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Posts tagged ‘SEO’

October 21st

5

Useful Link Roundup

Excerpt: I've been awfully busy the last few days, but still a few interesting things came flying by: My buddies at Conversion Rate Experts released an article on their blog today which really rocks: Understanding your visitors. Bloglines apparently fixed their "Crawler problem", according to their news pa…
October 16th

20

A4UExpo was great, yet again.

Excerpt: Matthew and his team at Existem have done it again. If people ask me, anywhere in the coming 12 months, which show they should attend on online marketing, I can only say one thing: A4UExpo. They're really giving all the other search and online marketing shows a run for their money. The last f…
October 14th

14

SlideShare should get it's SEO fixed

Excerpt: While I'm uploading my presentation of my WordPress session to SlideShare, I was looking for an upload client as my HTTP connection was bound to die. I searched for [slideshare upload] and found this result: PHP Session ID's in your URL? A presentation as the best result on your site for that…
October 9th

9

Cool SEO tools roundup

Excerpt: Some of the cool SEO tools I've come across the last few days I just had to share with you: Google Tutor has released a very cool Google Insights bookmarklet: Once installed you should see a bookmark cleverly titled ‘Google Insights Bookmarklet’ on your bookmarks menu. To use the bookmarklet s…
October 7th

3

Are you coming for dinner?

Excerpt: Next week it's time for A4UExpo and while we were doing Strike Point last night, Dave said he'd buy me and our mutual friend Mel Carson dinner. Now Marcus Tandler will also be at that dinner, which makes it a perfect dinner to attend if you want to learn some interesting stuff! Now the good thing i…
September 30th

0

SEOktoberfest

Excerpt: I was at SEOktoberfest in Munich last week. You should have been too. It was the best conference I've seen both content, networking and business deal wise. Ever. Be there next year. Richard's quote is the best thing to say about the whole thing: SEOktoberfest was the opposite of most webmaster con…
September 24th

4

SEOktoberfest starts!

Excerpt: So today it all starts, I'm typing this from Marcus "Mediadonis" Tandler's apartment in Munich, from which we'll leave in about an hour or so to meet with the attendees and the other speakers. And when I say other speakers, I'm not talking about "little" people, I'm talking about industry people …
September 21st

17

SEO Plugin for WordPress

Excerpt: Just a short note, to let you know that next wednesday, I'll be releasing an SEO plugin for WordPress. It's not the life changing best plugin ever, no, it's a reasonably small thing, that will make your post slugs much cleaner, and do so automatically. Now here's the funny thing. There's only one …
September 20th

10

Submit your website? My ass.

Excerpt: So I just got an email from "Paul" of http:// www. TrafficGeneratorSite.com/ (no linklove whatsoever there). He said he "really liked my website" and was "Wondering if you would like to post my site banner on your website - I pay 30% commision for life for the revenue you generate." Now I'm not the…
September 10th

56

Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless

Excerpt: While Joost is enjoying his well deserved honeymoon, he asked me to do a post as guest blogger. "As long as it's anything about search", he said. Alright, that's not so hard :) I thought I'd dive into the discussion of search engine rankings and what the value is in SEO. To match the style of Joost,…
August 22nd

20

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.4

Excerpt: Yahoo released the new SiteExplorer, which forced me to fix the SEO Link Analysis extension, which now works again with Yahoo's new interface (it won't work on the old one anymore). Microsoft has also updated their webmaster portal, I'm currently figuring out how to include that again, but have for…
August 20th

42

Breadcrumbs in WordPress

Excerpt: Historically, blogs, and thus WordPress, have never had breadcrumbs. There's hardly any theme that has them built in, and though there were some breadcrumb plugins for WordPress, in my opinion, they sucked. Breadcrumbs are a great utility, both for usability and SEO. They allow people and search …
August 15th

29

B2B SEO: Link Building

Excerpt: To get you through the weekend with a healthy dose of B2B SEO, here's another guest post by my colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis, the third in this series, after B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches and B2B Content SEO. In this third article of the series about B2B SEO we'll be talking about…
August 12th

11

Technorati Authority: why it sucks

Excerpt: When I moved from joostdevalk.nl to yoast.com, I committed what someone described as "Technorati suicide". Why? Let me explain how Technorati Authority works. Your Technorati Authority is simply the number of unique blogs linking to your blog over the last 6 months. In my case, yoast.com hasn't bee…
July 24th

14

SEOktoberfest

Excerpt: Some of my readers are seasoned SEO's, others are not, some wear black hats, some, like myself wear spotless white hats, but we all enjoy having a drink, don't we? Well this october, you might be in for the drink of a lifetime. Imagine being in Munich, during Oktoberfest, drinking alongside this c…
July 22nd

14

B2B Content SEO

Excerpt: Another guest post by my Onetomarket colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis: In the first part of this series about B2B SEO, we spoke about an online strategy for B2B websites. We named some differences between B2B and B2C websites. We also determined the kind of content a B2B website needs. This article di…
June 24th

38

Danny Sullivan speaks at SES San Jose!

