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April 28th, 2008
Posted by richardbaxterseo
Earlier this year my good friend Dan Faircloth started optimising his website - Faircloth.info - in the hope of getting a Google ranking for his own name. For 99% of those who try, this is a challenge enough, but when you’re a guy who makes bits of particle accelerators (specifically, I think, the "ion source" at ISIS) and your name is ranking highly on domains belonging to UK academic institutions like ISIS and global scientific projects like CERN, you know you’ve got a job on your hands if you want to outrank the big guys.
Numerous conversations at parties about SEO later (including buying a few amazing domains like particleaccelerators.co.uk), he’s got himself a position 1 ranking for his own name (ok, it’s moving about a bit but not bad, eh?) by carrying some simple SEO changes like setting up some 301 redirects (turns out there were quite a few domains bought up), some good link building, reviewing and realigning his inbound links, and making proper use of H1’s, meta titles, and quality outbound links.
It’s the list of activities that he carried out, by date that are most interesting to me, and there’s definitely some conversation to be had here on the value of each step taken, so please, I’d really like to hear your thoughts!
In date order, here’s what he did:
- 03-Jan-2008 - First proper faircloth.info website was built and set live
- 08-Jan-2008 - Registered faircloth.info to Google Webmaster Tools
- 12-Jan-2008 - Redirected all other owned domains to the .info site
- 20-Jan-2008 - Google first listed the site at position 3 but site fluctuates between 3rd and 14th until the 19th April
- 10-Feb-2008 - Put links to faircloth.info on epac06.org
- 13-Mar-2008 - Changed two indexed PowerPoint files that were ranking higher by putting links in the files to back to faircloth.info and the various other keyword domains
- 20-Mar-2008 - Ensured that every PowerPoint presentation published links back to faircloth.info. At time of writing about 5 presentations are out there now, including a few hosted on lab websites (CERN, Frankfurt etc)
- “Dan Faircloth” search string fluctuated between position 14 and position 3 on a daily basis until 19-April-2008
- 19-Apr-2008 “Dan Faircloth” search string first listed at number 2
- Present - "Dan Faircloth" is in position 1, Dan Faircloth ranks in position 2
Dan made some really impacting changes and for me, it’s all about the epac06 and Powerpoint links. Those Powerpoint links hosted on the high authority domains have got to be passing some good pagerank. Almost exactly one month after rolling out all of the changes to the documents hosted online, the rankings stopped fluctuating and stabilised. Fantastic! Come to think about it, those rankings were all over the place…
So, your thoughts are welcome, especially on the document links, and if you want to give him some "next steps" advice, be my guest. Dan’s got the bug now, and he’s really excited about his next project - getting a ranking for particle accelerators! Good break from actually building them, eh, Dan?
Cheers,
richardbaxterseo
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April 15th, 2008
Posted by randfish
Today at SMX Sydney (which I’ll have a more detailed post about this weekend), Danny Sullivan and I sat together on a site review panel in the late afternoon. One of the sites we were asked to review was DiscoverTasmania.com. During our investigations, we stumbled across some remarkable cloaking from one of Australia’s top travel websites - Flightcentre.com.
We started by reviewing this page about Hobart, and grabbed a short snippet of text to analyze whether the page had any duplicate content issues. Here’s the page below:
We ran a search at Google to check the phrase and came up with this result:
Clearly, you can see a page from Flightcentre.com outranking DiscoverTasmania.com’s page about Hobart, yet something looked fishy. The lack of a cached version indicates that they’re trying to hide something, so we decided to investigate further. Clicking on the Flightcentre.com link, you’re brought to this page:
And yet, reviewing the source code shows no mention of the phrase in question… Which instantly led us to the hypothesis that the domain is cloaking. Sure enough, turning off Javascript and changing our user-agent to Googlebot, we saw a completely different version of the page:
Of course, this site review was in front of a live audience, so there was no putting the cat back in the bag (and if that wasn’t enough, Google’s Adam Lasnik was also in attendance as a panelist). From talking to attendees after the show, it appears that Flightcentre is actually one of the largest travel companies in Australia, and folks here seemed to feel this was as significant as the BMW Germany spam case from several years back.
Lessons to learn here:
- Cloaking with User Agent isn’t wise - if you’re going to cloak in a gray/blackhat way, use IP addresses (however, even in that scenario, we still could have used Google Translate to see the original version of the page).
