social blog roll with tag: google

Comment rating and filtering with SezWho

I’ve added SezWho to the comment area. SezWho enables rating and filtering of comments, and shows you even comments an author has left on other blogs. Neat. Currently there are no ratings, so the existing comments are all rated 2.5 (quite good). Once you’ve rated a few comments, you can suppress all lower quality ...]

Google removes the #6 penalty/filter/glitch

After the great #6 Penalty SEO Panel Google’s head of the webspam dept. Matt Cutts digged out a misbehaving algo and sent it back to the developers. Two hours ago he stated: When Barry asked me about “position 6″ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But ...]

Sorry Aaron Wall - I fucked up

My somewhat sarcastic post “Avoiding the well known #4 penalty“, where I joked about a possible Google #6 filter and criticized the SEO/Webmaster community for invalid methods of dealing with SERP anomalies, reads like “Aaron Wall is a clueless douche-bag”. Of course that’s not true, I never thought that, and I apologize for damaging Aaron’s ...]

Save bandwidth costs: Dynamic pages can support If-Modified-Since too

When search engine crawlers burn way too much of your bandwidth, this post is for you. Crawlers sent out by major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search) support conditional GETs, that means they don’t fetch your pages if those didn’t change since the last crawl. Of course they must fetch your stuff over and over ...]

Update your crawler detection: MSN/Live Search announces msnbot/1.1

Fabrice Canel from Live Search announces significant improvements of their crawler today. The very much appreciated changes are: HTTP compression The revised msnbot supports gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (sections 14.11 and 14.39). Microsoft also provides a tool to check your server’s compression / conditional GET support. (Bear in mind that most dynamic pages ...]

Nofollow still means don’t follow, and how to instruct Google to crawl nofollow’ed links nevertheless

What was meant as a quick test of rel-nofollow once again (inspired by Michelle’s post stating that nofollow’ed comment author links result in rankings), turned out to some interesting observations: Google uses sneaky JavaScript links (that mask nofollow’ed static links) for discovery crawling, and indexes the link destinations despite there’s no hard coded link on any ...]

Why storing URLs with truncated trailing slashes is an utterly idiocy

With some Web services URL canonicalization has a downside. What works great for major search engines like Google can fire back when a Web service like Yahoo thinks circumcising URLs is cool. Proper URL canonicalization might, for example, screw your blog’s reputation at Technorati. In fact the problem is not your URL canonicalization, e.g. 301 redirects ...]

The hacker tool MSN-LiveSearch is responsible for brute force attacks

A while ago I’ve staged a public SEO contest, asking whether the 401 HTTP response code prevents from search engine indexing or not. Password protected site areas should be safe from indexing, because legit search engine crawlers do not submit user/password combos. Hence their try to fetch a password protected URL bounces with a 401 ...]

You can’t escape from Google-Jail when …

… you’ve boosted your business Web site’s rankings with shitloads of crappy links. The 11th SEO commandment: Don’t promote your white hat sites with black hat link building methods! It may work for a while, but once you find your butt in Google-jail, there’s no way out. Not even a reconsideration request can help because ...]

@ALL: Give Google your feedback on NOINDEX, but read this pamphlet beforehand!

Matt Cutts asks us How should Google handle NOINDEX? That’s a tough question worth thinking twice before you submit a comment to Matt’s post. Here is Matt’s question, all the background information you need, and my opinion. What is NOINDEX? Noindex is an indexer directive defined in the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) from 1996 for use in ...]

Interview with Richard Hearne (”Red Cardinal”)

Hi Richard, welcome to my blog! When I look through the top posters in the Google Webmaster Help groups, you’re almost always in there - it’s great to have you there and your posts bring in a lot of background knowledge that I’m sure many site owners appreciate. It’s interesting that you are - as ...]

Interview with Craig “cass-hacks”

Hi Craig, welcome to my blog ! Craig is, for those that haven’t noticed, an alien from some solar system far away. At least that’s the conclusion I came to after reading his introduction, the overview page on his site and his “my first computer” posts. I’m pretty sure that he’s either alien or ...]

Running Firefox in parallel

Sometimes it would just be great to have multiple instances of Firefox running at the same time. Some web applications just love to eat memory in Firefox, some web pages go crazy if you have JavaScript enabled and sometimes you just want different sets of cookies to let you manage two accounts at the same ...]

Being #1 with “Untitled Document” and Flash

Untitled Document We’ve all seen it - “untitled document” is a popular page name, probably the most popular one out there. I wonder who decided that “untitled document” was better than no title at all? There are a lot of those pages out there, do they even know that a good title can do wonders? Being ...]

Google Webmaster Groups statistics for September 2007

I finally got around to getting the statistics for September 2007 for the Google Webmaster Help Groups finished up. I have to admit the numbers for September aren’t the best, especially the counts for the posts by Googlers. Getting started at Google took quite some time and a lot of learning . And wow ...]

