SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: Apparently, he entered a deep bout of depression on June 27, and never acted quite the same since then. Matt Cutts stated something extremely vague in response here. "I believe any changes on the 27th were refreshing data used by an existing algorithm." Cryptic indeed. And many screamed expletives as they fell from grace to oblivion. … including me. OK, so I was the guy, and I didn't really contemplate suicide, but I was pretty upset. I got hit on the 27th; and the only thing that cheered me up is that the…

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Excerpt: I have never seen such horrible irrelevent link exchange requests from fellow webmasters since Axandra's Arelis product caught on in a big way a few years back.  The site is called LinkMetro, and it stinks.Google finally squashed the 2-way link exchange as the SEO-currency; but now LinkMetro is here to facilitate and promulgate the worthless practice despite its decline in usefulness these days.I get approximately 5 emails per day like this:"A LinkMetro member has requested a link exchange with 1 or more of your websites (MY-SITE <> SOME-SPAM-SITE). You may accept or decline this link request by clicking the link…

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Excerpt: Link Bait is the hottest new fad in link building, and I keep my eyes open for obvious examples.  If it weren't on CNN, I wouldn't even believe it.  This is one of the funniest articles I have read in awhile:"Study: More Americans too fat for X-rays, scans" http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/07/26/obesity.xrays.reut/index.html (there, I linked to it) Basically, the article states that as a result of eating too many double cheeseburgers, Americans are either not fitting into the machines, or the machines just plain can't penetrate the cheeseburger-shielding.As a side-note, I'd never poke fun at obese people who have eating disorders or genetic diseases;…

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Excerpt: I said awhile back in my post, Google Violates Computer Science that people have too much faith in Google.  I said that even light obfuscation of Javascript redirect code, such as rot13ing the offending code would likely trick even the formidable Google.  I may have changed my mind.  This stuff may work near-term, but I have my doubts as to the future.Interestingly enough, Microsoft is experimenting with a new technique whereby they target certain areas known to be spam "paradises," and use actual redirection as an indication of spam.  The project is called Strider Search Defender.  To implement this, they actually…

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Excerpt: Should the need exist to change hosting companies, the process must be completed in the proper order.  Not doing so may result in a time window where your site is unreachable; and this is clearly not desirable — from both a general and SEO perspective.  The focus of this elaborate process is to prevent both users and search engines from perceiving that the site is gone — or in the case of virtual hosting, seeing the wrong site.  Search engines do have heuristics for recognizing that these problems exist, but it is better not to rely on this.  Note: Virtual…

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Excerpt: This class can be used to detect where a site visitor is located and tailor their page content accordingly.  For example, you may want to say "We surrender!" for French users, instead of the usual "Hello."  No offense to Frenchies of course; but I had to poke some fun to make this post less dry :)To do this, we need to include this class in our application; the code below the class definition implements the aforementioned example.  Many thanks to MaxMind for providing their free database; additionally, they have a better, more accurate version for a fee.  Keep in mind…

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Excerpt: I decided that I would test what I think is an inconsistency in the interpretation of the robots.txt specification by various implementors cited here.I created a robots.txt file for this site that is contrived to test how various spiders interpret the specification.  Here it is:User-agent: *Disallow: /blog/seo/automatically-highlighting-internal-links-p51.htmlDisallow: /blog/seo/msn-search-p5.htmlUser-agent: googlebotDisallow: /blog/seo/msn-search-p5.htmlUser-agent: msnbotDisallow: /blog/seo/using-referers-http_referer-to-increase-conversions-and-perceived-relevance-p9.htmlUser-agent: slurpDisallow: /blog/seo/yahoo-hostings-lack-of-htaccess-support-p8.htmlSince I'd like to make sure all these pages are indexed well in the first place (and because I'm a link-whore), please link to this post for me :)We already know that Google will only exclude the page on MSN search, but I'm curious how Yahoo and…

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Excerpt: Some people may know about this already, but it's worth discussing since it has been pertinent to me a few times:In theory, according to my interpretation of the robots.txt specification, if a Disallow: under User-agent: "*" exists, as well a Disallow: under a specific robot's User-agent:, and that robot accesses the web site, both rules should be applied, and both should be excluded.  However, Google does not interpret it this way, and only applies the rules for the specific robot User-agent:, "googlebot."  For Google, it is necessary to repeat all rules in "*" under googlebot’s User-agent: as well to get…