announce a new social news site known as Sphinn. This site will offer users the ability to submit articles about interactive marketing, search, and social media, and then other users can review those articles and vote on them. As with other social news […]

As a Vice President of Engineering, Udi is responsible for core search. Before joining Google early in 2006, Udi was CEO of A9.com, a Senior VP at Amazon.com, and Yahoo’s Chief Scientist. He started working on search algorithms in 1989 with the invention of Suffix Arrays (with Gene Myers) while he was a professor at […]

Just last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Google’s VP of Search Quality, Udi Manber. We focused our conversation on various aspects of search quality, Google’s algorithms, and Google’s development processes. Understandably, Udi was not going to provide a tremendous amount of detail about these things, because these are areas that Google considers […]

Page Rank gets a bad rap sometimes. It’s easy to understand why. People got obsessed with Page Rank a few years back, and for a long time, people would not let go of the notion that Page Rank was the only thing you needed to worry about in SEO. For that reason, many really smart […]

In what may have been her last interview before leaving Google, I sat down with Vanessa Fox, and we talked about Google Webmaster Tools, and we also spent some time digging into duplicate content. When at Google, Vanessa Fox created and developed Google Webmaster Central, which provides tools and information to help site owners understand […]

Shortly before she left Google, I spoke to Vanessa Fox about what’s going on with Google Webmaster Tools, and, we also spoke for a while about duplicate content problems. While I was working on polishing up the interview transcript Vanessa left Google. So I may have had the last real interview she did while at […]

Google continues to roll out new features in its Custom Search Engines (CSEs). One of the most interesting ones is the implementation of “Linked CSEs”. What this feature does is allows applications to be built that can dynamically build a CSE. To whet your appetite for this feature, let me provide you with an example […]

At the recent SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle, one of the big sessions was on duplicate content. There is a great blow by blow coverage in posts by Vanessa Fox and by Matt McGhee. You can also see an older post about dupe content here by Chris Boggs. At the start of this session, the […]

While I was out at SMX Advanced, I sat through the penalty box summit. As always, Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts had a few interesting things to say. Tim Mayer started by noting that Yahoo! remains committed to the search. Evidently, there was a rumor floating around in the industry that Yahoo! was going to […]

Many major SEO firms make it a standard practice to recommend the purchasing of links to their clients. The search engines actively discourage this practice and do their level best to detect those paid links. Here are 15 things they can use as signals that a link is possibly a paid link: Links Labelled as […]