Online PR UK & Expert SEO

I have been puzzling over robots.txt and wordpress - My plan is to create natural ‘link hubs’ for each category, but if you know wordpress, you will know that when you have subcategories of categories, you get duplicate content, because the category pages show all the subcategory content…

so i’ve got to work out a workaround - either by customising the menu so it doesn’t show the offending pages or by doing something interesting with robots.txt

anyway on the theme of robots.txt here are a few from famous wordpress blogs

Mattcutts.com
User-agent: *
Allow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /files/

seoegghead.com (note the satan bit / hiding the contact page)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/seo/automatically-highlighting-internal-links-p51.html
Disallow: /blog/seo/msn-search-p5.html
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /blog/seo/msn-search-p5.html
Disallow: /*?cat=
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /blog/seo/using-referers-http_referer-to-increase-conversions-and-perceived-relevance-p9.html
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: slurp
Disallow: /blog/seo/yahoo-hostings-lack-of-htaccess-support-p8.html
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/
Disallow: /contact-the-egghead.php
User-agent: satan
Disallow: /

wordpress.org
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

scobleizer.com
User-agent: IRLbot
Crawl-delay: 3600

User-agent: *
Disallow:

davidnaylor.co.uk/
doesnt actually use them !
which is interesting… ( i’ll email him and ask why )

I have been on a ’surf and research’ day today and I’ve been looking into blackhat SEO

Google can be spammed, but not like it used to be. In the past it was ‘all inbound links are good’ (within reason) and volume of links are good. Now its more about ‘quality’ sites back linking to you.

How do you qualify quality? - good question. I suppose a simple answer is :
- there is a human guardian looking after the site?
- the site is has a theme like your site?
Anyway…if you want to see spamming in action i.e. keyword stuffing, page redirects and cloaking, then just go to google and do a search for ‘viagra’ i almost guarantee you will find a couple of spam sites in the top 10 results.
Yes spamming works - but not for long, its only a quick fix. Check that search again in a few weeks and those sites you saw will have long disappeared and replaced by more spam sites.

The other thing I realised was how closely knit the black hat community is. It seems to be dominated by a handful of main players who are good programmers and who understand the technical weaknesses of the search engines.

They seem to do well financially , but they are constantly playing a cat and mouse game with the engines working in the ‘bottom feeder’ areas on the internet - porn, financial services and medicine sales. The funny thing is that these sites typically don’t build reputation, they just get big exposure for a while and disappear.

a good launch point is www.blackhatseo.com

I’ve been asked to do a difintive list of SEO to do’s - a really big and tiresome job. But fortunately I’ve been let off the hook because I found this complete run down of SEO factors affecting Rank

Check it out, its very useful  - it even has a viagra ad there !

If you don’t know, SEO is worth nothing if you don’t get links. SEO is simple enough in that there are certain technical things you change to allow search engines to catalogue a site.

But online PR is a whole other beast ( so i’m finding )

The problem is that for a corporate, the connection between building buzz, getting links, then ranking is all too tenious and mysterious for them to generally take it seriously. As a result the online PR process gets packaged as ‘it’s like offline - but we send stuff to PR web!’.

The next level is where certain sites get targeted, but of course because the content does not have ‘buzz’ it only gets taken by crap sites. So the page views are tiny for the effort expended and the search benefits are negligable.

Luckily I do work with a couple of sites that rock on this front and when you see the connection between :

• SEO’d site
• Hot News
• Great writing
• And tons of links coming in

it is quite beautiful when it all works. It is like seeing an eco system flourishing. I speak of www.anorak.co.uk - cool site with attitude and a great example of how to harness ‘buzz’

- it has a long way to go, but what it does well, it does very well. Now it’s time to spread the knowledge,  evangilise and motivate.

I was given  a book recently : Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO and I’ve written about it in my last post (good book by the way)

The clever part of this was that Jaimie (one of the authors) had been broadcasting the fact that he was releasing the book about 4 months before launch from his site http://www.seoegghead.com and he offered to give a free copy of the book to SEO bloggers if they would return the favour and write about the book and maybe give a link or 2.

What Jaimie understands is that with SEO, link building and buzz building, are the binding ingredients in connecting a well optimised site to search engines.

If you don’t know, search engines see links as a vote of confidence in a site. The more good sites link, the more confidence - the higher the rankings. Thats a simplified version but basically correct.

So he sends these books out at about $10 USD a piece and for maybe a $1000 worth of freebies to bloggers like me, he gets our links, insight and hopefully for him, recommendation.

He knows with enough good buzz from SEO’ers, his book will reach into the core web dev community who are perfect for this book.

In my professional life I can see a growing recognition that if you can harness the love of a product or company or service and help those evangilists spread their message about you, that message will travel right into the people who you most want to have as customers.

I’ve been given a copy of Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie’s new book Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO

there are 2 parts to this : 1 the bit where I talk about the book and 2. the bit where I talk about the clever marketing they have used for this cool book.

My review

I dig it, its a really good book for someone who is a professional web developer working with PHP MySQL and has built their own CMS, or may be has inherited it and they want to get theor heads around SEO without getting into the social theory of what and why with SEO. In other words its a book for people getting their hands dirty with code.

Through my professional role as an SEO’er I’m advising a company who my employers are working with. They have a custom CMS and they need traffic since their SEO is hell (they even use an Iframe on the front page where the content goes ! ! and they wonder why google does not rank them.

Anyhow the dev guy got a load of “seo this and seo that” and all he got was bored. he wanted to know how to fix things and what things to fix. thats all. Wether the site got more traffic was almost academic to him. It was all about eh development solution. This is where this cool book comes in nicely. For more SEO you should check out the authors site SEO Egghead

The marketing thing is on a seperate post