November 2007

Tom Fakery and the Spam of Web

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 29, 2007 in Web spam

Fake blogs, fake forums, fake directories. Spammers have resorted to all sorts of interesting means for fooling the search engines.
I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to create a fake Web site. You can certainly create a spammy Web site, but can you fake one?
What sparked my curiosity on the topic was the post [...]

Where to buy PageRank-passing links

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 28, 2007 in Link Building

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, co-workers and associates, or anyone else. Specific actions, suggestions, and techniques are not necessarily used by or endorsed by my employer, co-workers and associates, or anyone else.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, none of my [...]

SEO Nonsense - Sculpting PageRank Builds Muscle

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 26, 2007 in Seo Myths

I see that certain voices are once again advocating the idiocy of managing PageRank through the use of “rel=’nofollow’”.
I could compose yet another long-winded argument debunking the nonsense but I’ve already done that more than once. So, while it’s true there are plenty of gullible people in the SEO community who run around from [...]

The intrinsic value of valuing relationships on the Web

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 26, 2007 in Advanced SEO

Blog posts have become the new preferred spam method for the SEO community. They have replaced paid links, reciprocal linking, and forum/blog comment link dropping as the most popular method for promoting mediocre content. Of course, those old tried and true methods are still being abused so the search engine filters undoubtedly have [...]

The inevitable Thanksgiving Holiday post

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 20, 2007 in General

I would really love to write some more useful content this week but I’m trying to wrap up a few projects before the American Thanksgiving Holiday. I’ll continue to monitor the comments and reply as I can but it will probably be Sunday evening (my time here in Seattle) before I can write something [...]

How not to write an SEO analysis

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 19, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

I like Fantomaster. He’s a smart guy with a no-nonsense attitude. So when he links to someone’s analysis I usually follow the link and see what’s up.
I was disappointed with this study of the possible correlatione between PageRank and search results because the paper doesn’t even begin to describe the data that was [...]

Who wants to be an SEO theorist?

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 16, 2007 in General

What a loaded question.
People in the SEO community are, for the most part, only informally trained in the SEO Arts (as we describe our skill sets here at 1st Query). Nonetheless, there are some very good, knowledgable SEOs out there who rarely comment or blog (and I don’t mean the so-called [...]

The economics of managing relevance

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 15, 2007 in SEO Theory

The theorem of search engine optimization tells us that, as optimization increases within a query space, the natural randomness of search results relevance diminishes.
That might seem like a statement of the obvious but knowing that optimization always diminishes randomness enlightens us in several ways. We now know, for example, that in a natural (unoptimized) [...]

Fundamental principles of keyword analysis

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 14, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

Keyword analysis is one of the oldest, most fundamental tasks in search engine optimization. All that content enrichment and link building has to be driven toward the right keywords, the actual queries people use to find content on the Web.
There are four kinds of keywords:

Brands (high value)
Pop expressions
Seasonal descriptors
Random descriptors

“Pop expressions” includes anything [...]

Gaming with Trust, Relevance, and Usefulness

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 13, 2007 in Game Theory, SEO Theory

There is an old study from 1961 that looked at how people determine relevance of documents. The researcher selected technical documents and gave them to qualified individuals to sort on the basis of relevance. Some of the documents were sorted on the basis of title and some of them were sorted on the [...]

Next Page