Excerpt: I'm in Hamburg for SES, which is btw, a great show, with about 350 people attending. We had a great night yesterday starting with the launch party of Timo Aden and Lennart Paulsen's new company Trakken GMBH! During that party we did a show of Webmasters on the Roof. Kevin Ryan of SES was in tha…
June 20th

9

Crawl Rate Tracker

Excerpt: My friend Patrick Altoft and I were talking about his crawl rate tracker plugin yesterday, discussing some possible new features. He mentioned that it didn't work on 2.5, more specifically, that the install failed on 2.5. Luckily, Mezza had e-mailed him a fix, I tested it for him and it proved to w…
June 19th

9

Winners!

Excerpt: First of all, I want to congratulate Idealizer with winning the free ticket to SES Hamburg. He understand best what these conferences are about for Marcus, Matt and me ;). I will contact you for the details! Thx to everyone who participated, hope to see you there! There's a few other things I wante…
June 19th

25

B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches

Excerpt: This is a guest post by my Onetomarket colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis. You'll be seeing more guest posts from him and other people in the future! Business to business marketing is a strange thing. In some ways, it cannot be compared to business to consumer marketing: The market is much smaller T…
June 16th

4

WordPress Goodies

Excerpt: A small update to say I've fixed one plugin and added another resource for WordPress fanatics. First of all, I used to think that with the release of WordPress 2.3 and 2.5, the need for my Permalink Redirect plugin had gone away. However, I noticed that some friends of mine had loads of indexed URL'…
June 10th

49

The must read article about WordPress SEO

Excerpt: I've been working on this article about Wordpress SEO for quite some time, and I'm very proud to be able to release it to all of you now. I can say all sorts of things about it, but this is really the biggest, and probably best, article I've ever written. Go read it now: If, after reading it,…
June 10th

2

Google translating search results

Excerpt: This morning, while discussing some issues with one of my German SEO colleagues, I was searching for [flug amsterdam] in google.de (if you know me you guess which client that was for). At the bottom of the SERP, I saw this: Basically, this is Google offering me, the user, to translate the search …
June 9th

68

Meet Yoast!

Excerpt: After a couple of years on joostdevalk.nl, I've decided it was time to do a couple of things at the same time: redesign to a more professional look move to a .com domain and US based hosting 301 redirect the entire old domain to that new domain Now those of you who are unlucky enough to…
June 6th

20

Win a ticket for SES Hamburg!

Excerpt: So SES Hamburg is close, very close, and if you haven't bought a ticket yet, you can win one here! There are three reasons, according to Matt McGowan, to come to SES: Constructive feedback on how to improve your website's visibility in the Search Engines - more relevant traffic, more sales …
June 6th

14

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3!

Excerpt: I've been receiving "complaints" from quite a few people the last few weeks that my SEO Link Analysis plugin for Firefox stopped working on Yahoo! Site Explorer. It took some time, (actually it took 20 minutes, but it took some time to find that time) but I've fixed it now, so go download the new ve…
June 5th

2

Interview with Kevin Ryan of SES

Excerpt: For a new series we've started on DutchCowboys I recently interviewed Kevin Ryan. We covered some interesting topics, like the difference between the European market and the American market, the influence of the Chinese market and loads more! I'm really looking forward to seeing Kevin and Matt on…
June 4th

14

PageRank Sculpting with nofollow, the final words

Excerpt: Matt just did a huge post with updates to Google's SEO documentation, and mentioned a new page about nofollow. This page features one block of content that is the final word on whether using nofollow for PageRank sculpting is "allowed" or not: Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign…
May 24th

11

Nice noframes spam...

Excerpt: I told the people who attended my session at SES New York a while back that spam in the Netherlands was just as abundant as everywhere, just more stupid... Well this is a nice example of such ridiculous noframes spam, which ranks them #1 for some pretty competitive keywords, check out how their goog…
May 9th

21

The difference between being on top of and ahead of your (SEO) game

Excerpt: Warning, this is more of a philosophical post then it is a "technical" one as you're used to of me. It's also late here, so my english might not be up to par either, but this post needed to be written now. So here we go. One of the things that keeps amazing me when I look at the SEO community, is…
May 7th

5

Heroes coming to Holland

Excerpt: In the coming few weeks, a couple of my friends and heroes are coming to Holland! First, Kris Jones from Pepperjam is coming to do the keynote at Affiliate Dag 2008, the very first Dutch affiliate conference with over 500 people registered already! I will be speaking there myself too, talking abo…
May 7th

