I just wanted to wish everyone Happy Holidays and hope everyone has a great New Year’s Eve! I know the blog has been stagnant for months now. I have been extremely busy working with clients and hope to have a new years resolution to start blogging again! If you are in need of any SEO, SEM or Affiliate Consulting please drop me a line. I also know a great web and flash designer on the market if you need any pretty work done on the web.
Yes! I am back. I was able to get an invitation to the Socialbrowse Beta. Socialbrowse is a new social linking site. I would describe it as a combination between Twitter, Del.icio.us and Digg or Sphinn for us SEO dorks.
Basically it is a Firefox plugin that launches a sidebar and a quick flag link in your main toolbar. Whenever you are on an interesting page you can just flag it, which does a save similar to delicious. It basically drops the link like a Tweet, then Socialbrowse aggregates everything and keeps you posted on what is hot on your sidebar. You are able to filter your sidebar by everyone or just those folks who you are following/following you (follow works similar to Twitter)
Links are categorized into things like Business, Sports, Technology, etc. Hopefully the categories will expand over time or even be customizable by users.
In terms of SEO it looks like everything is behind the wall at this point, but I think that will change when it comes out of private beta. They do give a little flavor with the popular page, and from what I can see they are not using any sort of nofollow tags. Only time will tell if that will change, but for the time being, links have the title tag as anchor text and they are a live link - good for SEO once the site gets a bit of authority.
On a side note, your profile page has a message board on it where you can have short conversations, but you can not put html in any of the text.
From an industry perspective I’d love to get a crew of SEO’s in here to see how useful it can be. I think it has some potential, especially for those of us too lazy to go to the popular page on delicious or sphinn on a regular basis - and the fact that links end up buried in a slew of tweets. I have 9 extra beta invites, and since I have not posted here in 3 months pretty much anyone who reads this can probably get one from me 
Just drop a comment.
Everyone knows that Adobe is one of the elite PR10, top dawg authority sites on the web. With that knowledge it is once again a no brainer to understand that with a PR10 home page, almost every page on the domain carries a sick amount of authority and page rank.
How can you get links from Adobe? Well if your company has done some development using Adobe products, here are a few examples of how you can get involved and subsequently rewarded….
1. Apply for the 2008 Adobe Max awards. Their 2007 site has a PR8 and both winners and honorable mentions get a PR7 backlink. In fact you get more link love if you are an honorable mention then you do for winning, so it pays to have a good but not great submission.
2. Take part in Flex Camp!
Hang around and get interviewed for quotes and you can get a backlink from a page like this one.
3. Get involved with the Flex dev community. Submit content, and you get an “About the author” plug at the bottom of your entry - write a very long entry and they break it into multiple parts - more links for you.
4. Another option is to write some content for the Edge newsletter!
See, just because a full flash web site makes you cringe does not mean you should stay away from using Adobe products for development. I’ve seen a new site come out of absolutely nowhere to a PR7 with just a few Adobe.com back links.
PS - yes, it is true that PR is no longer the end all of SEO that it was a few years ago, but a backlink (or 10) from someone like Adobe can do wonders for you either way, and if your site is development related you are golden. Happy flexxing.
- Jim
I will be at SMX West this week. It is closer to my house then the office, so it is a no brainer. If you will be there and spot me in the crowd please stop by and say Hi!
I am not planning on live blogging for the conference, there are way to many other folks doing that.
Being somewhat “advanced” these tend to be refresher courses for me, but I am hoping with Danny’s great schedule I will pick up at least a few great new tidbits at SMX West (session list).
I read an old interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger awhile ago. It is something he said back in the day when he was Mr. Olympia 6 times in a row in the 70’s. It goes something like this…. Arnold, how do you keep winning this year after year? What do you do to gain that extra edge? - Arnold replies (insert your favorite Arnold voice here) “It is the extra 3 push ups”.
Well I am hoping SMX will be my extra 3 pushups.
