Last week Matt Cutts talked about hidden links and illustrated a case of what was a pretty blatant attempt to hide links within text.

This morning I surfed over to MichaelSaunders.com (a brokerage here in Sarasota) and saw that their footer area is full of keyword-laden text. If you mouse-over the paragraphs you will see that a large number of the keywords in text are actually links to different parts of the Michael Saunders website. The text links are made to blend in completely with the rest of the paragraph. It appears that the links are there solely for search engines and not users of the site.

» Continue reading “Is MichaelSaunders.com Violating the Google Guidelines?”

Since when does the world revolve around pleasing Google?

The fact of the matter is they are a publicly traded company and are in it to make money off your advertising dollars. So when Matt Cutts starts telling webmasters that they need to write code to please Google’s agenda, I say “please!” He recently wrote:

If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.

Since when is Google in the business of regulating disclosure for the types of links you have on your site? And why is Matt speaking like a representative of “search engines” as a whole? Matt is also encouraging snitching on those who are “selling links”. (Note to self: report every single commercial website to the Google link nazis.)

» Continue reading “Please Register Your Link Intent with the Google Borg”

I love how Google always preaches their “build for humans, not for bots (search engines)” philosphy yet they rely on bots and computerized systems themselves to rank search engine results. Am I the only one who thinks that’s a strage paradox?

» Continue reading “This Title Won’t Rank for Anything Relevant. Thanks a lot Googlebot.”

Yesterday Jason Calcanis gave a keynote speech at SES where he stirred up quite a bit of controversy. I still can’t decide if he’s a pompous asshat who creates controversy by virtue of his own ignorace or a brilliant marketer who stirs the pot intentionally to create buzz. Either way, he is once again the center of attention. Allen at CenterNetworks has the audio (I’m always very impressed by Allen’s coverage of events) of Jason’s speech so you can judge by yourself.

» Continue reading “Jason Calacanis Thinks Netscape Users are Idiots”

Rand from SEOmoz recently posted an article detailing two different approaches to structuring a page’s title tags. There are different schools of thought regarding what structure is best suited for titles. The two approaches mentioned are Rand’s “Company Name - What is this page about” and Ammon’s “What is this page about - Company Name.”

I think overall it depends on your particular goal because it’s all a balance of SEO, branding, and trust (or clickability). I think it’s most helpful to take a look at an example (rather than trying to figure this out theoretically).
» Continue reading “Should You Put Your Company Name in Title tags?”