WebProNews

Exploring The Google Penalty Box

Pick a number between 6 and 950 and you'll likely find evidence, or at least the antecedent number, for a Google ranking penalty. Webmasters and SEOers are in general agreement Google penalizes, and have dubbed them according to their numeric reprimand: -6, -30, -60, -950, and so on. Google inadvertently in cases has acknowledged such penalties exist, but has yet to present any hard and fast rules.

There's Value In Stumbling

Here's an interesting question put forth by webmasters: What's a link in StumbleUpon worth? Well, it's nofollowed, which means not much in terms of link juice. But there may be an indirect value. Part of that, of course, is branding. It's good to be found in as many places as possible. But another value, as noted at SearchEngineRoundtable, is the chance that somebody stumbles upon your site and blogs about it. If so, you've just earned another endorsement and possibly a good link.

So What Links Should you Nofollow?

A few weeks ago, there was a lively exchange on Search Engine Land about using the “nofollow” link attribute to sculpt PageRank.

Flickr Adds Nofollow Tags

Love 'em or hate 'em, you can expect to see fewer links throughout Flickr.  The photo-sharing site recently added nofollow tags to most external links, making them pointless as part of an SEO strategy.

Fighting Google's Paid Link Stance With Robots.txt

Andy Beard has hit upon a compromise between removing text links from his site and being summarily punished by Google for selling them.

Nofollow Makes it Into HTML5 Specification

HTML5 appeared as first working draft at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Danny Apologizes to Wired and SEO Community

Danny Sullivan (a.k.a. The Godfather to those of us in the SEO realm) messed up, kind of. In a post he OK's for the Search Engine Land a couple days ago titled, "Get A Free Link From Wired" they basically outline how to get yourself a free link on the wired.com site. I especially love the "don't be too evil" note which implies that some amount of evil is OK.

Nofollow and Wikis

There is no such thing as a free link.  No matter what the person who is selling you it tells you.  And the web will always adapt to make it so.  Even if its hard work. Barry Schwartz posted Get A Free Link From Wired today on an SEO blog, noting that:

How Meta Commands Can Help You Love Spiders

Nearly all search engines utilize spiders (which are also known by their original name, robots) to go out and scour the web looking for web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine.

Debunking Wordpress SEO "Expert" Articles

I am going to attempt to debunk almost every Wordpress SEO "Expert" article ever written, and in some respects this article even debunks some of the things I have written in the past.