Topic Category: Things to Avoid
Search engines all have terms of service that webmasters should strive to comply with. Sites that violate the engines' terms of service are often removed from the engines' databases altogether. In this topic category, you'll find articles that describe practices that should be avoided to ensure that your site remains indexed in the major search engines.
April 29, 2008
Spamming Sphinn, Digg, and Others...
By Scott Goodyear
While it is important to get the word out about your site or service far and wide, there is a fine line between submitting something interesting and spamming social sites like Sphinn, Digg, and others. Some are surprised to find out that some of their self promotional efforts may be construed as "spam". In this post I want to point to an example that I saw over at Sphinn.
March 13, 2008
Does Google Think Your Site Was Hacked?
By Scott Goodyear
Has your site recently taken a nose dive in the rankings? Do you find that your site is no where to be found even if you use your domain name as the search term? Whether you have a Google WebMaster Tools account or not, you may now find a note from the WebMaster team waiting for you, after you've created an account and verify your site.
January 23, 2008
How Not To Advertise Your SEO Services
By Scott Goodyear
A few weeks ago, I had a post talking about link exchange spam that we periodically receive. As a follow up, just a few things to note regarding advertising your SEO services online. I got an email from a "Nick Slevin" advertising that he could "help to improve my rankings". It appears that I wasn't the only one. As an online marketer, I get all sorts of questions regarding how sites should market online. Email marketing is often a touchy subject.
December 11, 2007
Link Exchange Spam, Our Site Has Nothing To Do With Snowmobiles.
By Scott Goodyear
Like quite a few of you, we receive spam and link exchange requests all of the time. We also receive requests from existing WebPosition customers asking that we include some type of automated link exchange module. While I can't tell you what is in store for the future of WebPosition, I can show you why most software companies shy away from creating link exchange software...
October 10, 2007
California Judge certifies class action suit against Target.com
By Curtis Friedl
Target may be in trouble, and if they are you may be too. On Tuesday October, 2 2007 a Judge with the US District for the Northern District of California approved Class action status in a case brought against them in part by the National Federation for the Blind(NFB).
September 06, 2007
"Are Paid Links Evil?" from SES San Jose, what you missed...
By Scott Goodyear
I'm back from attending the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose and I'm putting together a few posts about my experience. In the meantime, I'll relate part of my experience from the "Are Paid Links Evil?" session. It was a lively session that was more food for thought than actionable tips...
May 17, 2007
Apple.com telling Google "we don't want to rank"?
By Scott Goodyear
As I mentioned a while back, Google states that they are getting more aggressive in how they treat links. High rankings based entirely on links (i.e. the term does not appear on the page) are often called "Googlebombs". For several years Apple.com has enjoyed a first page ranking for the terms MP3 Player, MP3 Players, and often top 10-20 rankings for related terms like MP3 device, digital music player, and others. Today they no longer rank in the top 100 for keywords that they should dominate like MP3 players and simply MP3. In the past, they were supported by benign Googlebombs.
October 12, 2006
Basic Security Considerations for SEO
by Curtis Friedl and Scott Goodyear
www.marketposition.com
When every day business owners search for a means to improve sales, they often start by examining their sales force. Sales people are trained on the latest sales techniques, or provided incentives to push the higher margin products to customers. While many owners often overlook their web site as their best sales person, SEOs understand that looking at keywords, weighting, and placement in addition to links and excellent navigation are important just as important to their virtual sales person; their website.
March 24, 2006
Duplicate Content: How Does it Affect Your Rankings?
by Richard Drawhorn
If search engines detect duplicate content on your web site, it can have an adverse effect on your rankings. When a search engine finds the same content on more than one page, they tend to consider it a form of spam. In this post, I'll review some of the ways duplicate content may appear on your site and a few strategies to avoid being penalized by search engines.
February 15, 2006
Google Removes Large SEO Company from their Index
by Richard Drawhorn
In a recent post in his search engine related blog, Google representative Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by them from Google's index. In this post, I'll review the reasoning behind this decision and provide a few tips on how to avoid this fate for your own web site.
June 15, 2005
Warning About Duplicate Tags
In the past it has been suggested that you might want to add two or more title tags to a single page since this technique appeared to help a site's ranking for some engines. Several years back we had even researched this and found that it could indeed improve your site's search positions in some engines.
June 15, 2003
Is Your WebSite Guilty By Association?
by Brad S. Konia
My company has been doing search engine optimization since 1999. Several times per week we get calls from people who are looking for help and don't know where else to turn. One of the most frequent complaints we hear is that one or more search engines are completely ignoring their site. The call usually goes something like this:
May 20, 2003
Hidden Images and Links Explained
May 20th, 2003 Update: Matt Cutts, a Google representative, put out a warning at a recent search engine conference in Boston that Google will be cracking down on hidden text and invisible pixel images. Since Google already has the technology to index images, such a threat should carry some weight. You'd be wise to avoid typical methods to hide text and links if you wish to be safe with Google. Rather than hiding links, consider creating a site map page that links to your other important pages without using the transparent pixel technique. We'll report more on this as information becomes available.
July 15, 2001
The Top 5 Tips and the Top 5 Mistakes of Search Engine Marketing
Being the editor of the largest search engine marketing newsletter in the world, I've been asked on several occasions what my top five marketing tips would be. That's a tough question to answer since there are so MANY tips and techniques I've discovered over the years that work exceptionally well. It's difficult to boil it down to just five. However, before the drum roll starts for my top 5 SE marketing tips of all time, let's start with something easier...
December 15, 2000
Watch Out for Fancy Menu Systems
Sometimes people submit but become frustrated as to why the search engine only indexes their home page. In theory, isn't the search engine supposed to spider to all the other pages on your site too?
June 15, 1999
A Marketing Technique You Should Avoid
Despite the fact that this article might cause more controversy than any I have previously written, I feel that this subject needs to be addressed. Before implementing any new marketing strategy, you should ask yourself "Is this the right thing to do?" Although this sounds simple, when dollar signs start dancing around in your head, it becomes easier to look the other way. I know, because I've been tempted on many occasions to choose the wrong path.
February 15, 1998
Avoid Pitfalls with Frames
While frames can make Web site design and the navigation of a site a bit easier, they wreak havoc on your Web site's ranking in the search engines for two reasons:
January 15, 1998
How to Avoid Trouble with the Engines
In past issues I've discussed a number of things you should do in order to get positioned higher in the search engines. Just as important as the DO'S, are the DON'TS:
1. Never use keywords in your meta tags that do not apply to your site's content. Positive Tip: Let's say you have a travel service business. The single keyword "travel" will probably be very hard to be positioned well on.
December 15, 1997
The ol' Switcheroo
We all know that InfoSeek is the Web site marketer's favorite search engine because of its lightening fast time to index a site. You probably know by now that a site submitted to InfoSeek is added to its index in minutes (in most cases) and you can quickly learn how you ranked.
