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Excerpt: Note: the code for the auditing script is located here.
As a programmer, I cannot stress it enough. What is it? Escaping all data processed by your web application's code! It's a common security issue, but most people are only accustomed to it, these days, in the context of SQL. Every programmer worth salt knows that he must escape/sanitize data sent to a SQL database. Otherwise, carefully-constructed input can form a totally cool query that exposes and/or vandalizes data. Despite this,…
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Excerpt: What really stops anyone from using a CSS-based layout, throwing up some spammy content, then using CSS with all sorts of positioning to hide it? Spiders can read CSS now, and you'll get busted, right? Perhaps.
But what if one were to place the CSS in a file and exclude that file via robots.txt? To make it look even less like subtrefuge, simply place the CSS file in your images folder or something. Assuming Google actually honors the robots exclusion protocol, wouldn't that permit one to …
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Excerpt: Syndicated content is content that is authored by another source and placed on your web site under license. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, it also implies that a purchase of the said content occurs, but I suspect that definition will change soon. RSS (acronym: really simple syndication) feeds tend to be free, and very often available for use anywhere according to fair use laws. They are getting more and more pervasive. This is important, as free syndicated content on a simila…
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Excerpt: One of the criticisms I have of many CMSes is the fact that they frequently employ lousy WYSIWYG editors. These lousy WYSIWYG editors, in turn, generate lousy HTML. And on-page factors still matter for SEO, despite our new focus on quality inbound links.
Lousy HTML, that is, HTML that does not usefully incorporate H1, H2, and B tags, lacks defining structural elements that search engines can use to attribute importance to the various parts of a document. WYSIWYG editors typically do not …
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Excerpt: I was cruising around the SEO landscape during my lunch break. I know this is an old trick, but I just found a pretty funny example. An SEO firm, "Only Ten Matter," offers what its founder, Joseph Smith, calls "guaranteed SEO." He extolled the virtues of his services, and perhaps the Book of Mormon (Is he the same guy?), and claims to offer a guarantee that he will get you to the top 10 for "competitive keywords" like "guaranteed SEO."Well let'…
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Excerpt: I've always used '{' and '}' to access characters in a PHP string. I knew I could, but I never really used '[' and ']' to do the same, out of habit more than anything else. Apparently, not only is it allowed, but it's recommended by the PHP documentation here. "Characters within strings may be accessed and modified by specifying the zero-based offset of the desired character after the string using square array-brackets like $str[42] so thi…
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Excerpt: Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable cites a thread on WebMasterWorld here discussing whether people are noticing a decrease in the quality of the traffic from Google's CPC content network. And, while I can't speak from a tremendous amount of experience in paid advertising (I'm mostly organic), I can state that the traffic I received from AdSense for legal keywords was horrifically bad. Most of the traffic was, indeed, from MFA sites. I was so ticked…
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Excerpt: If you actually read my little bio over on the left up there (you didn't, and I'm not so pompous as to think you care :)), you'd know I'm a white hat SEO who is currently doing some serious SEO consulting for a law firm. I'd like to share a few things I've noticed in this area, and complain about how horrible the scene really is.Link Spam:Many successful law firm web sites engage in bulk spam links. By that I don't mean comment-spam. I mean…
