

SEO Advice from Someone Not Selling It (Some Contrarian) - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-tips.html

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jrockway
SEO tips seem a lot like black magic to me. Nobody ever explains _why_ , and
nobody shows any data... they just say things you are supposed to believe. I
find this annoying.

(I have never focused on SEO, and my website always comes up for terms that I
expect it to come up for.)

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rgrieselhuber
The people selling black magic tend to use techniques that end up getting them
busted in the long term. But there are some things that are just good
practices from an SEO perspective and have nice usability and accessibility
benefits.

There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and
similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)

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azanar
_There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and
similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)_

Not just directed at rgrieselhuber so much as the whole community, what would
you say are the predominance of such companies relative the whole SEO market?

My experience so far has suggested a vast number are just floating on borrowed
time until someone busts them, but I'll be the first to admit my sampling
might be biased.

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wheels
I end up having a lot of people ask me "SEO" questions which basically just
amount to understanding PageRank and the basics of Google's ranking-fu. What
I've seen is that the desire for SEO comes from and ok place -- people just
seeing page ranking as black magic and wanting someone to demystify it. Nerds
tend to take for granted understanding the basics of web search. A surprising
number of people in the web world have no basic grasp of the concepts, but
still know that showing up in search results is important for them.

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randfish
I left a comment on Gabriel's blog, but if you're a startup building a site
and doing SEO, be careful not to take all of this advice, particularly #9 and
#13, but #6 is also not entirely wise.

p.s. Yes, technically I fit into the "someone selling it" category, but I also
despise misinformation on this subject.

p.p.s. sachinag - your assessment of "independence" due to being on a
subdomain and use of "pass PageRank" isn't accurate either. All pages pass
PageRank, and PageRank is not limited to "independent domains." There are
other link weighting factors that certainly do apply to separate "root
domains" but the logic you're trying to apply isn't going to help get better
rankings in the way you suggest.

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patio11
#13 (write less pages and less text to conserve ranking potential) is directly
contrary to both the truth and my experience. The more content I add to my
website, the better it ranks in aggregate and the better the front page ranks
in particular. If you want I can even show you a graph of amount of content
versus traffic as a result of Google. Let me spoil the surprise: it fits n *
(# pages) ^ (1 + y).

Your pages do compete against each other in some narrow senses: for any given
query, you'll typically be capped at two results in the SERP (results page),
so if you had a third best option on your site it gets left out in the cold.
However, pages on your website are (and _should be treated as_ ) comrades in
arms.

The more links my page on, e.g., Jane Austen bingo cards collects, the more
trust my domain will have and the more juice that individual page will pass to
the literature category its in and the other page it links to. This helps me
rank both the other literature pages (which have scant anything to do with
Jane Austen) and also the almost wholly unrelated, e.g., Easter bingo.

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epi0Bauqu
As I said in the blog comments, I realize #13 conflicts with #10 & #11, but
who ever said it couldn't :) ? It's all about your SEO goals & priorities.

Sure, in general, the more content, the more Google traffic you are going to
get. I'm not really disputing that. All I'm saying is if you take away stuff,
the ranking that is left will be concentrated on what is left on the page.

For example, take the situation where you really convert on one key phrase and
not much on anything else. In that situation, you really want to concentrate
on that term and you probably want to strip out things that don't help you
rank on that term. This advice becomes most useful on the homepage/landing
page itself.

In any case, I've noticed it and wanted people to be aware of it, because it
isn't that obvious. I'm not saying you should do it or that it is universally
true--probably not; after all, what in life is...?.

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boundlessdreamz
#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term
ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you
are doing it wrong. Sitemaps help is discovery. If some of your pages are not
crawled or just poorly crawled sitemaps can help in that regard. If those
pages have good content then you may rank well. The ranking benefit of Sitemap
is just a side effect.

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kiba
At my wiki, I don't try any SEO tricks at all. I just write a lot of content
and focus on submitting to social news site and post my wiki on in certain
forums to get feedback. Eventually, I just stop doing them.

Eventually, the search engine traffic just overtook the organic traffic that I
have built over the years.

I still don't know why search.live.com show up consistently as the #1 referrer
to my site even though it is completely about FOSS.

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fallentimes
It's referral spam that Live's crawler sends out. Google analytics appears to
block it, Clicky and numerous other analytics programs do not.

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epi0Bauqu
Do you know the exact cause? I see this too and it is just plain weird.

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eli
Google "MSNPTC". Last I checked, nobody could understand it, but it's a weird
bot. I had it _hammering_ one of my sites with bogus referrals. Many hits per
second. I just blocked it.

(ModSecurity is a fantastic Apache module for blocking bots, attacks, and all
manner of junk, btw)

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rms
Also see [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-
shee...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet)

Finally there are many degrees of so-called black magic and it's paranoid to
suggest that Google is instantly onto all of them and will inevitably penalize
your site. I would be happy to answer questions by email on this topic.

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epi0Bauqu
It's no secret that I'm paranoid about getting penalized, mainly because I
don't want to repeat that unfortunate experience.

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njharman
"Beware of nofollow links."

Is the end all be all search? Is it not worth trying to drive direct, actual
traffic(as opposed to search engine referrals) to your site.

If I provided service "foo" or consulted on "foo" I'd love to have links to my
articles/sites in the citations and or external sites list on the "foo"
wikipedia article.