5

Online Reputation Management e-book

Excerpt: Glen Allsopp from ViperChill released an e-book this weekend on Online Reputation Management, and I have to say, it's an incredibly good read. We do quite some reputation management at Onetomarket, but I'd have a hard time writing it down as good as Glen has done, keeping it a fun and good read. Do…
May 6th

0

Strike Point Co-Host

Excerpt: I co-hosted Strike Point with Mikkel yesterday, here's a link to the show: Was Yahoo Immature in Microsoft Takeover Bid. We discussed the Yahoo! / MicroSoft stuff of course, IndexTools and sitelinks. I think it was a pretty good show, so go get it!…
May 4th

14

Traffic estimation with Google's traffic estimator

Excerpt: I was reading Aaron's excellent post on the value of a #1 ranking in Google, and decided to do a quick check on one of my most important keywords in the Google traffic estimator, vs. Google Analytics, and I was once again astonished by how incredibly bad the estimator data is when noone is bidding o…
April 9th

9

Enjoying SMX München

Excerpt: I'm enjoying SMX with my colleagues Evert, Nina and Roy. The presentations went well, and the off-conference part was great too. Refined Labs, Thomas Bindl's outfit, threw a great party yesterday evening, while launching their new bid management tool Refined Ads, which looked pretty damn good! …
April 8th

5

In Munich for SMX: jetzt geht's loss!

Excerpt: We had a very fun time last night with my good buddy Marcus and his friends. We had the pleasure of meeting people like FridayNite, Sistrix, Jojo, Ron, inHouse SEO, Jens and four people of the German search quality team. We now have a nice conference day ahead of us, where my Onetomarket…
April 5th

21

User stylesheets to show nofollows

Excerpt: Update: now works with links with rel="external nofollow" etc too! I've recently switched back to Safari as my main browser because good ol' Firefox kept crashing on me, and I must say that it's been a smooth experience so far. Safari is a great browser, of course, and 3.1 is very fast as well. O…
March 31st

21

Cool new Rank Checker by SEObook

Excerpt: Aaron just pinged me that he has this great new Rank Checker available on SEOBook. I haven't tested it yet, but since it's Aaron's, it should be good anyway! Check out the video: …
March 22nd

67

PageRank sculpting - Siloing and more

Excerpt: PR sculpting seems to be "all the rage" at the moment. Tracking the conversation back seems to get me to an article by Dan Thies of september 4th last year, pointing back to an interview with Matt on SEOmoz. It's been a whole load of buzz lately, coming up at SES again a few times too much, and I th…
March 18th

3

SES NY 2008

Excerpt: So I'm in the big Apple, my first trip ever to the States, to speak at the Search Engine Strategies 2008 conference here, and it's a blast so far! I spoke yesterday on the Search Around the World - Europe session, and it was fun, getting a lot of good feedback. Today I walked around the show floor, …
March 12th

6

Co-host at the Shoemoney show

Excerpt: I co-hosted the Shoemoney show on WebmasterRadio with Jeremy Schoemaker yesterday evening, and it was fun! This time, instead of calling in, I Skyped in, and it all worked flawlessly. We spoke to Richard Zwicky of Enquisite, who's an intelligent guy and a pleasure to talk with, and then rattled on a…
March 12th

11

PageRank sculpting: my view

Excerpt: Dave did a good post about nofollow sculpting, and he got a very good quote from Matt Cutts: Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect. My analogy is: suppose you've got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time plan…
March 10th

16

Custom WordPress database error pages

Excerpt: WordPress 2.3.2 (we're on 2.3.3 at the moment) introduced a nice new feature which has been on my todo list for quite a while, and I've now finally gotten around to: the possibility to create a custom database error page. The idea is simple, you upload a file called db-error.php to your wp-content d…
March 6th

46

A Dutch discussion on paid links

Excerpt: Here in the Netherlands we have this long history of having so called startpagina's. They're basically collections of links to websites around a subject, with each subject having it's own subdomain. They're named after startpagina.nl, the first, biggest and probably best of it's kind, and there are …
March 6th

11

Google subdomain & 302 spam

Excerpt: Dave pointed out last week that 302 spam is far from gone. Wiep pointed me at another form of spam that's far from gone, combined with 302 spam. If you search for "hypotheekoffers" and flip to page 2, you'll see a whole lot of subdomain spam. These subdomains 302 redirect to one domain, resulting in…
February 26th

16

Snagsta

Excerpt: One of the great benefits of becoming a bit better known in the SEO industry is that you get to work with the hip and the cool people in the web 2.0 space. The guys at snagsta, a social recommendation site, one of whom I met last year at A4Uexpo, have a pretty good concept which they are currently d…
February 22nd

