Link re-working is something that keeps popping up on my radar and few recent events have prompted me to blog about it.
Basically link re-working is the process of contacting people who already link to your website and asking them to change the link to make it more valuable from an SEO perspective. For example if somebody linked to my blog with the anchor text “Blogstorm” I could ask them to change it to “Blogstorm SEO blog” or even just “SEO blog”. Read more →
How many times have you seen a website being used on TV and thought that it was either an amazing example of product placement or that you couldn’t understand why such an obscure site was being featured?
Quite often I take a look at sites featured in popular programmes to see if they really exist and more often than not the sites are live but are just fake websites developed by film production companies.
One of the most famous fake websites is Erinsmail, the email service often seen being used on Neighbours. The website doesn’t exist on the real internet but Erinsmail is used by almost all the residents of Ramsay Street.
A website often seen in the UK on Eastenders is the fake search engine search-wise.net, Google is giving a malware warning for this domain so visit at your own risk. Checking the about page of the site reveals the following:
This is NOT a real search website!
Owned and operated by Compuhire (Eccentric Trading Company Ltd), this website has been set up for clearance purposes so that it can be used in film and TV productions when scripts require that a search engine is shown in vision.
Doctor Who has used dozens of fake websites including www.unit.org.uk in the past as part of some clever viral marketing campaigns. One campaign encouraged users to search for “doctor blue box” on Google to find the site but this campaign has now been ended and the site altered so that it no longer ranks for this term.
Matt Cutts gave Digg & Wikipedia a nice piece of news last week at Wordcamp 2007. During the conference Matt was offering tips on search engine marketing to WordPress bloggers and explained that Google is starting to treat underscores in URLs the same as hyphens. In the past hyphens were treated as word separators while underscores weren’t.
One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That’s great news, because it historically hasn’t been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn’t “see” the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. I wouldn’t recommend targeting “iphone_review” as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query.
Digg and Wikipedia are probably the largest sites that uses underscores and will see a huge increase in traffic. I’m not saying the increase in rankings for each page will be huge, far from it. However if each of Digg’s 2 million pages and Wikipedia’s 12 million pages ranks 1 place higher in the search results thats going to equate to a load of traffic.
The last thing we need is Wikipedia getting more search engine traffic.