Typically when your start prepping for your interview as an in house SEO (or if you are talking to a potential new client), you will want to see what and who you are up against. Usually you will run some keyword difficulty type tools, then size up the competitors by reviewing a few of the “CEO List” keywords. Once you identify a pattern of sites, you jump on their sites and start reviewing what level of SEO tactics they are using and what you can exploit when surpassing them in the SERPs for your new client.
It is at this point I spend an extra 5 minutes per site and see if I can determine who I am up against. Plus, while I am at it I review what Web Analytics, PPC and/or email marketing vendors they are using. I always think it helps in your pitch to present them with new information on competitors they may not know.
Typically you can start by viewing the source code and scroll down to pick up the Web Analytics vendor by grabbing their tracking code. It is always interesting to see if they are using a free solution like Google Analytics or if they are purchasing a system like Omniture. Often times you can take a look at the site ID in that tracking code and use it as a footprint to see what other sites they may be running as well. This often opens up the door to discuss with your soon to be client regarding different tactics their competitors are using and what we can do to combat it. Side note: there is a neat Firefox plugin that will show in your status bar if they are running Google Analytics on the site
From there it is usually best to find your way to a thank you page so you can take a look at their conversion tracking scripts. Usually things are clustered together that will show you what PPC tracking software or email marketing software they are using. Multiple times I have seen eCommerce sites that actually post right there things like the cost of goods or margins on a product. It is amazing what people leave lying around.
Unfortunately, what SEO firm they are using is often the hardest of the bunch to find. But, many of the bigger SEO firms have their own tracking systems which are fairly easy to pick up. Other SEO firms will actually post the name of their company right in a comment in the robots.txt file (but be careful, because some companies have a Robots.txt generator).
You should always pay attention to what you are dropping in your robots.txt file, you don’t want to leave yourself open to the world. Jennifer Slegg just posted on this over on her blog. Take a look, it’s a good read.
- Jim
As you might know from scanning my blog, I have only been blogging for a few weeks now. But I am certainly not a newbie. I’ve been SEOing for 6 years, and I think I am starting to understand what it is like to blog on the side while trying to make money during the day. Maybe it gets easier when you are not tweaking your layout and getting things set up, but my guess is it does not get easier over time.
I was driving home the other day, and while “talking web” with my carpool mate, Mike, he mentioned how last year Rand over at SEOMoz posted their 2006 financials and they recently posted an update for 2007. I took a look and sure enough, he did. It was interesting to note that the revenues were less then both of our perceptions considering how front and center they are in the search community. Now, with the launch of the SEOMoz paid membership area in 2007, along with taking on funding - I am sure things have changed drastically this past year - but that’s besides the point. SEOMoz has been pumping out some of the best, more informative, must read posts in the industry for the last 4 years. So how is it that Rand was releasing so much great content but not pulling seven figures? Maybe back then he was pushing out TOO MUCH great content!
I’ve been following tons of industry blogs during my “lurker” phase (pre blogging), as well as listening to quite a few podcasts over at WebmasterRadio.fm and I have noticed that some people like Shoemoney drop new posts all the time (10 a week or so), while others like Oilman and WebGuerrilla Greg Boser of (SEO Rockstars fame) are lucky to get off 1 or 2 posts a month. Is it because these guys were are too busy adding to their bankroll hand over fist to post more often?
It is going on 3 years since the famous Shoemoney check, I wonder if revenues have matched the curve at the same rate as his readership? Shoemoney & team built Auction Ads, and from this post it sounds like they really started focusing on it in Feb 2007. Notice in this graph when the traffic peaked and started declining.
SEOMoz’s traffic started to decline right around the same time; Feb 2007 - right when they launched their premium services.
(Yes, I know Alexa is complete garbage and the numbers don’t exactly match Rand’s numbers, but I am too lazy to dig further…so stick with me here)
How many hours a week are you spending blogging and commenting on blogs?
I pose the question to you….are you making less money every time you pump out a new post?
