What does Captcha Stand For? CAPTCHA is Greek for annoying. Ok, not really. It’s actually an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Much like a CAPTCHA is unintelligible to pretty much everyone, the meaning behind the acronym is also ambiguous, because no one knows what a ‘Turing’ test is. Refugeeks to the rescue! A Turing test is basically a primit... »
One of the most often overlooked sources of Enterprise SEO headaches is that of HTTP Status Codes. While the codes themselves are very straightforward and easy to understand, many times sites still return the wrong ones. This can give users the impression that your site is not working, or poorly set up. Worse, at least in terms of SEO, it can mean the difference between successfully ranking, or st... »
In other parts of our site we’ve discussed what HTTP Status Codes are, and explained their definitions in terms that don’t require you to be a programmer. This article is a bit different. It covers the three HTTP Status Codes every SEO needs to be familiar with, but it also looks at five other common codes, and the REL Canonical attribute. Note that throughout we’ll be referencing the codes that a... »
So far when it came to SEO – one of the biggest complaint was you are OK if you are a brand. Looks like Matt Cutts has had a change of heart and is hammering UK brands one after the other. The latest wave of COMPLETE sitewide penalties are: Links of London Brand Republic Bright Local USC Blue Banana This is Cornwall Update: Looks like their site moved to westbriton.co.uk – so maybe not... »
As most people know now, MYGuestBlog has been hit with a penalty which has wiped it out of the SERPs yesterday. I can say that the writing was on the wall once Matt Cutts wrote about guest posting earlier in the year. (side note – interesting titbit – I was the FIRST guest poster on Ann Smarty’s personal blog see this post the post was picked up by the NY times – this shows... »
It has been a while since I have covered BlackHat Tactics, partly because I have been busy, but partly because I didnt want to be part of the problem of pushing them. However I decided, I rather cover them, so that sites that fall prey to these, can take preventative actions. Typically sites that link out, but may not want to pass equity or to track outbound clicks, or want to cloak the urls would... »
I often get questions from a number of SEOs and people working on SEO for sites. One interesting one that I see time and time again is “Should we use No Index” for stuff we no longer want search engines to index in the results pages? If this was a few years back, my standard response would be to use the “disallow” line in robots.txt. You can see that recommendation from Mat... »
Note: I have been meaning to write this ever since I read Ian Luries’s post on “How to create a content strategy”. I suggest you read that as well – it’s a great piece in actually getting the work done. The piece below is just a starting point. I have lots more on the way, hopefully I will be able to expands on most sections and start giving out some more detailed examples and actionable strategie... »