Stephan Spencer wrote a dandy of a post over at SearchEngineLand entitled 36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To.

I wish he would have made a smaller list and stuck to the basics — anytime you set out to make a really long list, you’re going to start filling it will crap for the sake of making the list longer and more “authoritative.” That seems to be what happened here, as there are 5 or 6 points that serve only to spread more misinformation.

I’m going to tackle the points I believe are incorrect one at a time, over a series of posts, because they need to be corrected. First to the plate:

Reciprocal links

This is what Stephan has to say about reciprocal links:

Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount.

Well yeah…it’s easy for Google to see that Site 1 and Site 2 are both linking to each other. But so what? Automatically devaluing the links without looking for other signals would be like breaking up a couple making out on the bus because, for all you know, they *could* be brother and sister.

Let’s walk through a couple examples where it would make absolutely zero sense for Google to discount reciprocal links.

Example

If I have a site about baking, then it would be natural for me to link to other sites about baking. Conversely, it would be natural for other baking sites to link to me. We might even put each other on our blogrolls.

In many of the niches in which I operate, every authority links to every other authority. It’s natural to do so. This is how the internet works.

And guess what?

These reciprocal links are valuable

If you’re looking for the absolute best information on baking, who would you trust more to point you to valuable content: Other bakers, or your barber?

The bakers, of course.

But if we are to believe Stephan’s argument, the value of the most relevant links in a niche would be discounted since the sites sites are linking to each other in some fashion. The effect would be that a baker’s recommendations would be devalued relative to a barber’s (assuming the baker’s links are two-way and the barber’s is one-way).

This makes sense how?

And in any event:

Most reciprocal links aren’t intended to be reciprocal

Look, there are cases where reciprocal links are worthless. If my baking site has reciprocal links to a site about green army men, that isn’t going to help. The link probably won’t count that much, but not because they’re reciprocal. The link won’t have a lot of value because there’s a pretty big signal that these links are not natural.

Off-topic link trades are garbage.

And maybe that’s what Stephan meant to say.

But discounting reciprocal links as a rule is just insane. It’s completely natural process to link to related sites, and it’s completely natural to receive links from related sites as well.

Reciprocity is only a problem when there is intent to manipulate, and to measure intent, you have to look for signals that go beyond such a simple observation.

by Kevin Spence

It’s true: A lot of big brands think that they don’t need SEO.

Now, before you go off giggling into the wilderness, it isn’t that big brands don’t know that SEO exists. In fact, they have what *seems* to be a valid logical reason for thinking they don’t need it. Their reasoning goes like this:

If we aren’t monetizing search traffic to our site through eCommerce or banner ads, then it doesn’t make any sense to pay someone to help bring traffic to the site. And in any event, everybody already knows our site exists — even if they’ve never been to it. They’ll find us if they’re looking for us.

It sounds solid on the surface, right? I mean, you can see how some people would be persuaded by such an argument. And in many cases, yes, everybody *does* know your site exists, even if they’ve never been to it (for instance, I’m absolutely certain that Wawa has a site, though I have never been there).

What’s wrong with their logic?

What these guys don’t understand is that SEO is not just about traffic numbers, and in some instances, it has almost nothing at all to do with traffic at all.

So what I’m going to do for the remainder of this post is take a look at one big brand’s web presence and explain how SEO would seriously help their marketing efforts.

Serial SEO Neglecter: McDonald’s

I’m going to use McDonald’s as an example here, because I don’t think there’s a more perfect brand in the world I could use to illustrate my point. This is why:

1. Everybody is familiar with the McDonald’s brand. You know they have a website, even if you’ve never been there.

2. Their website is about as optimized for SEO as a koala’s fart.

3.  ROI on SEO efforts would be difficult to measure, as McDonald’s isn’t directly monetizing their traffic in any way at all. And they shouldn’t, of course, as that isn’t the function of their site. But any decently good marketer knows that not everything worth doing has an easily measurable ROI.

Digging in

Let me show you a little screenshot of McDonald’s homepage so you can understand just how little search optimization they’re doing right now:

Oooh boy, that’s a lot of flash. I don’t mind flash in general, and I believe there are some good uses for it, but here there’s nothing being done that couldnt’ be done with CSS and jquery.

