Your SEO is shit » SEO-001

Getting a site banned

SEO-001 — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 16:07:54 +0000

So a lot of sites have some fun exploits they leave lying around,

here’s one:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/celebrities/lady-gaga/

notice the ‘next 40 stories’ link at the bottom of the article list, paging through that means:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/celebrities/lady-gaga/?page=2

and

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/celebrities/lady-gaga/?page=3
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/celebrities/lady-gaga/?page=4

but there’s actually no limit to the pages on the counter, so you can

once all these pages are indexed because of the links above…

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

duplicate pages

WIN!

Want to fuck an S.E.O. over?

SEO-001 — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:38:47 +0000

Hi,

In the last couple of weeks I’ve spent quite a large amount of time playing with analytics, most specifically Omniture.

I don’t know about other analytics packages (well, I do but I can’t be arsed to think about it), but Omniture has a massive implementation flaw, which of course opens the door for some fun.

There seems to be no security tie between the page containing the beacon and Omniutre, what I mean is, that Omniture servers will accept a beacon ping from anywhere, any page on the internet.

Sooo, for instance, I could wander over to Apple and have a quick shifty at their Omniture beacon and then copy it into any page on the web, and that page would start contributing data into Apple’s Omniture account. They have no domain blacklist / whitelist you see.

So this is where any SEO would start thinking, ‘How can I push this ?’

Well, since the ping to the server is javascript generated, this means you can easily script the beacon transmit function ( s.t() ) to send all manner of fun stuff into the Apple Omniture account.

Obviously, once you can push false stats into a sites analytics, you’re going to be able to generate a shitload of headscratching by anyone within the organisation that spends time analysing those stats for leverage, which is usually the SEO guy.

kekekekekekeke

SEO-001

Signs of SEO Maturity in the U.S.

SEO-001 — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:18:54 +0000

In my humble opinion, which isn’t worth much, the public face of SEO in the U.S., for all their publicity attention seeking, is a failure. We’ve written about it here before, about how Superstar SEOs san about on the back of doubling the traffic to a site back in 2001 which they think gives them an open ticket to stand up, claim they’re the best SEO in the world and join the speakers circuit *yawn*.

And this works for them, they’ll get the call offering them some money to go mend something somewhere .. and panic.

For people with an ounce of knowledge about SEO, the U.S. has always appeared behind the curve, this is fine for them, their audience is vast and a teensy bit of SEO knowledge can make some gains, changing an ‘and’ to an ‘&’ in a title tag say. They still constantly whitter about PageRank and Keyphrase density and spam tagcoulds onto anything they can find – Zzzzz.

There are a few U.S. SEOs that we know of that actually ‘get it’ – the whole thing, the whole kit and kaboodle, everything from stats implementation and shortcomings, through Business Intelligence, onward through prioritised reccomendations, into implementation and through Executive reporting (‘here’s a graph, it goes up … that’s a Good Thing for your company’

Jessica Bowman

It was through Jessica (indirectly, she doesn’t know me), that I landed on this article – which is possibly one of the most intelligent writings I’ve seen about SEO so far this year (and by far one of the most interesting to come out of the U.S.)

Have a read, It starts of with an interview of Stephan Spencer who nails it, and then moves to Jessica who puts icing on the cake

enjoy

SEO at Enterprise level is a flop

SEO-001

The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Marketing

SEO-001 — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:31:51 +0000

I’m place-marking this to take to bits later, so far I can’t read past the second paragraph without exploding
MSNBC MSN Article on SEO

SEO-001

How not to ask for ‘SEO’

SEO-001 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:11:52 +0000

This is how not to ask for SEO (Requires sound for full SEO effect)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-EfRLaZFSU

Thanks 2008, you were great.

SEO-001 — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:00:13 +0000

So 2008 is in it’s dying hours. We started the year in bouyant mood based on the back of round-robin snowballing bank loans for money that only existed as IOUs. Though we wouldn’t find out how much the banks had screwed us over until later on in the year. Everyone was happy (apart from some sweaty bankers hidden in the back rooms of Canary Wharf guarding their deep dark secret).

So, 2008 on average, you were great. Any old idiot could knock up a website and somehow make some money on it. Sarah Beeny may (or may not) have said something which resonates into all corners of the current economy, ‘Gone now are the days when any old imbecile could buy a property that needed nothing doing to it, completely fuck it up and sell it for a 50% profit’. This cuts to the core of the economic re-adjustments that’s going on into the start of 2009.

Any old idiot could buy a URL completely make a mess of it and somehow mostly be ok.

Any old idiot could start a curtain design consultancy and somehow make money.

It’s all based on money that never existed.

Come 2009 any Business will be looking at it’s assets and trying to wring every last ounce of value out of it. There’s no such thing as an over-performing website, all websites, whatever they do, could do better – we’re seeing this with the now aggressive stance Google is taking to it’s primary products, and Google is the most successful website in the world.

