SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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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…

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Excerpt: Many search engine marketers have historically recommended placing relevant keywords in URLs.  The original rationale was that a URL's contents are one of the major criteria in search engine ranking.  Yahoo especially was enamored of keyword-rich URLs.   Over time, this has changed.  It is now a minor criterion with regard to ranking.  On top of that, dynamic sites make the process more difficult.That does not mean, however, that creating URLs with relevant keywords is obsolete.  God no.  Thinking like that is terribly narrow-minded.  So let's enumerate all of the benefits of placing keywords in URLs.  Here they are — my…

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Excerpt: You might get sued!  Expect Google to mail lots of legal letters as they make a desperate effort to protect their ailing trademark.  Google has become almost synonymous with search — and if they aren't careful, they'll end up like "Band-aid," "Spam," and "Frisbee."If any of those terms have not lost their trademarks yet, they are already travelling down Generic Lane.  Ask yourself if you would say "adhesive bandage strip," or "plastic flying disc."  I doubt it.  And when a trademark becomes synonymous with the generic item, eventually it loses its trademark status — genericide. The word 'google,' with…

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Excerpt: I was playing around with the What is Hosted on that IP? tool I just published, and some of what I found is a bit scary.  I see cases where there are a few relatively legitimate sites nestled on the same IP with hundreds of spammy sites.  Needless to say, this is a liability.Suppose I am a devious SEO who does not like my competitor very much.  My competitor is also a big cheapskate.  He uses the "Beginner Hosting" package from some fly-by-night web hosting company that, like everyone else these days, oversells.  He pays $2.95 USD per month.  That's…

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Excerpt: Google just added a curious new feature to Sitemaps, now renamed "Webmaster Central."  It allows the webmaster to specify whether he or she prefers a site be indexed as www.example.com or example.com.  It is documented here.  This is curious for a few reasons:1. BigDaddy was supposed to resolve this issue.  In actuality, the problem seems fairly trivial.  It did not surprise me that BigDaddy was supposed to resolve it.  This feature is an admission that BigDaddy is not the end of the troubles in this realm.2. In my opinion, the current demographics of Sitemaps webmasters are such that anyone willing…

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Excerpt: I added some new tools to this blog.  Not all of it is the mundane "link bait" you see on most SEO web sites.  Some of it is kind of neat.  Here's what I have so far:1. View HTTP Headers - This one is pretty boring, but it's the first one I created while figuring out how to hack WordPress to wrap the scripts in the theme I use.2. View HTTP Path - Once I got more daring, I wrote a script that examines a URL, follows any redirects, then shows the path to get to the final destination.  Looking…

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Excerpt: This is a summary of the videos located at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-reinclusion-requests/ and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-tips-for-ses-san-jose-2006/ titled "Video: Reinclusion requests," and "Video: Tips for SES San Jose 2006," respectively.  The latter is dated August 7, 2006.Note: As before, my opinions are in italics to indicate where I'm expressing an opinion, not citing Matt. In the first video, Matt discusses reinclusion requests.  He has a previous post here regarding the topic, but he asserts his recommendations have changed somewhat since that post.So what does Matt currently recommend you do when you think you have been penalized by Google for spamming?  He recommends using Google Webmaster…

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Excerpt: By way of Search Marketing Standard's blog post here, I came across the article titled Natural-Born Search Killers by Rob Garner.  It points out that as the web matures, web designers and programmers are increasingly faced with more redesigns and fewer designs from scratch.  Everyone knows that flash and hidden text blight search engine optimization efforts.  Little attention is ever given, however, to the fact that URLs acquire value over time, and the fact that not factoring this into a redesign can mean literally tossing equity into the garbage.  And redesigns frequently entail changing URLs.  He calls this concept "Link…