Trick Ranking Software to Use Random Proxies

There are myriad options for rank tracking software, the most common of which probably being WebPosition Gold, but hardly any of them actually do a decent job of using proxies to prevent from getting banned. For example, WPG only allows you to choose 1 proxy, while in a perfect world you would be shifting through hundreds. Now, if you wrote your own rank-tracking software, you would not be running into this problem. However, for the majority of SEOs, writing custom software is a waste of time and money. So, how can you trick any search ranking software to use different proxies? Requirements A LAMP Server – you can get a cheap one from Linode. I would highly recommend them. ($19.95/mo) A PHP Developer – There are really only a handful of lines of code...

Reinclusion Requests: How to perform successful reconsideration requests

You have really done it this time. You always knew your days were numbered, but didn’t realize that number was today. And now, your site has plummeted in the rankings or, worse, disappeared altogether.  It is time to grovel and beg and plead your way back into Google’s good graces. After assisting several clients with successful reconsideration requests over the last 3 months, I thought it might help to list off as much of the groundwork that you and others should perform to make your reconsideration request as successful as possible. You Betta Recognize: Forgive the slang, but you do need to understand the gravity of the situation, and that gravity has nothing to do with your rankings. You are about to ask a Google employee to spend 5 to 10 minutes...

General Search Ranking Penalties

There is not much clarity regarding penalties and, as I have mentioned before, the very term itself is applied loosely and inaccurately time and time again. I have taken a few moments to put together a list of common search penalties and their diagnosis / prognosis / and treatments. Time estimates in the prognosis are based on our previous efforts – each penalty removal is different. Sitewide Ban: Diagnosis: Sitewide bans are the easiest to diagnose. You were in the index, now you aren’t. To determine this ban, check site:[yourdomain].com in G/Y/. If your site normally shows up for this query but no longer does, you have suffered a sitewide ban. Please make sure to determine the following though: 1, you are not employing a robots.txt or meta robots...

Google Penalty Myths

One of the issues I discuss regularly with clients are elusive Google “penalties”. More often than not, good-willed webmasters and small business owners undertake SEO techniques that are not only frowned upon by Google, but easily detectable and and even easier to counteract. However, these techniques do not usually bring about “penalties”. Penalty: a punishment levied by a search engine, normally in response to techniques which violate the ToS, which leaves the punished site ranking below the point at which it would rank were those techniques simply countered and ignored. Is your site suffering a penalty? It is far too easy to attribute your site’s poor rankings to a penalty when, more often than not, another more straight-forward...

Poor Attempt at Cloaking: Exhibit #1

Generally speaking, if you are going to try to do geo-targeting via IP address, you might want to make sure something like this happens… Now this prime ranking position in Google is not only drawing the attention of Google’s spam team, but it is also keeping would-be subscribers from clicking on what appears to be a page specifically for Mountain View, California, home of “the Google”. Who knows, maybe it is a ploy to get Matt Cutts to buy DirecTV? No tags for this post.

Gmail 302 Hijacked…

Thanks to Jake Bohall, our Director of Sales, for noticing this due to a nasty Firefox 3.0 bug, requires that he type URLs into the Google Search App because the location bar no longer works. It was years ago that the 302 hijack became a popularly abused method to steal rankings but, due to some apparant algo improvements and what I believe to be a well orchestrated misinformation campaign by either people who wanted to still abuse it or Google who didn’t have a good fix, the method seemed to disappear by-and-large. However, the bug reared its ugly head again today, as Gmail.com itself was hijacked in Google. As you can see, Gmail.com, or mail.google.com, are not ranking for the keyword gmail.com in Google. Instead, the ranking is replaced by a spam blog on...