There are some disciplines which should flourish in the next year, SEO should be one of them as part of a CRM/PPC push trying to increase engagement and ROI on websites – and not before time. Without trying we’ve found and highlighted some terrible sites and tried to show why they’re cruddy on the few postings we’ve made so far on here.

If ever there was a time to sort the good SEOs from the shit ones, 2009 feels like it will be it.

Happy & Prosperous New Year to you, it will be neither prosperous nor happy – Good Luck

SEO-001

SERP Click Through Percentages

SEO-001 — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:33:34 +0000

In August 2006, AOL fucked up massively, they released click through data of their Search Engine users. Well, not all of them just 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users made over the course of three months. You can get the torrent on Mininova if you want a look: http://www.mininova.org/tor/388815

There were pretty much no surprises. People search for shit, they don’t conceive anything they type might be stored or that they are tracked as an individually identifiable user so they drop their guard. ho hum.

Anyway, the interesting thing to know is that AOL search is a white label of Google. AOL add a shitload of crud to the SERP which makes it ugly and the algorithm used is a bit ‘safer’ than the live Google algorithm but generally, AOL Search is Google.

Because the SERP click through metrics were released we can work out which ranking gets which traffic, this is really useful. It’s improbable that Google would ever release this kind of information. AOL shouldn’t have done and people got sacked for doing it… but hey, their loss.

AOL Ranking Click Through graph

So we can see that the first ranking on a SERP, according to the harvested dataset gets clicked on by 42.3% of the people who see it, second place gets 11.92% etc.

Some things to know and think about:

Who’s clicking on the PPC Adverts? Anyone?
AOL SERPs pages are maxo pimpo compared go Google, the fold is in a completely different place
Other stuff I can’t be bothered to type

SEO-001

www.diy.com

SEO-001 — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:54:58 +0000

Quick Post

I heard B&Q the major purveyor of fine quality tools and materials for builders, trade, plumbers for all your household needs was thinking of selling www.diy.com – which of course is madness (even though it’s worth a mint).

They’d easily make more money than the URL is worth, even in this economic climate, if they made the site useful in any way at all.

There’s so many half cocked attempts at plugging content in there (it’s actually got some good DIY guides if you can be arsed to hunt around for a couple of hours to try and find them). and theyre pimping it so hard with great big offer gif’s that the site is unusable.

The search and navigation is fatally broken.

Here’s a challenge – go to the B&Q website at www.diy.com and try to find out if they sell a bathroom wall light with a shaving plug.

It’s fun for all the family. It’s like a Pirate Treasure Hunt – ARRRRRRRRR

SEO-001

DSG Retail

SEO-001 — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:48:01 +0000

So most people should know that jsut about anything electrical (fridges, freezers, blu-ray players, flat screen tv’s DAMN must stop slapping in keyphrases! ) sold on the high street in the UK is done through a DSG retailer. I’m talking Currys, PC World – who were and then werent and then were again) , Dixons…

Some of you might have had the misfortune to try and use their weirdy site, which has far too many problems to list here.

Anyway, so, you’ve got a calamitous CMS system, it happens to us all, what do you do. I tell you what you do, you try and bolt some ‘save-yer-ass’ SEO onto it that’s what. Behold:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GB&q=inurl%3awww.currys.co.uk+inurl%3aseo

For example:

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/234260

Automatically I’d be thinking I’d be looking at some kind of doorway sub-site, but it’s all so mashed up and broken that it’s of no use at all. I don’t really know what it’s trying to do.

Anyone who remember the SEO/Google ‘Tolerance Years’ will shudder that an SEO is flagging his SEO work by using SEO as a directory point.

ho hum

SEO-001

Christmas

SEO-001 — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 09:21:33 +0000

Merry Christmas.

Hopefully this means an end to the ’Buy a Steam Cleaner for you Dad as a Christmas present, it’s what they always wanted. It makes a perfect present, and comes in a lovely big box which looks great when wrapped up.’ bollocks on the Shopping channels.

I had a look at the QVC site in passing, look at this disaster:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.item.V25685.desc.Karcher-1500-PSI-Pressure-Washer-w-Dirtblasterand-VPS-Wand

Homepage duplication:
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/

Dead Directory:
http://www.qvc.com/qic/

Logo links to:

http://www.qvc.com/?rewrite=no&cm_re=MH-_-LOGO-_-LOGO&cm_sp=MH-_-LOGO-_-LOGO

ooh look:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.item.Kiss-My-Arse

returns a 200, so if it’s linked to, it’ll get indexed

sheesh, what a mess, and thats just the start of it – there’s loads more like how they’re (mis)handling internationalisation and stuff, but Meh! I’ve got a turkey to cook

SEO-001