- Jim
This post is designed to give you a few basic commands to help you pull a quick report showing you how much Googlebot has hit your site, without dealing with dropping old data into a log analyzer
So you show up a a new job, a new client or you just remembered that you had a guitar tab site on your old college account that you forgot about 10 years ago. Regardless of the reason you have decided it is time to look back in time and figure out what level of love the old Googlebot has been giving your site lately.
Now there are tons of great web based, free, etc log analyzer tools, but we all know what a pain in the ass those can be to deal with and load. Well, there is a pretty easy way to see what is going on if you learn a few commands and we assume you are on some sort of Linux box (see a future rant on IIS/Windows web servers). It is time to put your War Games hat on and run sweet filters through the command line.
1) Log into your server using some form of SSH, I always use putty. It’s easy, its free, its secure and you can delicious this link putty.exe and fire it up on the fly from anywhere.
2) Figure out where the heck your apache log files are located. Often this will be somewhere like /usr/local/apache/logs/ or ask your host, IT guy, etc and go to that directory
$cd /usr/local/apache/logs
3) Now, you are sitting in your logs directory, and you can list your directory out
$ls
Figure out what file you want to dig around in. For simplicity sake let’s use the current log which 99% of the time is called simply access_log.
4) The first command you are going to run is called grep. It basically searches through a file for all rows that contain a character string and then outputs them to the screen. Since we are hoping that Googlebot comes to your site many many times a day we don’t want to see a million lines scroll by in front of your eyes (although that would seem very War Gamesesque), so we will use something called a pipe, which is denoted with a vertical bar like this: |. We want to “pipe” the output to a command called “more“. More basically will send one page of output to the screen at a time, and with each press of your space bar it will send another screen full of results from your output. So, here is what you do
$grep Googlebot access_log | more
If you ran that command you would see a list of just the URLs that Googlebot hit.
Check it out, hit space bar a couple times and see how it looks (hit the letter q to quit out and get back to your command line). As you can see we have now grabbed all the times Googlebot hit our site (at least in the life of this file).
5) Next we want to make this data more usable. Let’s take the output and list it out by URL to see what URLs are getting indexed the most. So we are going to grep for Googlebot and then pipe it to a command called awk. Awk can do all kinds of cool stuff but in this case we are just going to pull out the URL from each line of our log file. By default awk will split up a line by spaces. Since our log file is delimited by spaces we can count from the left and determine that the URL is the 7th from the left (6 spaces to the left of it). Basically you use the ‘{}’ and drop in dollar sign and then the field you want, in this case 7.
$grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | more
OK so we have the URLs, but how do we get the duplicates and stuff figured out? No, we are not going to port this to excel to do that. There is a command called ‘sort‘. Sort just takes everything you send it and sort it alphabetically. Sweet
$grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | sort | more
As you can see they are all nicely sorted. The next step is to get rid of the duplicates and replace them with a count of how many times that URL showed up. There is an easy command to do this called ‘uniq‘ and if you place a -c option it will give us a unique list including a count
$grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | sort | uniq -c | more
Now we got our list, but it is somewhat out of order. It sure would be nice to have the ones that were indexed the most at the top of the list. No problem, we can just use ’sort’ again and add in two options one to sort numerically and the other does a reverse sort (put the highest numbers first)
$grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | more
There you have it, now you can easily see how many times Google bot has hit your site in the timeframe of your access log. Piece of cake right?
Well, you may tell me, but yeah Jim my server seems to gzip up all the log files and they roll them off every day. Ok no problem. Let’s say you want to go through all of the log files from the whole month of January and see what the Googlebot traffic looks like, and you are too lazy to unzip the files (or heck maybe if you unzip your server will run out of disk space.
In comes the gzip with the decompress option. Combine that with wild cards (in this case match everything between Jan and gz in the file name) and put it at the very front of your command, then pipe it to your grep for Googlebot.
$gzip -dc access_log.Jan.*.gz | grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | more
Last but not least we probably want to save this so we can check it out later. Well instead of using a more you can redirect the output to a file using the > command and drop the file in your current directory.
