50 good SEO articles

Compilations of content – top 10 this, 5 way to do so – has become one of the prime advices for writing linkable content. This list of 50 of the years best SEO articles is very linkable and has thus not only served is purpuse as linkbait, but also delayed my going to bed by some hours…

Go read: The Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year.

In the top of the list you’ll find articles by Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Aaron Wall (SEOBook), Rand Fishkin (SEO Moz), and Matt Cutts (Google).

SERP Anatomy by Matt Cutts

My favourite Google person (Matt Cutts) seems to have been inspired by my favourite not-Google person (Rand Fishkin) and started a whiteboard-venture to tell a little something about Google.

The first session:

Matt talks about the anatomy of a search result, and gives some useful tips on how you can help improve how your site appears in our results pages. This talk covers everything you’ll see in a search result, including page title, page description, and sitelinks, and explains those other elements that can appear, such as stock quotes, cached pages links, and more.

I’ve always been a strong advokate for meta descriptions in order to get precise results in the SERP, but the meta description is often disregarded due to it’s shaded past as SEO-dumping ground. Well, next time this debate arises, I’ll have Matt’s words to back me up :-)

Read more: The anatomy of a search result

…or watch the video:

Clamp-down on Cloaking – the Google scattergun

…and so the story goes that one day Cloaking-system.com came forth and boldly announced that they would violate Google´s almost canonical Webmaster’s Guidelines and more precisely the section about cloaking:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. Some examples of cloaking include: * Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users. * Serving different content to search engines than to users.

Here’s how Cloaking System describe their method: (from IP-delivery @ Cloaking System)

IP-delivery is the type of cloaking we use at Cloaking System. IP-delivery means that content is delivered, based on different IP-addresses. IP-delivery based on country IP’s is used by Google. When you type in www.google.com in your browsers address bar, you are automatically shown Google’s page in your own language… At Cloaking System we use IP-delivery a bit differently. We take the IP-addresses from the search engines and search robots and show them the content of one page, and show a different content to the visitors – your visitors. They are shown the page on your website that you want them to see.

The observant reader will notice that Google’s guidelines and Cloaking System´s method have some discrepancies. Now, openly admitting to corrupting Google’s search results can be compared to entering a the arena for a bullfight. Brave Cloaker Happy Cloaker Somehow, these two images remind me of each other… So… expectedly, Google blocks Cloaking System from their index – but our heroes are not duped at all. Like true heroes, they stand fast on their right of way, defending their points of views. On SEO Ninjas some of the central people from Cloaking System have a say: Google Promotes Cloaking. Impressive! True bravery. They are almost on par with Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. Now, putting ourselves in the place of the bull/Google, what course of action can be taken do when their first attempt to still the rebels has failed? But of course – find customers who have bought services from Cloaking System – and if unsuccesfull – find out where the rebels work and kick them out of the index too. And so ReFocus, the white hat-chapter of Cloaking System, was also booted out of Google’s index. That’ll teach them… Maybe someday we will see ReFocus back in Googles index – but until then they’ll have to follow the wise word of the Bible: “And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also.” (Luke 6:29) And so it seems this time round, the bull won… Sad Cloaker

globalwarming awareness2007 – hvad er nu det?

Som oftest når forskellige SEO-virksomheder sætter en optimeringskonkurrenve igang er det med fokus på et eller andet nonsensord – som oftest “[virksomhedens navn] er for seje” stavet baglæns. Der skal ikke mange timers erfaring i internetmarkedsføring til for at se at de fleste konkurrencer af den type blot er slet skjulte forsøg på at skabe opmærskomhed til virksomheden. Det er denne konkurrence utvivlsomt også, men jeg vil alligevel give arrangørerne et lille klap på skulderen/skuldrene for at sætte et søgeord med lidt mening i spil: globalwarming awareness2007.
Ideen er at man på en given dato skal ligge som en samlet nummer 1 på de 3 store søgemaskiner. Nedenfor kan du se resultaterne på de forskellige søgemaskiner:
Google: globalwarming awareness2007,
Yahoo: globalwarming awareness2007 og
MSN: globalwarming awareness2007.