Their page titles across the site are equally horrendous, and to Google, their homepage might as well look like this:

More 100% flash pages are found throughout the site:

Why McDonalds should care

I happen to like Chicken McNuggets, so I chose to Google ‘chicken mcnuggets’ to see how McDonalds is doing for that query.

They’re fourth…right behind Wikipedia, a site that wants to know what’s in a Chicken McNugget, and a story about a lawsuit directed at McDonald’s. These are obvious reputation management problems, but there is a bigger problem — one over which McDonalds has complete control.

The page on mcdonalds.com that is actually ranking for Chicken McNuggets is the absolute last page that McDonald’s wants you to see at this point. Yup, you guessed it — their nutritional info page. Goodbye millions of dollars spent on carefully crafted marketing messages trying to convince me that your food is getting healthier, because I just landed on your nutritional page and now I’m gone. Thanks for trying, though!

A letter to McDonald’s

You think that you don’t need Google, because you’re freaking McDonald’s and everybody already knows your name. You think people will find you on their own when they want to. And you’re 100% right.

But look, it’s not all about being found. It’s about showing people what you want them to see when you want them to see it. The bottom line is your lack of SEO is hurting the rest of your marketing campaign.

So do yourself a favor: Hire an SEO Expert. Take their advice on how to flesh out the content of your site. Teach them about the qualities of your product that you want people to associate with your brand, and the SEO will make sure that searchers are presented with the content that you want them to find for whatever you search for.

Just because you’re a big brand doesn’t mean you don’t need SEO.

by Kevin Spence

by Kevin Spence

Emailing someone to ask for a link is like kicking them in the kneecaps and then asking  for money.

by Kevin Spence

If I were an SEO Jedi and had to pass along five words of wisdom to my SEO padawan, this is what they would be:

1. Think objectively and filter out 99% of what you read as complete nonsense. Maybe it’s SEO gold to someone out there to know that the blood pressure of their users while viewing Tentacle Porn dictates their bounce rate on your site, but as for me, I consider that type of knowledge about as useful as knowing the molecular makeup of a donkey’s fart.

2. Pay attention to what’s going on in the industry. Reading about how real time search works today vs. yesterday will be of much more use than reading yet another keyword density post that makes as much sense as a Charlotte Church cameo in a Lady Gaga video.

3. Intentionally do stuff the ‘wrong way.’ If there’s one thing that drives me mad about SEOs, it’s that they are so often afraid to break the rules. ‘ZOMG that title isn’t in an H1 tag the world will explode in a fiery ball of google wrath.’  How about you ask yourself this: where did all these rules come from? I’ll tell you where they came from.1997. Sure, there is such a thing as good form. But there’s also such a thing as blindly following without trying out alternatives for yourself. Break stuff. Learn from it. Make awesomeness.

4. Don’t confine yourself to the internet when link building. Want to know my most successful link building campaign ever? A 5 minute interview on ESPN radio (that I initiated with a simple email to one of the hosts). Within 24 hours I had links coming from The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Sun, BBC, and a juicy link in an AP article syndicated across thousands of news sites. Not bad for five minutes of time, eh? Now, how are those link exchange emails coming along?

5. Learn to program. The language doesn’t matter, and you don’t have be MIT good at it. You don’t even have to be local community college computer science 301 good at it. All you need to do is understand how a basic algorithm is constructed. One thing goes in and another thing comes out — what would have to happen in the middle for that to happen? If you don’t know how algorithms work, figuring out what happens in the middle would be just as baffling as determining a monkey’s diet based on the coloration of the poo it’s flinging at you.

by Kevin Spence

I’ve been experimenting with how Google’s real time search works, particularly as it pertains to Tweets.

To start off, I’m making one major assumption: That tweets are not just chosen at random (that would just encourage a barrage of twitter spam affiliate links — send enough out and some will get through). That leads me to my second assumption: there has to be an algorithm at work here to determine which tweets are chosen and which never see the light of day.

To test things out, I chose the search term ‘walmart.’ I chose this for three reasons. 1. People always have something to say about WalMart. 2. It’s a popular target term right now for people promoting affiliate coupons/discounts. 3. I thought it might be interesting to get a sample of real time results for a well-known store/brand.

Analysis

After parsing and saving thousands of real-time search results for ‘walmart,’ my preliminary analysis shows no correlation between profile elements (thematic tweets, bio link vs no bio link, etc) and the likelihood of having your tweet included in the real time results. It was worth exploring, but right off the bat, I’m going to go ahead and toss that hypothesis in the trash for the time being.

