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Excerpt: The sites for the Free SEO Site Clinic are selected!  I will be reviewing the sites www.elitehosts.com and www.arlin.net.  Both are web hosting sites.  This is an ultra-competitive industry in many ways — including SEO.  I have some ideas to help drive traffic with long tail keywords in the aggregate.  That's a hint as to what I will suggest.  This will be in addition to the mundane recommendations to resolve the standard SEO mistakes and concerns.  The in…

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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-ti…

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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 keyw…

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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 "…

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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 …

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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 Bi…

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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…

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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 h…