February 1, 2007

Papers | SEO Penalties Revisited

Maintaining high SERP rankings is a full time job. Chances are you have watched your hard earned rankings plummet before and know the agony involved in determining why it occurred. So what are some of the main penalties and causes for losing a stellar ranking? Several factors old and new apply.

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January 26, 2007

Papers | How is Google Detecting Link Bombing?

Whoa first Wikipedia blows away all our authority links and now Google is tinkering with their algorithm to defuse link bombing. I for one have been wondering for some time why they didn’t hand edit these suckers out as I would guess many people assume Google itself thinks George Bush really is a miserable failure.

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October 19, 2006

Papers | Publish on Demand: Jeremy Robinson Talks POD

I went to an expensive business conference recently and after the keynote speech the speaker handed out his professionally bound book with DVD for free to everyone in attendance. The book looked just as professional as anything you would find at Borders or Amazon. Cool factor: 5 stars.

Providing this free prize is not only easy but it is becoming incredibly affordable. I ask hit POD author Jeremy Robinson what's the dealio with print-on-demand.

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October 8, 2006

Papers | 10 Pre-Design Questions

When I am fleshing out a project, idea, design, marketing concept or even a logo I keep coming back to the same terrible memory.

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September 11, 2006

Papers | 10 Steps to Designing the Next Killer App

Coming off the end of another sleep deprived week long work binge I realized that for 8 months I have been doing nothing but spec’ing out socially delicious AJAX’ed masterpieces, complete with mockups, flowcharts, marketing plans, and brand boosting viral schemes. here is how I go about it.

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August 31, 2006

Papers | PC Related Stress

Stress and fatigue are well known side effects when working with computers. Deadlines, tedious data entry, filtering information, multi-tasking, not to mention all of the physical problems that sitting on your ass for 12 hours/day will impose - my eye sight is absolute crap after a life time of CRT tubes.

Here is a list of things I started doing last year that really did improve my way of life with my chosen profession.

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July 19, 2006

Papers | Google Pagerank & Backlink Update 07/13

On July 13th there was a full blown backlink and PR update across all data centers at Google. I avoided commenting on it because it is even more confusing than the last update, but here is my best effort to lay out some of what we do know.

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July 2, 2006

Papers | Why you need Reverse DNS

Standard DNS is a well known concept. You create an record with your domain registrar pointing your domain name to an IP address (ie: your web server). Your DNS server then propagates this record to DNS servers around the world and voila, you are directing traffic.

Reverse DNS is a bit different and in this article I will explain why not implementing it is costing you money.

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July 1, 2006

Papers | Performance Tuning Mysql for Load

On one of the largest Vbulletin based forums I operate we just finished a record month with a little over 217,000 uniques with just shy of half a million total users. As anyone else running a big board knows hitting these types of figures while maintaining a smooth user experience is not always easy. Vbulletin, although likely the best forum software around, pumps a helluva lot of queries.

After 3 months of tweaking here is how I optimized to pull off these numbers with only a single dual Xeon 3.2ghz server with 4GB of memory.

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June 6, 2006

Papers | Long Tail Theory

The Long Tail Theory was first coined by Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. In a nut shell the Long Tail theory states that ‘our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits� (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.’

Simple no? Actually there is a lot more to it.

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May 4, 2006

Papers | Domain Sniping 101

What if I told you that I have been happily buying 3 and 4 letter domain names, all day long, for $10 each, and have been doing so for years now? What’s more, often times I turn around and resell these same domains for massive profits a few months later. It's really quite simple.

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April 18, 2006

Papers | Deep Linking

Now it is no secret that SEO’s have been taking advantage of deep linking to gain free SERP traffic but I see a lot of chatter about this latest shift being a tad too drastic. I tend to agree with them but hey I don’t make the rules. The simple truth is that deep linking to a site's interior pages enhances usability because, unlike homepage links, they specifically relate to what the user is seeking. So this makes a lot of sense and should be covered a bit.

Aside from the standard oldskool methods like: trackback pings, exchanges, paid placement, and blatant link dropping here are the three areas I focus on for getting my content deep linked on heavy juice sites.

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April 9, 2006

Papers | Shoemoney Interview

I’ve seen Shoemoney around the usual forums and sort of picked up reading his blog earlier this year. The dude struck me as a real down to earth guy enjoying the take and working hard - like any of us. He runs a live web cam, has zany contests, and even got a photo taken with Paris Hilton. I bumped into Shoe on Efnet yesterday and we spoke a bit about SEO, SMS systems, getting over a cold, and other fascinating subjects. Watch for the gold.

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April 7, 2006

Papers | Original Google Algorithm from Stanford

Surely you've read and reread The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page? This is the original Stanford paper from 1997 that started the Google phenomenon. The photos at left are from Stanford University.

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April 6, 2006

Papers | What is Web 2.0?

