Notes on SEO

Feb 10, 2017 Thread · 3 posts →

About 3 years ago I built a news board for people in creative agencies called Advertisers.io.

Sep 14, 2016

Remember the RapGenius blackhat growth hack? buff.ly

Mar 12, 2016

Quantifiably, 301 redirects can expect a 15% drop in organic traffic.

moz.com Accidental SEO Tests: How 301 Redirects Are Likely Impacting Your Brand Those 301 redirects could be more costly to your brand than you previously imagined. Brian Wood dives into the results of an accidental SEO test that turned out to be serendipitous. (opens in a new tab)

Mar 11, 2016

All of @Medium's external links are nofollowed with the exception of links to @Twitter.

Feb 24, 2016

That's cool, so now Google search results contain no real results.

thesempost.com Google AdWords Switching to 4 Ads on Top, None on Sidebar It seems that Google is rolling out a change to Google AdWords that sees 4 ads at the top of the search results, none on the sidebar at all, and an additional 3 ads at the bottom of the search results. This replaces… (opens in a new tab)

Jan 21, 2016

Great answer by @randfish. What are the downsides to reposting existing blog content to Medium? buff.ly

Jan 17, 2016

Interesting, so quantifiably 301 redirects can expect a 15% drop in organic traffic.

moz.com Accidental SEO Tests: How 301 Redirects Are Likely Impacting Your Brand Those 301 redirects could be more costly to your brand than you previously imagined. Brian Wood dives into the results of an accidental SEO test that turned out to be serendipitous. (opens in a new tab)

Dec 9, 2015

“Websites are for humans, not robots, or spiders, or aliens.”

solomon.io Websites are for Humans Writing an article that gets read by tens of thousands is exhilarating. If you’ve written an article, it’s hard not to obsess over the analytics. (opens in a new tab)

Jun 25, 2015

YouTube search has always been a little blurry. Some interesting thoughts here—The Advanced Guide to YouTube SEO

searchenginejournal.com YouTube SEO: How To Rank Higher On YouTube Learn how to optimize your videos for better ranking on YouTube. Drive brand awareness, engage your audience, and unlock new revenue streams with an effective video strategy. (opens in a new tab)

Jun 16, 2015

Did Google Just Penalize Its Own $100M Investment? The Thumbtack Case

Jun 16, 2015 Thread · 2 posts →

Friends knowledgeable about analytics. I have a site 3,000 mo/session site that is getting 18% of traffic from Google.

May 10, 2015

An interesting look at variable length meta descriptions in 2015

moz.com I Can't Drive 155: Meta Descriptions in 2015 For years, we've suggested a 155-character limit to meta descriptions. As long snippets appear more and more often, is it time to revise that rule? (opens in a new tab)

Apr 10, 2015

Build a directory, and the SEOs come crawling.

Mar 21, 2015

I was spamming so many links that Comcast called saying I had a virus. I was using 4TB of bandwidth each month.

johnathanward.com Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure A candid account of a decade trying to earn online, tracing my path through websites, affiliate marketing, advertising, and business setbacks. (opens in a new tab)

Feb 3, 2015

Whoa, it's pretty amazing that @Gimletmedia is the top search result for Startup. google.com

Dec 25, 2014

Waiting for all the #SEO Twitter bots to favorite this tweet. Hook line and sinker. #social #socialmediamarketing #SEM #socialmedia

Sep 2, 2014 Thread · 3 posts →

Hey @bjornjohansen, wanted to let you know that selecting the retina option on your lazy load plugin renames all images as 'Thumb.'

Aug 29, 2014

Google Authorship was a pain in the ass in the first place. Plus added an odd UX. Good thing it's dead.

Aug 16, 2014

Spammers built a tool called XRumer to spam sites. With negative SEO, it has become a weapon for blackmail.

dejan.ai Hello, this is an extortion email. A blackmailer demanded $1,500 to not point 20,000 XRumer forum profile backlinks at our site. Here is the email in full, Google's response to the campaign, and a 2016 follow-up DDoS extortion attempt. (opens in a new tab)

Jul 18, 2014

A solid SEO case study—How We Grew OkDork 200%

okdork.com SEO for Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide to 200% More Traffic When I was director of marketing at Mint.com one of the largest ways we grew to millions of users was via Google. Specifically via people searching for relevant terms and clicking through to our site. Over the years… (opens in a new tab)

May 27, 2014

Websites are for humans, not robots, or spiders, or aliens.

solomon.io Websites are for Humans Writing an article that gets read by tens of thousands is exhilarating. If you’ve written an article, it’s hard not to obsess over the analytics. (opens in a new tab)

May 23, 2014

How can you predict the future of Google Search? Look at how it's ranking porn. buff.ly

Apr 7, 2014

I love SEO case studies like this—How We Grew OkDork 200%

okdork.com SEO for Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide to 200% More Traffic When I was director of marketing at Mint.com one of the largest ways we grew to millions of users was via Google. Specifically via people searching for relevant terms and clicking through to our site. Over the years… (opens in a new tab)

Jan 9, 2014

Gawker has some serious SEO. It outranks the Ad Age articles that it is summarizing.

Jan 4, 2014

The problem with paywalls—Search and social are primary sources of traffic, but paywalls interfere with both.

Dec 24, 2013

Whoops, this looks black hat to me—RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed buff.ly

Nov 7, 2013

Anybody have success changing their wordpress blog's permalink structure to %postname% ? Keep getting 404s with the redirects in my htaccess

Oct 27, 2013

Why Moz’s $12,000 bounty program for new engineers didn’t work.

geekwire.com Startup lessons: Why Moz’s $12,000 bounty program for new engineers didn’t work Moz — back then called SEOmoz — was growing rapidly two-and-a-half years ago and they needed people to keep the momentum going. (opens in a new tab)

Oct 24, 2013

Pro Tip: Search Engine Terms are now nonexistent. Look at Queries under SEO in Google Analytics to find inbound keywords to your site.

Aug 30, 2013

It is amazing that I still get paid backlink offers on my site. Are you trying to destroy your clients search rank?

Aug 17, 2013

Interesting deep dive — How I Would Do SEO for Rap Genius - Moz

moz.com How I Would Do SEO for Rap Genius A step-by-step approach to how Rap Genius can win the 'lyrics' SEO game and get ahead in a saturated market run by old dinosaurs. (opens in a new tab)

Apr 30, 2013

Props just for the pic of Total Annihilation in this @SEOmoz article.

seomoz.org Why SEO Is Like An RTS Game (and why you should care) Battlefield control, offensive weaponry, opponent research, and more; in many ways, SEO can be compared to a real-time strategy video game. In today's post, learn how you can lean on your early gaming roots to benefit… (opens in a new tab)

Nov 18, 2011

Is it really possible that 20% of searches don't yet exist? What does that even mean?