SEO Mentor

Reading a very recent post at Davidmihm.com about Local Search and Ranking Factors David talks about a new survey and study that was launched about local search and “Participants were asked to rate the importance of 47 criteria with respect to their influence on rankings in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms”

David says the following about his study:

“It is my hope that this study will help small business owners confused by Local Search, or those strapped for time, to prioritize their marketing efforts.”

The results and discussion are worth taking a look at with regards to his Local Search Survey!

Below I found a couple articles that I found very informative on the Local Search subject:

Local Search Ranking Factors

For businesses that are truly local in focus, targetting local search ranking factors is a very effective SEO strategy if for no other reason that it enables you to weed out your global competitors and focus more on ranking tops for …

Yahoo Offers Local Search Tips

Anytime a search engine rep. hands out SEO/SEM advice, I think it’s generally worth listening to. I did my best to get some local SEO advice from Yahoo’s Brian Gil when I interviewed him a couple months ago. Be sure to read that if you …

Everyone needs to remember that the “SMX Local & Mobile 2008” in San Francisco, July 24-25 and my good friend Jordan Kasteler will be speaking so you can’t miss it!

So I was on Sphinn.com today and found a blog post called “301 Redirect Explained” and was plesantly surprised to see something of this nature get to the top. Originally posts on Sphinn were more based on great articles like this that gave the users great content with articles that really brought value to it’s users (don’t get me wrong, there is still great stuff at Sphinn.com and I go there everyday). But finally an article full of great content that really gives value and education to the readers.

So I have titled this post “The long lost subject of 301 Redirect” because it has been a while since this subject has come up in the SEO community lately all it has been about is Jason Gambert (loser), Microsoft/Yahoo mess, Advanced Blackhat SEO, etc.

So getting to the point of this post I wanted to bring back the topic of the 301 Redirect. In the article posted by Ron Tovbin where he guest posted at Shimon Sandler’s blog ShimonSandler.com, he gives some great content with much value to help those understand in great technical depth what as 301 Redirect is and how it works.

Here are a couple things that I really liked from Rob’s post:

The new URL can also be 301 redirected, this is called chaining and should be avoided if you want play nice with the search engine spiders.

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I know you have heard of the Google Sandbox and have probably even had an experience of having one of your sites in it. But some have been asking what it is and why it exists. Ann Smarty of SeoSmarty.com recently wrote an article about this subject of the Google Sandbox at SearchEngineJournal.com. Ann is one of my favorite bloggers when it comes to basic and simple SEO, when she writes something you know it is top notch. So what does Ann have to say about the Google Sandbox:

“Well, let’s first start with the theories behind the term “Google Sandbox”. It appears webmasters understand it as two a bit different phenomena:

1. “Google Sandbox” is supposed to mean a period of time before a newly launched website is properly indexed and ranked. They say, Google deliberately holds back indexing new sites before they “earn its trust”.
2. “Google Sandbox” can also mean a sudden drop of SERPs that happens about 3 months after a site was launched.”

Here are some other great articles about the subject:

Will Mass Directory Submission Get Your Website Into Google Sandbox?

There is an SEO theory which suggests that mass directory submission will get your website into Google sandbox. The basic idea is if your new website has too many links all of a sudden, usually due to mass submission in a short time, …

What is the Google Sandbox?

The Google Sandbox is an unconfirmed theory about how the top search engine indexes web sites which were recently created. If it truly exists, the Sandbox puts new web site operators at a disadvantage in Google search results. …

How to Avoid the Google Sandbox

There is still a lot of discussion going on wether the Google Sandbox exists or not. Some say it exists some say it doesn’t. Just pretend it does exist, how is it possible that some SEO’s don’t get hit by the sandbox filter? …

So I am back an am a new daddy but I will get to that in my next post tomorrow. While I was gone I was reading up on my favorite blogs and came across a great article by Bill Slawski of SEObytheSea.com. Bill always has very intense and intellectual SEO Articles and his How Search Engines Can Learn From Looking at Sequences of Search Queries article was no exception.

Bill writes,

“Whenever someone searches at a search engine, they not only get information in response to their search, but they also provide information to the search engine about the things they are searching for - information which the search engine might find useful in helping other searchers.

If that searcher performs another search related to their first search, then the search engine might create an association between the two search phrases that the searcher used, if the two phrases appear to be related. If they perform a series, or sequence, of searches on a concept, then the search engine might take advantage of that information.”

If you are not following Bill at SEObytheSea.com then you are crazy! So I am going to make it easy for you, go to http://www.seobythesea.com/?feed=rss2 now and subscribe to his RSS Feed.

So a very funny post by “The Tutor” of GoogleTutor.com really go me thinking about how addicting Search Engine Optimization can be and especially how addicting Google can be.

The post “63 signs you’re addicted to Google and the Church of Search” has signs that will either make you laugh or make you wish you never read them (reminding you that you are a loser). Here are some of my favorites:

• You have a Tivo wish list keyword search for “Google”
• You know what Matt Cutts dressed as for Halloween last year
• You know the last name of Matt, Eric, Sergey, Larry, Marissa, and Vanessa off the top of your head
• You think having Vanessa in that last item is stupid because everyone knows she left Google a while back
• You have more than 10 SEO/SEM blogs in your feed reader
• You’ve lost sleep over Toolbar PR
• You’ve said ‘just Google it‘ (grr…)
• You use Google as spell check
• You use Google to do math
• You know the full name of the person Matt Cutts spoke out to help in a court case
• You check the Google holiday logo, every holiday
• You use Google 411 instead of 411
• You know that there is more than one type of PageRank

Remember there are 63 signs at the original post. If you can answer any of these questions above, don’t worry you will be alright

 

 SEO Mentor Podcast #4 SEO News & Tips [16:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This SEO Podcast I talk about some of the following news items:

Google Joins Venture for Mobile WiMAX Next-Gen Wireless Internet Access

Yahoo and McAfee Offer a Safer Way to Search with SearchScan

 Yahoo Shares Tumble After Microsoft Pulls Bid

The SEO Tip for this podcast I talked about Loren Baker’s post about Subdomains or Subfolders : Which are Better for SEO?!

“Subdomains or Subfolders? What’s better for a blog/forum/etc: a subdomain (eg. http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/) or subfolder (eg. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/)?

Subdomains and subfolders both have their advantages, especially when setting up blogs.

For blogs, I prefer a subfolder (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/) because the link juice which is sent to that blog is going to be naturally distributed to that main domain, and other subfolders under the domain.”