Blackhat SEO Practices

A good SEO practice is one executed with patience, it is something that will add to a web page’s content without taking away from the main idea, or product. It is carried out with methods that are not considered black hat, and if viewed would generate positive feedback.

These types of tips are everywhere, and im not going to list them as i just want to get across a general mood and feel for the type of work SEO should be and the type of work that myself and 1 Call Service provides. Comment spam, black hat email marketing, illicit popups and deceptive code are all included in the my DO NOT DO list. in my opinion these types of activities crowd up the internet with tons and tons of utterly useless shit, and it just frustrates me.

Heres an example.

you go to a website, the actual website is say 150kb thats maybe a second or two loading, or it would have been but wait theres more, A LOT more!!!, theres 500 spam comments that are loading, theres 2.5MB of Viagra ads and theres of course the website survey and maybe that cool flash page curl advertisement your younger family members always love to click.

20 seconds later your just getting to read your content, well at least they got to your web page right? your SEO is working. right? right?

now some of the other SEO problems that I find difficult for me

SEO problems, Data Collection

Having a start and an end to a process makes sense, if theres a beginning then there is logically an end. But how can you judge when you should end? Good question. No idea. But If all we are after are results then (once again)logically we need data to compare. Collection of data from sources like Google Analytics is a great place to start. the sooner you can start collecting data the better shape you will be in later when you need to compare that data, so some stats equations and skew the graph in your favor.

How much data do we need for a good comparison?

Two months of data is in my opinion the minimal amount of statistical data you need to make any kind of assumptions at all but in the large picture its almost no data at all. You see a website is like any business it is effected by the weather, the market, the season, the holidays, and without good data going from one factor to another you wont be able to get a honest to God good statistical reading of how your website is doing.

If two months is a minimal point of statistical data needed to make a judgment then I would say two years is a reasonable amount of data for a good comparison. Granted the web moves quickly and assuming you are doing SEO you should be able to see a general rise in your sites traffic from a multitude of sources from around the globe.

No related posts.

• Choosing Link Partners
• 5 Elements of a winning SEM strategy
• Maximize your paid advertisements with Google
• and a two part series, Tools of the Trade, Part I , and Part II

Related posts:

1. Blackhat SEO Practices and General Problems Hey guys, I know its been awhile since I’ve published...

Article can be found at SEOchat.com or

Related posts:

1. Sempo.org SEM institute I was linked to this website by a friend, it...

site tweaks and tune ups with sem 101

Related posts:

1. Sempo.org SEM institute I was linked to this website by a friend, it...
2. Wonderful Information on Web Fonts Recently read a wonderful article about how you can add...
3. Integrating Facebook Authentication with your Website just reviewed an article on Nettuts about how you can...

LEarn SEO basics.

Related posts:

1. Sempo.org SEM institute I was linked to this website by a friend, it...

first is information in “The Benefits of Directory Submissions“, thought dead by some developers directory submissions are just another thing that should be added to a long list of SEO related optimizations, and link building techniques.

Related posts:

1. Sempo.org SEM institute I was linked to this website by a friend, it...

First SEO Quake found at seoquake.com

Seo quake is both for Firefox and IE, and its primary function in is to help quantitatively define the information presented on a website or page being viewed. The main feature I would point you guys too is the keyword density ability, basically it can read through your pages and find out how many times a word or group of words appears on your site. VERY HANDY if your going for SEO optimizations this is a must, try and get your good key words between 5-20 density for maximum effect on your home page.

Next we have the all powerful Developers toolbar from Chris Derick

The toolbar can be downloaded from addons.mozilla.org

Developers tool bar is a multifunction toolbar allowing users to view style information, edit css, outline styles, edit their browsers width and height and so much more. Just with those key features makes the developers toolbar the #1 Firefox extension any kind of web personnel should have. Being able to specifically target a browsers width and height is something I think we all have had to do at a specific time, and with 2 clicks boom you can view the site in that exact resolution.

Being able to edit css on the fly even on another website and save it off also a helpful or potentially a time saving feature. and of course most praised feature in my opinion is the ability to highlight hovered objects, and see their css roots. See what div, what class and what id they came from, makes editing your styles that must faster.

Umm lets see, Colorzilla downloadable over there colorzilla.com !!

Colorzilla is simple, it places an icon down in the lower left hand corner status bar and  you just select it to get an eye dropper in Firefox, thus allowing you to retrieve any color on the firefox screen. Oh its sOo handy.