43

SEO for Newspapers

Excerpt: photo credit: Martini Captures In preparing for our first meeting with our new client het Financieele Dagblad today Ramon showed me a few articles he'd found on Newspaper SEO, and while reading through them I thought: kind of ok, but not completely there yet. So I present you with my ideas on Ne…
February 20th

35

Putting nofollow back on links in comments

Excerpt: This blog has been a dofollow blog for quite a while, and I actually believe in the "fight spam, not comments" theory. However, the amount of spam I'm receiving this month, disguised as actual comments, is killing too much of my precious time. And since I think you'd all be better served when I have…
February 19th

14

Looking for SEO aware WordPress developers

Excerpt: I'll make it quick and easy: I'm getting too much requests for WordPress related work (plugins, themes, etc.). I don't mind because I love to cherry pick, but I'd like to have a few people whom I could refer too. So please, if you're a WordPress developer and you're aware of SEO (hey, if you read th…
February 17th

22

Experimenting with tags

Excerpt: As some of you might have noticed, I've put up a tag cloud on the homepage of this blog. The reason for that is that when checking my analytics, I was finding that my older posts were getting lower amounts of traffic. Now that wasn't really a problem with the first posts I wrote, as those weren't so…
February 11th

29

WordPress plugins and SEO mailing list

Excerpt: I've decided to start a weekly mailing list on WordPress plugins and SEO, which will contain: Info on new cool plugins I've come across or have coded myself SEO tips for WordPress Speed optimization tips for WordPress Tips and tricks for increasing the conversation on and the community aro…
January 7th

21

Wikia Search: Crap

Excerpt: Dave asked what people think of Wikia Search, and I can't say anything else but: crap. The results are crap, and what's worse, you can't track anything from it. Results Check out the query for my name. #1 is me, as it should, out of the other 10 results, 5 are german. I'm searching from the Neth…
November 26th

0

More SEO Blog tips

Excerpt: Aaron & Giovanna have a nice write-up about SEO tips for your blog today, which is a whole lot broader then my WordPress SEO guide: The blogger's guide to SEO. Check it out! (And while you're at it, digg it!)…
November 23rd

112

WordPress SEO - The beginner's guide

Excerpt: Increase search engine traffic to your WordPress blog with one night's work! Imagine having the search engine traffic to your blog increased by tens of percentages, or perhaps even doubling it, by just a few hours work. With putting just a bit of SEO effort into your WordPress you can increase your…
November 22nd

5

Matt, Adam, Please let me report linkspammers!

Excerpt: Hey Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik, I've got an idea on how you could help me report people who want to do foul link exchanges to you. What about creating an email address, to which I can forward all those automated emails with subjects like "Quality PR5 linkswap", so you can just ban all of them...…
November 13th

11

PageRank: more valuable than ever

Excerpt: Now that Google has been so nice as to decrease PageRank for at least a portion of the sites they have identified as selling links, PageRank, and more importanly historical PageRank data, has become very valuable linkbuilding data. If you know that a site has decreased in visible PageRank, are yo…
November 11th

6

A del.icio.us linkstructure!

Excerpt: del.icio.us is showing us right now what the power of an authoritative domain, together with internal linkjuice can do to your site. More and more, I see del.icio.us ranking for pretty cool queries with their "url" pages. For example, see these results for [iphone css3]: The title of that pag…
November 7th

25

We need a Google court!

Excerpt: Imagine this (and no this is not based at all on any of my clients, just for the sake of this argument): you have a client who has a pitch black history in search engine optimization, his tactics ranging from "simple" cloaking to using negative links to push his competitors sites down. At one point,…
October 26th

0

Semantic HTML and SEO

Excerpt: Just wanted to let you girls and guys know, an article I wrote for dev.opera.com got released today: Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization.…
October 26th

5

SEO has to be on your mind all the time

Excerpt: Dixon is giving a presentation right now about the changing nature of search, and pointing at the problem I see with clients a lot too: SEO can not be a "slice" of your marketing "pie", it needs to be a fundamental value in all your other marketing activities. Yes you need to do your "basic 101" …
October 26th

3

Extreme SEO Q&A

Excerpt: So yesterday I was on the panel for the last session of the day: an Extreme SEO Q&A, moderated by Ciaran Norris, and on that panel with me were Dixon Jones, Marcus Tandler and Jason Duke. We had a lot of fun, and loads of good questions came up. Some of the topics we touched on: Buying links …
October 23rd

16

Nofollow outbound links on your homepage and category pages

Excerpt: As you might have seen, I have now nofollowed all outbound links on my homepage and category pages. On the single pages for posts, these links are not nofollowed, unless I nofollowed them on purpose. I decided to do this after some discussion with a couple of guys (for who's interested: Roy, Martijn…
October 19th

41

I requested reconsideration, and got my PageRank back!

