I’ve been named a finalist in two separate SEMMY Award categories. Please support the SEMMY Awards and their fairness by voting for what you feel are the best articles prior to .

Google 2009 Finalist
Sitelinks Research, Examples, Theories and Best Practices
This post came shortly after my SMX East 2008 Panel on Google SiteLinks. With assistance, feedback and findings reported back from other search marketers, this post was aimed at providing some opportunities for SEOs and webmasters to better control their domain’s Google SiteLinks. I’m up against excellent posts from Aaron Wall (What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?) and one from Bill Slawski (How Google Universal Search and Blended Results May Work).
– Vote Here!

Rants – 2009 Finalist
Ranting: Google & Online Reputation Management
I guess it isn’t much of a surprise that if I were going to have a quality rant, it’d be about Google. I do find it somewhat laughable though thata rant of mine might be compared alongside one from Rae Hoffman. Her post about these SEMMY Awards (The SEMMYS Launch, The Whineys TBA) joins Danny Sullivan’s Crappy MP3 Sites, Comment Spamming & Enough Already and David Harry’s Social Media Cash Grab as competing finalists.
– Vote Here!

Please remember to review all the finalists on the SEMMY web site and vote!

I decided to have a little bit of fun this afternoon. Why? Because I don’t ever do anything fun, that’s why.  Or, I found myself citing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines earlier today and read for the 1,387th time that one should…

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would.

…yep.

We’re messing around with a text browser today kids.

While I’m one to stick to what the big G says, I doubt very much that anyone in the search industry makes it a truly regular practice to go through this hassle process. If people are going this far in compliance with the guidelines, they’re simply filled with awesomesauce and nothing less.

And yes, I know this only a suggestion and not a requirement… But hey, like I said – this is all in the spirit of having some fun.

Here’s how you can mess around with Lynx and start thinking a bit more like a spider.

Download & Install Lynx
The current version of Lynx is available in a few forms. If you want to get your geek on, you can acquire the source code to perform your own build. That’s a 3.4 MB Download in ZIP format with other formats (tar.gz and tar.bz2) also available from the Lynx Current Distribution Directory.

If you just want to see what your sites look like in Lynx though, I’d direct Windows users towards Takeshi Hataguchi’s site via SourceForge. There you’ll find a 2.8MB download of a Win32 app that will have you running Lynx in no time.

Once you unzip that, you may run into an error about not having a lynx.cfg configuration file not available.

Looks like this:

Easy enough. To get past this I went out and found this copy. A little old, but whatever. Should work. So, save that in the root of wherever you unzipped Lynx.

Try running lynx once more, and you should see this:

Getting to Your Site
I’ll go out on a limb and assume you won’t want to use Lynx as your default browser. If you do, just don’t admit to it publicly.

In order to get to your site (or any other site for that matter) you’ll want to press “G” for “Go”. Crafty. Enter a URL, like the wildly popular http://www.ericlander.com/ – You will get prompted to allow the wwsg cookie. That’s from my use of the What Would Seth Godin Do? Plugin.

Here’s what you’ll see…

Navigating & Options
Navigation is pretty easy. Page Up, Page Down (or Space Bar) will jump screen to screen. You can use the up and down arrows to jump from link to link. Press the right arrow to “click” the link and visit the highlighted hyperlink.

There are actually quite a few options you can check out within Lynx.

For the Lazy
There’s something very… geek about Lynx in this Win32 port. It’s sexy in an ASCII art kind of way. But really, who has the time to open up Lynx, become familiar with these commands, look at ugliness all day… all for the sake of simulating a spider?

Yellowpipe Web Hosting (who now gets a free juicy backlink with less than desirable anchor text) created a handy FireFox plugin to simulate Lynx that makes this whole process painless.  Bet you’re wishing I just told you to go download it in the first place, right?

