March 2008

How SEOs should and should not use Webmaster Central

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 17, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization

I rarely comment on specific SEO tools as it’s pretty well known that I consider nearly all of them to be worthless, or at least worth less than the knowledge of how to structure informative queries is worth.
Google’s Webmaster Central Tools have received a lot of attention and as I have studied blog and forum [...]

Any help for an odd qmail spam exploit?

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 16, 2008 in General

I’ve been using qmail on the Xenite server for several years now. The current server, I believe, was set up in 2004. In 2005 email spammers began using Xenite as a relay and we were told to change our /var/qmail/control/helohost to explicitly reference mail.xenite.org so we did that, naively thinking the evil email [...]

Google’s March 2008 Update Upshmate

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 14, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization

It may be time for Matt Cutts to update his what is an update post from September 2005 and I don’t mean his October 2005 post more info on updates.
His December 2006 explaining algorithm updates and data refreshes is also getting stale.
So, some of my Web pages vanished from Google’s index. That happens from [...]

Random SEO terms you may not be familiar with

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 13, 2008 in SEO Theory

People keep talking to me this morning so I have decided to just toss out some concepts I probably haven’t discussed before.
All-Purpose Optimization - Standard page-coding and/or link acquisition techniques that express no thought or finesse. You find these techniques on many blogs, in many tutorials. This is the basic stuff that everyone [...]

Principles of Advanced Search Engine Optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 12, 2008 in Advanced SEO

Dana Larson reviewed SEMPO’s ‘Advanced SEO’ Course in February. The course covers five topics:

Advanced Keyword Research
SEO Diagnostic & Audit
Advanced Link Building
Editing & Optimizing pages
Reporting & Analytics

This is actually intermediate SEO. Why? Because I arrogantly say so.
Not that I’m the final arbiter of advanced search engine optimization but the really advanced stuff is [...]

This page intentionally left blank

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 11, 2008 in Content Theory

There was a project — which appeared to be a joke, in my opinion — called This Page Intentionally Left Blank. You can still find it by searching for “This page intentionally left blank”. If you study the page closely (it should take the slowest mind only a few seconds) you’ll see that [...]

Showcasing links through link warehouses

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 10, 2008 in Link Theory

A couple of years ago I coined the expression ‘link warehouse’ in a blog comment. I had been using link warehouses for a long time but had not really shared the idea before. A few days later I wrote a post on SEOmoz that explained the link warehouse idea in greater depth.
A link [...]

The art of optimizizing with articlets

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 7, 2008 in Content Theory

People have no problem talking about themselves or their companies but they become reluctant and obstinate when you suggest that they “create content” for their Web sites. The average business owner creates more content for his or her Web site in a week than will be actually posted on the Web in their life [...]

SEO Punditions: 2 out of 3 ain’t bad

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 6, 2008 in SEO Theory

I found three interesting posts on SEO blogs today. 2 were interesting because they got it so right. 1 was interesting because it got it so wrong. Let’s talk about the wrong-headed post first.
I speak of SEO analytics. Yes, friends, SEO analytics. Who, I ask you, should know about and [...]

Experten Tricks

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 5, 2008 in Web spam

Disclaimer: Neither I nor my employer endorses, condones, or recommends the use of search spam tools, networks, or resources.
The Outing
As many of you know, generally speaking, I have a “hands off” attitude toward the Web spam community. Nonetheless, every now and then I find a spammer has gotten in my way and I feel [...]

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