Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

Registered a domain and no clue what to do with it?

Sometimes I’m just registering domains because I think that specific domain name could be worth something. However, I don’t always have an idea for them.

A good advise is to check the domain with different extensions. Let’s say you registered my-domain.de. Now check out my-domain.com, my-domain.net, my-domain.org, etc. and see what they did with that specific domain.

That might help you with building an idea for your domain!

SEO Facts and Myths – W3C Validation, Dynamic Pages, Duplicate Content

Some interesting facts about SEO taken from Matt Cutt’s latest video sessions:

  • When you launch a new website, rather launch it with a few thousands pages instead of millions. After that, add pages in a healthy period of time.
  • Be sure to have unique pages!
  • Don’t worry about W3C validation too much. It’s good to validate but it’s not necessary. Usability and how the pag looks should be your first thing to worry about. Personally I never really cared about W3C validation because in my opinion they’re living in the past.
  • Dynamic pages with query strings are crawled by most searchengines just one link deeper. If you have to use dynamic query string pages be sure to keep your parameters short and avoid long numbers as they might be treated as session ids.
  • Try to use mod_rewrite or simliar techniques to make your urls more friendly and readable
  • GEOIP targeting is not treated as cloaking, however, you should never treat the googlebot or any other searchengine bot in a special way. Cloaking means to show different content to searchengine bots than to users.
  • Google does a lot of duplicate content detections. There are several forms of duplicate content, like full duplicates or just near duplicates. Be sure to write as unique pages as possible and you won’t get into trouble.

That’s a short summary of what I written down while listening to the videos.

Dropped Link-Vault

I finally decided to drop Link-Vault, I removed the code from every website I maintain.

Reasons for that:

  • The LinkVault website is banned from Google
  • I see lots of auctions about selling Vaultage on eBay (by the admins)
  • The admins are not responding on the official forum anymore
  • People say Google decreases the value of sites displaying Link-Vault Links

I wasn’t sure at first if I really gonna drop them, but in the meantime things have even gone worse than before.

Personally I suggest to drop Link-Vault. In long-term your site may experience penalities if you still use it.

Google supports META NOODP tag

Matt Cutts writes:

In some circumstances, Google uses descriptions from the Open Directory Project as the title and snippet for a web result; this tag lets you opt out of the ODP title and description.

This can be pretty annoying if you want your chosen title to appear in the Searchengines and someone else submitted your site into dmoz with a totally or slightly different title.

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

So that’s indeed a very cool meta tag and you should use it by default, just to be safe.

The Pirate Bay making over 20,000 a day

The file sharing site The Pirate Bay are set to be making over $25328 a day, with single day advertisements costing 20,000.

The past four months the Swedish company Eastpoint Media have sold ads for The Pirate Bay for an average of 60,000 per month, according to sales manager Luar Busó. The police raid on 31 May resulted in even more visitors to the site and prices for ads went up accordingly.

‘The biggest ads today cost 20,000 and so far we’ve sold four’, says Luar.

Eastpoint sell ads for The Pirate Bay in the Scandinavian market. File sharing is most widespread in Sweden where many people have broadband. But The Pirate Bay runs in twenty five different languages and gets visitors from all corners of the planet.

I expected that Priate Bay probably achieves some nice earnings but I didn’t expect it to be that high. Not bad.

Fake Forum Statistics

Obviously it does help when starting a new forum! In the past I used to register fake accounts myself on new forums I created and started posting. Nowadays it’s a little bit easier. Most forums run vBulletin, so if you run vBulletin, too, there’s already a pre-built hack for you:


Fake Community Statistics

Here’s an example of what it does:

Total registered members: 5
Added amount: 100
Forumhome now shows instead of 5:
Total registered members: 105

Of course, if a new member registeres it will be 106.

This is helping newly created forums to get off the ground. However, my manual method also included manual posting which is not part of this hack. So you better combine this hack with posting some threads here and there.

I made a custom solution for the Invision Power Board, if you’re interested leave a comment.

Unfortunately there are so many forums in the internet that in most cased you won’t succeed with your forum without pushing it in the first place. Noone will register on a ghost forum, that’s a fact.

I’m planning on releasing a custom written script for an automated posting routine soon. With this script you will be able to feed your forum with postings in a matter of seconds, based on individual topic sources. Check back every now and then to find out when it’s being released.

..have a nice day!

CommunityServer bug with URL Rewriting?

There might be some kind of problems with the URL Rewriting in ASP.NET v2. CommunityServer is affected by this as you can see on this Screenshot:

click for img

This screenshot also shows you where to get this Tool – Fiddler ;).

First I made some tests with a site developed by us, we use custom URL Rewriting in the global.asax and everything runs fine, that’s why I’m not sure if this is really an ASP.NET v2 issue as it’s being claimed to be one by a couple of people.

Later on you see the CommunityServer Request and the possible bug: A 302 redirect instead of a 200 redirect which is very bad for SearchEngines. Due to this fact your site may drop out of most SearchEngines. Matt Cutts blogged on this, too: ASP.NET 2 + url rewriting considered harmful in some cases.

