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UPDATE: Matt Cutts clarified what he said/meant for me in a Tweet: “if I’m already investigating a site which is spammy-looking and appears off-topic/expired, then IA block is very noticeable.”

I was following the organic site review at PubCon on SE Roundtable this morning when Matt Cutts apparently let slip a jaw-dropping comment (as reported by Barry Schwartz):

Barry Schwartz: This is a huge red flag!!! Matt said, this is the best source of spam leads. You block archive.org in robots.txt file, you are caught in no time, Matt basically said

Okay, first let me remind people that Google owns its index and only Google sets its Webmaster guidelines. But if Matt really believes that blocking Archive.Org is a spam signal, he has MUCH to learn about Webspam.

I DO block Archive.Org on some sites, and many other people do as well. And there is sometimes compelling reason to do so.

The intent behind Archive.Org is a good one. I’ve used it to save my sites many times when, after a hard drive failure, I’ve needed to retrieve older copies of live pages to do some work. I love Archive.Org because it’s a great resource for researching how Web sites have behaved through the years.

Unfortunately, Archive.Org violates intellectual property rights on a massive scale and when site owners become aware of that they take action by blocking Archive.Org. I see forums do this. I see blogs do this. I see article archives do this. I see news sites do this. And I do this (on some sites, not all).

I’ve tried to explain to people through the years that if you put an image on the Web, or even an article, it’s out there. Nonetheless, some people do try to “keep the content” on their sites (totally unaware that the content is distributed to every computer that visits through a browser). Right or wrong, many people try to prevent Archive.Org from serving their content.

Some sites go dark with their content — that is, they place it behind a subscription wall. Leaving that content in Archive.Org doesn’t help them bind their visitors to the subscription model.

And some sites have rather dark histories. There are times when a new site owner needs to blot out those dark histories from public scrutiny. In the same session Matt let slip that it’s better to use a new domain than a burned domain, but that isn’t always an option. Sometimes a company needs to grab a burned domain to protect a new trademark. That’s reality.

Blotting burned domains from Archive.Org is one way of cleansing their past in the public eye. Google and other search engines need to leave some flexibility in their spam management for those needs (and I’m not assuming they don’t — I’m just saying that SEOs should not throw their hands up in the air and insist it’s a lost case).

The search engines are not the arbiters of who can brand what, and they don’t have all the power. They can choose to exclude good content from their indexes because of one red flag but I don’t believe they do that.

And there are other reasons for why people block Archive.Org. All of them are legitimate reasons in those people’s eyes. Google and the other major search engines may not view those reasons in quite the same way, but people should not take what Matt Cutts said and start telling Website operators to allow Archive.Org in to their content.

There are occasional legal issues that also require sites to block Archive.Org. If complying with a new statute or court order means blocking Archive.Org, the SEO community should not burden itself or its clients with angst over what the search engines will do about that. If all a site has done is block Archive.Org, I don’t think Google or any other search engine is going to penalize or ban the site.

It hasn’t happened to any site where I’ve blocked Archive.Org.

You can certainly mask some stealthy activities from other people by blocking Archive.Org but you won’t mask them from the search engines by doing so. Nonetheless, it should not be assumed that just because a site blocks Archive.Org that the site has done anything wrong.

Neither Google nor Archive.Org has a right to demand that Websites open up their content to all online archives. Webmasters have the proprietary right to block any robots they wish, and search engineers should not be suggesting or implying that this is morally questionable or unethical behavior.

The SEO community, however, absolutely MUST recognize that there are legitimate, moral, ethical, and legal reasons to block Archive.Org — and we need to SUPPORT those reasons and activities and we MUST encourage our clients to do what is right for their sites.

I was tempted to title this post “three articles I wish I could write every day” but the idea of putting a number into a blog post title now sickens me. It’s such a cheap, spammy trick now because everyone is doing it in an attempt to “create linkbait”. I almost never click on articles that use numbers in their titles any more.

I get the whole “write as many popular articles as possible” concept. We all want our sites to be popular, on everyone’s hot list, and the go-to place in whatever verticals we service. But every dog has his day and all blogs have really boring days. Some blogs just have more boring days than others.

What makes your blog exciting? What makes people want to get up in the morning and read it? Shoot yourself if you think the answer is “passion”. I’m sure we all understand that you need passion to write an interesting article, but the article does not make the blog. Not unless you can write the same article 500 different ways and keep it fresh and interesting.

