March 14th, 2008 Alex
Ok, so perhaps I went a little overboard with my previous post about Google and yadayada… Ok. I apologize. I was a little frustrated. The truth is that Google is indeed a great company. They have lots of great projects and ideas that they offer sometimes even for free. Of course they are a business and they have to make a profit.
Now, I should say that I generalized against the entire thing just because search quality was being unresponsive. If you think about it for a second, Google is inevitably a good company and solution to many problems. For example, I have seen how you can benefit greatly from the information provided by Google Analytics. And I love it. I used to love Urchin in the first place.
How about Google Docs? I currently have a couple of online forms that I keep bookmarked on my iphone. Therefore anytime I am on the go, I can still track some important events that I need. So many people love their Gmail accounts and their personalized search.
Anyways, I just think that Google brings good to the web and that their applications are great. Now, if we are talking about the quality of search, of course they have problems like every other search engine. All search engines have to deal with tons of information and trying to deal with it is just absurd. I think we complain so much to Google because they hold themselves to such a great standard that anything less than that is just weird.
Next time you think about Google think something good.
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February 26th, 2008 Alex
Just a quick note. A new Merkados project is on! We will be launching hopefully early next year a new service called Merkados Advanced Online Marketing Labs. This “labs” would allow online businesses to drive traffic to their site while creating a completely new experience and ensuring online success. This program will be by invitation only and Merkados will choose from the businesses requesting to be part of the program. Why? Well, it is technically impossible to create a unique significant experience without limiting the amount of businesses invited to a program like this. We will only take on fully committed clients with great desire to learn, contribute, grow and be part of something bigger than their own web presence. I know what you are already thinking: “this is going to be expensive”. I am sure that all of our client’s will be amazed at how affordable and profitable this will be.
If you wish more information about our program, please contact Merkados directly. As said before, the program will likely launch early next year and hopefully raise the bar way higher in terms of interactive marketing.
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February 26th, 2008 Alex
In the world in which we live, it is hard to predict that good will always overcome evil. Even though we want that to happen in the end. We have a client that is struggling in Google against a site that is damaging their reputation. The scam looks like this: The “artist” shows up at the business and demands payment in exchange of not doing a negative SEO campaign that would damage their reputation. The business typically would disagree to this demands and therefore the scheme begins.
The scheme
They put a website up, they do link building and they damage the business name online. Since they know SEO tactics that are against Google’s Guidelines then they rank very well. Google doesn’t do anything to prevent it (even though we have tried to contact them many times). Finally, they not only satisfy with damaging the reputation, they profit from it! They setup Adsense in this keyword-stuffed, hidden-texted pages and they get paid for it.
The business is hand tied, since they don’t want to involve in the same black-hat SEO tactics and they don’t want to do anything unethical to stop the assholes (sorry, but this is the only word I could find).
Then Google prides themselves from saying that their algorithms would catch up. While the reputation and the clientele goes down the drain.
It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to use the same tactics to manipulate Google’s algorithms. I mean, I am an honest person with good intentions. Why shouldn’t I manipulate the algorithms for the greater good, right?
Many times I have contacted Google about it and they even responded back saying we will take care of it (that was more than two months ago).
My way of complaining
My only way of complaining is to stop using Google as much as I can. I am starting to use Alltheweb.com as my main search engine (which is pretty good by the way). I have even made it my homepage so that I force myself to use something else. Why? Because I am tired. I am tired of being bullied. I am tired of Google’s unresponsiveness. I mean, if you contacted a business several times without any real answer, would you keep doing business with them? Is like going to Starbucks and ask the clerk for a coffee 70 times before they actually serve you one. Some say: “well, is free you know”; BS! is not free. Google is serving you ads everywhere you look. And by looking at those ads you are paying for it.
I am tired of seeing how we all have to cater to Google’s needs now: Make your website this or that way, don’t buy links, don’t do sneaky redirects, don’t sell links, don’t, don’t, do, take, make sure, remove, put, etc. Free? Are you crazy? Google is free? Free for who?I don’t think I have ever being told what to do so much.
I met with a client the other day, and I noticed that he had some repetition of keywords in his anchor text; my first recommendation was to remove them, because “Google may get you penalized”, unless you are BMW. And therefore their search engine has to show BMW’s site, regardless of what they do.
The death of SEO
SEO is dead. It has to be. Organic results used to be free, not anymore. So why not just pay for sponsored placements where you want them. And get also the freedom to design your website with hidden text, cloaking, keyword stuffing and non-descriptive alt tags.