With the profile/thematic hypothesis out of the way, the next step I wanted to take was to compare Twitter search results to Google real time search results for the same term.

Comparing Twitter search with Google search

The first thing I noticed when comparing Twitter search with Google search is that Google’s real time results are updated with FAR less frequency than they are  on Twitter. Part of this is likely a usability decision. There is just far too much noise on a popular Twitter term to digest anything at all.

However, the decreased frequency is likely also a side effect of a more important process — namely, the inevitable filtering process that all tweets must go through before they are widely distributed on Google. Now, given Google’s overall strategy against fighting spam, it would make sense to me that the first step in the filtering process would be checking tweets for links.

In comparing Twitter results with Google results, I noticed that tweets with links in them are generally filtered out, unless the tweet links to a site that Google trusts (links to sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, twitpic, etc, seem to always get through).

However, tweets with affiliate links rarely get through, and when they do, the affilate landing pages are *almost* always on trusted domains like blogspot.com. In fact, out of a few dozen links that got through, none were to the actual product page on the site of purchase — they were all to 3rd party landing pages.

Manual Review Hypothesis

I have no proof of this, as I am not a Google employee and have no insider knowledge into their development of real time search. But knowing how they have operated in the past, I would be totally shocked if there was NOT some form of a human review process at play here. After all, Google has already resorted to manual reviews on their traditional SERPS, having seemingly resigned themselves to the reality that no algorithm can prevent spam from breaking through without human assistance.

The problem here of course is that Google can’t manually review every tweet that it spits out in real time, as it would be prohibitively costly. So what could they do to solve this? Why, use US as the manual reviewers, of course.

Here’s an idea of how it might work:

Step 1: Display a given tweet to 1000 users in real time search.

Step 2: If 0 of the first 1000 users click a tweet, then trash it. If >x of the first 1000 users click a tweet, then show it to 10,000 more users. If >y of those 10,000 click a tweet, show it to 1 million more. And so on.

Now, big question here is whether Google would start to trust the tweeter over time. For instance, if 99 out of 100 of my tweets became ‘popular,’ would my tweets start to carry more weight and require fewer clicks to get greater distribution? If so, they would be opening a whole can of worms Digg style — I’d be surprised if they do it, but you never know.

Next Steps

As I stated, having a link in your tweet seems to decrease the likelihood of your tweet getting widespread distrubtion. But you know what doesn’t? Responding to someone else. In its current implementation, if your tweet is in response to someone else, then their name is clickable in the real time SERPs.

So first off, I’m going to try creating linkless posts in response to a dummy account. The most recent tweet at the top of the dummy account will be a link to one of my sites (no affiliate stuff, just a straight link), so that there is a decent probability of someone clicking straight to my site from the real time SERPs.

It’s worth testing out — as SEOs, we have to find out how to make this new development work in our favor. The possibility of appearing on the front page for any term we want in real time is just too good to pass up.

by Kevin Spence

There’s a lot that you can do with an htaccess file, and of course, things can get pretty advanced in a hurry. Here, we’re going to keep things pretty simple. These are the 10 basic htaccess hacks that every webmaster should know.

1. Force Caching with htaccess

Use: The following htaccess code won’t help the initial pageload, but it will significantly help subsequent pageloads by sending 304 status when requested elements haven’t been modified.

FileETag MTime Size
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus x seconds”

I generally set the cache for one day (86400 seconds). You can also set different expirations for each file type by breaking each file type up into separate ExpiresByType lines such as:

ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus x seconds”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus x seconds”

Simple!

2. Set a Custom 404 Page with htaccess

Use: I think this one is self explantatory. Just change ‘/notfound.html’ to match the path to your custom 404 page.

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

3. Implement a 301 Redirect with htaccess

Use: If you have permanently changed the URL structure on your site (via either optimization change or CMS migration), you will want to implement 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL.

The syntax for a basic 301 redirect is:

Redirect 301 relative/path/to/oldurl/ http://www.domain.com/newurl/

Explanation:
The first URL should be a relative path to the old URL and the second one should be an absolute path to the new URL.

4. Only allow specific IP addresses in certain directories

This is especially useful for admin directories. I generally set my home IP and work IP as the only allowable IPs who can even attempt a login. Unlike other .htaccess hacks, this one doesn’t work from the root folder. You will need to create a new .htaccess file, put the following code in it, and upload it to your admin directory.

