Comments on: Weak SEO and the quick fix

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:08:48 +0000

As I said:

I believe there is nothing more damaging to the reputation of an industry than SEO contests. The phrase “wacking off” keeps coming to mind and I am really surprised at some people who I once respected for getting involved, including myself. ;-(

I am breaking association with all the is “spam” and have removed many pages from this blog and will continue to remove more, link sleuthing is a smart idea for people who linked here. I also a one point changed permalink structure to have all posts end in “/” instead of “.html”

My name is Aaron and I am the king of broken websites. :)

By: Marios Alexandrou

Marios Alexandrou — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:53:53 +0000

Your SEO Contests link seems to go to one of the posts you’ve removed. Now that’s funny! :-) I got here after running Xenu and finding bad links on my site to yours. I can’t seem to find alternatives for the links unfortunately.

By: Halfdeck

Halfdeck — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:36:11 +0000

Some people lose their senses when they talk about things like paid links and nofollow. Biased arguments based on self-interest is the quickest credibility killer. I will buy links if my life depended on it, but you’ll never catch me claiming the tactic is ethical or tell you that paid links improve SERP relevance.

By: Michael Goldberg

Michael Goldberg — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:57:47 +0000

I would cover what ever I thought would be a benefit for people to know. Meaning give the good with the bad, but if you do not agree with it, say it.

Oh btw, I am starting to see something that I noticed here first, nofollows being dropped and commenters are being rewarded with site wides. Looks like some heard you message.

By: SEFL

SEFL — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:06:05 +0000

Touché, Mr. Pratt.

By: Aaron Pratt

Aaron Pratt — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:25:24 +0000

SEFL – I just used the “snake oil salesmen” phrase to bring home a point but yeah, “complaining” and debating are two different things. Smart people debate, not smart (that would be stupid right?) people get mad and call people names to defend their weak arguments.

JLH – Yes sir, instead of trying to have the folks a cpanel repair the cpanel/.htaccess/wordpress overwrite bug that plugin would do the trick. Excellent! *insert electric guitar sounds* :)

Dax also worked on a plugin to redirect all to root to harness link love if you forget the URLs of old deleted posts. It looks like it needs to be salvaged but that is a cool plugin also. Playing with Urbangiraffe redirection now… thanks.

I will eventually write up a post on rankings and removing posts in Google. I have to warn, it is not for everyone, if you know what the word “sticky” means you will lose that gift until you build more content and site flavor.

Update: Dax is surely an evil genius (in a good way), his 404 redirect works for all pages that no longer exist, type in a messy incorrect URL and see it fly.

Sorry, back to the subject at hand, JLH is 100% webmaster not SEO, anyone else care so agree or disagree?

By: JLH

JLH — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:38:17 +0000

Seek and ye shall find! Follow up to my previous comment with a link to a plugin that handles just that.

http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

I haven’t tried it yet, but seems like the description is spot on.

By: JLH

JLH — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:33:11 +0000

Prunings good for no other reason to keep the blog going in the direction you want. Just don’t waste any of that google juice and 301 to an appropriate page. I see you’ve done a 301 discussion for www and non-www a nice add-on would be how to handle single pages to their new on-topic replacement.

Hmm, that would be a nice plugin for wordpress. Instead of deleting a post, have an option to redirect to a newer or different post/page, I wonder if anyone has done that?

By: SEFL

SEFL — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:36:56 +0000

I’m down with everything you said, except the complaining about snake oil salesmen.

I think you have to say something if some idiot is on a webmaster discussion forum starting up some silly self-promoting crap about how link exchanges increase PR, which of course is the universal SEO solvent; or how cloaking is okay under circumstances of (insert BS reason here); or how it’s okay to keyword-stuff a job post on another site because it only applies to the site in question and therefore is a victimless crime (except of course to the unsuspecting site in question, but who cares about them, right?)

There are a lot of newcomers and people who may be looking on who may not have the same level of knowledge or ability that many of us have, and if you know something is wrong, it really is something you should stand up and say something about.

In the case of one board, webmaster-talk.com, there are a number of skilled webgeeks who have created an informal bond to speak out against the search engine spammer types and have done a pretty good job of it. Newcomers can learn and the spam noise is kept to a minimum.

So stand up and be counted, mah brutha.