Dec 1, 2011 Posted by Everett

Do You Have a Dirty Sitemap? Here’s How to Check…

In an interview a few months ago with Stone Temple Consulting, Bing’s Duane Forrester said this: “Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. Examples of dirt are if we click on a URL and we see a redirect, a 404 or a 500 code. If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap”. I forget where I heard it, but I seem to recall Matt... read more

Oct 28, 2011 Posted by Everett

Making the Leap From EMD to Branded EMD May Be Harder Than You Think

If you have an exact match domain (EMD) for a popular query you may be noticing that it isn’t as easy to stay on top for that query as it used to be. If not, you may be noticing it soon because many users, brands and SEOs have been calling for Google to dampen the effect of EMDs on SERPs for a long time now, and Google has said several times that they are trying to do exactly that. SEO is less and... read more

Jun 29, 2011 Posted by Everett

Filler Content VS Useful Content

I don’t like filler content. Visitors don’t like it. Google doesn’t like it. And panda bears hate it about as much as they hate having sex with each other. The problem is most of us have blind-spots to our filler content in the same way that people with ugly babies don’t know they have an ugly baby. I just had a “real” cute baby (He is, isn’t he? You’d tell... read more

May 6, 2011 Posted by Everett

Why Not Let Webmasters Put Rel Canonical in the Body?

This week some really smart people discussed the advantages of rel canonical over 301 redirects. See Canonical Tag or 301 Redirect by Tony Adam, and Cross-Domain Canonical: The New 301 by Rand Fishkin. Some of the findings were pretty interesting. For instance, Rand had a lot of success in saying the canonical URL for an entire site was a single URL on a different site. But wait a minute…... read more

Dec 9, 2010 Posted by Everett

A Tool I Use All The Time: Simple Web-Based HTTP Header Status Checker

I know there are all kinds of “new fandangled” Firefox and Chrome plugins that do this, in addition to lots of other things. I use packet-sniffers from time to time, and I use Firebug daily, just to name two. But for some reason, perhaps habit, perhaps because it’s just so easy – I keep coming back to this HTTP header status code checker that I’ve been using for years.... read more