Sebastian

Here is Joost's guide 'how to provide usable WP-SERPs', titled
"Make WordPress' search function suck Less". This tutorial will make your readers happy - at least if you invest the time to tweak your blog accordingly. read more »
2 Comments     
Google said they ignore reconsideration requests unless the link spammer has removed all traces on the Web. Unfortunately, getting inserted links deleted at all places is impossible. read more »
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Matt Cutts asks Webmasters for their feedback on possible changes of the way Google treats the NOINDEX directive. Except "leave it as is" I've not yet seen a reasonable argument. With this pamphlet I provide background info as well as a solution tha read more »
3 Comments     
When you must nofollow some (paid) links to comply to Google's guidelines, Google will not use their URIs for discovery crawling. Here is how to change this unfriendly behavior. This pamphlet also provides a procedure to fake good karma despite the read more »
2 Comments     
Search engines burn way too much bandwidth and processing time when they crawl unchanged dynamic pages. Here is how you can reduce your server load and bandwidth costs dramatically with proper handling of conditional GET requests from crawlers. read more »
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Microsoft Live Search upgrades their crawler today. From now on msnbot/1.1 supports conditional GET requests and HTTP compression. That's a very much appreciated move. I've chatted with Nathan Buggia from Live Search who was kind enough to provide m read more »
3 Comments     
Yahoo developer: "Dude, without the slash it looks way cooler!"

A red crab: "Nope. Stealing trailing slashes is a brain dead approach that produces crap and damages search engine rankings." read more »
10 Comments     
A while ago I've staged a public SEO test, asking whether the 401 HTTP response code prevents from search engine indexing or not. Guess which search engine doesn't behave ... read more »
1 Comment     
Please join my SEO experiment and get the finest SEO smut available on this planet. read more »
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Yet another robots.txt post? Nope, not really. I discuss Matt Cutt's recent "Remove content from Google" video, plus an uncommon approach that requires programming skills but rescues PageRank, and how it should work in a way that most Webmasters do read more »
1 Comment     
"Dear Googlers, I believe that a dog company like Google needs to take real-world Webmasters into the boat when playing with standards like the Robots Exclusions Protocol (REP), for the sake of the SEO cats."

Seriously, that's kinda RFC for robo read more »
6 Comments     
Voting is now open for the People’s Choice Awards for the Top Humor Article of 2007. The code has been debugged, the secret algo has been run, the titles have been randomly ordered and we now have determined the Top 10 finalists for the 2007 Rubber read more »
11 Comments     
Google removes XML feeds from Web search results. So unless Google provides a procedure to prevent feeds from accumulating PageRank whilst allowing access for blog search crawlers that request feeds (I believe something like that is in the works), i read more »
10 Comments     
Here is my idea of a smoothly migration from IIS/ASP to Apache/PHP, including lots of code snippets. Grab any Unix box from your hoster's portfolio and start over. Win! read more »
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Live Search will not dump their clueless and ineffective search quality project. They're proud to be the one and only bigger search engine that spams.

Even when they apologize to the Webmaster community, they're not able to tell the truth. They read more »
6 Comments     
Google is working on new robots.txt syntax, and I am, politely put, not amused. Here is why I fear that Google is going to totally mess up the REP:

Google supports a "Noindex:" directive in robots.txt, which is treated as "Disallow:". Of course t read more »
7 Comments     
A smart robots.txt logs crawler requests, maintains the crawler IP list, serves gibberish to nosy users, helps identifying new crawlers, is lean and easy to validate because it comes with crawler directives for the requesting search engine only.

read more »
8 Comments     
Forgotten –and, until recently, ignored– not standardized statements in your robots.txt might change Googlebot's behavior all of a sudden, without notice.

I don't know for sure which experimental crawler directives Google has implemented yet, bu read more »
8 Comments     
Rumors are out that Microsoft will launch a porn affiliate programm soon. The top secret code name for this project is "pornbucks", but analysts say that it will be launched as "M$ SMUT CASH" next year or so. Live Search promotes it since August 200 read more »
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Update: Googlebot does understand the undocumented Noindex: directive in robots.txt, but Google said it's not (yet) set in stone so be careful when you play with it.

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If you ever need a hot tip on how to waste an hour or two with quite funn read more »
3 Comments     
Here is my linking guide for the paranoid affiliate marketer.

Just because you believe that you're not paranoid, that does not mean Google will not chase you down. Not knowing respectively not understanding Google's 12 commandments doesn't preve read more »
3 Comments     
Folks are worrying whether an algo can detect the intention of links or not, usually focusing on particular links or linking methods.

Google on the other hand looks at the whole crawlable Web. When they develop a paid link detection algo, they h read more »
26 Comments     
Lots of good reasons NOT to sphinn this video.
* My server will be down for 15 minutes or so at 4:00 am
* It's frigging hilarious, err geeky
* You've better things to do
* 5 minutes of laughing on a Monday is not part of your job description
* read more »
6 Comments     
You’re absolutely right when you say that search engine nitpicking should not force you to throw nofollow crap on your links like confetti. From your and my point of view condomizing links is wrong, but sometimes it’s better to pragmatically comply read more »
8 Comments     
Here is my book on server sided redirects. It's a longish draft intended to bore you to death with geeky language and dull quotes from protocol standards and similar technical documents. For entertainment purposes it comes with search engine bashing read more »
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