May 2007

Answers to nearly 100 SEO questions that brought people to SEO Theory

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 23, 2007 in Link Theory, SEO Theory, Search Engine Optimization, Supplemental Pages, Web spam

What do you rank for? What queries do people use to actually find your site?
Many Website operators never look at their Web server logs. Buried in all those 1-time visits are a treasure hoard of queries for which you rank poorly but could do better on. If someone is digging into the […]

Competing with untouchable competitors

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 23, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

There are very few sites I cannot outrank in my most competitive queries. Who outranks me today is not nearly as relevant to my point as who has outranked me for the last two years. Rankings fluctuate but if over two years’ time you haven’t knocked the top dog out of the number […]

The SEO conundrum: Never-ending optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 22, 2007 in SEO Theory

The most common reason for failure to rank in search engine results is a blind reliance upon linkage. Not only are links not everything, they aren’t anything if there is insubstantial content being linked to.
Search engines resolve queries on the basis of which documents score the highest for relevance to the queries. Relevance […]

Google 3.0: What the Searchology update means to SEO

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 16, 2007 in SEO Theory

My first thoughts on the new Google (which has not yet reached whatever data center serves my Internet location as I write this) are of concern and hope. I’d like to see tighter integration between the various vertical searches. I think this is the right step forward, as it reflects upgrades to the […]

Google Universal Search: Google rolls out a whole new search engine

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 16, 2007 in General

Google announced today that it is replacing its Bigdaddy search engine with a new search engine Marissa Mayer had originally proposed in 2001.
Google Universal Search integrates Book Search, Video Search, Blog Search, News Search, Image Search, and Web Search into one interface. They have built entirely new infrastructure and algorithms to deliver the […]

Intermediate SEO: What ‘white hat’ spam looks like

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 16, 2007 in Intermediate SEO, Web spam

Have you ever heard of William E. Bailey? I have. Never met the man. But I knew people, when I was younger, who had been involved with the direct sales company Bestline Products, which Bailey founded in 1966. Mr. Bailey — who sold the company to Jerry Brassfield in the mid-1970s — was as close […]

How to game Google’s rankings with PageRank

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 15, 2007 in SEO Theory

As many of you know, Matt Cutts recently updated his April 14, 2007 post titled “How to report paid links” with an extensive list of dos and don’ts to help Webmasters understand Google’s position on paid links of all types.
The bottom line is that Google is only interested in devaluing links that are provided or […]

How many search engines are in your SEO world?

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 14, 2007 in SEO Theory

There was a fair amount of screaming and hollaring in various SEO forums last week, which usually signals an update (or “data push”) from Google. Lots of rankings were lost. Perhaps a large number of sites also dropped out of the Main Web Index and “went Supplemental”.
Oh well. Updates/data pushes happen.
After 8 or […]

Do you understand what your Web pages say?

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 13, 2007 in SEO Theory

There was a time when Web documents were constructed primarily with the user in mind: the person reading the content came first. And then we decided we had to get fancy, start adding stuff to the presentation to make Web documents look more like printed documents.
We added pictures, tables, embedded objects, frames, and other […]

How linking addition destroys your SEO life

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 11, 2007 in Link Theory

It’s not all about links.
Fortunately for a few of us, most people in the search optimizing industry haven’t figured out the truth. It’s about links and content, but the vast majority of people focus their search optimization efforts on link building, thus wasting most of their time and effort.
You’ll still see a lot of […]

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