SEOs love to complain about Wikipedia's rankings in Google. It seems that no matter what you're searching for, there'll be a Wikipedia listing. Michael Gray noted this to be true with popular actors and single character searches. Russ Jones checked out rankings for 600 keywords and found that 96% of them returned a Wikipedia page. And Loren Baker shows us how Google traffic to Wikipedia has been growing at an incredible pace (a good indicator of high rankings). Read the rest of this entry »

When you're an SEO there aren't too many accomplishments that feel better than a #1 ranking that brings in boatloads of clicks and conversions. Today I came across one surefire way to guarantee that such a #1 ranking does you and your web site little good. Check out this screenshot of search results from Google and you'll see what I mean. Read the rest of this entry »

LinkedIn notified me of a change in employment for a fellow search engine optimizer. Curious to see where in New York this company is, I decided to do a search for the address in Google. I was expecting Google to realize that my query is an address and present me with a maps-based result especially with the recent Google Universal initiative. Instead the top result was to a page from MapQuest (an AOL Company). Ooops!

It's not everyday that you come across a high-profile site that has been penalized by Google. And so it was with much interest that I read an article from Pronet Advertising about how they rank #1 for John Chow where the real John Chow used to rank. I'm not going to link to the official John Chow web site since it's now flagged as a bad neighborhood, but it's probably worth checking out. Read the rest of this entry »

Dealing with supplemental results in Google's index is nothing new. What is new (sort of) is a secret query that became public recently that allows you to see the supplemental pages for any given site. Unfortunately, it looks like this query has been disabled at some data centers and will likely be disabled across the board. Read the rest of this entry »

Google's PageRank, the little green bar that appears in the Google Toolbar for every site, garners a lot of attention. In days gone by, search engine optimization (SEO) was largely about getting a higher PageRank with 10 out of 10 being the best rating. Overtime, the importance of PageRank has diminished, which isn't to say that it doesn't matter anymore. Rather, it is now seems to be just one factor among many factors that is used by Google to determine what sites to show in response to search queries. Read the rest of this entry »

In the investment world there's a rule of thumb when it comes to the media. By the time the mainstream media declares something, it has already happened. For example, the slump in the housing market wasn't reported until well after it happened. Similarly, by the time the big media houses report that the housing market has hit bottom, it'll probably have already been there for some time. By now you're wondering what all of this has to do with SEO… Read the rest of this entry »

If you're managing a site with a large amount of content, you're probably doing well from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. However, my guess is that you could increase your keyword targets without actually creating any new content. It has recently come to light that the NY Times has taken two similar approaches for expanding their keyword reach and according to the reports both are quite successful. Marshall Simmonds and Matthew Brown continue to impress! Read the rest of this entry »

When search engines were first created their matching algorithms were simplistic in that they looked for exact matches for a user's search term. However, to remain competitive and to improve the results shown, Google has moved beyond simple matching and now understands synonyms. This means that in some (rare) circumstances you can achieve top rankings for a phrase that isn't an exact match of your content. Here's an example. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February I wrote about how Google was pressing on with their personalize search efforts. Up until yesterday, I had yet to see a real-world example of their tracking of my searches or any evidence that my search results were somehow tailored to me. Read the rest of this entry »

I participated a training session offered by PlanetOcean a while back. While the session was disappointing in that it failed to move beyond basic SEO issues, the speakers did show one interesting search result. Read the rest of this entry »

It's a Friday and there's snow and ice falling from the sky. Seems like a good day to skip the usual SEO/SEM post and instead post something humorous. Well, it'll be humorous if you've ever read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was checking out some SEO-related search terms such as SEO services. As I was scrolling through the list of results I saw this item at position 4 out of 37,500,000. That's pretty good and undoubtedly Promodo is actively targeting this term. Read the rest of this entry »

For once, the SEO in my post title doesn't actually refer to search engine optimization. Rather, it refers to the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. As you can probably tell, the site has nothing to do with optimizing web sites and yet it ranks number 3 in Google for the keyword "SEO". Read the rest of this entry »

One of the easiest search terms to obtain a top ranking for is your brand. If your brand and web site have been around for a while (1+ years), there's a good chance that you'll hold the number 1 spot in all the search engines without having to engage in any search engine optimization (SEO) tasks. But surely there's more you can do, right? Read the rest of this entry »