What makes your blog exciting is the personal touch you bring to it. Your flare for your selected topic(s). Maybe you try to linkbait people once a week. Maybe you write a humorous piece every month. Maybe you feature a guest post every couple of weeks. Whatever it is, that’s what makes your blog your blog, and that is what makes it exciting.

Only exciting to the nth degree is probably about as boring as a blog can get. I mean, in the SEO industry all we get to work with are links, content, servers, search engines, users, keywords, and about 5,000 other things. That’s really not much to judge by the content of most SEO blogs. You know, most SEO blogs write about keyword research, link building, and article writing. Never mind the thousands of other topics they could cover that are relevant to this field.

If you had to pick one topic to write about every day, what would it be? Link building? Articles? Keyword research? I can’t imagine boxing myself in to a single topic like that but if I had to I would want to be able to write … yes, you guessed it … three types of articles.

Humor – There is nothing like a good joke and in the SEO industry we don’t have enough good jokes. But if I were writing a blog about buttons I’d want to make it the funniest damn button blog on the Web.

History – Anything that has been around for at least six months has a history. I love history and you can always relate history to human experience. People grok history even if they don’t love it.

Strong, powerful, positive reviews of Websites – If there is anything that will get you off the topic that makes your blog so boring without totally abandoning the topic, it’s writing about how other people handle the topic. That’s not the same as a “Top 10 Links To Read This Week” post. Some people, of course, have taken the “Top 10″ concept to extreme lengths in order to make it useful (Wiep, Dave Harry — you know these guys). But if we all tried to do that no one would have anything useful to say.

It’s not easy to write about other people’s Websites. You can easily write about how much you like them, how useful you find them to be, how much you like the people behind the sites, how much you like to party with the people behind the sites, but writing about the sites themselves is tough. Website reviews are hard. They are darned good practice for anyone who wants to learn and master the art of SEO (or even the science of SEO).

If I had to write Website reviews all the time I would do my best to include history and humor in the reviews. There is almost nothing more boring than a Website review in this industry — except a “Top 10 links this week” article. If you can spice it up with humor and history — without getting medieval on anyone’s character or reputation — well, you can probably make any article interesting.

Which reminds me of the time I was trying to come up with a topic for SEO Theory. See, you’re probably thinking I’m going to plug the hard core links articles — but I don’t need to. They’re popular enough. No, I’m thinking about the humor articles. Those SEO joke pages drew some hearty laughs (and links) from people across the Web, especially the first one. Getting a link from Jeremy Zawodny was an honor and a privilege. To me, at least. I’m glad he liked the joke.

You see, I don’t write humor as much as I used to. I love writing humor, especially when people enjoy reading it. But humor gets old and it got old for me, mostly because I’ve watched so many people use it badly. How do you use humor badly? You act like a street punk on steroids, dissing every person you have argued with, disagreed with, or otherwise think you can provoke into linking to you. Insults and humor don’t mix, except for people who are drunk, on steroids, or who don’t know how to be civil.

If you have to make someone else look bad in order to feel like you’re making yourself look good, you must really think you suck as a person.

History, on the other hand, is a great theme to include in any article. I’ve often drawn upon history to illustrate points I wanted to make in SEO theory and other topics. I cannot imagine writing about a J.R.R. Tolkien story without touching on history but he makes it easy. However in SEO, where every year people join the field without a clue what happened in previous years, the history becomes a bit tedious. How many times should you point out, for example, that the so-called “Florida” Update was first noticed in October 2003 and not November? How many times can you show people that Google launched Hilltop in 2002 through Google News Search?

History gets old when you have to constantly repeat it because those who repeat history are doomed to ignore it. Why be constantly ignored?

But my point is that if I had to write about any one topic I would still prefer to use humor, history, and reviews of what other people have done. Why? Because I would be more interested in humor, history, and what other people have done than all the crap I could otherwise put together about any topic. If I had to write 500 articles on SEO theory or J.R.R. Tolkien starting today, you’d better believe I would use humor, history, and reviews.

Why? Because that would sustain my interest in the topic far longer than churning out top 10 link lists.

Because if you’re not interested in what you’re writing, no one else will be interested, either.

And I just wish I could write interesting articles every day.

