Archive for the ‘SEO Observations’ Category

Yahoo Displaying DMOZ Title? Also Not Following NOODP

November 10th, 2009 by Benj Arriola

Just a few minutes ago, colleague Laura Beatty here at BusinessOnLine notices something on Yahoo, and says Yahoo is not showing the correct title tag. I took at look at it searching BusinessOL  and yup, it does look different.

Yahoo Title different from the HTML title tag.

Yahoo Title different from the HTML title tag.

After looking at it deeper, of course the first think we checked was Yahoo Directory since Yahoo is already known to do this, in the same way how (more…)

Should I Trust Bing’s Search Engine Results?

August 7th, 2009 by Benj Arriola

Bing has gone all out with it’s marketing campaign, not only with online efforts, but also offline claiming itself to be the first decision engine, whatever that means. Before Microsoft came out with Bing, it was MSN Search, then Live Search and many people in the SEO field still believe their algorithm did not change significantly since live.com. In my opinion their algorithm does not even come close to the power of Google and Yahoo’s search technology. This explains how beneficial the new business partnership of Bing and Yahoo is. Yahoo will have a wider reach, use more resources, and Bing will have a more powerful search engine and both increase their their combined search market share.

Let’s do a quick search exercise on Google, Yahoo and Bing. (more…)

SEO Videos from OMS – Internal and External Link Building Strategies

July 23rd, 2008 by catfish

Hello again everyone. Sorry I have been MIA this week, although I did do a guest blog over at the OMS site about the 4 most common way that marketers squander resources for SEO. But I have been incredibly busy with client work, developing new internal processes for the SEO team, and putting together my OMS presentation for next Tuesday in Houston. I am happy to say that my band has been selected for Hyperfest 2008 in New Mexico which is very exciting for us, but the planning of that event is cutting into my free time (think blog time..lol). So that’s my long winded apology for taking so long to get these new link strategy videos up.

Obviously these videos are not comprehensive guides to linking but I think there is a lot of solid advice on the subject of both internal and external links that you hopefully will gleam a couple SEO tips from. Let me know what you think!

Why a Top 10 Listing in Google Continues to Mean Less in SEO

June 2nd, 2008 by catfish

So you’re thinking, Catfish you must have had way too much to drink at your birthday show Saturday night if you think that top 10 listings in Google are not important. Well I will plead the 5th on the extent of my celebration except to say I had a blast and I was very appreciative of so many of my friends coming out to celebrate with me. Turning 39 isn’t easy…lol. But, my original point in the title of this post still stands. A top ten listing in Google continues to mean less. And the reason is, because it gets harder and harder to (more…)

Build Links Fast! There Is No Penalty In Getting Many Links Quickly

May 13th, 2008 by Benj Arriola

Build Links Fast Without Search Engine Ranking Penalties

Now just before I said that, I am already wearing my bulletproof vest armor and mask with my forcefield on just in case people slam me right away without reading.

Links help in ranking

Here are a few SEO fundamentals that are considered SEO facts already my a majority number of people in the SEO industry.

  1. Incoming links to your website increase ranking. They are like votes of authority, trust, credibility.
  2. Google and many of the other search engines are against artificial link building. This is trying to influence search engines by creating so many links yourself trying to pretend many people like your site, thus linking to you.

Thus any form or kind of way you are trying to influence ranking artificially, like buying links only for the purpose of having a link for search engine ranking, or participating in various types of automated link exchanging and farming are frowned upon by search engines. And Google and other search engines are getting better and better in detecting these artificial link building activities.

Getting too many links too fast is bad! (more…)

Top 5 Ways American Express is Losing Money on SEO

March 17th, 2008 by catfish

So before I slam American Express today for being clueless (stay tuned), let me recap my awesome weekend. Although I couldn’t play flag football this last weekend because of my elbow injury, I coached our squad (The Vultures) to an opening day 29 – 6 throttling of team Havoc. We are now 1 – 0 in our second season in A League of the San Diego Men’s Flag Football League :)

Additionally, my band Dive Bomber won our first round of the Emergenza Battle of the Bands and we are moving on to round 2. Not bad for a band that doesn’t have a vocalist, although we did finally find one, but he hasn’t performed with us yet.

Ok, so now that I have bragged a little about how cool my weekend was, let’s look at the ridiculous SEO advice that American Express (who last I checked was a credit card company..lol) is distributing to people. Today I was doing a little reading at WebProNews and I read this story about American Express and their small business handbook in which they claim: (more…)

Google Experiement with Right Hand Column Results and Universal Search

December 13th, 2007 by catfish

Today on Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Lenssen illustrates a new Google experiment in which Google takes some of the universal search results that would normally be displayed in the main serps column and instead displays them on the right where you might normally see PPC ads. He makes a couple of interesting observations concerning the reasons that Google might have for doing this, most of which would economically benefit Google including increased interaction in the right column where PPC ads are typically shown and increasing Google’s opportunity to hand pick results based on economic considerations. I believe he refers to it as “allowing Google to try get away with (more…)

Subdomains vs Folders – Which is Best for SEO?

December 10th, 2007 by catfish

Well our San Diego Chargers found a way to win in Tennessee this Sunday coming back in classic style that featured a 2:00 minute drill for the tie and an LT run in OT for the win. It doesn’t get any better than that, but it sure does frazzle your nerves…lol. I hope we get another shot at the Patriots in the playoffs :)

Speaking of frazzled nerves, I was a little nervous Saturday night before singing for the first time ever at a bar with my band. Playing guitar and singing at the same time is hard enough by yourself, much less at a bar in front of people. But it went pretty well and no one ran out of the room, so from that standpoint, it was a success. For those that don’t know, I play in a band called Dive Bomber ( http://www.heavymusic.com/ ).

I am in the process of writing a three part article series for http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ about how PPC and SEO can work together to produce greater results. I am almost done with the article and I have to say it has really been fun. I am getting an opportunity to share some of the SEO observations that we have had at BusinessOnLine that can really make a difference for some Web sites and I think that’s exciting.

In SEO news, Matt Cutts today tried to add some logic behind the old subdomains versus subfolders debate. Google treats subdomains like (more…)

SearchEngineLand.com

December 6th, 2007 by catfish

One of my favorite sites for the latest news in SEO is www.searchengineland.com . The site is run by Danny Sullivan, formerly of SearchEngineStrategies.com (where incidentally I will be writing a column soon, stay tuned for details). But one of the things (or should I say some of the things) I have noticed about Search Engine Land lately is they don’t exactly correspond to what I would define as best practices with their own SEO. So I thought I would take a few moments to give some unsolicited advice to my friends at SearchEngineLand.com as if they were a client.

Here are my top 5: (more…)

It’s No Fun Being Sick

December 4th, 2007 by catfish

Being sick is the worst. I’ll leave it that…lol. Having a sick Web site (a Web site without valid HTML code) is not such a good thing either. However, it probably isn’t affecting your search rankings. In this post, Google Super Spam Fighter Matt Cutts confirms what many of us have believed for a long time, that Google doesn’t penalize sites for invalid code. However, that isn’t an excuse not to write valid code, lol. It just means it doesn’t have that much potential to affect your search listings. (more…)