The agile SEO blog

July 09, 2007

Getting permanent search engine rankings for your site requires making it very popular within your specific niche. This is what we call a web authority. Other site owners will naturally link to your site when they are talking about your topic because you have some of the best content out there.  It's common sense that if...

July 06, 2007

What can you do to make life easier for those search engine crawlers? Let's pick up where we left off in our inner workings of Google series. I am going to give a brief overview of how distributed crawling works. This topic is useful, but can be a bit geeky, so I'm going to offer a...

July 05, 2007

After trying a few different approaches, I've finally found a clear direction for this blog. Some A-list bloggers consider that starting another SEO blog is a bad idea. There are thousands of bloggers writing about SEO and the market is already saturated. It's going to be difficult to stand out. I have to say that...

July 04, 2007

Every SEO strategy has its good and bad Search engines have long kept their ranking formulas secret in order to give users the most relevant results and to preclude malicious manipulation. Despite all the secrecy, though, it remains extremely difficult for search engine companies to prevent either direct or indirect manipulation. We can broadly classify...

July 03, 2007

In 2005 it was the infamous 302, temporary redirect page hijacking. That was supposedly fixed, according to Matt Cutts. Now there is a new interesting twist. Hijackers have found another exploitable hole in Google: the use of cgi proxies to hijack search engine rankings. The problem is basically the same. Two URLs pointing to the...

July 02, 2007

Picture this scenario: Laura Martin has a mild headache. She knows she suffers from migraines, so she goes to her pharmacist. The pharmacist calls her doctor to get approval for a new refill of Imitrex, a migraine treatment medicine. Paul Stevenson feels extremely tired. He is aware he suffers from type 1 diabetes. His body...

June 29, 2007

I just learned that John Chows rankings dropped even for his own name!  He suspects that it has something to do with his review for a link back promotion. I am sure that is the problem. As of yesterday, I was not ranking for my own name. My problem was that when I moved from...

June 28, 2007

I am working on a killer post for next Monday where I am going to detail my best kept secret: a very simple technique to identify keywords with high demand and little or no competition. Do you want to have keywords like this? I've asked several A-list bloggers for their niche finding formula.  And guess...

June 26, 2007

It's been a while since I posted some juicy source code. This time, I am going to explain the infamous black hat technique known as cloaking with some basic PHP code. While most people think of cloaking as evil (asking for search engines to penalize your site), there are circumstances where it is perfectly legitimate...