News & Media

Search engines utilize both automated and manual means for detecting spam. Sophisticated algorithms look for abnormalities in inbound/outbound linking, sentence structure, HTML coding, and so on.

Even though Iâ??ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didnâ??t ask for it. Why? Because this month Iâ??m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretions, rather than subject a loyal Practical eCommerce reader to potential intense and unwanted scrutiny by search engine reps reading this article. There are so many sites out there committing search engine sins, it was really hard to settle on one.

Contrary to popular belief, there is more to increasing a website’s visibility in search engines than just sprinkling a handful of keywords on it. The way a site is designed and built has a major impact on whether search engine spiders are even able to access the content. Don’t assume that every programmer or web designer will know how to build a website that is balanced for the target market – and for the major search engines alike.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offers many more benefits beyond that of streamlined web pages with table-less layouts and precise positioning (no more transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs!), mentioned in my previous post. Indeed, that’s just scratching the surface of CSS. Here are some more clever things you can do with CSS to get your website really […]

Search engine spammers never prosper. Sooner or later, they get caught. And when they do, it’s almost never pretty. Consequences can include ranking penalties, removal of the site’s “voting” power (i.e., ability to pass PageRank), incomplete indexation (i.e., a partial site ban), or, worst of all, getting “graybarred” (i.e., a total site ban, when the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar is grayed out). You can’t exactly just pick up the phone and give Sergey or Larry a call with a “Mea Culpa” and then everything magically comes right again. It could take years for a business to recover from a site ban.

Data now out from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that the top five most popular shopping search terms for April were all brick-and-mortar retailers: “home depot” “walmart” “target” “sears” “best buy” SearchEngineWatch Blog then arrived at the conclusion that: These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what […]