Anyone else got problems with a 302 Redirect when using URL Rewriting?

We are using Context.RewritePath to perform our URL Rewriting and didn’t run into any problems so far.

My favorite SEO Tool

This URL is in my opinion pretty unique because of it’s great performance and very usuable tools. I’m using it for months for all kind of SEO related stuff.

What you find there is:

  • Link Value (pretty good to check if it’s worth to make a Link Exchange with someone)
  • Analysis / Linkpop (amount of backlinks, indexed sites, Google PageRank)
  • Domain Popularity (shows you all backlinks for the given domain, including up to 10 subpages per backlinking domain, host IP and Google PageRank)
  • Multi Pagerank (Great for checking other Datacenters for your PR – e.g. in case of an upcoming PR update)
  • .. and lots of other useful tools

I decided to share this gem with all my blog readers, so here you go:
LinkVendor – Professional SEO Tools

Antother very useful Tool is to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty: Duplicate Content Checker

Google PageRank update rolled back

Too bad, the changes were not persitant. Anyway, expect an update in the near future. In case you were lucky enough to check your ranks yesterday: It looks like they were pretty authentic, I think those numbers will go live with the full update.

If you weren’t satisfied with your new PageRank – now you got a little more time left for trying to improve your ranking! 😉

Google PageRank update in progress!

I just checked several Datacenters and many of my new sites got finally PageRank! As of now, these Datacenters carry the new PageRank already:

  • 64.233.179.104
  • 64.233.185.99
  • 64.233.185.104
  • 64.233.179.99
  • 64.233.171.99
  • 64.233.171.147
  • 64.233.171.104

There are several Multi PageRank checkers out there which make it easier for you to aquire your new PageRank, just google them.

Time to go and check your new Rankings! 🙂

GBuy is now officially known as Google Checkout

Google finally launched their Payment Service. Many people speculated about the name and now we have an answer: Google Checkout.

Google Checkout helps you increase sales.
And process them for free when you advertise with Google.

That is the first thing you read when you visit the Google Checkout Website.

I wanted to use the new service for my Shopping Systems but one little input field stopped me: Country. For now they only accept Customers and Merchanents from the United States. Too bad. They are planning to expand their service to Europe but until now no date has been announced.

The system is tightly bound to AdWords and features little `Buy Now` Buttons when using AdWords as Merchanent. Here is an Overview:

  • Pay with a single Login (like PayPal)
  • Financing (like PayPal)
  • Costs: 2% of the Transaction + 20 US-Cent (almost like PayPal: 1,9% + 30 US-Cent)
  • Deductibles for acquisitions by using AdWords

Let’s see how this evolves..

Trackback Spam

We all know what spam is, the annoying Viagra E-Mails in our Inbox, the comments stuffed with links or even the SMS Messages on your Handy bugging you to call some Dating Hotline. There are a couple of popular spam forms:

  • Spam email = the grandfather of them all
  • Spam usenet postings = the grandma of them all
  • Spam blogs = splogs
  • Spam pings = spings
  • Spam referrers = it’s dying… but not yet gone
  • Spam blog comments

.. and the newest invention is Spam Trackbacks. Most WordPress Users get a notification and comment about Trackbacks by default. The spammer would post garbarge on his blog about your blog entry and you get a notification because of your blog’s settings. Now you click on the URL to see what the hell he is writing and voila – the Spammer gets his wanted traffic.

Now it’s questionable how effective this is, but it’s pretty annoying for sure. The Volume is increasing by the number of newly created Blogs. As this kind of spam is rising we should consider turning off Trackbacks, sad but true. Another feature exploited to death.

New Webmaster Forum

Run by Jon of Super Affiliate Marketing Blog they are doing a few things that the other forums have avoided, including allowing graphical sigs and affiliate links. Right now its Monday morning and there are already 335 members and over 4000 posts.

Will WickedFire be able to compete with other big Boards like Sitepoint, DigitalPoint, WebmasterWorld or v7n? Let’s wait and see.

It’s definitely worth to register there: Wicked Fire

The perfect AdSense Placement

I recently read that article here: AdSense Strategy: No Borders, Mo’ Money at V7N from Peter Da Vanzo and would like to add a little follow up, very nice article by the way :).

After you removed all borders from your AdSense Ads and formated its colours there’s one alignment which serves great power. Look at this screenshot for example:


The perfect AdSense Design

What you see here is AdSense aligned in a way to show up as additional Navigation Bar. Of course it’s not a real navigation bar of that site but it looks like it. Newbies will probably go and click on those items because they think it’s part of the Navigation.

If you want to create such an AdSense-Navigation-Bar you need to go for a Text-Link Ad with border and font colour adjusted to your site, read the article posted above for more information about that.

Google PageRank update in Progress!

Pretty odd timing in fact but it might be related to BigDaddy – which went live a couple of days ago. No official statements so far.

This Blog went from PR0 to PR4, quite ok for the short online time 😉 You can check your new PageRank by using different Datacenters, there are several Tools out there to achieve that.