SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: It's now pretty clear that companies must monitor their online reputations.  It's also not such a great idea to tick off bloggers in the first place.  News is likely to spread, and fellow bloggers may send links freely.  Reporting something stupid is great link bait!  As a result, a small company may suddenly find flaming on page 1 of the SERPs for brand-related queries.  "Fixing" that can be frustrating.  Let's take a look at some blatant spam that someone working for a company posted on my blog — here:"Data is not real time is delayed by 15-20 minutes depending on…

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Excerpt: It has become popular for companies to create corporate blogs for promotional purposes.  Blogging, for various reasons, just seems to facilitate "buzz."  Strictly from a "mechanical" SEO perspective, though, does it make sense to house the blog in a subdomain — that is, blog.yourcompany.com, or a subdirectory — yourcompany.com/blog?To be honest, I believe that if your primary focus is to harness the "juice" from links, a subdirectory just plain makes more sense.  On the other hand, many SEOs who I have respect for have gone the subdomain route.  Maybe nobody really thinks about it.  But the way I see it,…

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Excerpt: It's funny that of all the bloggers in this little SEO-blogosphere, it is one of those "evil" black hatters who had to admonish us for our poor grammar.I'm often very surprised at the horrible grammar mistakes in major SEO blogs.  I'm not going to point any fingers either, but the "then vs. than" mistake is my personal pet peeve.  "Then" is an adverb, and "than" is a (coordinating comparative) conjunction.  Mixing them up just looks really bad. You know who you guys are — there are many.  But when a spammer uses better grammar than you do in his Viagra…

This handy set of rules for mod_rewrite automatically redirects any URL ending in "/index.php" to the same URL ending in "/."  It works for the root directory as well as subdirectories.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /.*/index\.(php|html)\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.*)index\.(php|html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

For example, "http://www.example.com/subdirectory/index.php" would be redirected to "http://www.example.com/subdirectory/."

This eliminates one of the peskier canonicalization issues with relative ease.  It's a bit tricky because of the way mod_rewrite updates its variables during execution — hence the odd use of the variable {THE_REQUEST}.  If anyone knows an easier way or finds a problem with it, leave a comment. 

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Excerpt: I had to write about it eventually.  DMOZ is a horribly corrupt, flawed system.  Personally, I hope it goes away.  With the evaporation in importance of the Yahoo! Directory and the closure of Zeal, the writing on the wall is no longer just writing.  It's happening.  And with AOL running it, you may also wonder why your password hasn't been released for academic research on passwords. That said, many SEOs are still a bit DMOZ-obsessed.  Even if the pages themselves drive zero traffic, the links, for reasons I do not entirely understand still do carry a disproportionate amount of link-equity. …

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Excerpt: Elite Hosts is a smaller full-service web hosting company.  If I had to compare it to another company, I'd say it's a lot like a smaller version of Pair.  Elite Hosts has bearded Unix gurus ready for action 24/7.  Unfortunately, their marketing department may be blinded by the big Unix beard as well.  Everything is fixable, though.  So let's get started. They appear to highlight reseller hosting, but also sell directly.  This is typical these days.  Everyone wants to outsource his marketing department — and, in fact, this is a viable model.  Doing this, however, does not obviate the need…

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Excerpt: This is totally off subject, but I promise another post today.  In the meantime, though — I can't make this up.  I'm staying in Washington D.C., visiting a friend, and I forgot to bring deodorant.  Since I have mercy on the souls of others who stand near me in this heat, I decided I'd go pick some up at the local CVS.Unfortunately, when I got there and found the deodorant, it was locked up.  Yes, the deodorant was locked up.  I had to wait 10 minutes to get someone from CVS to open the case for me.  So either there…

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Excerpt: I'm friendly with some spammers.  Most of them are pretty nice guys.  I don't spam, and I never will — but I keep in touch. Since most spammers are really just out to make a buck and not hurt anyone, I would never expect them to mock and laugh at a spam victim.  But sadly, that's exactly what "white hat" Rand Fishkin and the "professionals" at SEOmoz did.Let's have a look:G-man writes on their blog:"you've got to understand what I currently do for a living…I scrape the search engines and create the "crap" that they really don't like to see…