Opportunities in Search

So I went to visit Google in Mountain View … … and learned that every second sentence has to be prefixed with “so”. Wait, that’s not all. I’m sure you’re all just reading this to hear about the secret information they’ve been feeding me, heh. Sorry, you’ll have to join Google yourself to find out more about ...]

A set of command-line Windows website tools

If you have to do things over and over again, it’s a good idea to use a tool to make things easier. Windows is a bit limited (or very - when compared to Linux) when it comes to batch file scripts and “wget” is limited to what it can do right out the box, so ...]

Google Webmaster Groups statistics for August 2007

Another month goes by, here are the statistics for August (and some comparisons to July in brackets) 2007. The numbers Number of new threads = 1329 5.3%] Number of new posts = 7676 -1.0%] Average number posts/new thread = 5.48 -4.5%] Number of posts by new users = 1061 (13.8%) 30.0%] Number of threads by new users = 813 (61.2%) 13.4%] Average ...]

How to use Google webmaster tools stats with Excel

Google’s webmaster tools has a neat feature that lets you download your query and click statistics (once you have verified ownership of your site). The data you can get from there is quite comprehensive, but hard to break down for use in Excel. As a fun exercise I put together a small Python-script that takes ...]

Go hack yourself - recovering your FTP password

All of the websites I put together at the moment are used for playing around and testing things. It’s fun to set up a site, try some things out, delete it or just let it sit and then - usually much later - start over and try something else. The only problem is that by ...]

Daily Search Forum Recap: May 15, 2008

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web....

ISP to Spy on User Activity to Deliver Targeted Ads

United States ISP Charter Communications announced that it will start looking at your surfing behavior to find you relevant ads. While continuing to deliver the same fast and reliable Internet service you’ve always received, innovative new technology in the field...

Yahoo Opens SearchMonkey Doors to Everyone

Are you a developer? You may be interested in SearchMonkey, Yahoo's new open developer platform, which was released to all developers yesterday. The concept behind SearchMonkey is to empower developers to build applications that increase relevancy of search results. Developers...

Google's Malware Review Form Now Working Again

Google's Malware Review form, which was added back in August of last year had some technical issues this week. First reports came via Google Groups at about 1am on May 15th. Webmasters trying to utilize the form received a "oops,...

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Figures From The API Wrong?

A Google Groups thread reports that the numbers reported from the traffic estimator tool within Google's AdWords API interface is reporting different numbers based on the IP calling the data. The AdWords advertiser said that depending on which IP is...

Terrible Landing Page Rant

Be forewarned: I may have several rant posts coming at you over the next few days. Here’s the first.

Let’s get one thing very, very clear. A good search ranking is wonderful … but for all that is sacred in the geekdom, please don’t ruin a perfectly good ranking with a terrible landing page!

Being the geek that I am, a large proportion of my daily searches are for software, scripts, or applications of one sort or another. Unfortunately, a large percentage of the landing pages that I am directed to from those top 10 rankings are so bad that th

Make Those Image Hotlinkers Give You Backlinks!

Ever get tired of people stealing your bandwidth because they hotlink your images? I used to have Myspacer’s sucking my bandwidth dry because their pages got so much traffic, and they were using my images for their backgrounds, etc. There are several ways of dealing with this issue, one of which is showing a different image to them than they bargained for, but there’s a new widget script available now that is even better - it gets the thieving hotlinkers to give you a backlink! Woot!

LinkMyPics is subtitled

The 2,000th SEO Scoop Post

I just noticed that there were 1,999 posts here, so I thought, hmmm…. I should do something special for the 2000th! Unfortunately, my creative brain cells were on vacation, so I couldn’t come up with anything cool. Instead, I thought I’d just push you towards a series of posts I just completed over on my DazzlinDonna blog. I did get a little flack for spreading the posts out and being wordy, but I did that for a reason. Maybe it wasn’t a good reason, I don’t know, but hey, it was A reason. a ton of great audio recordings There are 2 featured recordings

Blogging Response Rate (Poll)

Whilst the test I performed over the last few days isn't ideal, recently, just for a few days I actually switched off my email subscriptions. Email subscriptions has never accounted for the largest percentage of my subscribers, but I have always recognised them among my most responsive readers. I assure you the decision wasn't taken lightly, especially with a number of major launches to write about which were highly targeted to my core audience.

One of the promotions I was testing was for Jeff Johnson's Continue reading | 13 Comme

Banned By Google
It happens... even to the most accomplished SEO professionals. Last August Dan Thies revealed the amazing story about how Brad Fallon, Stompernet founder and owner of MyWeddingFavors.com was kicked out of Google, because of people exploiting bugs in Google. For many people the "proxy hacking" explanation was extremely complicated to understand (I struggled), but what wasn't revealed was how Brad's company survived (and grew) without his top Google listings. It is now revealed, in a 54 minute video with

Questions For Ken Evoy of Sitesell
Image via WikipediaMy previous post on