SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Search Engine Bans, Filters and Penalties

Stuntdubl has an excellent post discussing search engine bans, filters, penalties and more.

Cutts on the NoFollow attribute

The important bit in this post isn’t really that you can edit a Firefox CSS file to quickly spot nofollow links, which is rather cool, but the example under which it was used - a blackhat spammer.

Then if you want to link to a blackhat spammer without it counting as a vote in Google, just add rel=”nofollow” to the hyperlink, and you’ll be able to tell the difference between normal and nofollow links.

Is it so far fetched to think that Goog is aggregating nofollow recipients (if the sum of nofollows is a greater proportion of regular links than is statistically negligible) and then working that in algorithmically for search results? I think not.

A New List Apart

If you follow CSS, standards, or any sort of Web development in general, you would have noticed today that perennial Web magazine A List Apart has entered its fourth incarnation.

It looks fantastic. Very clean. Very professional.

Google says sandbox exists, sorta

From SEOMoz (hat tip: threadwatch) comes the first real instance in which a Google employee has strayed from the Google line that there is no Google Sandbox.

I asked him [not Cutts, but a different Googler] what Google internally called the sandbox. He doged my question fastidiously until saying that he would try to get the spam team to adopt our term, “sandbox”, so we could all call it the same thing. I asked him if they would continue using it and he said “definitely” or possibly “almost certainly”… He noted in words I cannot remember exactly that they felt it was having a remarkable effect on the quality of the index. We moved on to other subjects after this, but not before he was vehement in explaining to me specifically that they did not design it to affect “all new websites”, but that a “filter must be tripped” for a site to be “boxed”.

I can vouch for the last statement in there. I’ve personally seen new sites rank out of the gate in Google. The most common explanation seems to be an unnatural gain in links for new sites. Though I’m more inclined to vouch for topical links rather than sheer number.

SES San Jose Wrap-Up

RustyBrick has posted the wrap-up of Search Engine Roundtable’s excellent SES San Jose coverage. Be sure to check it out as it provides lots of useful information about linking, RSS, and pretty much every SEO topic there is.

Increasing your AdSense income

Jen has a terrific interview today with the man in charge over at Weblogs Inc., Jason Calacanis.

Here’s the best bit of information from the interview:

What single change do you think made the biggest leap in your AdSense income?

1. Taking off the borders around the advertisement
2. Making the links the same color as the links on the blog

Those of you that have done those two things will know that he’s right.