Excerpt: This blog got penalized with a -1 PR penalty for "selling links". Now I did have some paid links on this blog in the past, when I was newer and less visible to the search world, and less "wise". I'm not against buying or selling links, but doing it on your own blog, when you're an SEO is asking for …
October 17th

2

Intelligent site structure for better SEO

Excerpt: I wrote an article for dev.opera.com titled intelligent site structure for better SEO. Go check it out!…
October 14th

2

What's the PageRank of your wp-admin dir?

Excerpt: Sometimes you've got these moments when you're working on something, and you think "d0h". I logged into the css3.info admin pages, to find that the /wp-admin/ page had become a PR6... So I decided to update my robots-meta plugin and add the possibility to nofollow the login/logout and admin/registra…
October 12th

0

Definite guide to robots meta tags

Excerpt: I've created a big page with almost everything you need to know about robots meta tags! You can use my meta robots plugin to add these tags to your WordPress pages.…
October 11th

37

WordPress: Noindex specific posts and pages!

Excerpt: The single most requested feature for my robots meta plugin was to have the ability to add noindex tags to specific posts and pages from within the write post and write page admin screens. I've now fixed that, with the release of version 2.0 of this plugin! For those that have not updated since 1…
October 8th

12

Google: keyword density should NOT be this important

Excerpt: I'm talking about the Dutch SERPs at the moment. Google has been getting better and better at recognizing synonyms, plurals and singles etc in Dutch, and a few other European languages too. This caused a problem though, because suddenly, all our "startpagina's", pages full of links on a particular s…
October 8th

5

WordPress 2.3 makes creating dupe content even easier!

Excerpt: WordPress 2.3 has tags built in, as it was one of the most requested features by users. The default kubrick theme and a lot of others now have a link underneath each post to the category the post was placed in and the tags appointed to the post. Like this: Combine that with WordPress's defaul…
October 5th

23

PageRank dropped??

Excerpt: Although I don't see a PageRank update going on, somehow, the PageRank on my frontpage suddenly dropped to 5... Seems they're dropping PageRank on linksellers, JasonD was hit as well...…
October 3rd

15

Feeds in the search results?

Excerpt: There was some discussion on one of the biggest Dutch online marketing sites as to whether RSS feeds were any good for your SEO. I gave a quite lengthy reaction to that in Dutch which I wanted to share with all of you as well. My opinion is that the fact that feeds are showing up in the search re…
September 13th

12

Optimizing your WordPress titles

Excerpt: I've recently redone my entire category structure, going from a large group of categories to only six of them. I did that with a plugin which adds an ajaxy bit of interface so you can easily add and delete categories to posts from the category overview. This plugin is called wp-cats. Now after do…
September 9th

9

More WordPress SEO: robots-meta update

Excerpt: After reading Halfdeck's post about Third Level Push, which Roy pointed me at, I decided to add the necessary code to the Robots Meta plugin, since the code example Halfdeck gave was for an older version of WordPress (the wp_list_cats function he uses was deprecated in WordPress 2.1). It's quite…
September 1st

4

Update of Robots Meta plugin: more duplicate content issues solved

Excerpt: WordPress has a few nasty issues with duplicate content which the Robots Meta plugin I wrote can solve for you. In the latest update I just put up, you can now also disable the date based archives if you don't use them, and the author based archives. Especially the last one is one that few peopl…
August 24th

8

WikiPedia breaking the SERPs

Excerpt: I can't help but agree with Michael Gray on WikiPedia if I see stuff like this: http://www.google.nl/search?q=merchandising&pws=0&hl=nl. That's 5 results out of 10 for Wikipedia... Come on Google, fix it!…
August 21st

6

Merging plugins: the meta-robots WordPress plugin

Excerpt: I've merged a couple of plugins into one plugin, creating the meta-robots plugin. This plugin is able to add all meta robots tags you'd possibly wish to add to pages.…
August 16th

9

noindex,follow your WordPress search result pages

Excerpt: The webmaster guidelines advise you to prevent your search result pages from being indexed, WordPress doesn't do that by default (yet), so I've written a small noindex-search plugin which takes care of that by adding a meta robots noindex,follow tag to search result pages.…
August 8th

11

Busting some SEO myths

Excerpt: Short note: A fellow Dutch SEO, Wiep, has done a nice post busting some SEO myths, worth checking out! The results: Google indexes a website if you add a Google Analytics code. Busted! Google indexes a website if you use Google AdWords. Busted! Google indexes a website if you add Google A…
August 7th

2

The trouble with 301 redirects and backlinks

Excerpt: On the SERoundtable the question is raised whether you can check if a site 301 redirects to your website, referring to a thread on the SEW forums and an article by Aaron Wall. That seems quite simple to me, as most of the times you'll see clicks coming in from sites on which your own site doesn't ha…
August 2nd

1

Perfectly coded AJAX with fallbacks, and still no Google love?

