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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,n…
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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 re…
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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. These are typically used by students on a shared Unix machine. However, I have also seen quite a few university professors post valuable academic information on such a web site.
Now, it is widely bel…
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Excerpt: Syndicated content is content that is authored by another source and placed on your web site under license. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, it also implies that a purchase of the said content occurs, but I suspect that definition will change soon. RSS (acronym: really simple syndication) feeds tend to be free, and very often available for use anywhere according to fair use laws. They are getting more and more pervasive. This is important, as free syndicated content on a simila…
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Excerpt: One of the criticisms I have of many CMSes is the fact that they frequently employ lousy WYSIWYG editors. These lousy WYSIWYG editors, in turn, generate lousy HTML. And on-page factors still matter for SEO, despite our new focus on quality inbound links.
Lousy HTML, that is, HTML that does not usefully incorporate H1, H2, and B tags, lacks defining structural elements that search engines can use to attribute importance to the various parts of a document. WYSIWYG editors typically do not …
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Excerpt: I was cruising around the SEO landscape during my lunch break. I know this is an old trick, but I just found a pretty funny example. An SEO firm, "Only Ten Matter," offers what its founder, Joseph Smith, calls "guaranteed SEO." He extolled the virtues of his services, and perhaps the Book of Mormon (Is he the same guy?), and claims to offer a guarantee that he will get you to the top 10 for "competitive keywords" like "guaranteed SEO."Well let'…
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Excerpt: If you actually read my little bio over on the left up there (you didn't, and I'm not so pompous as to think you care :)), you'd know I'm a white hat SEO who is currently doing some serious SEO consulting for a law firm. I'd like to share a few things I've noticed in this area, and complain about how horrible the scene really is.Link Spam:Many successful law firm web sites engage in bulk spam links. By that I don't mean comment-spam. I mean…
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Excerpt: Since Google has decided that cloaking, in fact, is not against the rules (not really, make sure you click that link), I have decided to post my simple cloaking toolkit written in PHP. I cannot support this thing, so please don't bombard me with emails. If you're very proficient in PHP, but never bothered to learn about cloaking, then this is for you. If you want to report a bug, email me at jsirovic AT gmail dot com. It's quite likely there are…
