Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

UPDATE: Please review the comments. It appears I was confusing behavior from Thesis and other themes with at least one SEO plugin. I don’t have time to revise this article sensibly to reflect my error.

The All In One SEO Plug-in for Wordpress and similar add-ons for blogs are some of the most popular tools people rely upon when optimizing their blog-based sites.

Over the past year I have found more and more Websites suffering from lost search visibility that I have traced back to or suspected could be traced back to use of the “All In One” SEO Plug-in or other so-called “SEO-friendly” plug-ins.

And there are a lot of them.

These tools are proving to be a real disaster for the general Web population because most people don’t know enough about administering a Website or blog to understand how to control the stupid assumptions that the SEO plug-ins make.

The people who write these plug-ins may think they know SEO but you can tell them I’m on the record as saying they don’t know nearly enough to justify what they are doing. These guys have absolutely no business writing SEO plug-ins for blogs.

The basic SEO plug-in mentality has become almost ubiquitous. I see people refer to these plug-ins frequently and liberally as “must have” options. When I ask why they think the plug-ins are so important, they almost universally give me three reasons:

1. The (SEO) plug-in lets you change your page title
2. The (SEO) plug-in lets you write a meta description
3. The (SEO) plug-in lets you create a custom page URL

When these plug-ins first hit the market a few years ago the SEO community jumped on them because Wordpress and other blog platforms did not let you customize your page structures.

That’s no longer the case. Wordpress, for sure, lets you set custom titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs. It’s very easy to do this. Just look at the form where you type in your blog post.

Of course, fans devoted to these plug-ins will be quick to point out that they provide other features. Sure they do. Some of those features may actually even provide some value.

But the real problem with “All-In-One” and other SEO plug-ins is that they are attempting to hide pages, hide links, and otherwise sculpt PageRank.

And in case you didn’t get the memo, GOOGLE SAYS THIS IS A STUPID THING TO ATTEMPT. They don’t use those words — those are my words, but the message is the same.

Google told people they changed how PageRank was flowing on pages that include nofollowed links about two years ago because people were screwing up their search results trying to sculpt PageRank.

That’s right, all the genius PageRank sculptors didn’t know what they were doing.

So here we are in 2010 and people are coming out of the woodwork claiming their copy is not being indexed by Google for as much as 7 days. I’ve been following these complaints in volume since January. I have responded to very few of them.

In every case where I have examined a Website in question I found one of two (or two of two) problems: the sites were either using “rel=’nofollow’” on their internal links and/or they were using “noindex,nofollow” on their tag and category pages.

These HTML directives were all embedded by SEO plug-ins like “All-In-One” (and there are more out there — they are all guilty).

People are flabbergasted when I suggest to them that they turn off or remove these plug-ins. Why? Because they want to be able to change their page titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs. Not because they want to sculpt PageRank, but because they want to perform very basic functions that Wordpress now lets you perform (not that these bloggers have enough knowledge of SEO to be doing this anyway — but that’s beside the point).

On the rare occasion where I’ve persuaded people to disable the plug-ins and they’ve gotten back to me, they’ve told me their sites were suddenly being indexed.

Frankly, too many people are trying to optimize for search through plug-ins. Technically, there is no technical reason to use any of these plug-ins. I would fire any SEO technician working for me who insisted on using a plug-in — I don’t need that kind of incompetence on my team.

It’s okay to experiment with plug-ins. We do it all the time. We’ve tried “All-In-One” and trust me, I was NOT happy in any way with the way it impeded our search optimization efforts. This plug-in couldn’t optimize a 1-page Website that only had one word, a word that occurred nowhere else on the Web.

In case I haven’t made myself clear, you’re not helping yourself in any way by installing an SEO plug-in on your Wordpress blog. If you don’t know enough about SEO to do it yourself, you don’t know enough about SEO to disable the stupid features these plug-ins turn on by default.

I even found a site where an SEO firm blogged last year about how it stopped monitoring the SEO plug-in through upgrades and they learned to their chagrin how an automated upgrade of all plug-ins turned on a feature they didn’t want activated. Even experienced SEOs are being undermined by the incredibly stupid default choices that are made by “All In One” and other SEO plug-ins.

Now, people might think I’m being a little harsh here. Perhaps I am. I am sure the Web design firms behind these plug-ins feel they have a lot of good feedback from their users (more than 1 million people have apparently installed “All In One” to date). To that I say: Feedback from the ignorant masses isn’t going to help you fix the royal screwups you’re tossing around the Web.