Excerpt: You've probably seen it too... Great looking websites coded with all sorts of fancy AJAX functions, and it's done absolutely right. If you disable javascript, all the links that were first used to show content or do an action on the current page, now take you to a new page on which the content you'r…
June 24th

6

Nasty duplicate content trouble created by annoying "SEO"

Excerpt: Update: Scott has since fixed the issue, as seen in the comments. (And I have thus removed the nofollows :) I was checking the backlinks to my No Personalized Search plugin page, when I saw this turn up as one of the backlinks: Now of course I thought that was odd (and a bit funny), so I w…
June 11th

5

Yahoo SiteExplorer web vs. API: answers from Yahoo!

Excerpt: In response to my post about the Yahoo API giving the "wrong" results, I got an email from a Yahoo! rep, and we've been emailing back and forth a few times since. When I showed him the difference in the numbers given through the API and the Web interface for css3.info (I've updated my domain-info t…
June 9th

16

Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Excerpt: This discussion has been around for ages, but here in the Netherlands, more and more webdesign companies are claiming they can do proper SEO. Now I'm not arguing that a lot of the work SEO's have to do sometimes, is caused by webdesigners who don't know what the hell they're doing. It's a good thing…
June 7th

5

302-hijacks and domain name spam

Excerpt: Aaron reported halfway april that 302 hijacking is back, and today, I came across the most horrible example I've seen in a while. Looking at this query (for obvious reasons), my eye was caught by the feedburner.name result in there. Since the title reflects another URL, I was already suspecting some…
May 29th

17

SEO Jokes

Excerpt: My colleague Roy made me laugh today, and not a little, over this very geeky SEO joke: Me: "Hey, we're ranking for duplicate content." Roy: "How often?" Now, if you can laugh about that, you know you're doing good as an SEO and probably bad in your personal life :). Any more SEO jokes you guys …
May 24th

7

Yahoo SiteExplorer API giving "wrong" results?

Excerpt: I was working on adding a new metric to the domain info tool, being the "deeplink ratio" (the number of links to other pages than the homepage, divided by the links to the homepage * 100), when I found out Yahoo's SiteExplorer API is giving me wrong results. It returns way less links than the SiteEx…
May 10th

6

Blocking your site's search results?

Excerpt: Recently, Matt Cutts posted about search results in search results, as apparently Vanessa had updated the guidelines about this a bit after some uncertainty as to how you should handle your sites search results. The guideline now states: Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or…
May 7th

10

Cloak your sitemap!

Excerpt: There's a discussion on Webmasterworld as to whether XML sitemaps are a welcoming door for scrapers. Especially with the new autodiscovery feature for sitemaps around, it becomes very easy for a scraper to find any and all URL's in your site. So in my opinion, they are a bit too warm of a welcome. T…
May 2nd

24

nofollow is NOT meant for editorially reviewed links

Excerpt: Imagine you're like me, and you like WordPress so much that you write plugins for it. People start writing about these plugins and they, of course, link to you. You see these pages writing about you show up in your referrer stats and of course you go and have a look at what they're writing about you…
April 30th

5

Fixed category subpage titles and a fix in permalink redirect plugin

Excerpt: Subpages of category archives were improperly 301'd back to the main category page... Fixed that now, so update NOW: the permalink redirect plugin. I fixed the title for category subpages too btw, check how this works: [sourcecode language="php"] } else if ( is_category() ) { echo single_cat_t…
April 30th

10

Affiliate links? Cloak them!

Excerpt: John Chow did a post on how to hide your affiliate links... Of course the only proper way to hide affiliate links is: cloaking them. I'm thinking about building a WordPress plugin for that specific purpose. Anyone know of a proper affiliate link cloaking script?…
April 22nd

25

Optimize your shopping cart in 5 steps

Excerpt: A friend of mine was adding a shopping cart to his site, and wanted some advice on how to optimize his shopping cart. I thought: why not give the advice I gave to him to all my readers as well? So here we go, a complete article on shopping cart SEO. Step 1.: Make sure your inventory is spiderable …
April 16th

42

How to get Google to crawl your site faster

Excerpt: Yet another question out of my referrers to answer: "how can i get google to crawl my site faster". There are two possible reasons why Google is slow in spidering your site. The first might seem obvious: if Google doesn't find enough (quality) links pointing to your site, it doesn't think your site …
April 15th

9

NoIndex for RSS feeds!

