Your SEO is shit

Define an English Person

admin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:46:16 +0000

If ever you were in doubt that there was random magic in SEO then ‘Define an English person’ should display that there is some unknowns.

Define:English Person

Your SEO is Shit, defining English people since 1976

Define English Person
30 High Street
Letchworth
ENGL ISH

Referrer Reporting is a Bag of Shit

admin — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:40:01 +0000

Every. Single. Day. someone asks why this metric doesn’t correlate to that metric, or if this metric is this number and that metric is another number then why the third calculated metric is different to the calculation.

Generally all metrics are shit, and about to get a hell of a lot shitter with the EU Cookie crapery, but that’s a whole different post

None are more shitter than Referral Tracking

Q: What is a Referrer?
A: In this instance, we’re talking about the last site you visited, in an ideal world, your browser would remember every site you visit, in order and tell the next site, which site you were last on. This is a browser function, it’s client side functionality, it’s the individuals browser that remembers the last site you were on and gives that information to the next site visited.

So hang on, you’ve generated a reliance on a metric that requires each and every single person who visits your sites browser to blag where they came from?

Hopefully, you’re starting to see why this is bullshit.

Lots of people, quite rightly, don’t want a site to know where they’ve come from, or the last site they were on, all manner of malarky could ensue so mechanisms exist to make sure that the referrer is not kept or transmitted by the browser.

Or you might be on a secure site, which links out to another site, that second site shouldn’t really be passed the secure site as the referrer, that might make it … insecure

Referrer tracking is great for web owners, many a happy hour can be spent grepping the log for referrers and then visiting them to see what they are (you can see the stupidity in this also, web owner ping pong)

Referrer log spamming used to be a great laugh, especially on those .edu or .ac.uk sites which published their AWStats, inbound from a University domain anyone?

Anyway, the myriad of things that strip the refferer include things like personal privacy software, corporate firewall, browser settings, some browser plugins, some redirects, etc etc etc

Referrer tracking is shit, but it’s some kind of barometric

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

I am become SEO, the destroyer of webs

admin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:14:51 +0000

I’ve been really hung-up on whether to write this post or not. There’s a general likelihood that it may cause the de-indexation of this site. Search Engines should not be editors, but they possibly will seek to protect their business. That will make this an interesting experiment.

Advertising

Most Search Engines generate revenue from advertising, some search engines facilitate this advertising on 3rd party sites (we don’t display ads, but wordpress even has easy plugins for publishing these adverts). There’s some guidelines about what you can publish, etc.

The basic model, as I’m sure you are aware is that a Merchant asks a Search Engine to display an advert in some way when a certain phrase or word is searched for and then will pay on each click, or to contextually analyse the page surrounding the advert and deliver the Merchants advert into places where the contextualisation is correct. In this second model, the website displaying the advert gets a portion of the click revenue when an action is performed.

All this works terribly well, and barring some clickfraud skullduggery it’s a model which seems set to continue.

Micropayments

The more astute amongst you will have realised where this is going already.

Forever, Business has been working on a way of acquiring micropayments for web content. But have generally failed to come up with a pain free way of harvesting these from passing Audience who generally feel that web content should be free.

Obviously, Business is doing it the wrong way round, and there’s no alternative for them.

Tips Jar

Imagine, during your general trawling around the web, say from Digg or Fark or B3ta or wherever, you had a low impact mechanism to thank a publisher of some content you liked by dropping a few proper real world coins into their tip jar. All it would take would be about 3 mouse clicks.

Would you do it?

You go to a site, you see something that genuinely interested you written by a small time website owner desperate to make a few bucks here and there from his site.

Would you do it? Would you?

If you do, just make sure you visit a few pages wherever you end up.

Martin Schaedel

admin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:56:35 +0000

Martin knew many people globally, he was a world citizen and, frankly, an oddball.

There was some uncertainty whether the tales he told were true, or tall. It didn’t matter, he was a force of nature, often infuriating, often cocky but always full of ideas on how he was going to make the world better.

I knew him while he lived in London, always talking about the 8 bedroom apartment he was going to rent in Kensington and flat share with several super models who ironed his shirts. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, this is the enigma that was Martin Schaedel.

The loss of Martin in a light aircraft accident at Santa Monica airport leaves the world a lot less colourful and definitely more lonely.

Rest In Peace, Martin Scheadel.

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

Does Yahoo! hate IndexTools?

SEO-003 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:53:36 +0000

Yahoo! can’t have a lot of faith in their Web Analytics suite (formerly IndexTools). I say this because they are using free 3rd party analytics software on several of their sites instead.

We recently exposed the use of Google Analytics on the Yahoo! Rivals site which was bad enough.

You can imagine my shock when I discovered Google Analytics code on the Yahoo! Search Blog:

Great PR.

SEO-003

Yahoo! Rivals Analytics

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:11:02 +0000

Article has moved Yahoo! Rivals Analytics

Because we are fucking useless

by the way

PARIS HILTON SEX TAPE FREE DOWNLOAD

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