What is the best free SEO technique that you can use? More importantly, what makes an SEO technique “free”? An economist would quickly tell us there is no such thing as a free lunch. So one should ask if there are any truly “free” SEO techniques.

I submit that there are no truly free SEO techniques. They all come with a cost. But I suspect that anyone interested in the topic of “best free SEO technique” is probably looking for a way to optimize that doesn’t cost them money. Low-budget search engine optimization has its place in the field but people should understand that all their do-it-yourself SEO is costing them money.

How much is an hour of your time worth to you? That is, how much would you actually bill another person (or business) for your time? $25? $50? $100? That’s pretty cheap SEO but it’s still expensive if your search engine optimization doesn’t bring you back at least that much money. DIY techniques are expensive if they don’t produce a return on investment.

Still, what can be said about free SEO Techniques? Are there no-dollar-down techniques anyone can use and, if so, which one(s) would be the best? That’s what we’re here to figure out. So let’s start with the very basic stuff:

Free SEO Technique No. 1: Build your own Website. Many companies literally throw thousands of dollars at Web designers to build them wonderful Web sites. Your Web designer may be the Frank Lloyd Wright of his class — the Warren Buffet of Web design — but frankly you don’t need his services. Not for search engine optimization. The fastest, easiest, simplest way to create an optimized Website is to download the Wordpress software and install it.

You’re done. Is it ugly? Yes. But aesthetics have absolutely nothing to do with search engine optimization.

Free SEO Technique No. 2: Write your own content. Most people wrongly believe they cannot write content. Many people foolishly convince themselves they don’t have time to write content. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in the time it takes you to explain why you don’t have time to write your own articles, you could have written enough content for one Web page. All that time you spend sending emails back and forth with your Web designer and SEO tech — yeah, you could have written a TON of articles.

On a good day I can write between 30 and 40 articles. At the height of my writing productivity some years past I was putting out about 50 articles a day.

I normally ask my copy specialists to write 5-10 articles a day. That’s 5-10 articles you have taken the time to think about, research, and edit. The average business operator who insists s/he cannot blog will write anywhere from 10 to 30 emails a day. To create a successful blog you only need to write 1 article per day, it doesn’t need to be more than 100-200 words long, and most people wouldn’t know if you mis-spelled something anyway. Heck, most people cannot even use their personal pronouns correctly (”Clem and myself will get this done right away…”).

Free SEO Technique No. 3: Write a long-winded, thoughtful comment on someone else’s blog once each day. Don’t embed any links in the comment — but you’re allowed to use the link field in the blog comment form.

What does this get you? It shows people you’re willing to take the time to share their passions, and they will click on that link under your name and they will visit your blog and some of them will link to your blog. So you’re killing two birds with one stone: you’re creating a name for yourself (which is worth more than a million links because people will search for you after reading a few of your thoughtful comments) AND you’re attracting those high value editorially-given links.

Free SEO Technique No. 4: Write about other people’s sites. Write often. Write liberally. Link out to those sites. They don’t have to be competitor sites. Just write about someone else’s site and don’t ask for anything in return.

What does this get you? The thanks from many people who are struggling to achieve some visibility for their sites. If you are sincere in your comments and selective in who you write about, you’ll find you are quietly building a community of friends and allies who will help you in many ways through the years.

Free SEO Technique No. 5: Make sure your blog pings lots of ping servers. You can find lists of them across the Web. The better you are at pinging, the more likely your blog will achieve search recognition quickly. “Search recognition” just means your articles appear in various search indexes. The sooner you get your content into the search indexes, the better.

Pinging alone does nothing. You have to write the articles. See free SEO Technique No. 2 for more details.

So that’s five (5) free SEO Techniques. Notice I did not say anything about keyword research, meta tags, title tags, SEO plug-ins, toolbars, link research, 301-redirects, metrics, or any of that other tedious stuff that people are so passionate about. You literally do not need to fuss with any of that stuff if all you want to do is just use the best free SEO techniques.

You can go a long way using these free SEO techniques. You can even compete in some competitive queries using them. That doesn’t mean you should only do SEO this way. It just means that it’s doable (this way) if you want to do it this way.

And which of the five is the best free SEO technique? All of them.

Think about that answer for a while. I believe you’ll see why soon enough.