- Noarchive is a clear giveaway that something shady is going on - it’s like whistling and twirling your thumbs outside a bank that’s just been robbed.
- No matter who you are or where you are, there’s a good chance that someone with some SEO knowledge is going to stumble across your clever (or, in this case, not so clever) spam.
How egregious is this particular case? Not that bad, actually. While they’re technically violating the guidelines (and Adam certainly didn’t seem particularly pleased), the content in the cloaked text-only version actually does match up to the text in the image version. The content from the DiscoverTasmania.com website may have been taken with legitimate permission as well (we were unable to verify this at the conference). All in all, my guess is that Google won’t ban the entire site, though they may remove some of these pages from the listings. The bigger issue is how fragile cloaking really is, and how close you are to being called out for it at the most inopportune moments. 
p.s. Looks like Neerav from the conference has already posted on the subject (and has a great photo of Danny, Adam, and me in our SMX Sydney Site Review labcoats, to boot).
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April 15th, 2008
Posted by Thetjo
Being a BSc in psychology, the entire internet sometimes seems like a field trip to me, SEOmoz.org being no exception. Thus, I hereby present you my findings of the group dynamics at SEOmoz.org. These findings are made within 10 days, and may thus be off on some levels. If these types of analysis are welcomed, I will keep my eyes open and report back on it after a couple of weeks.
Role Differentiation
It appears that there is no clear role differentiation on the website. There is no clear group of people on YOUmoz that posts blogs in category X or does task Y. At the SEOmoz blog, however, there is a clear role differentiation as listed on the About page. I guess us members are all ‘Mozletts’, as nicknamed by rmccarley.
Status Differentiation
High status is usually defined as having a tendency to initiate ideas and activities, and being seen in a consensual prestige (a positive evaluation or ranking by others in the group). In this perspective, high status is assigned based on several things over at SEOmoz.org. The first is obvious: the tag under your avatar, whereby SEOMOZ STAFF carries the top rank, PRO MEMBER being second, and NO TAG being a distant third. However, status differentiation as clearly listed as these generate a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having higher status, or a commonly seen avatar, appears to result automatically in more ‘thumbs up’, even on ultra-short reactions like ‘great!’ and ‘indeed’. I would find it very interesting to see what happens if somebody like Sean Maguire would create a dummy account and start posting the exact same comments he is now. Would that generate the same amount of thumbs up? (No pun intended, I think you post great material Sean, but more on that later.)
Self-Evaluation Through Social Comparison
Self comparison is the process of comparing your own behavior to that of a group you’re in. It occurred to me that the level of comments on SEOmoz is high. On most websites, moderators work overtime to keep things tidy. The ‘thumb up/down’ seems to be its own moderator here. However, only in rare occasions I actually spotted a comment with more than one thumb down. That could either mean the level is extremely high, or there is a high amount of tolerance for ‘he thinks differently about things’. Whether the above is true for the level of YOUmoz blogs is harder to tell. It appears that I am part of a new group of Mozletts that is actively posting blogs on YOUmoz. Some first-time-bloggers create blogs that differ from the generally accepted norm of ‘long and educative for a semi-broad crowd’. Whether this fresh blood will eventually conform to the norms or start their own new kind of posts is yet to be seen.
Leadership
Many groups have two different kind of ‘leaders’; chosen and spontaneous. The chosen leaders of SEOmoz.org are clear. This is the purple-ish tagged Staff. They get respect from the others bloggers, initiate contests, and keep things neat. Randy appears to be the person in charge (confirmed this today by checking the About page), with all other SEOmoz employees being a somewhat shared second. On the spontaneous field, however, I would like to nominate Sean Maguire as McDaddy. Virtually no blog goes untouched by him, and comments as much as ‘great’ get thumbs up. Even though he has no formal form of leadership, he does appear to have a larger-than-most-others influence in discussions.
Communication Networks
This is something that I was not able to observe well due to my short time around here. My thoughts are that the SEOmoz staff makes decisions and simply voices them in a blog. No true member-participation takes place in this process.
What are your thoughts on my observations? Are all new Mozletts truly different from the old crowd? Is Sean really a McDaddy?
P.S: bear with me on my Photoshop skills.
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