Dragonfly Media Curacao

The sad thing about making websites is that they are, by definition, temporary. At the speed the internet is moving, you just know that the website you made yesterday is not good enough anymore tomorrow. But then again, this is marketing and that’s the way it works. You need to move forward and renew yourself, and your company, every day to be able to stay ahead of the curve.

When you redesign, reorganize or rebuild a website the URLs of the individual pages will usually change as well. This becomes a problem when you think of all the links into your website and the link juice you’re throwing away if you don’t redirect these links in an SEO-friendly way. Sure, you can catch the errors people are getting and redirect them to the proper page or your homepage with links or JavaScript, but these methods don’t work well for the search engines. This is where 301 redirects come into play. (more…)

One of the blogs I read regularly is garrycon.com. Last week Garry posted a somewhat panicky post about how he thought that he’d been doing all the wrong things on his website.

He wrote about how he thought schemes like Text Link Ads were bad, links without rel=”nofollow” would make him lose PageRank and how duplicate content on his own site was making pages in his site go supplemental.  As Andy Beard told Garry in the comments; he was effectively the victim of Google FUD.

FUD is an abbreviation for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. The idea is that you use people’s fears to sell a product by casting doubt on the competitor’s product. IBM used it very effectively during the 70’s to discredit Amdahl. Even though Amdahl’s products were better and more cost-efficient than IBM’s products people preferred IBM computers because of the FUD.

Google FUD is slightly different though. Google uses it to spread fear in the hearts of SEOs that try to bend the rules. The method is that they tell webmasters just enough to know what is the right way to do things but they leave room for speculation. Then when people address the holes or, try to, take advantage of the apparent holes in the algorithm they hint that those tactics might get people banned. (more…)

Two weeks ago we posted about our efforts for getting some pages out of Google’s supplemental index. The theory was that pages that have gone into supplemental are not getting enough internal link love. This theory was backed by material from Michael Martinez, Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin so we were pretty confident that this would work, but you’re never sure in SEO.

We decided to use a Wordpress plugin called popularity contest to display a list of most visited posts on every page in the blog. As a result of using this plugin every page on the blog would add a link to the ten most popular posts in the blog. This means that those most popular pages would get link love from about 100 sources and every new page would add another link. (more…)

For some of the websites that we work with there are notable differences in the way they rank in Google and in Yahoo. For instance; a website might rank well in Google for a specific search term and be 10 to 30 places lower in Yahoo, or the other way around.

The problem lies in the fact that the search engines are fundamentally different and, because they don’t tell anyone how they work, nobody really knows what all defining factors are for ranking. So, the result is: everybody’s guessing at the differences between Google and Yahoo and nobody’s sure about how to rank well in both at the same time. (more…)

SEOmoz.org has a special section for people who want to publish their content on the SEOmoz-blog. The content in this Youmoz-section sometimes rivals the posts in the official blog in usefulness. One of these very useful articles was posted a week ago by Vincent Goldsmith.

In this post Vincent talks about what he has learned about SEO. In doing so he gives a very accurate account, in our eyes, of some of the fundamentals - as well as pitfalls - of SEO today. He sums up what he has learned in 6 bullet points:

1. Planning matters
2. Text is king
3. Content isn’t everything
4. Google isn’t everybody
5. Update regularly and be very patient
6. You can’t ever stop

Read Vincent’s complete article at Youmoz or at his own website.

For the last few weeks there has been a lot of debate about Google’s supplemental index which was sparked by an article in Forbes about the so-called “Google Hell”. The biggest part of this debate was a rehashing of earlier discussions and misconceptions, but some were interesting to follow.

Especially the discussion at SEOmoz.org got pretty heated in the comments to a post by Rand Fishkin, aptly named “Supplementary My Dear Watson“. The comments in this post even lead him to retract part of his original statements in a follow-up post. One of the commenters to SEOmoz’s post (Michael Martinez of seo-theory.com) said something that we think can help us get some of the posts in our blog out of the supplemental index.

Michael Martinez explained the main reason for pages to go to the supplemental index:

“linkage (Internal PageRank) determines why pages go Supplemental”

He backed up his statement with content from mattcutts.com, Matt Cutts himself also added to the debate and eventually everybody settled on Michael Martinez being right. (more…)

Almost all SEO projects we do start with onsite SEO. The reason for this being that a website should be set up correctly before you should start with offsite SEO (who wants to link to or recommend a website that’s no good?). So, what are the basic first steps of onsite SEO? (more…)