One of the most controversial practices in SEO wisdom is to use a blog service like Blogger for your blog. Most people in the industry advise against using third-party services to host blogs, especially for businesses. In a perfect world, that advice could be the best or the worst advice. In the real world, it’s just one more piece of flotsam on a sea of conflicting opinion. Here are some reasons for why you should use Blogger for SEO. Below those reasons you’ll find my tips.

Why should SEOs use blogger?

• So that you don’t look stupid when people ask for help specifically with blogger
• So that you can give informed comparisons when people ask for them
• So that you can see how Google favors some blog systems over others
• So that you can explain the benefits of using Blogger to people

The SEO industry looks unprofessional when people ask for help with their Blogger blogs and SEOs step up to the plate with such gleaming gems of wisdom as “Get a real blog!” Millions of people use Blogger for their personal blogs. Their reasons for doing so are legion, although most of them probably don’t know enough about the Web to feel comfortable using anything more sophisticated than Blogger. Treating people badly when they ask for help is sure to put you on most people’s DO NO BUSINESS WITH lists. Either give specific, helpful, detailed advice tailored to the level of knowledge of the person asking the question or don’t reply.

Any competent SEO technician should be able to provide at least basic help for Blogger users. Blogger is not rocket science. You don’t have to commit everything to memory. Just set up a Blogger blog, use it occasionally, and stay on top of how it works. Log in to refresh your memory before replying to someone’s plea for help.

You should be unbiased in your comparisons because on those occasions when people do ask for opinions about which service to use, they usually get rather useless advice like “I use Blog X! It’s great!” or “Don’t use Blog Y! It sucks!” Again, when SEOs don’t tailor their advice to the level of knowledge of the person asking the question, the SEOs don’t fool anyone. Showing how incompetent you can be as source of professional help isn’t going to win you many customers.

If you cannot already provide a concise, informative comparison of 2-3 blog services then you should make that a project you complete within the next month. Don’t just look at the terms of service and features pages — set up some blogs and use them. Understand what is good for an inexperience user and what is helpful for an advanced user.

You cannot possibly know in advance which blog service will be best for another person. You may be able to help them understand the complex documentation that all blogs inevitably accrue. Don’t limit your knowledge to just the basic services. Build a library of tips and tools for each service.

Google does inherently favor some blog services for reasons I cannot explain. How do I know this? I know this because I maintain multiple blogs on multiple blog services. Blogger blogs have advantages over other blog services’ blogs. But those advantages are offset by disadvantages, too. Nonetheless, if you don’t know how having a Blogger blog works better with Google in some ways than using other blogs, your SEO knowledge is weak in this area.

Sometimes it really is best to suggest people use blogger because, frankly, Blogger is sometimes the best solution. You need to know when that is true and why.

Why should anyone use Blogger?

This is the easiest question to answer. Blogger is a fast, easy-to-set-up service that is tied in with Google AdSense and other services Google offers. Google has done a decent job of integrating some of its technologies across the platform. So for people who want to use fairly sophisticated blog tools without having to figure out how to make everything work together, Blogger offers a fairly stream-lined plug-n-play interface. (Wordpress, for example, won’t allow you to embed Javascript on its hosted blogs.)

Most bloggers do not host their own Web sites. Why? I don’t know and frankly you don’t need to care. When someone asks for advice on how to set up a blog, the first words out of your mouth should be, “How comfortable are you with Web hosting technology?” Many SEOs fumble the ball and say, “Use Wordpress!”

Now, Wordpress.com is a great site (I use it) for third-party blog hosting but before you recommend Wordpress.com, ask if the user wants to integrate Google tools and technologies. If they answer “Yes” and if they are not comfortable with Web hosting technology, you should not need to wait for that truck to knock you into next week to figure out that this is a prime candidate for Blogger.

Some spammers love Blogger, btw. They set up blog farms with it. Of course, Blogger has struck back by testing blogs to see if they are human-controlled. There is a neat little trick Blogger has been using for several years that occasionally frustrates legitimate users. I’ve found references to it going back at least as far as 2006 (that may be the year when Google implemented it). Basically, you set up a blog, start posting to it, and after a few days, maybe a couple of weeks you log in and find a message that blatantly and falsely accuses you of being a spammer. It demands that you click on a button within 30 days or your blog will be deleted.

