August 2007

Being relevant in an SEO state of mind

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 10, 2007 in Content Theory

Relevance is determined by context, but the context of which I speak is not created through words on a Web document. We shape the context of relevance through our perspective, the way we see the Web, search engines, and users.
Three ingredients must be brought together to form relevance: a searcher’s query, a search engine’s [...]

SEO Theory and the lack of social media

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 9, 2007 in General

We’ve been encouraged more than once (and in more than one way) to participate in social media. When I say “we” I mean the SEO Theory blog. In fact, several of you have submitted SEO Theory posts to various social media sites, including Sphinn.
All promotion is appreciated but it’s impossible to demonstrate SEO [...]

The rules of SEO Idiocy

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 8, 2007 in Seo Myths

Any idiot can create a Web page that makes money. Spammers do it with automated software all the time, and I would say that most idiots are actually smarter than software. Most.
Once in a while someone will take something I write to a forum guru and ask for an opinion. Some forum [...]

Linking in a searchless Web

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 8, 2007 in Link Building

Link building has become the heart and soul of most SEOs’ strategies these days. But there was a time when linking networks were necessary for Web sites to build traffic because most people didn’t even know the search engines existed.
So let’s take off the SEO Theory mantle for a moment and imagine a Web [...]

Google outlaws the Web: Sites no longer allowed to link

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 7, 2007 in General

Google has now decided that Web sites are no longer permitted to exchange links, a practice that predates Google and search engines in general (linking is what makes the Web the Web).
Both Threadwatcher and Fantomaster have expressed some outrage at this latest attempt by Google to dictate to Webmasters what they can and cannot do.
As [...]

Support Russ Jones’ robots.txt proposal

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 7, 2007 in General

Russ Jones suggested on the Google Cache that search engines honor a disallow-by-keyword directive in robots.txt. This is a great idea. If someone injects spam pages into your site that use keywords in the URLs, you should be able to tell the spiders to ignore those pages — thus rendering the offensive and [...]

Diary of a Mad SEO Gooroo

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 7, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

So you want to know how to get some PageRank? I could tell you but then Googlers who read this blog would run back to Matt Cutts and tattle on me. And the problem with sharing techniques in the open is that as soon as everyone picks up on them, a huge massive [...]

Google’s desperate gamble

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 6, 2007 in Web spam

Although it’s still a little too soon to suggest that Google’s downward spiral has finally begun, Google has lost search market share two months in a row. As near as I can determine (based on largely unreliable third-party estimates), Google began losing market share in late May.
Late May. That would be about the [...]

The measured nonsense of SEO relevance

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 3, 2007 in Content Theory

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that we want to quickly estimate how many expressions a document may be relevant to. We have to make some assumptions.
First, we’ll assume that duplication of words doesn’t matter.
Second, we’ll assume that we have to look at word combinations that proceed only in one direction (from beginning [...]

Intermediate SEO: The Magic Content Principle

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 2, 2007 in Intermediate SEO

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke is often quoted as saying “any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic”. Magic is burdened with so many definitions you really cannot be sure of what it is. For my part I’ll say that “magic is the art of changing things through thought and symbolism”.
We don’t influence [...]

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