27 Apr

Can You Lose Weight on Spam

By Scottie Claiborne

Search engine optimization is a lot like weight loss. You’ve got some things that are effective and some that are not, and it’s hard to trust the claims of one over the other. You want to believe the great-results-with-no-effort claims, and you hope they are true… but are they worth wasting your time and money on?

Fad Diets and Quick Tricks Spam

It seems every month there is a new fad in weight loss: protein-only, all the grapefruit you can eat, or high carb/low carb. All offer fast results if you’ll just stick with it. They usually do achieve some results; however, they aren’t lasting.… Read the rest

20 Apr

Google Link Filter

By James Peggie
April 20, 2005

Incoming links are important to the rankings of your website. Having a quantity of relevant incoming links increases your sites relevance and boosts rankings within Google and the other search engines.

Traditional SEO wisdom used to state – the more incoming links the better. However the new belief is that there is a preference for quality over quantity.

There is a growing consensus that within Google a “Sandbox” exists for new links. This is similar to the aging filter believed to exist for new sites – what has traditionally been known as the Google ‘Sandbox.’… Read the rest

15 Mar

Search Engine Friendly Redirects – File Level

There are three articles dealing with redirects to handle redirecing one file at a time, redirecting one directory at a time, and redirecting multiple pages easily.

If you are going to move a page you will likely want to redirect visitors to the old page to the new in such a methd that the search engines don’t get confused. Some of the ways they can get confused include:

  • Bringing up two copies of the same page. This is likely to trip a duplicate content penalty.
  • Using a temporary redirect. This means ‘the page has moved but will be back shortly – don’t update your index’.
Read the rest
15 Mar

Search Engine Friendly Redirects – Directory Level

There are three articles dealing with redirects – see related posts for more information

If you are going to move a page you will likely want to redirect visitors to the old page to the new in such a method that the search engines don’t get confused. Some of the ways they can get confused include:

  • Bringing up two copies of the same page. This is likely to trip a duplicate content penalty.
  • Using a temporary redirect. This means ‘the page has moved but will be back shortly – don’t update your index’.

A 301 permanent redirect is the redirection method recommended by the major search engines.… Read the rest

15 Mar

Search Engine Friendly Redirects – Custom 404s

There are three articles dealing with redirects to handle, see related posts for more information.

If you are going to move a page you will likely want to redirect visitors from the old page to the new in such a method that the search engines don’t get confused. Some of the ways they can get confused include:

  • Bringing up two copies of the same page. This is likely to trip a duplicate content penalty.
  • Using a temporary redirect. This means ‘the page has moved but will be back shortly – don’t update your index’.

A 301 permanent redirect is the redirection method recommended by the major search engines.… Read the rest

07 Mar

Emulate Crontab Using ColdFusion

By: Nathan Johnson

Setting up automated scripts on Windows can be difficult. The built in scheduler is hard to set especially if you don’t have console access. An easier way is to set up the site so that the first person to navigate to the site each morning causes the script to run. This is actually really simple to do, and can be completely seamless for the end user. Simply use the script page as the source of a little 1px by 1px image hidden somewhere at the bottom of your site’s footer:

	<img src="http://www.mysite.com/dbupdate.cfm" width="1" height="1" border="0">

Even though the SRC of this “image” is not a real image file, the server doesn’t know that, so it still runs the page to accommodate the request, and doesn’t require your user to navigate through the page or require you to dump large blocks of code into each of your site’s pages.… Read the rest

07 Mar

Automating Database Updates Using ColdFusion

By: Nathan Johnson

Recently, I was asked to help automate some time consuming database update tasks for one of our Real Estate clients. They needed to ensure that their MLS listings were always up to date, but also couldn’t afford to take their site down while they were manually updating the database (imagine the data entry headache brought on by 1000 new MLS listings every day!). To further complicate matters, their hosting only supports ColdFusion, and can’t parse ASP or PHP pages. Thankfully, the concepts presented here are relatively straight forward and translate to PHP and ASP easier than the other way around.… Read the rest

18 Jan

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

Duplicate Content Penalties

By: James Peggie and Dylan Downhill
Originally Published: Jan 18, 2005
Updated: Jan 30, 2005

Fact: Google penalizes page rank when it determines that content is duplicated by other sites.

If your rankings have slipped then it’s possible that your page contents have been duplicated causing a duplicate content penalty. Google doesn’t want multiple copies of the same content cluttering their results pages so they will devalue all but one of the copies of the content based on the age of the page.

Don’t Let Other People Benefit From Your Hard Work

Writing good quality content for your site is hard work!… Read the rest

16 Jan

Avoiding a Bad Search Marketing Experience

By James Peggie
Originally Published: Jan 16, 2005

We have many enquiries from companies that have had a bad search engine optimization (SEO) experience in the past and are looking for a reputable search marketing company to work with. Often these clients have been banned from search engines because the companies that they have hired to improve their search rankings use quick fix, unethical SEO techniques.

What can you do to ensure that this does not happen to your business? Or if you have had problems in the past how can you be sure that these experiences will never happen again?… Read the rest