Excerpt: As regular readers might recall, I wrote a guestpost on SEOEgghead asking for an equivalent of "noindex, follow" for RSS feeds. Now it seems the search engines have been listening a bit, or at least have been thinking in the same direction... In a post about preventing duplicate content with your…
April 11th

1

How to prevent Google from indexing script output

Excerpt: If you have some scripts on your site like, for instance, my domain-info script, you often use GET parameters so people can link to them or bookmark them. This has a lot of benefits, but it creates a problem as well. Search engines will index this output, causing your server to use cycles for some…
April 8th

35

How to remove www from your URL with mod_rewrite

Excerpt: I got a hit today for the following search query: how do you get rid of the www in url. As you can see that hits on my article about removing PHPSESSID's, which isn't quite what the person was looking for I guess. Here's the code to 301 redirect the www version of your site to the non-www version us…
April 2nd

9

Why Google doesn't like frames in your sites

Excerpt: I'm currently working on a site for a client who has a site which uses frames, and he asked me why Google always linked to the "wrong" page. He did not build this site himself of course, and hasn't got much of a clue as to how HTML works, let alone search engines. He asked me to explain it to him, …
March 31st

16

Google, WordPress and trackback URL's

Excerpt: I've been playing around with WP-Googlestats for some blogs, and I noticed something I really didn't think about until now. Googlebot, and other spiders, all spider the trackback URL's that are in the meta data for posts. But since it spiders that and it's not really sending a trackback, it get's re…
March 30th

15

PHPSESSID in your URL? Learn to 301 redirect them with PHP

Excerpt: I'm doing some work on a site which has like 4,500 pages indexed with a PHPSESSID in the URL, causing some major duplicate content problems. I got the server admin to disable the PHPSESSID's by adding the following to the vhost config: php_value session.use_trans_sid 0 php_value session.use_only…
March 26th

1

SEOdays was great, even though Google fucked up

Excerpt: Ok, so a lot of people asked me what I thought of SEOdays, since they don't speak Dutch and thus can't read my posts on the Onetomarket blog. The headline says it all, I've met some very cool people, of course Jennifer Slegg and David Naylor, but also Jason Duke and Johan Terpstra, a Dutch guy wh…
March 24th

5

Ask.com: I'm flattered, but...

Excerpt: Do you really think that I should rank #1 for my name? And no, not "Joost de Valk", but "Joost"? Hint: go off, and spider joost.com...…
March 19th

2

Going to SEOdays!

Excerpt: Some people watching the blogosphere closely had already guessed it: I'm going to SEOdays tonight. We only finalized it last thursday, so it has been quite hectic, but tonight I'm getting on an airplane over to London, to spend a few days and nights with the awesome DaveN, JenSense and others! I'm …
March 16th

4

Showing linkdata, but not PageRank

Excerpt: Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable covered my greasemonkey script for external links, and in the comments, Michael Martinez said: Why in the world would anyone want to look at Toolbar PageRank with live link data from Google Webmaster's link tool? That's like saying, "Give me old, poisoned mayo…
March 3rd

2

No Directory WordPress plugin

Excerpt: With Yahoo! introducing the NOYDIR tag to opt out of the title and description from the Yahoo! directory for your pages, I had to update my NOODP tag WordPress plugin to add the NOYDIR tag as well. In the process I added a small option screen to allow you to show either of the two, neither, or both.…
February 23rd

9

IP-delivery or cloaking: useful, but do you WANT to use it?

Excerpt: My friend Jaimie Sirovich sent me a chapter of his upcoming techy SEO book. More specifically, he sent me the chapter on cloaking, geo-targeting and IP-delivery. It's a fun read, and his example scripts are very, very complete and work nicely. Of course you can have all sorts of debates on wheth…
February 5th

2

Yahoo SiteExplorer suggestion

Excerpt: This Yahoo SiteExplorer suggestion needs some votes. It basically suggests adding an option to just show 1 link from each domain. I commented below that it would make sense to add in the results somewhere "and 1,000 other links from this domain", but I agree that being able to filter out all the sit…
January 26th

1

Live search asking stupid questions

Excerpt: Ok, bashing on Live is easy perhaps, but this example is so typical of why I hate the engine... If you've been reading my blog somewhat longer you know that one of my domains which I use a lot in examples is www.css3.info. Just a decent domain, with a pretty good amount of backlinks considering it's…
January 26th

1

Guest post at SEOEgghead.com

Excerpt: I did a guest post over at my SEOEgghead.com asking for noindex, follow for RSS feeds. Go check it out!…
January 22nd

