A Formal Proposition of Search Ethics

Many of you may not have known this, but the first time I ever became publicly introduced to Moz and the SEO world in large number had nothing to do with introducing a new tactic or proving my merits as an SEO, but rather my particular position on the growing debate about ethics and Search Engine Optimization. Rand Fishkin picked up on my piece entitled “Consensual SEO: Debunking the myth of Ethical SEO” in a post called Russ Jones of Virante on Search Engines & Consent. While it is still a good read, we humans tend to do this silly thing called “grow” and in time I have come to what I believe to be a more thoughtful and complete understanding of the Guidelines, ethical search marketing, and the reasons for the continued tensions...

Virante’s Software List Grows Again

I am proud to announce today the launch of AuthorRank Pro, the first and only tool that allows you to track your AuthorRank, AuthorTrust and other metrics over time. The tool also helps you find great authors for your own site and great opportunities for writing on other sites. But what I am most proud of is the growing corpus of great software owned and operated by Virante. Remove’em: We’ve removed over 1,000,000 bad backlinks from the web as the most comprehensive tool for penalty recovery online. nTopic: Statistically proven to increase organic traffic when recommended language is applied across your site. Penguin Analysis: The Machine Learned Penguin Risk Detector. Know just how vulnerable you are to the next Penguin update! AuthorRank Pro: The...

The Most Devious Link Campaign of SEO History

Disclaimer: This article represents my own opinion and not that of my employer, clients, or business partners. 1,792,729 I want you to try and remember that number. One million, seven hundred ninety two thousand, seven hundred and twenty nine. It is a big number, and it represents the most successful, devious link building campaign of all time. What makes it successful is quite clear. The number you are looking at right there is none other than the number of unique websites according to NerdyData that have attempted to install authorship markup with links to Google+. Now, I am careful to say attempted because many of them have installed it incorrectly, but the backlink still exists. No doubt the 4,587,474 historical root linking domains “earned” by...

More on Google’s Javascript Handling

Many of you probably noticed my recent post without any substantive content. I was seeking to answer the following questions… Does Google wait for timeouts and display that content in the index? is that content searchable? How does Google handle content generated at intervals in javascript? Will Google index content that is only displayed after an action like a button click occurs? We now have some pretty solid answers to each question… Does Google wait for timeouts and display that content in the index? is that content searchable?Yes. Google does wait for timeouts and display that content in that index. That is to say, the content that was displayed after the timeout is included in the search index such that you can find it by searching Google for...