I used Blogger for several years before that happened to me. When I researched the test I found that every person who complained about it was still blogging several years later. They all clicked on the button. So I clicked on the button and the problem went away.

Does this filter out all the spammers? Probably not. Supposedly a human reviewer looks at the blog after you click on the button but I don’t know. In any event, new bloggers should be reassured that Blogger is trying to keep the service useful because it does send traffic to random blogs. That is one of the most useful features of Blogger — its built-in Webring service lets you click from blog to blog without having to search for stuff. People occasionally find blogs they bookmark for future reference.

How To Use Blogger For SEO

Make sure the blog pings – This is the Number One (1) Reason why anyone should use Blogger. After a few posts your blog will usually start showing up in Google Blogsearch. There are many well-established, aged blogs that don’t appear in Google Blogsearch. Why? I have no idea. But I see Blogger blog after Blogger blog move quickly into Blogsearch. Blogsearch is a good bellwether tool for SEO to see how well a blog is performing. If I cannot get a blog into Google’s picky Blogsearch, I feel like the blog lacks something.

Of course, many Blogger blogs fail to appear in Google Blogsearch. There are, I am sure, many reasons for that. Nonetheless, using multiple blogs on multiple platforms in exactly the same way, I have consistently watched the Blogger blogs move into Google Blogsearch faster than all the others. The only way I have found to get a blog in as quickly or faster is to link to it from many other blogs that are already indexed regularly in Google Blogsearch.

If a blog appears in Blogsearch it should get into Google Websearch, but that isn’t always the case. So another good bellwether test for a blog’s health is to see if it appears in BOTH Websearch and Blogsearch. If it does, you’re probably on the right track.

Pinging, of course, can get your Blogger blog into other services as well, so that needs to be said.

Use recap posts – One of the disadvantages of Blogger is that Google automatically sets the robots.txt file to block indexing of all /search results. That is the subdirectory where your labels go. So using labels on Blogger is almost pointless, although some people have developed clever ways to create categories on Blogger. Those categories won’t be crawled and indexed but they will help your users.

Still, many people are not comfortable digging into HTML so it is a good idea to write a monthly recap post that links back to your older articles. Danny Sullivan has provided the best examples of how to do this with his regular recaps on SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand (I’m not sure SEW has kept up the practice with their new design). Barry Schwartz also provides frequent recaps on Search Engine Roundtable. Recapping your posts helps get them recrawled and keep them in the index.

Linking back to older posts is also helpful. It’s not well known but many Wordpress.com cross-links within their network are nofollowed. You don’t have to worry about that (yet) with Blogger.

Use Blogger to link to your primary site – I’m not talking about spamming the index with fifty reposts of your front page. Let’s say you have 50 pages of content on your site. You should be able, over time, to write 50 articles on your Blogger blog that link to relevant pages on your site. The Wordpress.com terms of services discourage this practice. Blogger’s do not. But you should also link out to other content as well, thus making your blog a useful resource.

Being able to get a Blogger blog indexed quickly and thoroughly offers you a linking resource that is generally safe to use. Just understand that Blogger is being watched closely for abuse. It’s not offering open invitations to create crawl pages.

Use Blogger to test expressions – Some queries are more competitive than others. Relying on your link research to determine which queries are competitive is a bad idea. If you can use an active, eclectic Blogger site to get an article into the top 20 or 30 search results for a query without investing in a lot of links, the odds are pretty good that you don’t have to go into hyperoptimization overkill to participate in that query. And it gives you a place for a relevant link.

Conclusion, Recap, and Winding Up (or Down)

Even search engine optimization gurus can learn something from using Blogger. It is by no means the best blogging platform around but it is still useful, popular, and well worth understanding. SEO arrogance has relegated Blogger mostly to the unwashed masses and Web spammers. The so-called black hat spammers may not be getting as much benefit from Blogger now as they used to, but remember that most of what the black hats do is exactly the same thing as what the white hats do — the black hats just take the good stuff to excess.

You don’t need to create blog farms populated by autogenerated mush and rehashed RSS feeds to get some good SEO benefit out of Blogger. Nor do you need to act like a snob and try to proselytize for your favorite platform when people ask for help or advice about Blogger. Either step up to the plate and show people you’re a professional who knows how to deal with the platform or shut up, step aside, and let a REAL SEO do some work.