SEO Egghead Consulting Group

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: This post is an answer to those who have criticized my unabashed advocation of cloaking as an ethical practice.  I maintain that cloaking, in quite a few cases, is necessary, and far from unethical or black hat.  Here is just one example of the many I will cite over the coming weeks:Cloaking to Avoid a Spider Trap:A long, long time ago people used to be very fearful of cookies.  I'm not sure what it was.  Maybe Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, or some other influential but mindless individual spoke out about their "security risks."  I don't know.  But…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: So there was just a PageRank update, and everyone is excited as usual; but perhaps a bit less this time.  I know PageRank is "dead" as a metric of site importance and ranking.  I don't deny this at all.  I'm glad most people shook the PageRank obsession.  Barry agrees with me in this post.  I remember when PageRank was hyped to the point that people were spoofing PageRank using redirects to artificially inflate the value of domains.  SEO Black Hat documented this here.  He says:"This further illustrates how useless Page Rank has become in measuring a site's importance." Ok, so…

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.ckers.org, a site about software security with some SEO stuff as well.   That was even less bright.  I was eventually going to report the site (see below), but RSnake at ha.ckers.org had a rather amusing way to deal with the problem.RSnake used IP cloaking to serve different content to the IP that was swiping…

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 that the referenced content is located at the top of the page, but this is not possible when there is no more page to scroll.  Even if it does manage to do so, it is still helpful to highlight it somehow after the move…

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 there is any easy way to find this stuff generally.  Yes, even for Google.  Clever spammers will be doing this sort of thing for awhile.  Google will nail the lousy spammers that cut and pre-made paste scripts with a common signature, just as the Feds catch the script kiddies running precompiled exploit scripts…

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.  One of earliest cited problems is that Google is kicking many pages out of the main index and into the supplemental index.  Many web masters complained, and Google listened — at least temporarily.  Now Matt Cutts says something ambiguous like "I believe any changes on the [June] 27th were refreshing data used by an…

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 before, it has a whitelist. Obviously, you may want to whitelist your own site!2) It adds the parameter to a preeexisting rel attribute if applicable, i.e. rel="foo" becomes rel="foo,nofollow" 3) Works on unquoted parameters, i.e. rel=foo. So here it is:If you don't know why this is…

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 Google's most recent actions that are, in my opinion, aimed at swiping Microsoft employees. One of them, Kai-Fu Lee, was apparently an integral part of Microsoft's search engine team. The result was an ugly law suit and a later undisclosed settlement. He is currently president of Google in China. Microsoft argued that Lee…