SEO News Blog

Posted by great scott!

Our Week o’ Whiteboards draws to a close with the last of our SMX West interviews.  This time we’ve got IndexTools COO, Dennis Mortensen, at the board to talk about what you need to look for when tracking traffic spikes on your site.

As Dennis explains, a big spike in traffic isn’t always great. We’re all familiar with the surge of traffic a front-page spot on a social media site can get you, but what’re you really getting from it? Are those visitors converting? Linking? Or are they simply taking up bandwidth for a few moments and then leaving?  If you have a sudden increase in visitors, but see no gain from it, then you’ve actually done yourself no favors (especially if there was significant time or money spent on the effort).
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Posted by great scott!

This week, Rand discusses various methods of Content Categorization. Placing some time and effort into your info architecture can make a huge difference in both rankings and user experience. As we’ve said many, many times, a flat site architecture (four clicks max!) is one of the keys to getting spidered and indexed properly.  Perhaps more importantly, a well-planned content layout will better enable you to control the flow of internal link juice, thereby helping to avoid keyword cannibalization and make sure your strongest pages rank for your highest value keywords.
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Posted by great scott!

Howdy, Gang, and happy 2008 to you all!  Here we are with our first Whiteboard Friday of the New Year and it’s one that many viral marketers out there should pay close attention to.  This week, Rand discusses what it takes to make viral content and linkbait hit home with users in order to gain links to boost your rankings, rather than just landing on the front pages of social media sites.
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Posted by great scott!

Well folks, Christmas has passed but we’re here with the gift that keeps on giving: Another installment of Whiteboard Friday! To round out our last episode of 2007, we brought our good friend and search industry celebrity, Vanessa Fox, into Whiteboard studios to talk about Vertical Search (or Search 3.0, if you will).
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Posted by great scott!

Hey Gang! This week Rand talks to NetConcepts’ CEO, Stephan Spencer, about cloaking and redirection via black hat, gray hat, and white hat methods.  This is pretty high-level stuff but incredibly interesting, even if it is of questionable Glegality (that’s Google Legality, heyooo!).  Is it effective? It sure as hell can be. Will it get you into trouble? Well, only if you get caught I suppose, which is why Google is rumored to have the “Boser Tool” that they use to try and keep an eye out for this stuff.
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Posted by great scott!

Well, we’re back from PubCon so here we are with some spankin’ new Whiteboard Friday content for ya. This week, Microsoft Live’s new Webmaster Tools honcho, Nathan Buggia, joins Rand to discuss what’s up at Live, the perils of life in the engine race, how they deal with paid links, and what they’re doing to win market share.
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Posted by great scott!

As promised, here’s a bonus edition of Whiteboard Friday, Part II of Rand’s interview with the one, the only, Danny Sullivan.  Part II covers what Danny would like to label “Search 3.0,” that is to say Vertical Search, Universal Search, Integrated Search, Blended Search, etc (of course, most of those are trademarked, hence the need for a generic term like Search 3.0).
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Posted by great scott!

We’ve got a doozie for you this week folks. Search Engine Land’s very own Danny Sullivan dropped by the Mozplex for a little Whiteboard Friday guest spot. Before I knew it, the camera batteries were running dry and he and Rand had talked for almost an hour, so this is going to be a multi-part Whiteboard extravaganza!
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Posted by randfish

This week, as Scott heads off on vacation for Thanksgiving, I’m posting our latest Whiteboard Friday on the concept of links as votes of importance from the search engines’ perspective and how link juice passes. Below the video itself, I’ve created a few helpful graphics to better illustrate the phenomenon I’m discussing:

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Posted by great scott!

Hey Gang,

This week, Rand discusses how search engines are using historical linking and reference patterns to help determine, and reward, primary source material in blog and news searches.  Could this bring implications in keyword searches? Will the time come that link volume isn’t a key factor, but rather the engines place a stronger emphasis on where and when a story or trend breaks?
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