I have a Playstation 3 that stopped working a couple of days ago. I called Sony on their 1800 number and sure enough I had to wait 15 minutes on the phone. After waiting a nice lady talked to me about my problem and offered me solutions. My problem was solved. I call that support.
I mean, I hate having to wait 15 minutes on the phone, but at least something happens. With Google, you don’t get a phone number. And after somebody replies you still see that nothing gets done. We are not talking about a $400 dollar toy like the Playstation, we are talking about a companies reputation and their clientele of 30+ years. Do you know how much that is worth? Yet they don’t have a phone number. Do you know how much time my client would spend on the phone? I can tell you that a lot more than 15 minutes.
Don’t manipulate me anymore as opposed to me manipulating the algos
I getting pretty tired of this one sided game. Google versus me. It reminds me of those kids that think that because they own the ball they also make the rules. The works until a bigger kid with a better ball comes along and nobody wants to play the bully. That is why is so funny to me that Google jumped and screamed when Microsoft announced a possible buy of Yahoo. Bigger kid with a better ball.
I am so ready to start playing other games. I wished I had the resources to come up with my own ball…
Anyways, if you are reading this ask yourself this question: Do you really think that Google is helping your business? Or do you think that they are trying to make you think that while you are really helping Google?
Google used to be a great company.
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February 14th, 2008 Alex
Today, checking one of our client’s indexation I noticed something fairly interesting. Yahoo Search had indexed a page that is found only by following the completion of a form. Now, this might not sound weird to most people, but for the savvy SEO this might mean a vast set of hypothesis.
Read the rest of this entry »
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January 28th, 2008 Alex
Last time I checked I had a difficult time finding easy-to-digest information about the 301 canonical redirection. Why does it has to sound so complicated? Anyways, I am going to explain here each of the components of an effective htaccess 301 canonical redirection. If you are one of those people that like the complicated stuff and the higher level explanations, this post is not for you.
OK, let’s start by taking a look at the entire snippet of the canonical redirection. But before we proceed, please remember two things, one is that the .htaccess is a file that can be included in any folder under your domain and therefore from this point on we will be referring to the one located in your root directory (the same as the home page). The second thing to remember is that the htaccess won’t be available in the front side of your site (the client side), therefore either you will have to log in to your Control Panel (Cpanel for example) or you may need an ftp access to your server (which is my preferred method).
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The first line:
“RewriteEngine on” means that if for whatever reason the engine is turned off, we would avoid several headaches trying to find what is wrong with the code. This part isn’t essential since most of the time the engine is already on.
The second line:
The Rewrite Condition. Basically refers to a set of criteria that has to be met in order to apply the rewriting. It is composed of two parts, first the parameter and second the value. So for example in this case, the rule’s parameter is the Host requested. The value here (^yoursite.com) as you can see has a “^” sign in front of it. This sign means “at the beginning” in regular expressions. Which would mean that the Host requested needs to have yoursite.com at the beginning, otherwise don’t apply the rule. In what cases this would be the case? For example if you had subdomains configured such as: lorem.yoursite.com or lipsum.yoursite.com. Both of this subdomains wouldn’t receive the rule because the Host requested starts with something different than just yoursite.com. The final part of the second line is the [NC] directive. This directive means “no case”, so regardless of if the request was with capital letters or lower cases, still the rule would apply. For example if the request was for YOURDOMAIN.com and another one for YourDomain.com, both of them would receive the application of the rule.
The third and final line is the fun one. Up to this point nothing has been performed yet. The third line contains the rule to be applied or the “transformer”. It is composed of three sections divided by a space. The first section is the matching. What should be match from the request? In this case ^(.*)$ means: ^ (the beginning as before), then (.*) means: match (.) any character and as many times as necessary (*); finally the $ means the end of the string. So for example, if we wanted to match the first two letters of a the word “Monopoly” we could create a match by using: (..) which would return Mo.
The second section of the third line is the application of the rule. So once we matched a specific part of the request, now what? The second part is the “do what section”. So in this case, rewrite the url as: http://www.yousite.com/$1. You might be wondering: Why $1 at the end? Well the parenthesis in the first part of the third line are containing the complete request ((.*)), so we can reference that matching by using $1. And if you had several parentesis in the matching, such as (.*)ts(.*), you could reference the first one as $1 and the second one as $2 and so forth with as many as needed.
The final portion is the modifiers. The modifiers in this case determine the kind of redirection that is taking place. The L means that if the pattern was matched then it should be considered the “last line”. And the R=301 means that the redirection should be treated as an external redirection with header code 301 (which means permanently moved to).
I hope this helps us get a better understanding of the basics of canonical redirection.
Alex Centeno MBA.
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