Alright this definitely has a fork in it as it’s been done to death but I still get asked this question more than any other - what is web 2.0? At this point I usually sigh and break into a long diatribe about AJAX, tagging, wikipedia, XML and other boring subjects, but from now on I will just point people to this thread.

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March 31, 2006

Papers | Paid Links & Google

Is Google devaluing paid links? Matt has a must read article up with a Q&A on pretty much everything under the sun including Big Daddy, RK, sitemaps, and more. There is a lot of gold in this article for anyone even remotely involved with SEO'ing for Google so give it a read.

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March 13, 2006

Papers | Interview: Seth Godin on Squidoo

Well the name is catchy innit? I heard Seth Godin drop his latest project in the video I posted the other day of his insightful speech at the Goggleplex. So what the frack is Squidoo? Squidoo is sort of social bookmarks manager but with a few twists, some of them can even make you money, or donate to charities. Daily Candy on Squidoo: ‘think Friendster meets Wikipedia’. Now I know what your saying ‘oh please not another social bookmarking content portal’. But Squidoo is quite different... Continue reading "Interview: Seth Godin on Squidoo"

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March 6, 2006

Papers | Organic SEO via Article Submission

Alright I promised I would come back to this in my original review of Article Post Robot, where I covered article submission for gaining some organic seo love. Article submission was something I had tried in the past but I had always done so by hand submitting to 2 or 3 of the larger portals. In my test during February I was pleasantly surprised how easily I nailed #1 positions across Google, Yahoo, and MSN for some well searched terms. And in 7 days no less. On Big Daddy servers I was noticing #1 spots within 48 hours of posting. In this article I aim to explain step by step, exactly how I pulled this off, and why it works.

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March 3, 2006

Papers | Google's Supplemental Results

As I was running through my daily web chores today I noticed something peculiar on Big Daddy server: http://64.233.167.104. I did a site: command and instead of the usual 100,000 or so results I saw the dreaded supplemental results notification. I had lost 98,000 indexed pages and left with a paltry 108 pages! The website in question is a clients and is large Vbulletin based forum. As of yet the changes have not reflected on non Big Daddy servers, but that sinking feeling in my gut tells me.

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February 16, 2006

Papers | Predicting Pagerank

This one has been making the rounds all week so it deserves a mention here. A couple of products have cropped up claiming to actively predict a websites future PR - before the update. Ludicrous? Isn't that like the holy grail of SEO? Good grief. As it turn out iWEBTOOL does not predict pagerank.

The company has been debunked in several threads on the usual SEO forums, but basically it is returning completely useless data unrelated to Pagerank whatsoever. Here’s a quote from the excellent article linked above...

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February 8, 2006

Papers | Google's Big Daddy

Google has several data centers housing its index and anyone familiar with the Google dance will know what I am talking about. The dance is what occurs when one data center is not returning the same results as another. Someone searching for their keywords in LA will often have different results from someone searching for the same words in New York. The data is synching or dancing as SEO'ers have termed it. The location of these DC’s is important to any SEO’er as they can often be used to determine PR scores and ranking changes during an update. Chasing these updates is what we do. Living in Thailand these servers also allow me to see search results as I would in North America as the .co.th Google server is a bit slow at times propagating updates.

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February 7, 2006

Papers | Duplicate Content Penalties

A few Google updates ago one of my review websites went from top placement in Google and friends to 50th over night. Yahoo, MSN and the rest were unchanged. As it turns out one of the test domains I own was pointing to the server with the review site and tripping up Google’s duplicate content filter. A year of hard work SEO’ing seemed flushed down the toilet. Now the problem has since corrected itself but I have never achieved that top ranking on Google again from this rookie mistake.

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November 27, 2005

Papers | Covert Adsense Secrets

Cruising the usual marketing forums and websites I see quite a few tips and tricks for increasing your Adsene earnings. I know you do too, but how much of it actually works? I run Adsense across some 50 domains and will never be done tweaking my ads. Here are the techniques I have used that have actually worked well - in many cases drastically increasing my monthly earnings.

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November 21, 2005

Papers | Adding Value to Adwords

This is a breaking story about Google AdWords based on several rumours, readings and conversations. There is a fair likelihood that some information here is erroneous. In an email, Google Advertising PR Michael Mayzel stated, “We are not providing comment.” If correct the implications are huge and might provide Google advertisers critical protections they've been asking for. Google is about to announce significant changes in the way it does business with its advertisers.

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November 5, 2005

Papers | Googles Peoplerank Memo Leak

If you’re a content publisher and/or affiliate marketer that builds websites to rank organically (on the free left-hand side of the search results), then you’re going to want to read this… but more importantly, you’ll want to read the ‘stolen’ paper published by Google.

Here is an extract from Allan Gardyne’s latest newsletter (#263)…

Journalist Henk van Ess has caused a flurry of excitement on blogs and forums.

In his blog he revealed that Google uses teams of humans all over the world to evaluate the accuracy of Google’s search results.

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