Mark Glaser recently queried me about improving the SEO of PBS’s MediaShift. The tips and advice I gave him apply to most blogging and media websites. The piece was well balanced, with information from Poynter, and he mentioned Joost’s great article on Newspaper SEO.

Hard to say which is more embarrassing or pathetic, the fact that their image hosting is over it’s bandwidth or the cheezy dating adsense banner. Sk-rt you make it hard for me to take you seriously.

Sponsor:: Is your site broken and you don’t know what to do? Check out my SEO Services for information […]

Summize is a conversational search engine which allows you to search Twitter in realtime. Useful for finding customer feedback even when people do not provide it directly to you. For example, I just found out that for some people the Rank Checker Firefox extension stopped working after the last update. So I just reverted the extension and am awaiting another update from the developer. Summize offers RSS feeds so you can track conversations mentioning your brands and/or important topics.

Summize offers an API which can be used to generate free content for your sidebar if you publish Mahalo-like content, though that is a bit spammy.

Welcome to GoogleNet!

Hitwise recently mentioned that Google controls over 1/3 of UK web traffic.

With that much usage data, if you were Google, would you use usage data in your relevancy algorithms?

An Army of Google Search Editors

They could easily use algorithms to detect

• sites that they send a lot of traffic to relative to its total traffic (comparing ratios between toolbar data and search traffic)
• sites which have seen a rapid spike in traffic from Google
• sites which people quickly bounce away from (and do not later return to)
• sites which get a lot of traffic from Google but get few navigational queries

and flag anything out of the ordinary for human review. Marissa Mayer stated they have 10,000 reviewers.

Does Your Site Look Good to Google’s Relevancy Algorithm?

As the web keeps getting richer and deeper, and Google increasingly uses human review for demoting spam, all the aesthetic things matter:

• domain name
• site design
• content formatting
• branding and public relations

As search evolves so too will spam. Some spam sites will LOOK and FEEL better than most non-spam sites. And so the remote quality raters will be given more data to look at - perhaps eventually even a sample of backlinks or other related data.

False positives will occur - sites and careers built around Google without proper support stilts will crumble. Unless your site is of social significance (you are a big corporation, a non-profit organization, a government institution, an educational institution, a top blogger, an official Google partner, or Youtube/Google house content) then part of the optimization process revolves around not only creating sites that pass a hand review, but also trying to create sites that do not get flagged for review - especially if you are a thin affiliate site.

How do you not get flagged for review?

• Build enough quality signals and direct traffic that your site looks like a real part of the web.
• Build something people keep coming back to.
• Do not make drastic changes to your site unless you are comfortable with it going under review.

How do you pass a review?

Short term I think the aesthetic things matter a lot. Longer term it is best if your site satisfies a few criteria

• exclusive content that people value and keep coming back to (Google loses if they remove the best content from their index)
• a brand that people care about and search for (Google looks dumb if they do not rank your site)
• a meaningful and reliable traffic stream outside of Google (many quality signals may stem from this exposure, which will help keep your overall profile more organic)
• you could cause public relations harm to Google and diminish their brand value in the eyes of thousands of people (removing your site has real opportunity cost)

Usage Data for Algorithmic Site Promotion

Creating Fake User Accounts is Harder Than it Sounds

If usage data was ever used to promote sites, they could look at regional data and help promote sites based on what is popular locally. Searchers reveal their location by IP address and the queries they search for.

The Trusted Few

Google could use a subset of their users when using usage data to affect relevancy (perhaps users with 6 months account history, credit card on file via Google Checkout, and a normal email profile).

Why Usage Data is Tricky

Much of the signal from usage data is likely mirrored by PageRank, so the lift might not be that great until they really refine the technology.

Some tricky parts with promoting sites based on usage data are:

• usage data is quite noisy, and
• it may not favor informational sites over commercial intent the way that PageRank does. That informational bias to the organic search results is a large part of why AdWords is so profitable.

Microsoft recently presented a paper on finding authority pages based on browsing habits.

