Monthly Archives: May 2009

Are Blogger | Blogspot Blogs SEO Friendly?

Just because Blogger / Blogspot is owned by Google doesn’t make it SEO Friendly

For years I have been reading absurd suggestions that Google’s Blogger / Blogspot service is SEO friendly. At one time this was semi-true, and it is even possible with the current incarnation. However if you use the service “as intended”, without expert knowledge, you might find yourself up a creek without a paddle.

I am writing this on a Sunday, thus I am going to avoid vulgarities, cussing, and even an attention grabbing headline. The Google engineers at Blogger deserve that and more. Blogspot currently stinks for SEO.

Posted in blogging tips , SEO Blog | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Overnight Success

Whilst exploring historical backlinks on my old blogspot blog, I came across a comment I left that I decided needed to be recorded here…

Posted in Projects | Tagged | Comments closed

PageRank Update – Twitter Profiles – Tosh

Today we are going to face an avalanche of Technology bloggers who can’t help blogging about every intricate detail of Twitter in one way or another claiming that Google has devalued Twitter profiles in the search engine results pages (SERPs) or reduced the PageRank of profiles.

Whilst this is theoretically possible, it is also unlikely.

To understand why the change has happened

  • You have to understand SEO, external and internal linking, and have an advanced knowledge of how PageRank works. This gives me another chance to drop a very blatant affiliate link to Stomping The Search Engines 2 which is probably the best value (just a measly $1) high quality SEO training online. (http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/SEO-Training.html)
  • You need to study Twitter Linking structure over a period of time – snapshot SEO is for cowboys – even what I am writing here isn’t going to be highly accurate, because I don’t have access to analytics, server logs etc, and telling a script to analyse every page of Twitter just isn’t viable

I am not writing this just for another opportunity to pimp an affiliate link, but I am sick of poor SEO information out there among bloggers. I have suggested SEOs need to clean up old information, but to be honest, this is about as fundamental as it gets

I do have a fair understanding of SEO and linking structures, and I do monitor changes, not just the pretty toolbar PageRank Google updates every 3 months or so, or the ranking of my Twitter profile in the SERPs.

Here are a few of my more recent tweets on the topic:-

Posted in Google , SEO Blog , web 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

SEO Blogs Need A Serious Spring Clean

Stompernet are in the middle of a relaunch of their SEO Training product as an online course you can get access to immediately for $1 – when I first looked at the course it was a 2 DVD set last October.

Here is a blatant affiliate link – http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/SEO-Training.html

I listen to the “undercurrent” in SEO circles, and Stompernet is often criticized, though typically just by inferrence.

This post is to address some of the things I see repeatedly online, especially among SEO bloggers, and hopefully it will offer some additional benefit to bloggers in other niches.

Posted in Google , SEO Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Brain Solis and Techcrunch Blatantly Wrong About The Consequences Of Sponsored Reviews With Google

Google does not penalize for paid or sponsored reviews but can penalize for paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank – Brian Solis & Techcrunch are blatantly wrong.

As Techcrunch now has 2 million readers, many of them corporate, you would think they would be a little more careful publishing statements that are false, misleading or could seriously damage not just a single company, but a whole growing business sector, even if they clearly hate it. Opinion is one thing – stating facts that are wrong is in a totally different territory Here is an excerpt for the recent fluff piece for Brian Solis on Techcrunch

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.

Sarah Lacey’s recent piece was fluff as well

Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews – with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel=”nofollow”, javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc

I stated that Brian’s article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.

Posted in Google , marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

503 Service Unavailable Status Code Can Kill Your Search Traffic

This is a post I am sure the “Andy Beard Haters Club” will gloat over, but as I haven’t been able to find a resource anywhere on the effect extended use of 503 Service Unavailable can potentially have on a site, and in particular the effect on search traffic, I thought I should write about it.

Using 503 Server Unavailable For Extended Periods Can Kill Your Search Traffic

This isn’t your typical scenario – 503 errors are frequently sent when a server becomes overloaded, or there are some backend problems.

A search of the Google Webmaster Help forums doesn’t bring up a huge amount of cases, and mostly it is enquiring about what someone should do when they want to do some maintenance on a live server, probably for a short time.

In my case I didn’t plan to be in “Maintenance Mode” for an extended period.

Here is the complete timeline:

Posted in Google , SEO Blog , stats | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

First Link Priority – Is Stompernet Wrong?

Don’t just take the word of your favorite SEO blogger, learn to test ranking factors yourself.

When discussion took place about first link priority last year, there was certainly some disagreement, and also mention of a few “exceptions” to the rules.

My brain is wired to think of exceptions as things which can occur less frequently, or work-arounds that can be used to negate an otherwise common effect.

Prior Knowledge & Non-disclosure

Over the last few years a significant part of what I have written about on this blog has been about SEO – I try to be original, cutting-edge, providing a different perspective.

I don’t attend conferences, so what I wrote about isn’t something I have overheard at the bar, told in confidence, heard from a speaker on stage or anything else.

Recommending SEO products or courses is a little like tightrope walking – I don’t join any program that suggests either in the sales materials or legalese that it might be proprietary – I know tons of people treat proprietary knowledge casually – rip off other marketers etc.

I don’t

If information comes out in public that is from a notable source, and it has significant ramifications – thats worth blogging about, especially if I can offer perspective.

There are people I trust as sources, or whose opinion I value, even when they challenge my own view of the SEO world, and one of those is Halfdeck who occasionally blogs at SEO 4 Fun – last blog post a year ago. Better to catch Halfdeck on Twitter.

So I take stuff like this seriously…

Posted in SEO Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

A Geeky Look & Some Simple Solutions To Achieving First Link Priority & Referential Integrity With WordPress (Or Why WordPress SEO Themes Aren’t)

Think buying a custom premium WordPress SEO theme will give you perfect SEO? Think again…

I don’t think there is one “premium” WordPress Theme that doesn’t claim to be perfect for SEO “out-of-the-box”, so I thought I would bash some theme developer heads around and maybe knock some sense into them.

They might achieve 50:50 of what could be expected of a true SEO theme (though I haven’t seen the latest Semiologic Pro out in the wild), and potentially with the aid of 3rd party plugins currently available, they could reach 80:20.
However most claim they don’t need 3rd party plugins to achieve their eminence in WordPress SEO

That doesn’t leave WordPress SEO plugins off the hook, there isn’t one plugin that gets beyond 60:40 or with some tweeking possibly 70:30, depending on what factors you feel are important, or are aware of.

Awareness is certainly one of the problems…

Posted in SEO Blog , themes , wordpress | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Clickbank Automatic Bonus Delivery Systems

Clickbank Bonus Domination head-to-head with CB List Automator – 2 bonus delivery systems you have to consider.

I now own 2 scripts from 2 different authors to handle automatic delivery of Clickbank bonuses – this is something I hope to be able to handle in a radically different manner in the future, but for now, this is something I want to be able to automate with something off-the-shelf.

I paid for both of them

If you have seen marketing “gurus” suggesting that you send them an email to get a bonus, or submit a support ticket, then they obviously haven’t got their processes 100% sorted out.

Historically bonus automation was only possible by parsing sales tickets or somehow scraping data from the Clickbank interface. These days Clickbank have an API which can push data to an end point, though I believe it can only handle a single end point, thus you may end up using lots of Clickbank accounts for different things.

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Launch Tree Bonus From Stompernet

Am I am crazy? This is why you should buy Launch Tree from someone else. Read on to find out why, and decide for yourself.

Posted in marketing , Projects | Tagged , , | Comments closed


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