Posts Tagged ‘search engine spam’

SEO Snakeoil

Oct 14, 2009

The blogosphere is abuzz with the publication of an inflammatory blog post entitled “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists,” written by a web designer by the name of Derek Powazek.  The short version of his thoughts is that SEO is pure snakeoil, that good SEO is just good design, and no one should ever pay for SEO.

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

Like all good rants, his comments have garnered tremendous attention and citations from industry voices and bloggers (and here’s me adding to the pile).  Danny Sullivan has written on it not once but twice.  Over at SEOBook Peter wrote up a nice commentary on the issue.

The Issue

Part of Derek’s whole problem is a confusion and distortion of terms.  “SEO” is a term beloved by many and despised by still more.  It doesn’t fully describe the methods and/or tactics involved in promoting a website online.  “Online Marketing” or “Internet Marketing” is a better catch-all term.  What Derek means by SEO is in truth “shady spammers who try to game the system in various dishonest ways.” Guess what – most online marketers don’t do that.  Of course everyone is against that – but he’s putting forth his narrow view and experience of this topic as Truth.

All in all his post has been a great opportunity for discussion and commentary – a true example of great link bait at work, whether it was conscious or not.  He ends with a statement that I couldn’t agree with more:

“Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

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Why duplicate content is a problem

Oct 17, 2008

duplicate content can hurt search engine rankingsNow, more than ever, duplicate content has become an issue in terms of organic search engine rankings. With the popularity of wiki or hub pages and social media profiles, many people are relying on the copy and paste method of content creation. While you may think this is a quick way to spread the word about your or your business (say, by taking a section from your About page on your website and pasting it somewhere else), what you’re actually doing is generating duplicate content, which is a big Google no-no.

While it’s well-known that duplicate content can negatively affect your rankings, due to filters search engines have implemented to do away with spam, it’s not very clear what constitutes as duplicate content. There’s no real way to know how much is OK to be copied. E-commerce sites, for example, will often have a lot of the same information in product descriptions as other websites, and there’s not really a way around that. The best advice is to avoid taking too much–large sections of text or entire pages–and recreating them. If you’re wondering if you could come off as spammy, it’s best to do a little revision.

One of the most common duplicate content issues arises when people rename a page of their website and forget to redirect the old URL to the new page. If you just leave the old page up and the new page has much of the same content, that counts as duplicate content and could raise a red  flag in search engines. Even if you change the content, it’s a best practice to redirect to the new page or site, anyway.

Unsure if your site could contain duplicate content? Try this free tool from Copyscape.

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URLs: how long is too long?

Jun 23, 2008

In terms of SEO, descriptive URLs for inside pages are best. Try to avoid abbreviations or shortening/combining words until they’re nonsensical jargon. Easy enough to remember. But, on the flip-side, there’s speculation that being too descriptive (and too long) and come off as spammy, and may actually hurt your search engine ranking.

So, what’s too long? Here’s an example discussed on Seroundtable.com:

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-coffee-machine-blender-juicer-channel7-sunrise-australia-42.html

Wow, that’s a lot of keywords crammed into one URL. Even if it’s not clear if such a long URL would hurt a page ranking, you can be almost certain no one would remember that URL, which is another reason to have concise ones to begin with.

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