October 18, 2015
In 2009 Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post entitled Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines. The post generated over 170 comments of discussion, and illustrates how periniall the question: “What is SEO?” – has been in the history of the industry. Alternative titles for this debate include: “SEO is Dead” “Focus on User […]
March 21, 2015
In my earlier post on using <noscript> tags for ensuring good SEO when using lazy loaded images, we observed that Google is able to properly crawl, index and will rank pages for keywords inside alt tags contained within <noscript>. This gave me an idea to see if Google would do the same for <noscript> tags even […]
March 20, 2015
Is Google testing a ‘reading time’ metric to display as a search result rich snippet? Spotted this today: Here’s a closer look: Tweet this screenshot If you are wondering, it’s just coincidence that I happened to be performing research on schema, though this fact might have made it more likely I’d notice what is a fairly […]
March 15, 2015
Looking for my SEO experiment on original content? Check out 45wn343on Does Lazy Loading Images Hurt SEO? TLDR: No. Important Update! Make sure you read my super popular related post on using noscript to add keywords even when there is no associated image – the results were pretty amazing Lazy loading is a technique to defer […]
December 9, 2014
[custom_headline type=”left, center, right” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h5″ accent=”true”] What is Prerendering?[/custom_headline] Via Google developer docs Prerendering is an experimental feature in Chrome (versions 13 and up) that can take hints from a site’s author to speed up the browsing experience of users. It’s a bit like Firefox’ prefetching feature aimed at speeding up page load speeds by […]
April 4, 2014
Cast your mind back to the origins of the mainstream web circa 1996 to 2000, and recall that it was very much a static place (my favourite piece of childhood nostalgia that is still live on the internet today is the original Warner Brothers Space Jam website.) Back in those days, you could go online […]
October 9, 2013
When it comes to naming your online brand, there’s an enduring SEO debate over whether it would be more beneficial to try for an exact match domain (EMD), partial keyword match, or something unique with high brand-ability. Matt Cutts, unsurprisingly, recommends the latter and avoiding keyword stuffing your domain name: But what about the worst names […]
August 21, 2013
Some blackhat SEO has really hit the jackpot with a series of backlink insertions with targeted anchor text appearing on the following Techcrunch posts: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/29/the-future-of-science/ – Page Rank 6 http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/rabois-left-square-over-sexual-harassment-claim/ – Page Rank 7 http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/08/survey-monkey-growing-like-a-weed-fills-out-exec-team/ – Page Rank 6 If you read my blog, you are probably already aware that Techcrunch.com is one of the biggest technology and […]
July 20, 2013
I recently took the below photo while waiting for a train in Sydney. For what it’s worth, I really like the marketing message and actually went to the website on my phone with the intention of signing up for a blood drive. Here’s the mobile site landing page: Pretty good job. Integration of traditional display […]
June 30, 2013
Here’s an old yet under-appreciated video Google put out last March of a real search quality meeting in action. It’s really fascinating stuff and I especially like the super helpful annotations providing explanations on jargon non-Google search engineers would not understand – “trigram”, anyone? The topic for the meeting is spelling correction for long queries […]