Googlebot’s Javascript Interpreter: A Diagnostic

Warning: This is very old. I began writing this several months ago and just never published after some back and forth w/ Matt Cutts. Take with a grain of salt. Over the past two weeks multiple respected bloggers in the search community have commented on the increasing abilities of Googlebot, especially following Google’s announcement that it can now handle some forms of AJAX. I have, admittedly, long believed that we over-estimate what Google and Googlebot are capable of, so I wanted to run a proper experiment to determine the exact capabilities of GoogleBot in reading and interpreting Javascript. The Question How sophisticated is Googlebot’s javascript interpretation and, more specifically, which Javascript functions can Google accurately interpret....

Exponential Moving Average, Volatility Pockets & Improved Correlation Studies

I apologize in advance for those of you who aren’t quite interested in the math, but I have had this stuck in my head for almost a week now and can’t get rid of it. To be honest, I probably shouldn’t write about this because it is such an integral part of so many future Virante projects, but here goes… The Deception of Integer Rankings A key problem with much of SEO is that rank order is deceptive. We perceive sites as positions 1 through 10, each with a fixed integer position when, in reality, their proximity to one another in terms of actual relationship-to-the-query scores can vary greatly. It is this hidden, underlying score that is key to many SEO functions – keyword competitiveness and ranking factor determination to name two....

Citation Labs’ Broken Link Building Tool First to Integrate nTopic

We are excited today to announce that Garrett French’s Broken Link Builder is the first 3rd party application to integrate nTopic, the content relevancy score. The integration is actually incredibly useful. In making link prospecting scalable, it is important that you be able to filter prospects based on relevancy. This is the case for nearly any out reach effort, but is particularly difficult in the Broken Link Building strategy because the targets no longer exist. In the past, marketers would need to click through to archive.org to try and find a record of the previous site, or use the URL to guess what the content may have been about. Historically, this process has been difficult to automate. You could use proxies for relevancy like keyword in title or...

5 Ways to Get Started with nTopic for SEO Today

A few weeks ago Virante launched nTopic, a method of measuring and increasing content relevancy for the purpose of increasing organic search traffic. We were excited to release a study that indicated that nTopic recommendations increase organic traffic with statistical significance, but many haven’t had the opportunity to determine how exactly to put nTopic to use. So here are a few straightforward, simple ideas. Of course, all of them require you go get at least the free nTopic API. Any keyword recommendations will require the paid version ($10/mo). 1. Improve Your Blog Content Probably the easiest way to get started with nTopic if you have a WordPress blog is to install the free WordPress plugin. The tool is quite simple. Once installed and activated, go...

SEOMoz was Right on Relevancy – Judging the Role of LDA in Increasing Organic Traffic

Disclaimer: We have no conclusive evidence that LDA or nTopic are actual Google rankings factors, and the nTopic sute clearly dtates this. However, we have statistically significant evidence that recommendations based on nTopic increase organic traffic. We are committed to the accurate, scientific representation of our findings and apologize fir any misrepresentations. On September 6th, 2010, Rand Fishkin and Ben Hendrickson dropped a bomb on the search community – a new on-page ranking factor had potentially been discovered. The statistical method known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a common method of topic modeling, seemed to correlate quite well with organic search rankings in Google. In layman terms, the relevancy of a document to the particular...

Pulling Links: The Pain Thresholds of Removing Common Backlinks after Penguin

Many of you probably heard about the launch of our new tool, Remove ’em, which helps you find and remove bad backlinks. Well, while I suppose it would be nice if everyone got penalized and had to use our tool, I think we would all rather avoid penalties and, on top of that, costly cleanups. So, let’s talk through a little bit about exactly how hard some links are to remove. Let’s start with the easiest to remove, then move down the scale. Oh yeah, and if you want 10% off of Remove ’em just use the coupon code tgc10. So, without further adieu, in order from easiest to remove to hardest to remove… Your own links First let’s be clear. Just because a link is easy to remove doesn’t mean it’s a good link. In fact, links...