Many sites manage to rank in search results in spite of bad optimization. Many people in the SEO field have to work with stubborn customers who refuse to change their immaculate works of art on the Interwebs — so we find other ways (links) to optimize.

Some Websites manage to stumble through the basic reverse optimization process by churning out enough content that they just get a lot of links pointing at their deep content.

If you think your site is doing fine with your SEO plug-in, don’t get upset because I’m telling you it’s hurting you. Just continue enjoying the limited search visibility you’ve subjected yourself too but please stop telling your friends to use these stupid plug-ins.

If search engine optimization were really so easy that all you had to do was install a damn plug-in, no one would do it faster or more often than me.

It’s NOT that easy. Any professional SEO who believes in and/or trusts these plug-ins enough to recommend them to anyone is, in my opinion, a complete moron who needs to get out of the industry.

You don’t hand a gun to someone and tell them to look down the barrel and pull the trigger, do you? So why would you hand a plug-in whose SEO shortcomings have been well-documented to someone who doesn’t understand SEO and tell them to use it?

If people start listening to me now, it will take about 2 years for the SEO industry to rally to the cause and advise everyone to NOT use these stupid SEO plug-ins. Maybe — it would be wonderful if they did — the plug-in writers will update their offerings to NOT do anything by default and to remove the stupid PageRank sculpting nonsense.

There is absolutely no reason for any SEO plug-in to use “rel=’nofollow’” on post-embedded links, to embed “nofollow,noindex” on any public-facing page, or to allow the user to override the page title, meta description, or URL.

If you want to experiment with other functions, do so. But understand that they might in the end turn out to be bad ideas, too.

A lot of people in the SEO community — including some pretty darned good SEOs (in my opinion) — still fuss over duplicate content. My position has for a very, very long time been: leave it alone. Let the blog do what blogs are designed to do.

If you don’t like how blog software organizes content on your site, then the best thing you can do for SEO is find another platform that organizes content the way you like.

You should be using category and tag pages to enhance your SEO, not hiding them out of some misguided fear that search engines will forget you exist because they find tag and category pages.

There are other options that Wordpress and other modern blogging platforms give you for handling how often and where content appears on your site. Learn to use the blog platform first before you start plugging in crap that knows even less about SEO than you.

CNET is carrying a story today about a recurring FBI proposal that Internet Service Providers retain usage data for 2 years. Privacy advocates are up in arms over this proposal, which the FBI has made in years past.

Unfortunately for the privacy community, they lost the battle fourteen years ago when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Most people naively believe the courts struck down this statute, but the most devastating part of the law remains intact. That is section 230, which grants the status of telephone service providers to Internet service providers.

Large ISPs like AOL and Prodigy (neither of whom is the Internet power it once was, btw). Prodigy doesn’t even exist any more — it’s now a part of AT&T (which used to be a real telephone company before it was run out of the business by the U.S. court system). AT&T of course provides wireless and long distance telephone service in addition to Internet service.

What Congress did not understand (or chose to ignore thanks to the high-paid lobbyists who represented the interests of AOL and Prodigy back in the 1990s) is that Internet Service Providers DO NOT ACT LIKE TELEPHONE PROVIDERS.

The telephone company facilitates a transient transaction. Once you hang up the phone your phone call is gone. That is not what happens when you surf the Web or send out email messages. In fact, whereas the phone companies don’t listen in on your conversations Internet service providers regularly filter your email, block or restrict user access to certain sites, take Web sites down, and otherwise participate in the online usage experience.

There but for a lie codified by Congress is a huge engineering distinction between telephone service providers and Internet service providers.

The codification has also withstood at least a few legal challenges, so don’t even hope someone will come along and get it struck down. That ship has sailed and the U.S. courts — ignorant of how Internet services differ radically from the way telephone services function — have ensured that CDA 230 will be around for a long, long time.

So now the FBI is saying they need to be able to track our Web usage for up to 2 years to see if we’ve been visiting child pornography sites. And CDA 230 strengthens their legal reasoning. BUT let me clue everyone in on something: with a few lines of code I can ensure that many thousands of people visit child pornography sites on a frequent, regular basis without their ever knowing it.

You could be rounded up and hauled in to jail because your Internet service provider will show the FBI that your computer visited child pornography sites multiple times. All I have to do is embed some code on a popular Web site that takes the user to the child pornography.

You’ll never see it, but your browser will. There will be no popup windows. Nothing left behind when you close your browser window.

HTML is that powerful and it is capable of making you look like you’re visiting a thousand Websites a day.

