On reciprocal links and why you shouldn&... Via Search Roundtable, a WebmasterWorld forum post this week asks the question, “should I get rid of my reciprocal links pages?” My short answer: Absolutely! In fact, links pages themselves are a particularly bad idea, unless they are in context (a corporate partners page, for example). In...

404s, 301s and a smidgen of common sense... My guess is that the reason so many SEOs ask the wrong questions is because they don’t have a technical background. I’m not sure how good Barry Schwartz’ technical knowledge is, but today he’s asked, “404 or 301 Your Old Pages? Which is Best For SEO?” There are two...

I have nothing to be worried about... Tamar Weinberg of Search Roundtable today asked, “do search penalty discussions worry you?” Well, Tamar, I’d have to having something to worry about in order to be worried. The way I see it, unless you’ve been employing optimisation techniques aimed specifically at improving rankings,...

Another reason to get on line... Through WebProNews today I learn that on line advertising spend in the UK is now greater than television advertising. On line advertising spend reached £2.8 billion in 2007, an increase of 40%, with TV advertising registering £2.4 billion. The figures, from the latest annual Ofcom report into the communications...

Block the rank monitoring tools!... Via Search Roundtable I learn that a number of WebPosition Gold customers are finding the software is being blocked by Google. It’s got many worried especially as it seems to be affecting other rank checking tools. Has Google finally shut these tools down? If that is the case, so what? I can’t...

How SEO will eventually die off... I really enjoyed reading Ian Lurie’s take on the death of SEO. He gives us a few ideas as to how SEO will finally meet it’s demise. (Note I’m not questioning whether SEO will die or not!) I’m going to give you my own take on each of the three theories; The Slow Meltdown While...

Algo chasing and SEOs generalisation... One of the biggest things that annoys me about SEOs is how so many of them make generalisations. For example, a recent poll conducted by Search Roundtable asked SEOs and webmasters, “do you like blog links?” The poll was sparked off by suggestions by some SEOs that Google had started to de-value...