This post is another in the spirit of my Sitemaps post, where I explained how to create an XML sitemap for inclusion into Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Today I want to talk about the robots.txt file, which is an extremely powerful and oft-misunderstood part of websites. I misunderstood it myself recently. Overview The robots.txt […]
This is a guest post from Mike Essex. See his full bio at the end of the post. Also, are you interested in guest posting on this site? Contact me at thebeginnerseo at gmail dot com and we’ll chat about it! From the very earliest stages of product development it’s important to gather people together […]
Google recently released and announced their “people widget” for Gmail. You can read about it here and here. *Notice* The two articles are identical, but Google is not using a cross-domain canonical. Google is creating duplicate content themselves by posting the same article on two different URLs! The Issue Google has released the same blog […]
Most linkbuilders constantly hunt for new ways to find new link prospects for their clients. Many of us use tools like SEOmoz, Ontolo, Buzzstream, and others to find new search queries. Sometimes, though, we have to think creatively, outside the box, to gather prospects that no one else has leveraged yet. One such way is […]
Is SEO a team sport? SEOs are often known individually in the industry, not necessarily for who they work for (though it is great when the company pushes the SEO into the spotlight, and the SEO gives love back to the company). At the beginning of my SEO career, I assumed that everyone had skills […]
*Note – this post contains no SEO tips or tricks or ideas. It’s strictly informational and I am extremely excited about it* It seems that I mention Distilled quite a bit on my blog. I accuse them of stealing my page titles, I recapped their London conference, and today I must mention them again. Why? […]
I’ve been asked a few times what blogs I have been reading to increase my knowledge of SEO. I’ve decided to put together a list here of blogs that I subscribe to via RSS. The Lucky 13 Blogs I Read via RSS SEOmoz: If you don’t know that SEOmoz has an incredible blog with the […]
Linkbuilding is a notoriously difficult task. Think about all of the sessions that take place at advanced seminars and you can easily tell that we all need new tactics and ideas for building links. In the past 2 months, I have gone to a conference dedicated to linkbuilding (#Linklove London), an event in Philadelphia put […]
Today I was listening to the webinar given a few months ago by Rand Fishkin on “Getting Value from XML Sitemaps, HTML Sitemaps + Feeds”. It gives some great information (if you’re a Pro member, you can find it here), though I heard some information that made me ask a couple questions and investigate. I […]
I recently developed this website, my first with WordPress. After working as an in-house SEO for a few months, I decided it was time to develop my own site, to practice what I preach. One feature I knew that I needed to have was a way to interconnect my posts, not only for SEO purposes, […]
I’m a search marketer. It’s what I do. I’m also a human being. It’s what I (as the philosophers like to say) be. I write this as both. The meta description, it seems, has long been a way that search engines have figured out what a website is about and they have used is information […]
I would love to just write this: Dear Spammers, Go away. Sincerely, John I cannot however, because I have mixed feelings about spammers. Background Today this site was hit with some massive spam by someone labeling themselves Betus Promotion Code. This is betting/gambling website that I guess is trying to achieve rankings through comment spam, […]
Well everyone, we have a fun discovery on our hands. Yesterday about 3pm I noticed the title had changed. My friend Tom Harari linked to my recaps using the anchor text “John Doherty’s Epic Recap of the London #Linklove Conference”. This went live on Tuesday morning. Wednesday at 3pm, this is what I saw as […]
On Monday, my post entitled “How Distilled Stole My Page Title” went around the Twittersphere. It was interesting to see the feedback and there were a lot of comments from a lot of people I respect. Read the comments here. Now I run into an issue. I’ve never confronted something like this before, and I […]
Google changed my page title in favor of the anchor text from Distilled’s blog. Yesterday I was doing some research on my blog and trying to find it using different keywords, searching old-school (like a normal Web user) using Google.com. I’ve been hoping to get this site ranking high for “John Doherty”, as it’s my […]