I don’t know what’s funnier, the fact that an SEO blog is ranking for “nude jaime pressly” or the fact that people are clicking on that image!
Archive for the ‘vancouver seo’ Category
Hot SEO sex! Image search results are awesome!
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Does a TLD matter for Google results?
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009I’m gonna say emphatically “Yes”, as I’ve been following my special vanity SERPs for “Keith Greene”. My main competition is a christian rock singer from the ’70s and a chef who once appeared on Hell’s Kitchen. Google still thinks I mean the non-Irish spelling of “Greene”, but what’s interesting is my online SEO resume ranks on page 1 for “keith greene” on Google.com (New Jersey proxy), but not on Google.ca (my home country):
Google.com results for "keith greene"
Google.ca results for "keith greene"
I host on Godaddy, which I gather the server is somewhere in the US, so this makes sense, but I’m a little disappointed in Google for not being able to recognize what country I’m from.. how rude!
The Curious Case of Kiwi Collection
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009How can you tell if your site has been given a penalty?
Its a long tail question with 54,600,000 results in Google, but nobody really seems to have a concrete answer. I’ve seen some things in my time that I would consider a penality, and I’ve seen some things that are just plain weird. One of those is Kiwi Collection. Three of my good SEO friends are working at this website, and they all have been cursed with a seemingly insolvable dilemma: the homepage refuses to rank. They have tried many different tests, experiments, pleading to the gods, but still no dice. What is even more bizarre is that (until recently) their site was ranked as a PR6! They get front page results for highly competitive keywords like “best luxury hotels”, but their homepage www.kiwicollection.com can’t even be found in the supplimental index.
I took a look at the site a few months back and learned they were inadvertantly hiding text and links due to some technical issues (CSS & Javascript.. go figure). It was through that investigation that I learned that Google can indeed read onpage CSS, but not linked stylesheets. So, rule of thumb #1: Don’t use inline CSS… ever. Not even as a joke, or a dare.
So, they got the site cleaned up, no hidden text/links and it validates perfectly, but still no love from Google. They tried another test by putting the same code on an additional page (www.kiwicollection.com/best-hotels.php) and it ranks like gangbusters. Clearly, they have a poisoned URL, but it is only that URL, and not the site. I’ve seen page level penalties where a single page will get kicked out of the index, but a perfectly clean page that’s a PR6? Very odd.
Just recently, their homepage dropped to a PR0. I suspect that may be due to them adding the link canonical tag pointing that page to /best-hotels.php, and that the PR is being transferred.
It should be interesting to see how it transpires…
The Truth Revealed pt 2!
Monday, April 20th, 2009Well, I’ve finally moved on from my previous job as the Senior SEO Strategist for Fiver Media. For those unfamiliar with Fiver, allow me to give some history. Fiver Media is a marketing company who’s client is Morris Mohawk Gaming, the sole licensee of the Bodog Brand in North America. I started at Fiver about 2 months after Bodog.com was seized in a patent dispute with 1st Technology, and they had changed their domain name to Bodoglife.com. I started as a Junior SEO, and one of my first jobs was SERP reporting, which I did by hand, and literally took hours as I searched the top 100 results for non-branded terms, only to type “not found” into my spreadsheet.
But, things changed fast at Fiver, and nearly two years later, we were back on top for most of our non-branded queries, and I had moved up to the Senior SEO Strategist position (aka “Head of SEO” as many email references called me). I learned a lot, quite quickly in that environment, and had some incredibly knowledgeable and way-to-intelligent-for-their-own-good teachers to guide my path. I wouldn’t change that for the world, but as they say “all things must pass”, and I moved on like my predecessors before me.
Obviously, I’m not going to give away too many secrets on how our small IM team was able to take a brand new domain and position it almost back to where it was before (there are no 301 redirects when someone else owns your domain!), but what I will say is that anyone who is still in denial about the power of a Brand in search are going to soon have a very harsh awakening.
So, the question that may be on your mind… ”Is this the end of your battle with Google?” Fear not, friends and readers, for I’m right back in the saddle starting up an internet marketing arm for Thirdi.com. Thirdi is a small boutique company that provides software and CMS systems, mainly for not-for-profit organizations. It was started by a young go-getter named Matt Friesen, and it looks like its going to be a lot of fun. I will be contributing SEO Tips and Advice on the Thirdi Blog titled “Senses”, so if you want more SEO related stuff, feel free to visit us there.
We’ll also be doing consulting, and Search Engine Optimization at reasonable rates, if you’re interested… or if you happened to lose your domain name in some legal dispute and want to know how to regain your non-branded search traffic!
