Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

A favorite of pretend SEO companies is to spin articles using software and then publishing them as unique.  Here is a shinning example (http://www.masquerademasksformen.com/2012/01/16/texas-automobile-recyclers-offer-opportunity-to-save-big-on-auto-repairs/)

With countless companies in the usa taking visits in cash flow, there may be one that will be in fact booming and supporting individuals save money concurrently. The auto these recycling marketplace isn’t getting smaller, its expanding and there are many main reasons driving this increase in business. A vey important just one requires salvaging the average consumer a considerable amount of money car repairs.

Just brutal and why any company would want their website or brand associated with an article like this is beyond me.

I put together a fake news story last week and it seems someone posted it to Reddit.com and then the fun began!  I got a phone call from my host at around 8pm and he said my website might be under a DoS attack because it was receiving 100+ http requests per second!!  Needless to say my poor shared hosting account crashed and my host was working hard to keep it live!

Here are the results so far

The website usually gets 200-300 visits a day.  The 86k requests I could not serve kinda sucks but I was not really expecting this to go as viral as it did.  I will update this after the 24 hour mark.

30 hour update!

Referers.

A search for used auto parts Toronto turns up a math website as the number one choice in Blekko, they still have some work to do I think.

Here are some of my favorite SEO articles from the past week or so.

Can Small Business Do Their Own SEO?

An honest look at the reality many small business owners face when deciding to go the DIY route!

Google – Matt Cutts Debunking Graphic

Very funny!  Must be true.

Sometimes your website or various web pages within your site don’t rank well or rankings go down without any obvious reason.  Sometimes you need to dig deep and be creative.  There was a post over at Google support forums that received an interesting answer.

John Mu, checked out a posters site and made an observation about the length of the alternative text (alt tags) used in the images source code. John said that the images are using “a full copy of the – sometimes long – title as the alt-text for all of the product images on the page.” He recommended the webmaster stay away from throwing so much content in the alt tags of the images.

it could be confusing to see the exact same text over and over again. Search engines generally aren’t impressed by seeing the same text that many times, so I’d simplify that a bit by perhaps using the full text for the main product image, but not reusing it for all of the smaller detail-images.

Great little piece of information to file away!

OK, as you can see it has not been perfected but www.trueknowledge.com is very cool anyways.  Take a spin and let me know your comments.

OK, so who can answer this question…what search engine shows 11 sponsored results and only 4 organic results on the first page??

?

?

The answer is GOOGLE!!! These keywords are very expensive, so less organic results equals more clicks and more money in Google’s pockets.

I do realize this could just be some testing but if it is a sign of things to come,  my feeling is it will translate into a very poor user experience…

One of the main digs against Google is that it has been very slow in reacting to content farms that ad little to zero to the search results. Sure Google has chased down some little guys over the past few years but they have continually shied away from bombing the really big content farms. But Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s CEO has confirmed the ban. He told searchengineland.com, Blekko has decided to ban the “top 20 spam sites from blekko’s index entirely, based on our users click /spam on results.” This includes ehow.com, one of Demand Media’s top revenue generating web sites.

Skrenta explained this came up after listening to Danny on This Week In Google. Rich hacked together a reverse slashtag named -/contentfarms that allowed searches to remove these sites from their searchers. Today, Blekko decided to drop the sites completely from their index, making the slashtag irrelevant.

The top 20 sites Blekko removed from their index include ehow.com, experts-exchange.com, naymz.com, activehotels.com, robtex.com, encyclopedia.com, fixya.com, chacha.com, 123people.com, download3k.com, petitionspot.com, thefreedictionary.com, networkedblogs.com, buzzillions.com, shopwiki.com, wowxos.com, answerbag.com, allexperts.com, freewebs.com, and copygator.com.

Gutsy move by Blekko and it will be interesting to see if Google follows suit with some major moves. But let’s remember that Google makes a tons of cash from many of these sites because they show Adsense.

Typically most SEO’s will begin with a new website by optimizing the home page because that is usually your best starting page in terms of current search engine visibility but many beginners neglect the power of inner page conversions.  Inner pages can be so valuable because often the traffic that you send there is laser targeted and will therefore convert at a very high rate.  I have found it common to see inner pages with bounce rate and/or conversion rates that are 5-10 times higher better than home pages.

Here are a few results I pulled from a client that has been with us for the past two years and it can give you a good idea on the growth potential of inner pages.

The moral of this post is that you should always make sure the search professional that is working for you has a holistic approach to your search engine success.  Focusing solely on the home page will leave a lot of visitors and money on the table.

Sometimes I come across the most interesting pages.  Things were so different a decade ago when I was first getting into online marketing.  Something like this was a common sight *http://www.mvdn.com/exit.htm* (sorry, but please cut and paste, I don’t have the willpower to make this link live) and it actually worked!!  I notice the page rank bar on this page has a 3, I wonder if after a certain amount of time Google still allows juice to flow from a page like this?  Maybe the logic is that if it has lasted online for this long it is somewhat legitimate?

Let’s just hope it really doesn’t pass on any authority, but even if it does I guess it is watered down between the 200 or so outgoing links on the page.  Oh to be an SEO in another decade, would be so easy!