Tag Archives: seo

Dec 26

Link checker – Bad neighborhood

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I often get requests for me to add links to my sites. Usually it is just someone looking for something simple that will deliver them some relevant traffic.
What I have found though is that one should ALWAYS verify that the link destination is okay. It should not be in a bad neighborhood. In addition, it should not link out to bad neighborhoods. These bad neighborhoods will get sites that link to them penalized in the search engines.  That’s right – the sites that you link to can get your site penalized. Not only that, but the sites THEY link to might get your site penalized.
The link below has a bad-neighborhood checker. It will scan a URL and determine if there are questionable links. Then it will scan the linked to pages to see if any of their links are questionable in nature. It’s a great little tool and I highly recommend using it.

Dec 26

Don’t try to beat the search engine

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I just read the following article while I was trying to determine if static named pages are better for seo than those with parameters in the url. I’m always impressed with the things that are returned when I google something. It is often not entirely relevant to what I was looking for, but can be very interesting anyway.

If you get a chance and you are interested in SEO at all, you might give the following a read:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/top-10-bad-SEO-ideas.shtml

From the article:

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So what’s the bottom line? There are really two major things you need to do:

* Learn how to communicate to the search engine what your site is about. Many of the problems listed above relate to common practices that make the search engine’s job harder, or even impossible. Learning how to build your site so that the search engine can easily determine the unique value of your site is an outstanding idea.

* Don’t spend your time figuring out how to beat the search engine. It’s just not a good place to be. You may even succeed in the short term. But if you do succeed in tricking them in the short term, the day will come when you wake up in the morning and a significant piece of your business has disappeared overnight. Not a good feeling at all.

Take the same energy you would have invested in the tricks and invest it in great content for your site, and in the type of marketing programs you would have implemented if the search engines did not exist.

This is how you can grow your business for the long term.