Reading Time: 2 minYears ago I was talking with a woman named Carol about personal branding in search results. Her philosophy was to focus on one platform (LinkedIn) so she could “avoid having too much info about her show up online”. It makes sense at first, but the problem with that approach is that when someone searches for […]
SEO
301 redirects now pass their full value to the recipient
Reading Time: < 1 minIf you ever need to redirect users from one page to another — due to website consolidation, new URL or some other reason — the ideal way to do it is via a “301 redirect”. A 301 redirect is considered a permanent change, and Google will use that information to update the search results. However, […]
What is the “duplicate content penalty”?
Reading Time: 3 minIf you’ve done much research into search engine optimization, you’ve likely heard that you should be wary of duplicate content to avoid a penalty from Google. The good news is that there isn’t really a penalty for it, but you should still certainly work to avoid any kind of duplicate content-related issues. Mark Traphagen at […]
Google doesn’t change the rules for SEO
Reading Time: 2 minThere are a lot of misconceptions in this world. Should you shake a Polaroid picture to make it develop more quickly? No. Is the “getting millions for spilling hot coffee on yourself” lawsuit an example of our legal system gone crazy? Our legal system may be a mess, but in that case I think she […]
Keywords in your domain name don’t help
Reading Time: 2 minAs recently as a few years ago, you could buy a domain name that was loaded with keywords and automatically rank pretty well for those queries. For example, I could purchase “marietta-used-cars.com” and rank pretty well for “marietta used cars” and related searches. Thankfully, Google is working hard to discount those kinds of URLs, known […]
Be free to change your mind
Reading Time: 2 minJeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, recently made a powerful statement that has a lot of people thinking. According to Jason Fried at 37signals, Bezos said “people who were right a lot of time were people who often changed their minds“. In other words, putting your foot down and refusing to view things […]
Why I don’t put my name at the bottom of your site
Reading Time: 2 minYou see it all the time. Browse on someone’s website and you’ll see “Designed by xxxx” or something similar at the bottom. I don’t do that. Why? Simple: it’s bad for your business. My main goal is to help you succeed. By adding a link to the footer of your site, companies help themselves at […]
NHL Officials protect their photos from…themselves.
Reading Time: < 1 minIt’s a fairly common thing to protect your photos from being hotlinked — shown on another site but still hosted on yours. Bandwidth costs money, and people don’t like to have their hosting abused like that. A common solution is to configure the server to show the correct image when people are on your site, […]
Is this natural? Used cars, used cars for sale, buy used cars…
Reading Time: < 1 minAnother great “Whiteboard Friday” video from Rand at SEOmoz. This one talks about over-optimization and it covers it very well. Check it out: SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – On-Site Over Optimization from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Has Google changed the way they handle social media links?
Reading Time: < 1 minThe short answer is yes. And no. 🙂 Matt Cutts explains in the video below. In a nutshell, he says they haven’t specifically changed the way social media links count toward your site, but they’re always changing the algorithm and some of the changes certainly could have had an impact. They’ve made about 300-400 changes […]