What the new Alphabet restructuring of Google means for SEO

Nothing. Literally nothing. Link to me please. No tags for this post.

Dark Patterns and the Demise of Google Authorship

I won’t waste your time with yet-another-recap of the rise and fall of Google Authorship when it has already been done so nicely by the good folks at Stone Temple Consulting. Moreover, in a promise I made to myself, I will try and remain civil and polite in my brief analysis. I will begin with an open question to John Mueller, Matt Cutts and Google in general. Why should we believe this was a failed experiment and not planned obsolescence? Early in my career as an seo during the days of reciprocal link schemes, the black-hat thing to do was pretty simple. The formula is below: Create a link directory on your site Attract users of link directory, require reciprocal links Wait a few months Hide your outbound links from Google (Nofollowing “contribute...

List of SEO Tools and Whether They Are Vulnerable to Heartbleed

Make sure your SEO tools haven’t been affected by the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug. I compiled as many as I could think of here, but you might want to run some checks and add them in the comments. All of Virante’s tools were either unaffected or have been patched. Name URL...

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...

Testing JS: Nothing To See Here

Seriously, I am just testing some stuff out with Googlebot. The javascript running on this page should help us know a couple of things… 1. Does Google wait for timeouts and display that content in the index? is that content searchable? 2. How does Google handle content generated at intervals in javascript? 3. Will Google index content that is only displayed after an action like a button click occurs? It is worth pointing out that it appears Google is still asynchronously parsing Javascript. This page was almost instantly indexed by Google, but the javascript generated content has not been parsed. the marker blue wax among elephant made candle popular kids No tags for this...

Simple DDOS Amplification Attack through XML Sitemap Generators

It was all too easy really. Filling up a 10Mb/s pipe, tearing down a website with just a handful of tabs open in a browser seems like something that should be out of the reach of your average web users, but SEOs like myself have made it all too easy by creating simple, largely un-protected tools for unauthorized spidering of websites. So, here is what is going on… Yesterday a great post was released about new on site SEO crawlers that allow you to determine a host of SEO issues by merely typing in a domain name. This seems fantastic at first glance, but I immediately saw an opportunity when I realized that none of these tools – and really almost none of the free SEO tools out there – require any form of authentication you actually own the...