What do you do with a benchmark server? You use it to serve minimal content to other servers around the world and see how responsive your Web server is. If your Web server is located in New York City and you fetch the page from Los Angeles, what is contributing to the lag times between…
SEO Competitive Analysis Lists
This article is not really about lists so much as it is about DOs and DON’Ts. But I couldn’t fit all that into a short title. I think all of you have done more than your fair share of competitive analysis. One of the first exercises any of us does in competitive Web marketing is…
The SEO Metrics Conundrum
There are two economic principles every Web marketer should be keenly sensitive to. Goodhart’s Law says that “when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure”. In other words, people will game any metric that is intended to measure performance. One historical example of this was the American Securities and Exchange…
An Introduction to Website Oscillation Theory
Oscillation is a regular movement (back and forth, up and down, etc.) in a pattern or wave function. You’re most likely to see oscillation in your seasonal traffic spikes and dips. If you can predict about how much traffic a site will get based on the time of year then it’s probably oscillating. That’s neither…
An Introduction to Artful Link Poaching
Link poachery falls into that class of link acquisition strategies that includes Link Reclamation and Link Harvesting. Link reclamation deals with asking Website owners to replace links whose original destinations have been taken offline. Link harvesting deals with redirecting assets you control – which have earned links – toward other destinations you control. These redirected…
Landing Page Classification
Too many Web marketers treat Google as the only [meaningful] source of traffic for their sites. Your inability to earn traffic from other sources is an opportunity to improve your marketing. Your decision to ignore other sources of traffic should be supported by reliable information (not “data” – information). The more I discuss analytics with…
A Way to Boost E-E-A-T? {Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness}
I belong to oodles of Facebook discussion groups about SEO and building niche sites. The advice ranges from terrible to outstanding. Today, I read a post titled “One Other Way to Boost E-E-A-T.” Let’s discuss whether this strategy does what the author of that post suggests it will. For those who aren’t already aware, E-E-A-T…
Shaping Crawl: Adjusting Internal Link Profiles
This article utilizes metaphorical visualization techniques. Be careful not to confuse them with search engine algorithms. An Internal Link Profile is exactly what it sounds like. You have a page, John, that is linked to by Andy, Barney, and Charlie. Those three pages are the internal link profile for John. Internal link profiles serve three…
How to Do Fire Drill SEO
When I took a job with Visible Technologies in Seattle in late 2006, we had several fire drills per year. Everyone laughed or made fussy complaints about the inconvenience. I sometimes packed my laptop during these drills and took it with me. I wanted to know how long it would take me to get out…
Google’s Disavow Conundrum
What you’re about to read is excerpted from an older, longer premium article. The excerpts provided below omit details and context provided by even older articles from which they were taken. Be careful not to infer meaning beyond what you see here. I received the following question (reformatted for this article): “Michael, you’re convinced no…
Are Blog Keyword Targets Necessary?
The following question was asked in an online discussion: “Should blogs always have keyword optimization in mind in H1’s and title tags?” Although I did not ask my partner Randy Ray for his opinion, I know from working with him for many years that he prefers to target some type of query (possibly more than…
Can You Resurrect An Old PBN Blog?
A newsletter subscriber sent the following question to us in 2021: “Michael, I picked up an PBN domain. It was spammed out but the name is really good. There are about 95 articles. Some look like great content. Have you ever rescued a blog from PBN hell? What would you suggest?” Almost any site can…