All posts by Tad Chef

SEO 2.0 living and working in Germany as a blog & SEO consultant. I'm blogging in English for SEO blogs around the world. My real name is Tadeusz Szewczyk but my friends who don't speak Polish - my mother tongue - call me Tad Chef or onreact.

In late 2007 Google officially announced that so-called paid links are outside its webmaster guidelines, and asked webmasters to report paid links they find on the Web via a special form. Fast forward to 2011 and you’d expect that paid links are long gone, like stuffing meta keyword tags or inflating keyword density on page. They aren’t.

There is even a surge of interest in buying links after many large brands have been caught using this technique successfully to manipulate Google’s algorithm for months.

These large brands are not alone; indeed, even Google itself has been sponsoring sites that link to it without using the nofollow attribute required by the Google webmaster guidelines. So it’s no wonder that in this world where some people are more equal than others, many webmasters resort to buying links from text link brokers who are still more or less openly selling them.

A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions. To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag.

One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service. Thus it would be an advantage to serve all of them the perfect meta description.

Expanding on this concept, I wanted to test whether you can add more than one or multiple meta description tags.

I wondered whether Google would accept more than one meta description tag. Also, I wanted to find out which one it would take – the first one?

In the test performed by Shark SEO, both descriptions contained in one tag could be triggered to appear in the search snippet depending on the keyphrase used in the search query. Would it be the case here as well?

panda*

After watching the SEO industry debating the Google Panda or Content Farmer update as it was initially dubbed for weeks and now that the update has hit the UK as well I decided to compile a list of the most important resources on it.

This update seems to have hit far more SEO practicioners than average webmasters, that might be one of the reasons for the popularity of the topic.

Google itself says that 12% of search results have been impacted initially while in a survey 40% of US SEO practicioners admitted they have lost traffic in the update aftermath.

Content farmers have been hit but not all of them, the content farm that was the reason for the discussion on content farms got away unscathed. Demand Media’s eHow thrives even better than before. Why? It wasn’t really a content farms update.

It was a quality update as Google itself refers to it. Thus all kinds of sites have been affected even legit sites not following the content farm business model at all. Some of them have been reinstated after a public outcry though so it seems to be a good idea to ask your PR department for help when your rankings plummeted.

By now I’m quite weary of the manifold failed attempts by Google to enter the social media arena. We had:

  1. Google Answers
  2. Google Bookmarks
  3. Google SearchWiki
  4. Google SideWiki
  5. Jaiku
  6. Google Wave
  7. Google Buzz

to name just the most known failed or abandoned Google social media services. As with most of the previous offerings, last week’s Google +1 started in a clumsy beta or rather alpha version. I didn’t even want to test it at first, but then all the search and SEO publications frantically reported about it so I felt compelled to give it a try.

I encountered many difficulties, and it took me two hours just to “get it”.

Google +1 is way too complicated right now and it was quite buggy when I tried it over recent days. The Google +1 page itself redirected me to 404 pages in German (I’m in Germany) despite browser and Google preferences.

When Google +1 finally worked for me, I tried to use it extensively but to no avail. Nobody has noticed my +1s it seems, and I barely see any by others.

Still, everybody is writing about it and the list of resources is already huge. Furthermore, there are high profile people in the SEO industry who actually suggest we jump into it. So to provide a more objective resource, I decided to compile the links and to enable you to make your own choices.

 

Paris: small Eiffel Tower*

These days the “content is king” and “you need great content” mantras are everywhere. While some people in the SEO industry challenge it by stating that great content is not enough, you need to push, promote or market it as well. I rarely see an article that actually explains what great content is or actually could be. Also, many sites that allegedly offer great content provide mostly big or just long content.

It seems that many content creators rely on size to measure greatness, while on the Web it’s often the other way around. The faster someone can convey a message, the greater the content.

With the latest Google update aimed at so-called content farms, we’ve seen a flurry of articles focused on content quality. This is a good start, as content farm articles are often just long without offering value. Long or even big shallow content is not enough these days. Great or quality content is the key.

I’ve been guilty of producing big content instead of great content myself here on SEOptimise. Let me explain the differences between the three common types of content you encounter on the Web today:

Google.com results for [news]

Outgoing links are one of the most underestimated weapons in the arsenal of every SEO and webmaster. After all, you want to get backlinks not give away links by linking out, don’t you? So it seems to be a contradiction. Popular wisdom also suggests that you would lose by linking out rather than gain some SEO value.

Probably you haven’t noticed yet as I haven’t told you yet: starting from 2011 I’m stepping up my efforts on SEOptimise. I write more regularly for the blog and I’ll help the SEOptimise team with their blog SEO among others. So I start with the basics: broken links.

Blogs amass a record number of broken links over the years as they often deal with short-lived developments or news.

The Web deteriorates fast and with it your site quality when you link out. In my last post I argued that linking out is important for SEO. That’s true but you have to keep in mind who you link out to. Seeing hundreds of websites either disappear or move without proper redirects can teach you a lot about the Web and links. What did I learn?

hidden*

Denouncing SEO is a popular sport these days on the Web. It always draws crowds. Over the years the simple “SEO is spam”, “SEO is dead” or “SEO has no future” rants have worn out though as they have no basis and have been repeated far too often without any proof.

The sport of denouncing SEO has evolved.

Bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs of the aspiring kind denounce SEO while understanding the importance of it. The obvious linkbaits do not work anymore so these people have to come up with some theory of SEO that makes at least some sense before they denounce it.

Also by now we witness a variation of motives to denounce SEO.

It’s not just the folly of mistaking SEO for spam or the attention grabbing anymore, you don’t get as many links for denouncing SEO these days, it’s too common by now. So you have to at least try to prove the point of your rant or at least package it in a way that does not look like one.

Recently I noticed that the SEOptimise blog ranks at #1 for the query [seo blog] in Google.co.uk

Then it dawned on me why we rank at #1: the single most important factor to getting there was linking out.

Yes, it wasn’t link building or even getting links; it was simply linking out. You could argue that it’s lots of great content etc, but many SEO blogs from the UK have great content. Nobody is linking out like we do though.

Ingredients*

Back in the day, SEO was quite a simple process consisting of three parts:

  1. Market and keyword research
  2. On-page optimisation
  3. Link building (off-page optimisation)

In 2011, it’s not that simple anymore. Depending on what niche or industry you are working in or rather what kind of site and business model you have, SEO can be a lot of things. SEO can or even has to consist of more disciplines.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →