December 2006

That Google Thing You Do

Posted by admin on December 30, 2006 in SEO Theory

Matt Cutts gave us two Google history lessons this week. Over at SearchEngineLand’s Q&A with Jimmy Wales, Matt posted this comment:
I respect Jimmy’s opinion that he’d rather have “hubs” with reviews of hotels rather than the hotels themselves. The pendulum hasn’t always swung in that direction though. I remember when a different search engine […]

Who Is Linkbaiting Whom?

Posted by admin on December 28, 2006 in Link Theory, SEO Theory

Rand Fishkin invited me to blog for SEOmoz knowing that I would present an alternative point of view on search engine optimization. He took some heat over the decision but he frankly admitted that regardless of whether he agreed with me on every point (and we don’t agree on every point) that my posts […]

Walking With SEO Gurus: How Not To Get Trampled

Posted by admin on December 27, 2006 in SEO Theory

I just deleted an entire blog post because I realized, as I was winding down toward the end, that I was about to divulge a competitive secret I haven’t really shared over the years. I thought, “Why am I writing this post?”
Well, the short answer is that I want to provide meaty content for […]

The Inevitable SEO Terminology Guide: Advanced SEO Dictionary

Posted by admin on December 24, 2006 in SEO Theory

Just so my loyal readers know, this will be my last post until after Christmas.
And I’m not interested in compiling another rehash of commonly defined (or misdefined) SEO terms. There are plenty of such “SEO dictionaries” out there (for example, see The Martinez Dictionary of SEO and Spam Terminology, 2006 Edition at SEOmoz). […]

Mismeasuring Market Share: Google’s Twenty Percent

Posted by admin on December 22, 2006 in SEO Metrics, SEO Theory

Xenite.Org gets only about 20% of its visitors from Google. If they banned me today, except for the fact that I do check my rankings, I would barely notice. Nonetheless, there are plenty of people linking to a ridiculous article about Google’s 70% market share. This kind of nonsense is what leads […]

How search engine optimization works

Posted by admin on December 21, 2006 in SEO Theory

The Internet marketing firm I now work for has been interviewing people for various positions. When I sit down with someone to talk about an opening on my team, one of the first questions I ask is, “have you ever heard of search engine optimization?” Another variation is, “Do you know what search […]

How click management works

Posted by admin on December 20, 2006 in SEO Theory

Ask.com has now apparently patented a variation of DirectHit’s technology. Ask bought DirectHit several years ago and the old click-popularity search engine hasn’t been seen much since then. Which is just as well.
DirectHit was always a stupid idea because even though intuitively it does make sense that as people evaluate Web pages a […]

Leveraging empty content

Posted by admin on December 19, 2006 in SEO Theory

One of the most underutilized aspects of search engine optimization today is leveraged content. People go to the trouble of building sites with thousands of pages of content and they build in virtually no cross-promotional strategies. And what amazes me is that many eCommerce and advertising sites choose to serve empty pages to […]

Blog Tag: Five Things You Don’t Know About Me

Posted by admin on December 18, 2006 in SEO Theory

Halfdeck tagged me. I was sort of hoping to stay out of this one because I cannot think of five things that people in the online world don’t know about me (that I would not mind people knowing).

I dropped out of high school in the 9th grade because I had persuaded my parents to […]

Dear Google: Penalize This!

Posted by admin on December 18, 2006 in SEO Theory

For the past several months, a fair number of Webmasters have been complaining about a “-30″ or “+30″ penalty (depending on who is doing the complaining). Marios Alexandrou recapped what little information he could find about the situation on his blog, including a link to a post by Adam Lasnik in Google’s support group […]

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