SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: Is the world upside down?  By way of Jake's post on blog.outer-court.com, Microsoft was the only search engine that passed the W3C Markup Validation Service test in flying colors — no errors.  All the other search engines bit the dust.  Google came in fourth with 61 errors. Was it not Matt Cutts who said in one of his videos that HTML standards-compliance should not be a top priority for the web master, but it should not be entirely ignored either?  So why is Google seemingly not following its own advice?My guess is that they do it deliberately.  I looked, and…

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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.  In other words, the more specific set of directives takes precedence over the default, and only one set is applied. Googleguy says in the thread that he "…

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Excerpt: Hurry up and start a blog if you haven't already, because even the fundamentalists are ahead of the curve.  Mahmood Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, announced his new blog over here.  In an unabashed display of self-importance, his first post is an autobiography:It starts with "In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate," and then it rambles on and on about the evils of western culture.  Surprisingly, he didn't use the word "Zionist" or "Crusader" once in the post.  He also didn't bother to deny the existence of The Holocaust.  I'm impressed.  Maybe he read a book or…

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Excerpt: I'm looking at the latest Search Marketing Standard, and it exceeded my expectations.  No, that's not just because I'm in it :)Anyway, I'm pulling out a few gems from the magazine as a whole and posting it here.  My comments are denoted by italics:0. My unabashed recommendation to avoid those ugly deformed-looking beasties of dynamic URLs.  I focused a bit too much on the SERPs aspect of the URL, so I elaborated on it here.  For one, key phrases in URLs function as the sole call to action when the URL is also used as the actual anchor text –…

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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 a stop to this sandbox loophole awhile ago, and now it seems to be quite the opposite situation.When you snap a domain name, keep in mind that it may be subject to a penalty.  Such was the case for a…

OK, so it was just a temporary thing.  Phew!  Now my little application that watches stocks can resume its duties

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Excerpt: The sites for the Free SEO Site Clinic are selected!  I will be reviewing the sites www.elitehosts.com and www.arlin.net.  Both are web hosting sites.  This is an ultra-competitive industry in many ways — including SEO.  I have some ideas to help drive traffic with long tail keywords in the aggregate.  That's a hint as to what I will suggest.  This will be in addition to the mundane recommendations to resolve the standard SEO mistakes and concerns.  The in-depth reports will be done within the next few weeks. In the mean time, I did look at most of the sites you…

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Excerpt: Oh no!  Real-time (ECN) stock quotes appear to be gone from both the condensed and the detailed Google Finance views.  Hopefully, it's just a fluke and it will be back tomorrow.  Take a look:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=AMD&btnG=Google+Searchhttp://www.google.com/finance?q=AMDThis actually annoys me, as I use Google to get quick real-time visibility on stock quotes without having to log in to my TDAmeritrade account. Yahoo still appears to give out free real-time quotes, but it's not accessible via standard query.  Here's how to get ECN quotes from Yahoo: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ecn?s=AMDNot sure why this happened, but it was one of the "sticky" features Google had for me.  Now…