SEO Egghead Consulting Group

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Excerpt: It scares me slightly more than the DMCA itself that so many who should know better are totally ignorant of basic copyright law, and, even worse, benefiting from it in a way that most do not elicit.  Obviously, if the the thief charges for the content or uses it as spider-food on a network of spam sites, that is a problem.  Regardless, the author can claim an opportunity cost.  But there is another problem, and it usually involves totally lily-"white hat" sites. Assume every link on the internet to another page has a certain value in and of itself –…

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Excerpt: I used to assume that content behind forms was never spidered.  This does not seem to be the case, as one particular form on this blog made me aware.It appears that if Google sees a form consisting only of 1 pulldown (select), it will spider the links created by submitting the form request with the various values in the pulldown.  This has a few implications:1. Google may also spider a form consisting of any control with a finite domain, such as a group of radio buttons.  It could also decide to spider forms with multiple controls having finite domains –…

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Excerpt: I've never assumed that the "Allow:" directive was supported by all search engine spiders.  From what I know, only Google supports it.  The draft mentions it, but that's the problem — it's just a draft.  Officially, the directive does not exist.  Admittedly, it has been in the draft state since 1997!  I guess someone should do something about it, but nobody cares enough to do so. Anyway, Google's robots.txt makes the assumption that all spiders support this draft directive, and uses "Allow:" under "User-agent: *."User-agent: *Allow: /searchhistory/Disallow: /news?output=xhtml&Allow: /news?output=xhtmlDisallow: /search It's not such a big deal, but interesting nonetheless.  I simply…

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Excerpt: Many of us use social bookmarking sites — del.icio.us, digg, reddit, etc.  They're pretty useful, and also great sources of organic traffic.  There are plenty of plugins for blogging applications that place icons on a page to ease its bookmarking.  For example, the one I use for this WordPress blog is  called "Sociable."But that's for WordPress.  I wanted to experiment with social bookmarking on some of the custom sites I develop, so I developed a little class that will work for any web application.  I took the icons and referenced the list of sites from Sociable, so kudos to Peter…

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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 –…