Google Toolbar gives Google vast pools of data which it uses to rank websites in the search results

Is link building important anymore?

The idea of Google Panda was to try and remove poor quality sites that were clogging up the search engine results pages (SERPs). The plan was to kill off duplicate content or content that was no more than a bunch of links. But why have so many innocent people seemingly been caught in the cross fire? And are they really innocent?

If Black Hat is good enough for the Queen ....?

Black Hat SEO works, so why not use it?

Black Hat is Search Engine Optimisation work that crawlers like Google, Yahoo and Bing would ban your website for if they realised what you were up to. And they most certainly are getting better at this. Many sites that relied on copied content (content farms) or were nothing more than directories containing links (link farms) have seen themselves disappear from search results or moved so low in the rankings that they may as well not be there.

Even in the demo VevoCart makes no SEO attempts, as the page title and URL show here for a page that is listing men's boots ...

VevoCart and SEO

VevoCart is the asp.net offering for an online shopping cart and it was recently bought to my attention by a client. In terms of usability I have never applied it to a website because it is so poorly reviewed. You can read some stories of woe here: http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/carts/VevoCart.aspx.

Do blogs help SEO?

“Start blogging and it will help your SEO” are the words I so often see on forums or hear in conversations but many people try it out and never find the promised land of high rankings. So do blogs really help? In essence blogs can be effective but only when carried out properly.

Real SEO practitioners don't get too close to linkwheels

Link wheels, a SEO solution?

There are plenty of SEO companies pushing the link wheel solution at the moment. Have you lost your position in the search results because you were using link farms? No problem, use link wheels instead because Google sees these as natural.

Dealing with clients who don't understand something is prime cowboy territory

On the trail of the SEO expert

Being a growth industry, SEO is full of cowboys who see optimising websites as ideal ‘get rich quick’ fodder even if they don’t actually produce results for the client. I’ve sometimes followed these people through the system and it goes a bit like this:

Most SEO forums may as well be empty, they're simply full of link builders ...

Good SEO forums

I do a huge amount of work in forums for my clients because I see it as an important part of search engine optimisation. Not so much for link building, although it can have a profound affect when carried out correctly as I discuss in the article Forum Link Building – What Not to Do, but because it brings visitors from the forum to the website I’m working on.

Spinning articles works, but for how much longer and could there be penalties later?

Spinning articles for SEO

Before I start, an explanation. Spinning articles means taking one piece of text and running it through computer software so it looks like a different piece of text but still on the same theme. This makes it possible for some SEO companies to offer 100 articles for $100 or the like.

Links to your website only have a limited impact if the search engines do not understand the site itself

SEO: building backlinks doesn’t work

Shock and gasp, “building backlinks doesn’t work?” Well in some situations no. Here I’m covering one of the most common issues my clients talk to me about – “I built lots of backlinks (not spammy ones) but my website still doesn’t show high up in Google”.

Users building links can bring down a forum or seriously mislead visitors

Can we trust internet forums?

Many internet forum discussions are full of very questionable advice – I’ll explain why and how you can spot a genuine comment