I didn’t want pizza anyway. Plenty of sites have covered the news from Google that many users have wanted to hear for some time now — that those giant overlays on sites that prompt you to download an app will now result in a search ranking penalty. Many of the…
While this may be old news to some of you (just over a week now), I only discovered this weekend that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine can archive a page for you, with its own URL, on demand. Thanks to a tweet from Jennifer Sutton, I came across the post…
This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in Buffalo’s first WordCamp for WordPress users. Before my presentation I made it a point to sit in on the other sessions that were in the same track as mine. When discussing SEO, all the sessions I saw mentioned only Google.…
I’ve been doing this web thing from the start (sort of — I did not have a NeXT machine and a guy named Tim in my living room) and I’ve watched how people have clamored to have their web sites discovered on the web. As the web grew and search…
I have written many times here about SEO/SEM and how so much of it is sold to organizations by scam artists (though I recoil at the thought of calling them “artists”). Too often it includes demonstrably false claims, like how meta keywords and descriptions will help your site and that…
One of the ongoing truths about search engine optimization (SEO) has been that inbound links are usually a good thing. This has caused SEO scammers to abuse the practice by creating and using “link farms,” sites that exist solely to link back to client sites. This “spamdexing” technique is based…
It’s like I’m running out of novel titles or something. With the launch of Google Instant a couple months ago, the landscape for SEO changed as now site authors had to consider targeting keywords for search results that appear as the user types (see my post at evolt.org: Google Instant…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. There is quite a lot being written…
Late yesterday Google announced the launch of its new web indexing system, Caffeine. According to Google, it provides 50% “fresher” results and is the largest collection of web content it has ever offered.The big push for this new indexing technology is the rise (explosion, really) of real-time data on the…
There are many on the web who will recognize the name Derek Powazek. He is the name behind old-school sites such as Fray.com and Kvetch.com (which has apparently been taken over by spam bots) and wrote a book about communities (Design for Community, which mentions me by name, which is…
A List Apart has posted a triple threat today: three articles on site search and reporting.Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision by John Ferrara discusses relevancy testing and precision testing for your search results based on what users have searched for within your web site. He even provides a spreadsheet…