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

To allow a second IP, just add another ‘allow from’ line.

5. Prevent Image Hot Linking with htaccess

Removed. Here is a MUCH better way to go about this thanks to Maurizio Petrone

6. Enable gzip with htaccess

Gzip is a means of compressing the files on your server so they will load faster. To enable gzip, just

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

7. Remove ‘category’ from a URL with htaccess

Many content management sytems use the ‘category’ URL segment. For instance:

http://makeitrank.com/category/category-name

Well, that’s fine, and it’s necessary to make the CMS work the way it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t need to be visible to do its job. Just drop the following code into your htaccess file to get rid of it.

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

8. Define any page as the home page with htaccess

You can set any page as the homepage by adding the following to the htaccess file in your root directory.

DirectoryIndex myfile

9. Disable Directory Browsing

You want to keep people out of any directories that might reveal security weaknesses — for instance, plugin directories.

You can block vistors from browsing the directories by adding the following line to the htaccess file in the directory you’d like to block:

Options All -Indexes

10. Protect your htaccess file

Lastly, you want to protect your htaccess file. Hopefully your host has protected it for you, but you can’t be too safe with these things. The following hack will prevent anybody from accessing your htaccess:

<Files .htaccess>

order allow,deny
deny from all

</Files>

Are there any useful htaccess hacks I’ve left out? Let me know!

by Kevin Spence

A lot of people are concerned about how the Google Sidewiki feature might be abused, but personally I think it’s pretty cool and have chosen to embrace it.

I had a little back and forth with the always awesome Shannon Paul on Twitter today on the subject, and that ’conversation’ motivated me to create the maiden entry on my own sidewiki. For those of you who don’t have the feature enabled (or happen to use the incompatible Chrome…HAH!) this is what it says:

Rather than fill this space with marketing fluff that nobody wants to read, I just want to go on record and say that despite the controversy surrounding the sidewiki feature, I’ve chosen to embrace it and hope that you will too.

Now, if you’re really fired up about something I’ve written and want to ream me out in this public forum, please look at this picture of a funny cat first.

If you’re still angry after seeing a picture of a cat with a funny helmet on, well, there’s nothing more that I can do for you. Please have at it. I hope it is very therapeutic and saves you thousands in psychiatric costs.

Hopefully, you are a sane individual and will have calmed down by this point. If so, please send me an email or leave a comment on the site instead.

Cheers!

Kevin

What do you think?

by Kevin Spence

Google is less than forthcoming when it comes to checking backlinks with the link: command. Their data is generally incredibly outdated and incomplete, and probably with good reason (I assume they want you to use webmaster tools to check your own backlinks, and their web spam team probably doesn’t really want you to build links by checking the backlinks of your competitors). Thankfully, Yahoo gives us a great way to check backlinks for any site on the internet.

Basic Yahoo Backlink Checking Syntax

The best way to check backlinks in Yahoo is with the linkdomain: command, which will show backlinks for your entire domain.

You use the linkdomain command like this:

linkdomain:mysite.com

While that is pretty good on its own, if you spend much time looking through the results, you’ll notice that internal links are also listed, and that isn’t really helpful.

To remove internal links from the results, you just have to tell Yahoo to ignore them. You can do that with the -site:mysite.com command. So if you wanted to see all backlinks for a site without the internal links listed, the entire command would be:

linkdomain:mysite.com -site:mysite.com

Removing Specific Domains from Backlink Search

Just as you can remove your own site from the backlink search by using the -site: command, you can also remove any site of your choosing from the results. This is especially helpful if you have some sitewide links from certain sites that are clogging up your results and making them difficult to weed through.

The syntax here is exactly the same as above, but note that you can remove inbound links from more than one site at a time:

linkdomain:mysite.com -site:mysite.com -site:linkingdomain1.com -site:linkingdomain2.com

Removing Backlinks from Pages with a Particular Keyword Phrase

While it may not sound particularly useful to remove results based on keyword phrase, I have found many good uses for it. For instance, I have had some entries scraped, or syndicated around the internet that resulted in hundreds of backlinks, all with the same title. So if I wanted to see the backlinks without that title in the results, I would use:

linkdomain:mysite.com -intitle:the syndicated title

You can also choose to remove backlinks that have certain words in the URL with:

linkdomain:mysite.com -inurl:keyword

by Kevin Spence