Vancouver SEO is playing in the big leagues
Friday, April 17th, 2009Although it appears to be another glitch in the matrix, I hit page 1 for “seo blog google” (see screenshot), and can now boast that I’m in the same cyberspace as such esteemed sites as SEObook, SEOMoz, SEOBlackhat, and Matt Cutts… oh yeah, and GoogleBlog.
What does this mean? Well, absolutely nothing… but hey, I take what I can get!
Screenshot of "seo blog google" SERPs
Search Engine Optimization Victory!
Sunday, March 8th, 2009Well, I’m not sure it’ll hold, but still my 4 month old SEO resume has hit page 1 in Google. I took a screenshot to commemorate the event.
Google SERPs for SEO Resume
Happy sunday!
Yahoo for Yahoo!
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Well, as much as it is a lesser engine, Yahoo! is the winner for me finally ranking #1 for my semi-branded term “vancouver seo”:
http://ca.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG75M4XbBJGH4BlbbqFAx.?p=vancouver+seo&fr=sfp&fr2=&iscqry=
I’m still sitting in the low 50’s in Google, but since I started this SEO blog, there have been at least 500,000 more queries added to the term. Bunch of Johnny-come-lately car salesmen, I suspect…
Someday, I’m going to migrate this site over to a non-blogspot software so I can actually do meta updates that don’t require adding 10 lines of code to my template file everytime I create a new post…
In my professional opinion, Blogspot is one of the least Search Engine friendly blogging platforms. Ironic, as its owned by Google… I dream of the day that Yahoo! takes over, and buys Google in a hostile takeover.
Yahoogle, anyone?
Breaking News on Spam Crackdown!
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
Spam Crackdown Threatens Koy4Goff’s Penis Enlarger, Free iPod Industry
I love the Onion…
SEO the deep blue Vancouver Ocean with Google Earth
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009So, like all good SEOs, I regularly check my analytics to see all the fun and exciting ways people find my site. One thing I’ve noticed is a lot of bounce traffic for keywords like “google sea” and “google blue sea”, which I thought was odd.
I named this blog as a play on a classic song “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (my favorite being the Louis Armstrong version off the album “Stardust”. What I didn’t realize when I came up with that name was that Google had its eyes on spidering the ocean floor for Google Earth. So, to fufill the limited audience, here’s a video for anyone interested in Google Earth, or more specifically, Google Blue Sea…
I’m sure spammers will find a way to manipulate this so that their viagra sites show up there… Get ready, optimizers! Time to SEO the ocean floor!
White Hat SEO VS Black Hat SEO (who can cast fireball first?)
Friday, December 26th, 2008Being bogged down by work and the holidays, I haven’t had much time for SEO reflection, but recently, an event sparked some of my thoughts towards search engine optimization…
For the uninitiated, let me give you a little terminology lesson. For some reason, the SEO community is divided into two camps, White Hat and Black Hat. Those two Final Fantasy-esque terms originally come from descriptors for hackers (or h4×0r5). A Black Hat hacker is a malicious villian who breaks into your computer system and steals all your personal information, secret government files, your wife and the deed to your house… and s/he does it because you’re using Windows Vista. A White Hat hacker is a noble internet knight who breaks into your computer system and tells you he could’ve stolen all your personal information, secret government files, your wife and the deed to your house… and s/he does it out of the goodness of their hearts…
Somewhere along the line, the SEO community also picked up this terminology and applied it to methods of optimization. The White Hats follow Google Webmaster guidelines to the letter, and shun any notion of what they are doing is spamming. Black Hats utilize technical hitches in search algorithms to achive quick results at the risk of being busted by the Google cops, and think that White Hats are whinning babies.
I’ll be honest, when I first heard of these distinctions, I thought it was pretty cool. It reminded me of when I played Dungeons and Dragons when I was 9. The more I started doing SEO, the more I started to realize the whole concept was really kind of stupid.
“Really? You’re a noble and just individual because you’ve never used comment spam?”
“Really? You’re an internet super genius because you can do a 302 redirection to trick Google?”
Guess what? You’re in Marketing! Its all evil! Let me give you a quote from Bill Hicks:
“There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself – seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously… You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage.”
Now, before you start your moaning and complaining, yes I do realize that I am in the same boat. Yes, I am in marketing, but I can accept being Satan’s spawn if it means never having to work in retail again…
I suppose what I’m getting at is, if you do Internet Marketing, you’re a spammer. There is no ifs ands or buts. If you still don’t believe me, take this simple test…
Have you ever:
a) emailed someone out of the blue in hopes you would get a link?
b) looked at the content of your website and added a bunch of keywords to increase the density?
c) commented on someone’s blog and and added your website housed in keyword rich anchors?
d) used javascript?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, yes Virginia, you are a spammer. If you answered no to all of these questions, then you obviously work in retail.
Okay, enough ranting.