A few years ago I worked for a company that had a staffing issue. One of the people who needed access to the Internet was abusing his access to visit pornographic sites at work. The company raked him over the coals, monitored his access, restricted his privileges. He was so persistent that finally the company began monitoring everyone’s Internet usage.

And that was when I was hauled into my boss’ office every month for several months and chewed out for visiting hundreds of Websites a day when I should have been working (never mind the fact I was the most productive employee he had ever hired). He knew I wasn’t sitting there surfing the Web but he couldn’t explain all the Websites showing up under my account.

After a while it sank in to me what was happening: I would frequently leave a browser window open on a major news site. The news site, unbeknownst to me, began refreshing its pages every ten minutes or so, thus reloading all its on-page advertising. When I looked more closely at the tracking reports I began to recognize the domains from my own Internet marketing experience as ad servers and related resources.

My heavy usage was legal and mostly benign (although it used up company bandwidth in the most slothful way). I solved my problem by closing my browser window.

But that experience taught me that user logs don’t tell the whole story. And since becoming more deeply involved with the Internet I’ve learned things that would scare a drunken sailor sober. You have no idea of how easily your Web surfing can be managed and manipulated remotely.

So when the FBI tells Congress they need access to 2 years’ of our history, that tells me the FBI is not ready to police the Internet. They have absolutely no clue as to what they are doing or talking about.

In order to mask their activities child pornographers could easily flood their sites with unknowning traffic from tens of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent people. Instead of strengthening its investigative powers the FBI is proposing the virtual dilution of those powers.

I don’t know how Web-savvy the child pornography community are. But I read the occasional news story about the people who get arrested. They include judges, police officers, lawyers, prosecutors, doctors, and even some state and local lawmakers. They also include people who have been hanging around the Internet for years.

To blithely assume that these people have no knowledge or skill in setting up Websites that are sneaky and malicious is to put the public good at risk, and that is (in my opinion, which is not necessarily shared by my employer or co-workers) extremely irresponsible.

On the Internet there are NO simple tasks and solutions. We are STILL feeling the repercussions of “simple” things that happened in the 1990s. We have absolutely no business enacting new laws that threaten to drag multitudes of innocent people into legal quagmires that will destroy their personal, social, and work lives.

This is NOT the way I want my tax dollars to work.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.

I often find myself investigating suspicious Websites. The corporate world is growing increasingly sensitive about where their trademarks are mentioned, and why.

Yesterday’s mushblogs, which once relied upon Markov-chained gibberish to slip past search algorithms and filters, are now providing much more sophisticated mashup text that often convinces the unwary eye that nothing is wrong.

However, people are growing more suspicious about blogs that randomly mention companies, products, services, and people. They are learning to use Copyscape and other tools to try to find unauthorized duplicates of Web content.

It’s the mushblogs that cause the most headscratching, however. When people bring them to me they are certain they are looking at suspicious content but they cannot put their fingers on why.

Why the content looks suspicious is that it still lacks the ring of human sensibility. The paragraphs do not flow together smoothly. Whereas yesterday’s mushblogs floated randomly disjointed sentences and fragments together — often glued to each other by inappropriate ellipsis marks — today’s mushblogs are mining blog and forum RSS feeds, even microfeeds from sites like Twitter, for coherent comments.

You may unwittingly be cited in a dozen conversations in as many different contexts all because you randomly use some expression that a spammer wants to target.

Black hat services like Syndic8 publish RSS feeds for use by scripts that compile these mushblogs for blog farms. These black services are the reason why I refuse to publish full feeds from the blogs I control. The black hats will have to scrape my articles manually (some do) or just make do with the summaries.

There is not a great deal you can do to prevent black hats from repurposing your content. You can stop publishing RSS feeds but there are drastic consequences for that. And marketers who count RSS subsciptions loathe the idea of publishing only partial feeds because they lose subscribers that way.

You might consider watermarking your paragraphs, however. One simple way to do this is to embed links back to your site in random words embedded in each paragraph. Of course, some people might fear building many links from black hat sites. Another way to watermark paragraphs is to embed your site URL as text somewhere in the paragraph, but that looks ugly.

Some people have taken to paginating their articles. I’m not sure what the RSS feed looks like for a paginated article but the user experience is probably not very pretty on the subscriber side. Are they doing this to fight the scrapers? I don’t know.

Some of the aggregation scripts strip out links but if you’re embedding links you might add some attributes to mix up the syntax, or change the order of attributes.