Finally we have Firebug available addons.mozilla.org

Firebug has some similarities with the developers toolbar but its a lot more complex. In other words it can be used to help diagnose css related issues and help you dig deep to find what id or class your having trouble with, but where this thing has shined for me in the past is with the development of dynamic sites, the ability to track what files are specifically slowing down the loading or display of my site.

My list of Firefox plug-in’s again are

• SEO quake
• Developers toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Firebug
• and of course Firefox is the browser.

Do you  have your own plug-in you think should be included in this, feel free to comment and let everyone know about it.

No related posts.

• User-Agent: the robot the following rule applies to (e.g. “Googlebot,” etc.)
• Disallow: the pages you want to block the bots from accessing (as many disallow lines as needed)
• Noindex: the pages you want a search engine to block AND not index (or de-index if previously indexed). Unofficially supported by Google; unsupported by Yahoo and Live Search.
• Each User-Agent/Disallow group should be separated by a blank line; however no blank lines should exist within a group (between the User-agent line and the last Disallow).
• The hash symbol (#) may be used for comments within a robots.txt file, where everything after # on that line will be ignored. May be used either for whole lines or end of lines.
• Directories and filenames are case-sensitive: “private”, “Private”, and “PRIVATE” are all uniquely different to search engines.

Let’s look at an example robots.txt file. The example below includes:

• The robot called “Googlebot” has nothing disallowed and may go anywhere
• The entire site is closed off to the robot called “msnbot”;
• All robots (other than Googlebot) should not visit the /tmp/ directory or directories or files called /logs, as explained with comments, e.g., tmp.htm, /logs or logs.php.

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow:

User-agent: msnbot Disallow: /

# Block all robots from tmp and logs directories User-agent: * Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /logs # for directories and files called logs

via A Deeper Look At Robots.txt .

No related posts.

Before

Completely unsure about how good bots scan and index files and sites, myself and other bloggers alike had come up with a million different ways to present their own robots.txt file, and a million more ways to do theirs if they where using a wordpress site.

they ranged from

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /
Disallow: *

to something similar to this.

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /wp*

After

Some of what we have in our typical robots.txt is indeed valid, but bear with me for a second as i explain what i did to come up with some new results.

to gather statistics on what was being indexed I cross referenced the results from some analytic tools that I had available.

1. Google analytics (google search stats)
   
2. Stat press (wordpress stats)
   
3. awstats (server side built in stats)
4. Web mastering tools (By Google)
   

From the data I was able to pull from these resources I specifically looked for what was being hit. Because of the special way that wordpress loads, and imports I could see that /index.php was being indexed as a file, but most other FILES on the site where not indexed. All other PAGES or what would be considered a page by a typical computer user where not indexed as an actual FILE but rather indexed by its permalink location.

hmm … interesting Google bot indexes files and paths. Interesting  but not unexpected.

By now most of us know this, you set up a permalink structure in your website and it dynamically changes the links throughout your site to reflect the change. This is great for dynamically driven websites looking for a cleaner path or some SEO optimization.

The Google bot can in most cases follow an average custom permalink structure, I will note that the more difficult the permalink structures are ether crawled slower if crawled at all. I would shy away from lots of string names within your structure =?etc …

Back to robots…

So how does all this effect your robots.txt structure you ask? Well if you have gotten yourself a good permalink structure and you can then you can essentially set up your robots to block everything but the categories, pages, or posts you want it to crawl, and is perfect for helping eliminate duplicated content.

Here’s an example.

My own robots.txt file

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /category/archive/
Disallow: /feed/

I have disallowed my wp-admin directory, and a category in my wordpress permalink structure /category/archive, and finally disallowed my rss feeds, accessed through http://www.cssorigins.com/feed if my site was indexed properly by Google then all the content that would be in the feeds would already been indexed and thus the feeds would be duplicated content. The same goes for the archive category, since I post all my posts into that category as well as their individual categories.

But remember that the bots index files as well, so it would be a bad idea to do something similar to this.

Disallow: /*.php

as your index file now would not be indexed, along with the rest of your website. =(

Don’t understand? Think there’s a better way? Please comment and help us build a better understanding of how the web works.

No related posts.

via A Webmasters Blog – SEO, Guides, Tips and Tutorials: 10 Methods to getting your site indexed in google within 24 Hours .

No related posts.