There is a discussion at WebmasterWorld started by a Bluehost user who suddenly discovered that his primary domain had many subdomains indexed by Google — subdomains he didn’t know existed. Despite all the replies the user received, the correct solution has yet to surface in the discussion (as I write this). The problem is created by the way CPanel handles ADDON domains. In fact, the Web hosting provider has some control over that because some Web hosts don’t create this issue with their CPANEL Click to continue […]
Year: 2014
Bad SEO Practices and What You Should Be Doing Instead
I cleaned out 30+ spammy comments from this blog this morning and seeing all those “Michael Kors” links reminded me of just how much bad SEO advice is based on Web spam. Spammers drop links because they are using “churn-and-burn” tactics. They don’t expect the sites they are promoting to last anywhere near as long as the links. So when you’re an agency or doing SEO for yourself, it’s not a good idea to follow those spammy practices because you’re shooting for the long term. Smart, knowledgeable Click to continue […]
Lost User Data and Duplicate Comment Notices
One of our Web hosting accounts became unavailable to us and we had to rebuild ReflectiveDynamics.com from backups on a new hosting account. The blog backup included many user comments, including a fair number awaiting moderation. If you have received multiple notices of new comments from this blog in the past day we apologize for the inconvenience. Several of the most recent comments were not included in the backup file. We have attempted to reconstruct them from looking at cache images of Click to continue […]
You are Not a Content Marketer So Stop Saying you Are
It looks like faux content marketing has won the game of buzzwords with online marketers. This is not an “SEO thing” — just about everyone from ad agencies to freelance writers now call themselves content marketers. Language naturally evolves and words and expressions take on new meanings, so this is a normal progression in usage. I wouldn’t usually take an interest in this kind of misapplication of an expression except that all the content marketers are really confused about what they Click to continue […]
How to Recover from Negative SEO
Too many people are falling for the propaganda. A general feeling of impending doom is sweeping across the Internet Marketing community as people talk up the possibility of “negative SEO” in Web forums, blogs, podcasts, and conferences. I have dealt with negative SEO several times across the years. It’s never a pleasant experience but it’s much different from what most people are experiencing. If you’re losing traffic and you see links in your backlink profiles that you don’t recognize, Click to continue […]
Why I Never Reply to Guest Blogging Requests
We do our best to discourage people from asking us if they can write guest articles for our blogs. Once in a while someone still insists on sending us a completely useless email. Normally we just discard the email and move on. After all, everyone and their brother who blogs about Internet marketing has shared at least one dumb guest blogging email. Why bother sharing another? Because so many of you continue to ignore the pattern of failure and reach out to complete and total strangers who have Click to continue […]
Why Link Building Is More Important Now Than Ever
Link building is more important now than ever. Links from sites with low quality, “thin” content” are, by definition, “low quality links”. For a discussion of high quality content and high quality links, see this post, which details how to judge the quality of links and content. In the wake of Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, Michael Martinez and I have worked with clients who made mistakes in their linking strategy in the past. Some of them just gave up Click to continue […]
Small Business, Big Search Challenge
How do you compete on a shoestring budget with all those big, well-funded companies out there who hire professional search marketers and agencies to manage their organic listings in Bing, Google, and other search services? One answer that Randy and I share with our clients is a reflective strategy: to optimize for search outside of the search space. There is less competition in the reflective marketing spaces because most people follow the crowd. Reflective marketing for search is easy and Click to continue […]
Link Building Will Never Die but Bad SEO May Kill Your Website
Now that Matt Cutts has lowered the boom on using guest bloggery for linkery all the SEO bloggers are pouncing on LINK BUILDING and proclaiming its imminent death and departure from “white hat”, “good” search engine optimization. These people never learn from their mistakes. Link building is not going away and it doesn’t need to adopt another new name (like “content marketing”). People need to stop being ashamed of link building. It’s not that link building is bad for your Website, it is that Click to continue […]
Do You Really Need All These SEO Strategies for 2014?
Since November we have been treated to an abundance of predictive blogging from the SEO industry trying to get ahead of 2014’s “best practices”. Almost every new “SEO for 2014” article has abandoned the usual litany of obtaining links in favor of promoting relatively new priorities. But I find much of this generic advice hard to justify. Let me explain why, based on queries I see people are actually using. Why Do I Need Google Authorship? I honestly cannot tell you why you need Google Authorship, Click to continue […]