And while these measures offer some protection against totally unabridged use of your new content, they do nothing for older content — which I am increasingly finding in mushblogs. Quite possibly the various anti-scraping tactics have signaled to the black hat community that what they are doing is attracting too much attention.

So now I’m finding articles from 2, 3, even 4 years ago on new blogs. The articles are really snippets pasted together from multiple sources. You may or may not recognize your own work after 4 years if you see an entire article you wrote, but what if you see an article that only includes 1 paragraph from your 5-year-old copy?

This new spam technique now calls into question the value of older Web content. I’ve maintained archives of old articles on many sites. Should I now begin retiring that content before it’s scraped and mingled into repurposed mushblogs? Should we begin advising clients to stop publishing old blog content and feature articles?

Maybe it’s time to start walling off our old content and charging for access to it — a move that is sure to be the kiss of death to many a site’s long-tail chasing SEO content strategy. The news industry is struggling with the reverse of this method — walling off new content and only allowing free access to old content, if ever at all.

Content publishers need to start thinking about how to protect the integrity of their content while assuming that it will be scraped. It’s not a matter of if but when. If you can obtain some sort of branding value from the scraped content, the spammers may be reluctant to continue using your work.

Of course, this would mean reconstructing vast reaches of the archived Web. You would also, regrettably, have to close off some of our more cherished external sources of content recovery, such as archive.org. In order to protect the integrity of copy, textual watermarking may have to become very sophisticated.

For example, you may have to instruct your writers to start embedding variations on “here at best-seo-blog.com” in every paragraph. You may have to look at different ways to space out paragraphs rather than through traditional HTML markup (and give up on using DIVs and SPANs) so as to reduce watermarking text.

There is no doubt that Webspam is evolving at a fast rate. By the time we have developed fully effective techniques against today’s scraping technologies only script-kiddies will be using the mush-paragraph technique anyway. Still, I feel that we need to figure out a way to take some sort of action that will become a useful standard or best practice.

Otherwise, I’ll have a branding advantage over you as an increasing number of rogue Websites randomly mention best-seo-blog.com and seo-theory.com.

Does Website structure matter to SEO is a great question that should have been asked about 10 years ago. It’s being answered on many SEO blogs and forums but not in a very formal way, in my opinion.

Website structure helps your search engine optimization in several ways. Let’s take a brief look at how that plays out.

1. Website structure directly influences your site’s crawlability
2. Website structure facilitates or inhibits growth
3. Website structure may improve your on-site optimization
4. Website structure may improve your SERP optimization

Website structure directly influences site crawlability – This point is being made by more people than ever but it seems to be trapped within the thought circles of the SEO community. The difference between a crawlable site and a crawl-inhibiting site structure is most easily measured through cache data freshness. Keep in mind that search engines don’t necessarily recache your page every time they fetch it, but the more often your deep content is recached, the more likely that your site has good crawlability.

Good crawlability ensures that a search engine is most likely to fetch your most important pages more often than others, but also that it’s most likely to fetch a lot of pages rather than just a few. You manage or influence crawl by pointing a lot of links to HTML sitemap pages, embedding links to sibling pages in on-page navigation, and using local hub structures for logical sections of your site.

I generally recommend building at least 3 internal links (from as many different parts of your site) to each page in a complex site.

Website structure facilitates or inhibits growth – If you had to add a new section to your site today, one that is large enough to contain 5 important sub-sections, each loaded with lots of content (pages), what would it take to update your navigation? If you’re thinking, “I’d have to totally rewrite the nav system” then either your navigation has outgrown its usefulness or else you planned poorly for the future.

You should be able to increase the size of your Website by about 30% without having to restructure on-site navigation. This means you won’t severely inhibit crawlability. New sections/content should compensate for their crawl-draining value by adding more internal links to the mix. This is not about passing anchor text to your competitive pages. This is about ensuring that spiders keep finding links to crawl that are deemed important enough to crawl.

If you cannot easily add 30% more content to your site, then you need to start working on a rewrite of the navigation system before you find yourself in crawl crisis mode. It’s broken if you don’t have unused navigational bandwidth, so fix it as soon as possible.

Website structure may improve your on-site navigation – There are four points of optimization that any Web publisher can influence: on-page, on-site, off-site, and SERP. URL structure is an on-site optimization factor, rather than an on-page factor (although most people incorrectly treat it as an on-page factor). Because you may have nested directories, your URL structure may be very complex.

