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Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

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SEO Experiments Anyone Can Do

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 24, 2008 in SEO Theory

SEO experiments are an important part of the learning process in SEO theory but as we have no industry standards people don’t agree on how to structure SEO experiments. An SEO experiment should test a hypothesis OR it should generate data for analysis. Sometimes you can accomplish both tasks but I think that […]

How to get the most SEO bang from query operators

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 23, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Google’s poor link: query operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for the past few years. The query operator’s reputation has been dragged through the mud so much that most people now use Yahoo! for link research (which is equivalent to asking Monaco to handle your national intelligence initiatives).
Here are the […]

Exploiting the holes in search market share data

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 22, 2008 in Competitive Analysis

I have been monitoring and measuring search market share since public data has been released by the various services. Danny Sullivan has been doing it for many years more than me. However, as I have noted in past discussions, today’s metrics don’t accurately report real search market share. Search market share metrics […]

Four advanced SEO practices

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 21, 2008 in Advanced SEO

As I have pointed out myself, many people are disappointed in the SEO conferences because you cannot learn the “real” hardcore stuff from the presentations. SEO conferences nonetheless serve useful purposes because those presentations help people who are just learning about search optimization understand the basic principles and see just how much is actually […]

A day in the life…

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 18, 2008 in General

Wake up.
Check the rankings. Spam doing good. Have breakfast.
Hit the train. Walk to office and ignore co-workers trying to socialize.
Check the rankings. Spam doing good. Have a snack.
Go to meeting. Production off schedule because of last-minute changes I said I would not make the day before. Make more […]

When link faking fails, there is always search engine optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 17, 2008 in Link Theory

Greed, laziness, and ignorance are an SEO’s worst enemies. Sometimes I throw “panic” into the list as well. In this business, there are a lot of people who think they have the ideal trick for topping out the search results. How do I know that? I read their claims every day […]

The n dimensions of search engine optimization analysis

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 16, 2008 in SEO Metrics, SEO Theory

You can map search engine optimization across a variety of mathematical models. For example, traditional organic SEO is concerned with promoting a single URL to the highest possible position in the search results for a keyword. You can measure your position by drawing a line with 1,000 points numbered from 1 to 1001. […]

Hakia introduces QDex - Proves Semantic Search Is A Failure

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 15, 2008 in SEO Theory

Hakia proudly announced its QDex-based search on its blog. What is QDex? It appears to be a human-edited crawl-seed directory.
In fact, it appears to be a publicly visible human-edited crawl-seed directory (like Yahoo! and DMOZ). Hakia claims: “hakia’s pioneering vision is to bring quality search results from vertical domains by ensuring the […]

Brokering search engine optimization

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

There is a certain irony in the etymology of the word “broker” when one combines it with search engine optimization. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces broker back to medieval French, Portuguese, and English idiom for wine merchants.
A broker is a reseller, a middleman. He brings the buyer and the seller together, often helping […]

Gaming semantic search

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 11, 2008 in SEO Theory

The impetus to adopt semantic markup standards in Web page content has faded off, an inevitable consequence (I feel) of the clash between the proposal for structure and the reality of the chaos that is today’s World Wide Web. Although semantic Web advocates remain passionate about their cause they have not yet persuaded a […]