Travel Blog Challenge - Topic: SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

campinginheels on SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:48:48 -0500

Just a quick intro before launching into my reply - I'm Chloe, I own campinginheels.com, and I'm new here (please be gentle). Been blogging on a couple of .blogspot and .wordpress domains since 2005, but I only recently made the move to my own domain name. I work in SEO too (please don't throw things at me), but I'm very, very slack in applying the principles to my own blog - the last thing I want to do when I come home is more SEO. Still, I'm trying.

So, hi :)

This is a great little article, all us SEOers had a good giggle when it came out. By all means, it exposes some of what is involved in black hat SEO, but they really have used an extreme example here. The JC Penney fiasco - well, it made everyone think about how the SERPs are being manipulated every day, and yes, Google finds out - but not always. They definitely know a lot more than what they can take action on - I'm guessing they made an example out of these guys for their blatant disregard for Google's 'rules'.

It's amazing how different backlink analysis tools give you different figures. Have a look across Google, Opensiteexplorer, MajesticSEO - and then, if you can be arsed, download the seobook toolbar and have a look at what yahoo has to say. Interesting stuff.

Look forward to getting involved in some of the conversations happening around here. Just a heads up - while I work in SEO, I'm here for my personal blog only. So don't worry about me trying to hassle you for any work-related reasons! :D

Chloe

Jeremy B on SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:56:09 -0500

I did some research on this last night and from a number of different sites, I found that the alt description of your images is what Google uses to index your photos. Putting in a title helps too (more important than the file name) but the alt description actually drives the indexing and ranking of your photos.

Here's are two links that talk about this but you can do research on this to find out how google indexes your images.

http://www.searchenginejournal.....ence/6930/

http://www.seobook.com/link-ti.....ich-better

And straight from the horse's mouth - Google itself

http://googlewebmastercentral......artly.html

livingthedreamrtw on SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:03:12 -0500

Good point. I just checked Google Webmaster tools and I have 13,000 by their count. Weird.

m on SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:41:51 -0500

Black Hat will get you every time.

I checked out site explorer also. I don't think it is very accurate. It says I have 2,028 links. I have 31,000 according to Google Webmaster Tools which coincides with my records.

livingthedreamrtw on SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:23:57 -0500

Very interesting. I like the link to Open Site Explorer they provide, it is new to me. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

It gave my site an overall rank of 40/100, Domain authority of 33/100, Linking Root Domains of 63 count, and 2,720 total links.

I wonder how parallel their assesment is to google's calcs.

TourAbsurd on SEO article: "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:12:53 -0500

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02.....earch.html

Black hat SEO tricks and the Googly consequences. ;)