If you believe that search engines pay attention to page URLs (and you should), then your Website structure can be enhanced to help your URLs become more meaningful. You do want to keep them short. You do NOT want to include superfluous sub-directories just for the sake of embedding keywords. You do want to use important, relevant keywords in the page URLs.

Website structure may improve your SERP optimization – I often ask my students, “What is the first thing people see when they look for content on the Web?” Usually no one gets the answer right. It’s the first search results page, not the first Website listed at number 1. What people see on that search results page influences their decision to click through or not click through.

It is possible, for example, to influence people to click on the 2nd result more often than the first, if the 2nd result is clearly more relevant to a query than the 1st result. This happens more often than most people in the SEO industry realize. And keep in mind that “relevance” to a user may be very different from what it seems to be to a search engine.

The user may be looking for a very specific page, and may not be interested in the more algorithmically acceptable content listed above that page. Search engines cannot always deduce what the searchers really want.

Last word on Website structure – There is actually much more to be said about “Website structure” and SEO because, frankly, it goes beyond simple URL construction. You also have to look at page composition factors (are you embedding images, Javascript, iframes, etc.?). And you have to look at how presentation changes from page to page and section to section. Jarring or incongruous transitions may signal some content issues that will impact your search engine optimization.

If you don’t have a consistent page composition structure throughout your site your ability to target keywords and track return on investment for organic SEO is degraded. Uncoordinated page composition usually produces less converting traffic than coordinated page composition.

You need to look at things like percentage breakdowns of page content into boilerplate, injected keywords, original copy, advertising, etc. You also need to look at copy placement, structures used for formatting copy, and even HTML coherency.

Although writing W3C-compliant code is not necessary for search engine optimization, you can ensure your code is not broken by passing compliance tests. I think most people in the industry now agree that if nothing else, writing W3C-compliant code eliminates the headache of tracing broken structures that might inadvertently hide some indexable content from search engine parsers.

So the next time someone asks you, “Does Website structure matter to SEO?”, you’re in a position not only to say yes, but also to explain why and how. And that’s a good thing.

There is an overextended discussion slowly pacing its way through the SEO community regarding “overoptimization”, and in some corners people refine that discussion to internal navigation, although we could easily argue about what constitutes “internal navigation” (okay, I could easily argue about what constitutes “internal navigation”).

This is one of those SEO myths that seeks to explain phenomena without enough data to show that the explanation is credible. For example, near as I can determine, I use every page on every site I create to link home with targeted anchor text (most of the time, the keywords are brand-valued). I’ve never seen anything like an “over optimization” penalty for any of these sites.

But I strive to get my visitors to the right place as quickly as possible. Visitors tend to be disoriented when they land on random pages. They have braced for impact but the impact is still jarring.

That is, when you’re dealing with long-tail search referrals people usually know they are clicking through to a deep page that may or may not be what they are looking for. Visitors often guess that the search engine is putting them close to the right page if it cannot find the right page.

That places the burden of guiding the visitor on you, the SEO, because you’re optimizing that visitor’s search experience from the time they pick a link to click on until they take whatever action is regarded as a conversion (informational, transformational, or transactional).

Disoriented visitors look for something specific when they first click through to a page: confirmation that they are on the right path. If the page is what they want, great. If it’s not what they want, it needs to lead to what they want, and the shorter the path the better.

Conventional wisdom teaches us that visitors look for the home page to reorient themselves. In effect, they are adding a page between themselves and their destination because they are going through a mental reset. They are getting their bearings.

One way to reduce this extra page stressing on visitor paths is to provide more information on each page than you would normally expect to find — but the additional information needs to be packaged and flagged in such a way that people will see it and know it for what it is.

That information usually consists of text links or advertisements (usually graphical ads). The text links are the secondary navigation that is relevant to the page’s local neighborhood (its “section” on the site) OR they are cross-promotional links. Depending on your site design you may be able to provide both sets of links on a page without confusing visitors.

The advertisements are calls to action (well, they should be). If you have a 500-page site that sells an eBook, every page should have that invaluable “CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD NOW!” graphic. Don’t fuss over whether this is part of the site’s navigation. Most visitors will look for your home page before they scan your navigation to find that embedded “Downloads” link.

Using on-page ads and secondary nav menus or cross-promotional links to attract the visitor’s attention to what they probably want to find cuts down their travel time to the destination. It helps improve their search experience.

Search optimization is not just about getting people to visit a page. It also includes what happens after they click through. When you’re trawling for long-tail traffic you need to make sure you’re not dragging out the discovery process by forcing people to bounce all over your site, looking for what they really want.