13

Googling for microformats

Excerpt: Imagine, you can type in a query like "joost de valk class:vcard" and Google comes up with my contact page, because that has a vcard class in it's markup, the main class of the hCard microformat. This was suggested today on the uf-discuss mailing list, a mailing list I've been lurking on for quite a…
January 21st

16

Outbound links in english WikiPedia now nofollowed as well

Excerpt: A friendly admin of en.WikiPedia, whom I've been talking to on several occasions about spam on WikiPedia, has just informed that because of another big SEO contest, Jimbo Wales has ordered "nofollow" to be placed on all outbound links on en.WikiPedia. In my opinion, this is great news, as it will r…
December 15th

3

What I've learned in the SEM scholarship contest

Excerpt: Man I was cocky when I entered the scholarship contest. I though I'd beat everybody easily. The amounts of traffic that other articles were getting weren't very impressive, I thought, and I was sure to be able to get much more traffic. After all, I knew from experience what a few blog posts and news…
November 24th

3

Helping DaveN and Matt Cutts test MSN

Excerpt: By simply linking to Matt Cutt's .co.uk domain. For more details, check DaveN's post.…
October 30th

4

Marketing-Pilgrim SEO Contest

Excerpt: Boys and Girls, please help me out by reading this article, and giving me your comments on it :)…
October 24th

3

Launching a new blog? Get it right in one turn

Excerpt: My friends over at Aviva Directory have written another excellent piece of content: a list of 21 tips to launch your blog. Now I'm not saying I'm doing it all right, but I should be, and so should you. The list they made consists of 6 parts: The First Impression RSS & Subscriptions Social Book…
October 16th

15

Why PageRank says nothing about rankings

Excerpt: Sometimes you’ll get clients who say “my PageRank is x, yet I don’t get any visitors from Google�?. Understandable, I think. If you were graded 6 out of 10, by the biggest search engine out there, it’s only fair to expect some traffic, or isn’t it? PageRank is based on the academic sys…
October 12th

2

Wikipedia and Link-Spam: the story continues

Excerpt: As I told you before, some people on the WikiProject Spam page were talking about ways of sharing the links they remove with search engines, and especially Google. This dicussion has been going on, and now Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, commented on it. He said the following: I recently had di…
October 7th

0

The Sandbox, or is it the Trustbox

Excerpt: GrayWolf writes about The Sandbox not being the Trustbox, and the point he makes is the following: you're not trying to get out out of the Sandbox, you're trying to get into the Trustbox. This makes a lot more sense. Recently the tattoo blog of my colleague Roy suddenly got a whole lot more visi…
October 6th

3

Small new project: SEO Heroes RSS

Excerpt: I've started a small new project, a page with RSS feeds of major SEO's, on one of the domains I had lying around, SEO Heroes.com... The layout is heavily based on another RSS aggregator site, as you might have noticed. If people like this idea, I might do some funny stuff with it.…
October 3rd

0

Digg abuse

Excerpt: While I talked to you guys about how I made a site rank for some top keywords fast using Digg and some quality link-bait, I do not think that spamming is the answer. My colleague Roy Huiskes talked about some Digg abuse on his blog, and why this wouldn't work. He quotes an article on seomoz, about h…
October 3rd

1

Changing your permalink structure

Excerpt: I recently changed the permalink structure of this Wordpress blog, going from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ (Wordpress default i think) to the much more elegant and simple /%postname%/. This is very cool ofcourse, both because it's simpler and SEO wise, but on an existing blog, this leaves yo…
September 29th

1

PageRank update!

Excerpt: Some datacenters are showing new PR values for my sites, so an update is working. I have to say: it's turning out quite nice. CSS3.info get's a PR5, it's preview subpages are even PR6. My homepage finally get's what it deserves and goes to PR6, coming from a mere PR2... BTW, the page i use to check…
September 11th

0

Ambatchdotcom SEOcontest

Excerpt: A friend of mine was talking about this a while back, so i decided to have a look. The Ambatchdotcom SEOcontest, is a contest between SEO's of all kinds, who try to show their skills to other SEO's, and win prizes at the same time, it's quite cool, i might join in next time :)…
September 11th

1

Online Marketing / SEO

Excerpt: When you're an SEO like I am, you're expected to know the good sites about online marketing and follow them, to be sure your knowledge stays on the right level. Now sometimes you find sites that you find you should have found way before. This one about Internet marketing is a good example, it's a ni…
August 7th

0

SEO, Webdesign, e-commerce: you should do it all

Excerpt: Or none of it... The longer i work in this business, the more i feel you can either do it all, or do nothing at all, because you need to have a pretty good knowledge of say, webdesign, to do SEO, or of SEO to do e-commerce or... etc. etc .etc. Some companies do it all, and call it "innovative online…

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