The agile SEO blog

July 24, 2007

One of the most important measures of success for a blog is the number of RSS subscribers. There are many blog posts out there about how to increase your number of subscribers. They range from the use of bigger, more prominent and attention-grabbing RSS buttons, to offering bonuses for signing up. While you can use...

July 23, 2007

I frequently get asked why a particular page is no longer ranking. I wish there were a simple answer to that question. Instead of giving personal responses, I’ve decided to write a detailed post with the possible problems that might cause your ranking to drop, as well as all the solutions I could think of....

July 19, 2007

Duplicate content is one of the most common causes of concern among webmasters. We work hard to provide original and useful content, and all it takes is a malicious SERP (Search Engine Results Page) hijacker to copy our content and use it for his or her own. Not nice. More troubling still is the way...

July 19, 2007

Usually I don’t cover basic material in this blog, but as a loyal reader, Paul Montwill, requested it, I’m happy to oblige. As I learned back in school, if one person asks a question, there are probably many others at the back of the class quietly wondering the same thing. So here is a brief...

July 17, 2007

After reading this intriguing article in the LA Times, I came to the conclusion that Google has far more ambitious plans than I originally thought. In their effort to build the perfect search engine — an oracle that can answer all of our questions, even answers that we didn't know about ourselves — Google is...

July 16, 2007

Last month there was an interesting article in Forbes about the search engine marketing saboteurs. These so-called “SEO professionals” proudly proclaim their job to be damaging the hard-earned rankings of their clients’ competitors. I understand a lot of people would do anything for money, but it’s still unsettling to see such people trumpet their efforts...

July 13, 2007

Quality is king in search engine rankings. Of course spam sites using the latest techniques make their way up top—but their rankings are temporary, fleeting, and quickly forgotten. Quality sites are the only ones that maintain consistent top rankings. This wasn’t always true. A few years ago it was very easy to rank highly for...

July 11, 2007

Do you have pages in Google's supplemental index? Get 'em out of there! Matt Cutts of Google doesn't think SEOs and website owners should be overly concerned about having pages in the supplemental index. He has some pages in the supplemental index, too. As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve...

July 10, 2007

Let's face it. We all like to check the Google PageRank bar to see how important websites, especially ours, are for Google. This tells us how cool and popular our site is. For those of us who are popularity-obsessed, the sad part is that the other search engines do not provide a similar feature, and...