Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Cyrus Shepard reports on the Moz Blog that this year, for the first time, the  Moz Data Science Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings. They discovered that after Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, “the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.” In addition, Searchmetrics, another firm, used a slightly different methodology and found Google +1s to be the highest-correlated factor they studied.  They also make some recommendations about how to use Google+ to optimize SEO. Included in these are to follow great people, comment on posts, and share great content, making longer Google+ posts, as well as adding the  rel="author" meta tag to your website or blog. Another important factor is to post public.  Posts shared privately don't pass the same juice as publ...

Q: Who was the pitcher to pitch the only perfect game in the World Series? A: Don Larsen, October 8, 1956, as the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2-0. I've seen a few compilations on this subject, but the methodology in some cases seemed either flawed or not objective enough (surprise), so I though it would be useful to conduct my own research piece. If you take the "authority" approach on this, it makes it a lot easier to rank these various sites and eliminate the vast majority since they simply aren't strong enough to appear on the radar. Basically I got lists of networking sites and did a Google PageRank on all of them. Everything below PageRank 7 was thrown away. That narrowed down the field to 9 sites (boy, that part was easy!). Then, I got the Quantcast.com visitor counts and the Compete.com visitor counts. Then I compiled a composite number of inlinks for each site. Finally, I got the Alexa rank for each. What I did then was to try and come up with ...

"To the moon, Alice" -- Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden, The Honeymooners) The BlogOSphere has been buzzing the last couple of days since everybody discovered that the Googly-Bear decided to update it's PageRank algorithm (there had been hints for weeks before, to be sure -e.g., Danny Sullivan, Oct. 7 ). Ah, "poor little me", huh? Legions of very big blogging-related sites and commercial ventures -- Washingtonpost.com, Forbes.com, Engadget.com and SFGate.com noticed a downgrading in their PageRank. Some sites went up in PageRank. Our eggheadcafe.com site went from 5 to 6. One of my newest "playground sites", blogmetafinder.com , went from zero to a PageRank 3. This UnBlog remains unchanged, for now, at PR 5. Most experts agree that the key determinant was the practice of "buying links" such as text link ads and the like. Apparently, Google just decided to close up this last little loophole, and they did it with ample warning too. Now, this is ...

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends. - Woody Allen After a lot of pain, contacts and fixing, I'm not sure that they do. I am not going to name names or point fingers, but really, Yahoo seems to have completely lost it in the search engine wars. You put up a new website, create a sitemap, submit it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN ("live.com"), and you do everything right, including adding the new accepted "sitemap" directive to your robots file. Google jumps right on it. Within a day or so, virtually every entry in your sitemap is going to get indexed. If you ping them via the various RPC Ping server addresses and you have engineered the ability to update and use their Webmaster tools, the googlebot doesn't seem to have any trouble at all indexing your "stuff". That's coolio with me, because over a range of websites, I've found that the Googly Bear is responsible for 90% of my search engine traffic to the site. And -...

Google now "sees" underscores in URLS as word-separators(delimiters). Previously, in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. Now, it will see iphone and review. Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! To explain in another way, you won't take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don't have more than two or three equals signs in the URL. So, if you've been tormented about whether you should implement URLrewriting in your site or blog, don't fret. The number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn't a factor in your Google rankings. Although it doesn't matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). The file extension in ...

Over the last couple of years I've learned a few "tricks" that help to promote blogs and WebSites. Most of the time, the techniques work for both a blog and a WebSite, especially if the site has at least one RSS feed. Blog and site promotion is an ongoing process, it takes time. There is no "Magic Bullet". Use the following steps to start promoting your blog or website: Submit your blog's URL to each major search engine Google, MSN (live.com), AOL, and Yahoo. Also go to http://www.1stopsubmit.com/ http://www.submitexpress.com/ http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and submit your URL. The first one will automatically submit your blog URL to over 50 search engines for free. They ask for a reciprocal link, but it is not required. Open http://www.blogmetafinder.com/ (our site) and submit your blog to as many of these blog and RSS feed directories as possible. Use your key phrase in the title and at least once in the description if you are able to enter one. Th...

"Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy!" -- Andy Devine Recently I started playing with some ideas on using RPC Ping endpoints to help promote one of my websites, ittyUrl.net . For those who aren't familiar, it is customary to ping RPC servers with the title and url of a new blog post. Most Blog hosting software already has this built in. But - it also works for websites with articles, forum posts, or that display custom search results, like mine does. The idea is that these RPC servers will be prompted to go out and request your post and they'll index it, and many sites (some not so noble) will pick up the links and essentially you have gotten yourself some free backlinks (of course, backlinks with a low or no PageRank can actually do you harm from an SEO perf standpoint, but that's a separate issue). One example site that more or less picks up everything for you is weblogs.com . They have a "rolling" display of all the ping updates they've gotten, and ...

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all announced that they’ve agreed to set a standard for sitemaps. DiggSpeak Translation: "Amazing! Top Ten Reasons to use Sitemaps" Sitemaps are those XML files that list all the pages on your Web site. Search engines like to have all the listings in one place so that a site can be indexed without anything being missed. The protocol has now been released under Creative Commons, so any search engine can pick up on it if they like. Most webmasters / developers and web site owners use sitemaps, and there is plenty of sample code to generate these dynamically. We use sitemaps on our Eggheadcafe.com site, and I believe they result in much better indexing. Plus, you can specify how often the bots should crawl, and what the priority is of each item. For more complex sites, you can have a SiteMapIndex file in your website root, which has entries that point to any number of other individual sitemap files. So for example, you might have a messageboard...