Seo Lair | SEO Blog & Software Reviews

404 Error News

I’ve been reading a lot of buzz lately on various SEO blogs about 404 errors.  In case you haven’t heard, many SEO news sources are pointing to a recent webmaster help thread where Googler “JohnMu” states that having a large number of 404 errors on your site “doesn’t hurt you”.  I thought it was imperative to clarify some misinterpretations of this news, especially by beginners.  What I’m afraid of is people reading this news and simply not paying attention to 404 errors on their site.  By themselves 404 errors “don’t hurt you”, this is absolutely true.  It is important, however, to understand how 404 errors effect your site and how you can monitor them to actually improve SEO performance.  Yes, you heard correct…improve your SEO.

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Real Time Search Results From Google

A few weeks ago Google announced they were rolling out their much anticipated real time search function. While some in the community are excited to see how they can implement real time search results into their SEO program, others aren’t so optimistic.

How Does Google Real Time Search Work? Google real time search delivers results by crawling various “Social” sites such as Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Facebook, news articles, Digg, MySpace, etc…Along with a link to the content, Google shows how long ago the particular comment was posted. There are also options to pause the list to keep if from refreshing. Additionally, Google will only display this new feature if it has a “real time component”.

The algorithm for this new real time search feature is relatively unknown. I would imagine that their is individual algorithm for each source i.e a twitter algorithm, a digg algorithm etc. There should also be a separate algorithm that chooses the most reliable source for the keyword. Example:  A keyword like Read the rest of this entry »

Pubcon Las Vegas SEO

A Pubcon conference was held recently in Las Vegas and included a site review session featuring key players from Google, Microsoft, and Bing including Matt Cutts,  Derrick Wheeler, and Nathan Buggia.  While multiple sites were reviewed with the usual intermediate/advanced recommendations being pointed out, there were a few note worthy issues that came up which I’d like to highlight.

Keyword stuffed footer links are potentially harmful: The Chief of Webspam at Google pointed out that multiple uses of keywords in anchor text, particularly in the footer, can be construed as being potentially manipulative.  I always run across sites with a ton of sidebar or footer links which contain potentially spammy.  I would link to one but I don’t want to reward them with link juice .  Most of the time these sites have an extremely large footer with upwards of 10,20,30+ links.  Yahoo has also Read the rest of this entry »

Google's Twitter Algorithm

How will Google incorporate live twitter updates into their search algorithm?

News recently came out that Google and Bing will be featuring live twitter updates into their search results.  The big question here for SEO’s is how they will incorporate twitter into their algorithms.  In order to shed some light on the potential of Google’s Twitter Algorithm, I’ve looked at how different Twitter grader algorithms work and any additions to these that we might see go live.

One of the more popular site’s out there that will rank your Twitter profile is the Twitter Grader by the guys over at Hubspot.  Now while I wouldn’t suggest you optimize your Twitter profile for this tool, it is still useful for gauging success.  Over on their blog, Hubspot details what factors are part of their Twitter Grader’s algorithm.  Here’s a list of potential factors in the Google Twitter Algorithm:

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SEO Core Metrics

I was recently asked the following question by someone in the SEO community: “How can I show value if traffic and rankings aren’t increasing?”

Many SEOs tend to focus on what I would consider “core seo metrics”, meaning rankings, traffic, and other client specific KPI’s such as leads, revenue, etc…When reporting on these metrics, it can be hard to show value, especially in early stages when you are doing initial work that might not be increasing these core seo metrics.

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