Google has revealed a new page ranking system for images called VisualRank. The biggest search engine in the world today uses PageRank and this determines a websites value, based on its content and is scored from 0-10. The higher the websites PageRank, the higher the site appears on Google’s listings for the related keyword if […]

wow things are moving Fast, I think that the recent wordpress exploits helped and the fact we where just on Techcrunch can’t harm either, so the affiliate program we are going to give you $19.99 USD Just for signing up to the Affiliate Program
Commissions will be a Pay-Per-Sale $40.00 USD for each sale you […]

Or at least we all hope! Leeds United have entered the final stage of their fight to gain back the 15 points deducted at the start of the season, due to going into administration. The arbitration committee met over a week ago to decide the fate of the points and announced that a verdict would […]

The Us Justice Department have initiated an investigation into Yahoo and Google’s advertising sharing trial. The two week test, which allows Google to place its adverts alongside 3% of Yahoo’s search results, has been criticized since it was announced. The Department of Justice is looking into whether it violates any antitrust laws.
Although The Justice Department […]

Last week I attended the SMX Social Media Conference in Long Beach California, here are some of my thoughts about the event.
The one thing that really stood out about this conference was the “focus” or “intensity” most of the attendees had about coming to learn and take in as much information as they could about […]

That’s what just happened, a massive SQL Injection was discovered on F-secure, hat tip to 0×000000 I found it there, I wonder how many peoples computers just got malware on them.
But imagine in a controlled manner you could either destroy websites ranking by adding 50,000 links to all your competitors.
From F-secure,
Unless that data is sanitized […]

I just got a text message from Doug, saying that Car Rentals has only gone a won the
Best Car Hire Website
Winner: CarRentals.co.uk
“CarRentals wins through its convenience and breadth of choice, combining user-friendliness and a low-fuss interface.”
It’s even more impressive when you look at the shortlist of companies that car rentals was up against.
short list for […]

HAHAHA this is so funny…
We started off talking about my newest venture fighters and how its a great new challenge for me personally being its a totally new market for us to penetrate
I broke shoemoney’s rib while I was sat down in a bar :), so how can a big softie like Shoe promote fighters.. […]

Ok Matt was asked about Nofollow recently at the Domain RoundTable 2008, and If I’m reading this write, what Jaan posted
Matt says nofollow is a “very simple thing”. Nofollow link doesn’t flow page rank, doesn’t flow anchor text. Link level to say “I trust this link but I don’t trust this link”. You don’t […]

Ok one of my wifes favourite sayings at the moment is “busy idiots”, basically you are busy all the time but never focused enough to get things done. I have been looking at different open source solutions to stop 0 day expoilts, XSS hacks , and in fairness there are quite a few open source […]

well it was an XSS exploit in the community section of Barack Obama’s site the exploit redirected users to Hillary Clinton’s, I guess it could have been worse it could have just downloaded Malware.
How can such high profile sites keep getting hacked, come on web masters firewall up !!
DaveN

Ok I missed this question but also feel it worthy of a post :

Do generic domain keywords have an advantage in search engines ranking when the content is relevant / unique.
I ask this question as it was my rational in 1999 to register groups of generic domains in clusters rather than one off registrations, These […]

Dave TV asks the question “Are you Dave?” Personally, I think the mighty DaveN should step forward and announce himself as the one and only Dave.  Dave could already be considered the ultimate in home entertainment and is a match for any broadcast station. Perhaps he may start a TV station of his own?

yep looks like they are selling Juicy PR8 backlinks.. www.economist.com grab before they lose the juice
DaveN

So I create a few Free Wordpress Themes, let say 10 add a bit of copy say ..
Welcome to Free Wordpress Themes I decided to create a set of 10 Free Wordpress themes and the terms are. they are 100% free wordpress themes for personal or commercial use, You don’t have to pay me a […]

George Maxwell is a company that sells chesterfield sofas, and I guess his SEO is http://www.munki-boy.co.uk/index.html, so why did they register this domain
Domain name: DISTINCTIVE-CHESTERFIELDS.COM
Registrant:
George Maxwell UK Ltd
6 Ashley Court
Hale, Cheshire WA15 9PD
GB
Now if I found out that they had bought some links to a site we designed, that also sells chesterfield sofas, then […]