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Excerpt: I guess Google's adult-filter went on vacation with me this weekend, because there was a buxom blonde baring it all for everyone on the Google News homepage: Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable says: "I see it myself, I took a screen capture and blacked out the offensive part."I don't get it, what does he find offensive? :)…

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Excerpt: What's more annoying than knowing your site has 1000s of supplemental search results?Not being able to conveniently view them to see what's wrong …  The Google hack mentioned here enumerates the supplemental pages of a domain, and seemed quite useful to this end.  Perhaps Google doesn't want to make our lives too easy, though, because it appears that it no longer works as before.Then I recalled that someone had also created a great tool that reports the number of suppleme…

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Excerpt: I think paid links are just dandy!  In every other advertising venue, reputation is purchased.  Branding campaigns are ubiquitous.  It does not take long to spot paper advertisements that have no real call to action; rather, they aim to increase a product or brand's "ranking" in the human mind.  This is a what a paid link is to Google.  It is the analog of a branding campaign.  I'm not saying I think link networks are cool.  I'm saying I s…

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Excerpt: This is a compilation of stuff Matt Cutts has said historically, minus some of the more recent stuff here, here, and here.  I decided I'd dig backwards and document some of the older stuff.  I dated it accordingly.  Here it is:1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/Matt recommends using dashes over underscores to delimit words in urls. 2005.Google does not algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url despite the fact that some have raised it as a possible heu…

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Excerpt: I used to assume that content behind forms was never spidered.  This does not seem to be the case, as one particular form on this blog made me aware.It appears that if Google sees a form consisting only of 1 pulldown (select), it will spider the links created by submitting the form request with the various values in the pulldown.  This has a few implications:1. Google may also spider a form consisting of any control with a finite domain, such as a group of radio buttons.  It could…

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Excerpt: I've never assumed that the "Allow:" directive was supported by all search engine spiders.  From what I know, only Google supports it.  The draft mentions it, but that's the problem — it's just a draft.  Officially, the directive does not exist.  Admittedly, it has been in the draft state since 1997!  I guess someone should do something about it, but nobody cares enough to do so. Anyway, Google's robots.txt makes the assumption that all spiders…

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Excerpt: We finally have a conclusion on how exactly to interpret a robot.txt file for the edge cases mentioned here.  Someone started a WebmasterWorld thread on the subject of contention.Indeed, according to the specification, the rules for a specific matching user agent entirely override the "User-agent: *" rules.  Therefore, any rule under "User-agent: *" that should also be applied to a specific bot must be repeated under the "User-agent:" for that specific bot…

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Excerpt: Search engine marketers loved SnapNames.  Expired domains used to evade the dreaded "sandbox" aging delay.  I loved SnapNames too — but for a different reason.  I like domain names that don't stink.  The domain aftermarket is a boon for people searching for domain names that don't look like this:my-domain-name-idea-was-taken-so-i-registered-this-monstrosity-i-hope-you-like-it.comOK, so that's a slight exaggeration, but everyone gets the point.Google put…