Google Targeting Content Farms
Last Thursday, Google released a new update to their search engine aimed at knocking scrapers and content farms down in the rankings. Unlike most of their changes, which make minor tweaks and are rolled out with little fanfare, this one is major, affecting the results of nearly 12% of all queries. The change is currently live only on the US servers, but will likely be rolled out to the rest of the world in the near future. So what is a content farm, and how does this affect you? A scraper site is one that (usually automatically) copies content off of other people’s sites for display,...
Read MoreArticle Marketing
Have you ever wondered why there seem to be so many pages on the internet that have no point whatsoever, just a bunch of links? If you guessed it’s for the search engines, you’re right! Because Google gives a lot of weight to the incoming links that a site has, webmasters naturally want to get as many links as possible. Of course, many of them don’t know what they’re doing and either put up pages with several hundred links (which do basically nothing), pay someone to add their site to such a page (which both does little good and risks getting their site deindexed when...
Read MoreSEM and SEO: What’s the Difference?
Trying to promote a website? No double you’ve seen the terms SEM and SEO being thrown around. While similar, they are not interchangeable; SEM, or search engine marketing, properly contains SEO, search engine optimization. Most people are largely concerned with SEO, which refers to measures taken to improve the visibility of a site in the organic results (in other words, the ones that come up naturally, not the results in the sidebar that you pay for). This encompasses a variety of techniques, from white hat methods such as building great content with proper keyword density and getting...
Read MoreAdvanced CSS: Adjacent Sibling Selectors
In my web articles thus far, when I’ve talked about CSS it’s been in terms of the basics: the box model, relative positioning, page flow, etc. In the Advanced CSS articles, I’ll be talking about aspects the you wouldn’t normally find on every page. This isn’t necessarily new stuff from CSS3, just things that you wouldn’t normally need to know to do CSS design, but can come in handy sometimes. Generally with CSS, we select an element based on its class or ID and on its ancestors. However, sometimes we need to be a little more specific. For example, suppose...
Read MoreKeyword Stuffing
Earlier today, I was working on an article for another site and needed some anecdotal statistics, which I obtained by taking a look at the computer services section on craigslist. I noticed that a lot of the website designers and so-called SEO experts advertising there are still trying to get away with keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is a spam method that was employed in the 90s and the first half of the past decade; unethical web designers would fill their keyword meta tags with a huge number of unrelated keywords in an attempt to get their page to show up at the top of the search...
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