$gzip -dc access_log.Jan.*.gz | grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn > googlebot-log.dat
Even better, assuming your web server has a mail server on it you can go ahead and send the output to yourself (or your boss) in an email, even with the use of the -s option you can put a pretty subject in there
$gzip -dc access_log.Jan.*.gz | grep Googlebot access_log | awk ‘{$7}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | mail -s “Googlebot loves us, check it out” youremail@yoursite.com
Once you get the hang of this you can leverage your skills to do all sorts of stuff like track how many times Googlebot hit your site in a hour, what hours of the day Googlebot comes the most across the last 2 weeks or maybe instead of grepping for Googlebot you could grep for IP ($1) and figure out what IPs are hitting your site the most if you want to figure out who is scraping your content, etc.
Now fire up putty and start hacking some commands real time. Who needs those twiddle your thumbs and wait, 24 hours lag to get pretty graphs and fancy charts anyways.
Well I did not make it very many posts before straying away from SEO, but I figured out a quick way to copy campaigns in AdWords Editor today. OK, I actually did not figure it out, one of my reps over at Google gave me the scoop. Since researching this myself on the web last week and coming up dry I thought I would post the solution.
Once you have your account loaded, highlight the campaign you want to copy in the left bar. Then on the right hand side choose the Campaign tab. It should only show one campaign (the one you selected on the left). Right click on this and hit copy.
From there, go back to the left and highlight your account name at the top of the menu (or go ahead and log into your other account if you are trying to copy across accounts). Then Edit->Paste. It will drop a full copy of your campaign in. Don’t forget that you will need to rename your campaign since you can’t have a duplicate Campaign name. Now all you have to do is change your GEO targeting and whatever other changes you wanted with this “Copy” of the campaign.
Don’t forget that you will need to rename your campaign since you can’t have a duplicate Campaign name. Now all you have to do is change your GEO targeting and whatever other changes you wanted with this “Copy” of the campaign.
Hope it saves you time as well, because the Adwords Editor Help menu is pretty weak.
- Jim
We all know how much dealing with the title and meta tags are on sites. It does not matter if the site is big or small or if you are a white hat or a black hat. They just plain stink, but we can’t ignore them all together, and we certainly can not hard code them right into your template as duplicates.
Well, the answer lies in how you store this information in your CMS or custom database. Earlier today Rand over at the SEOmoz blog posted an articled titled Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website, and #1 (Title Tags) and #3 (Meta Tags) are both at the top of his list of factors in choosing a CMS.
For arguments sake, lets assume you have free reign to set them up however you want (most sites and clients I have worked with do). Here are a couple options:
This is the most obvious choice as it is a completely customizable area where you can punch in whatever fits you fancy for each and every page. This really allows for unique content, but you might run into big problems with an eCommerce site for example that may have 10,000 product pages.
Have a finite set of keyword fields (up to 6 maybe) for each page. The advantage of this is that you can use combination of static and dynamic parts to build these tags. Another big advantage is that you can leverage these same keywords in other places. For example, you can pull these fields to vary the anchor text for internal backlinks coming into the pages using these same fields. The disadvantage of course is that all of your tags probably have the same footprint (Title: keyword1, keyword2 at mysite.com), which gets pretty ugly when you are trying to generate meta descriptions that vary. Using madlib style replacement might work.
Which of these methods do you use, or do you use a different method all together? I have tried both methods, and neither seems to be a perfect solution. But, one thing is for sure, either way is much easier to manage then hard coding it.
- Jim
On some sites that I work on, we have been leveraging the whole concept of nofollowing internal links to help with page rank flow for the last six months or so. It was even confirmed to be a legit option a few months ago by Matt Cutts.
Well, in one of the more recent updates to Google Webmaster tools they added a link for “Pages with internal links”. In there they have some cool information about what pages are linking to which. When browsing through this I discovered some of the footer links to privacy policy, support etc are still showing up with hundreds of backlinks. It appears that at least in this tool, they are treating the internal no-followed links the same as a normal link.
Have you experienced this? Do you think this is just a different view, or are they really ignoring internal nofollows?
- Jim