Vil du læse mere om ‘verdensmesterskabet i SEO’ og søgeordet ‘globalwarming awareness2007′, så er det her det sker.

Update:
Der er kommet en dansk deltager i konkurrencen. Det drejer sig om www.globalwarming-awareness2007.dk. Så der er hermed givet lidt link-love til projektet herfra :-)

Info til menigmand:
Hvis du undrer dig over tekstens høje gentagelsesfrekvens af frasen globalwarming awareness2007, så er et helt bevidst træk fra undertegnedes side for at illustrere et tiltag de de fleste deltagere i konkurrencen nok vil arbejde ihærdigt med: høj koncentration af søgefrasen ‘globalwarming awareness2007′ i hele teksten. Dette giver nemlig sammen med mange andre faktorer de bedste muligheder for at opnå placeringer blandt søgemaskinernes øverste resultater.

Info til SEO-guys:

Det er interessant at Google allerede 2 dage efter offentliggørelsen af søgefrasen globalwarming awareness2007, er 12700 resultater i Google. Som nedenstående skærmprint viser, er de øverst rangerende domæner allerede registreret og indekseret samme dag som offentliggørelsen af søgefrasen. Og så er det jeg tænker – hvordan hulen kan det lade sig gøre? Er det Google Sitemaps, der er bøffet op? Er alle deltagerne, der har gode forbindelser? Eller er det Matt Cutts, der egenhændigt har fundet alle deltagerne og indekseret dem?
Og i samme omgang er det ret interessant at se forskellene på antal indekserede sider hos Google, Yahoo og MSN. Google har som sagt 12700 sider efter 2 dage. Yahoo har 128 (og her er med globalwarming-tag-arkivet på del.icio.us på 1-pladsen). MSN har 0, zip, ingen, none.
globalwarming awareness2007 screenshot

SEO Mastermind

Don Barslundhar været så venlig at linke til mig med teksten ‘SEO Mastermind’ – og det er jeg meget taknemmelig for. Ifølge Don B er intentionen at få denne blog til at dukke op på Google Søgningen SEO Mastermind.
Og da jeg naturligvis ikke vil modsætte mig prædikatet ‘SEO Mastermind’, ville jeg da lige hjælpe den venlige intention på vej med dette indlæg – som naturligvis er skrevet med samme intention: 1. pladsen i Google på SEO Mastermind

No WWW

No WWW er løsningen hvis du som jeg ikke er meget begejstret for de 3 W i internetadressen. Meget, meget simpelt. Download. Upload. Aktivér. Og så kan kan prale af at være: Class C

Hvis man hellere vil beholde sine W’er, kan man bruge dette plugin. Under alle omstændigheder bør man I et SEO-perspektiv vælge om man vil det ene eller det andet.

En ting er at et website ofte både vises med og uden www. EN anden ting er når et website ikke lader folk se indholdet uden www. Det har jeg brokket mig over for lang tid siden.

Tags in the head

Ever wanted an easy way to add tags as keywords to your posts? Ever wanted to use the excerpt as meta description? I have. And until now, I’ve been using the Headspace Plugin (quite a good plugin, but requires some tinkering and tampering).

Enter Tags in the head. Basically, you gain same results using the two plugins – Tags in the head is just soooo much easier to use…

Google Analytics

Instead of continuing Urchins activities, Google lauched Google Analytics – which in short is Urchin for free. Until now, I’ve been playing with Statcounter, which also is free but with a limited log file size.

I started using Google Analytics last week, and until now I am very happy with the detail of the data, although the interface is not as intuitive as Statcounters (The interfaces of pay-to-use tools, Traceworks and Webtrends are also better).

More thoughts on Google’s motvation for offering free web statistic tools:
Search engine Journal

more to come…