SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich: A blog about SEO, written for nerds, by a nerd.

Choose a Topic:

» Suggest a topic or buzz to cover; if I write about it, you'll get credit with a link in the post!

Fri
14
Jul '06

How to Deal with Content Theft

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Incidentally, some scraper, here, was stealing my content and posting it, verbatim, on his site.  I never authorized this.  He was even linking back and thusly sending pings to me -- I got alerted to each "citation."  Not so bright.  He also struck the content at ha.cke ...
2 Comments »
Wed
12
Jul '06

Automatically Highlighting Internal Links

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: I find it very annoying when I click on a link that references an internal part of a document, and I fail to see what I was trying to get by clicking it.  It happens the most when a webmaster puts an anchor name near the bottom of the document.  A browser "tries" to scroll such t ...
Leave a passing comment »
Tue
11
Jul '06

Google Violates Computer Science!

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: People have too much faith in Google – even when doing so implies a violation of the principles of computer science.  Many Google-oglers have contended that Google can find applications of JavaScript redirect cloaking with ease.  I'm not a PhD in Computer Science, but I doubt the ...
5 Comments »
Mon
10
Jul '06

Big Daddy hates Doorway Pages (and other pages too)

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Since BigDaddy, many have been screaming about the decreasing quality of Google's index.  Now let's get a few things straight.  Some SEOs (ahem, spammers) may be the last demographic that you want to ask about index quality; but even the whitest of white hats are noticing.  On ...
Leave a passing comment »
Fri
7
Jul '06

A (not so simple) method to add rel="nofollow" to links

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: I wrote this script so that I can run it over arbitrary HTML. Basically, what it does is it adds rel="nofollow" to links that are not in an array of whitelisted domains. It sounds simple, but it gracefully handles many conditions that most people do not bother with. 1) As mentioned ...
1 Comment »
Mon
3
Jul '06

Google does Evil?

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: The following is a quote straight from Google's Investor Relations web page. "If an opportunity arises to take advantage of competitors' confidential information, remember: don't be evil. We compete, but we don't cheat." Unfortunately, I'm not so sure this speaks for ...
3 Comments »
Mon
3
Jul '06

Influence of a tilde, ~, on a Link's Value

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: I have never gotten an authorative answer to this question, but I'm posting my thoughts. I've just acquired another ".edu" link to one of my sites. However, it contains a "~" in the URL. If you're not aware, by convention, a "~" prefix on a directory references a Unix home directory web site. The ...
Leave a passing comment »
Fri
30
Jun '06

Auditing for HTML Tainting

Archived; click post to view.
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 program ...
1 Comment »