Once you install and restart FireFox, you’ll be able to access it from Tools > Yellowpip Lynx Viewer Tool and you’re good to go. Here’s a glimpse of what my blog looks like now:

Takeaways for SEOs?
If you’re an in house SEO, I’m pretty sure this is a way to annoy any of your web designers. From a web development perspective though it’s handy to see how subtleties like unordered lists and headings are represented. Not that it means anything in the algorithmic equation of course…

For me this is something I’ll use from time to time to make sure content is being delivered as intended.

Hidden Links? Not So much…
Another oddity that I found while cruising autos.yahoo.com is that Lynx Viewer will show you hidden links. At least, hidden in the sense that they’re linked up without any anchor text. Initially I thought people like Yahoo! Autos (red headed step child for me) was really up to things again….

They weren’t.

I cruised on over to some company sites like SEOmoz, Bruce Clay and We Build Pages.

SEOmoz came back clean.

Bruce Clay had a link to Omniture listed as hidden, but we use that at ADP and all of the sites we tag with Omniture SiteCatalyst code does the same thing.

We Build Pages showed one flag for a “hidden link” but it’s not at all hidden. It’s a link to a profile of Jim Boykin from an image (this one). This led me to conclude that according to Lynx (or Lynx Viewer anyway) any image serving as an anchor to without ALT tags defined will show as hidden.

Section 508 compliance rears it’s head again.

Check out the “references” area too, also found at the bottom of the Lynx Viewer Add On for FireFox. It’s scrounging up some backlinks from… somewhere.

Anyway, that’s all the time I have for search geek fun today. Give Lynx a whirl.

In a conversation Monday night after the Boston SEO Meetup, I was reminded of the criticism I received from a post on Search Engine Journal called 3 Reasons Google Analytics Fails for SEO.

And for an unknown reason, about ten minutes past 3AM on a Sunday morning, I find myself sifting through one of my favorite elements of organic optimization.  Log files. Ugly to the untrained eye, these plain text files are a continual mess of what some would determine to be useless information.

I find them wonderfully mesmerizing. My server logs are more than some silly ASCII art fascination too. They’re the foundation from which my career in this industry was built on.

My post about Google Analytics on SEJ was written more than a full year ago. In that time Google Analytics has become prettier and more polished. It allows for more flexibility in reporting and even runs faster, tracking more goals, sources, conversion points… And whatever else the marketing big wigs deem useful.

I agree that analytics are critical to any marketing effort so please don’t get me wrong on that. But how many SEOs do you know out there who make it part of their regular practice to parse and review server logs? Very few. I guarantee it. I’m not trying to jump on the soap box here either. Some SEOs wouldn’t know what to do with a log file. Others simply don’t care.

But here’s a few reasons I not only care, but encourage others to love their logs…

Spidering Behaviors
Before any page of content is being ranked, it needs to be indexed. And in order to be indexed, a spider has to come on through. The very instant a spider requests one of your pages – a server log records it. What the user agent was. What URL was pulled. If it came from a referring URL. What type of HTTP response the server generated. All of these things are available for every single page requested.

Deep crawls are more a memory know with the advancement of social media – but some large and content rich sites love to see their site getting hammered by spiders eager to gobble up their content and whisk it off to be run through some algorithm of secrecy.

I like to use logs to answer some funky questions… Things like, how often specific pages are being pulled. What the delay is between initial spidering and inclusion in search indexes. What factors help control the acceleration of that process.

There’s a wealth of information in there if you’re hungry enough to learn.

404 Errors
Ever have someone link to your site / blog / domain / content with the wrong destination URL? Well, if you’re relying on page tagging analytics like GA, Omniture or otherwise… You’ll never know it.

Seven years ago I wrote an article with a really cheesy title: Never Ignore the 404.

Give that a read through because non surprisngly, the value of locating and understanding your 404 errors is simple and conventional. In fact… It hasn’t changed. I don’t think it ever will, either.

Historical Value
I’ve been with my hosting provider for years. So many that I actually have logs archived from the same sites dating back to ’99.  Every week my provider rolls over the log files meaning that I’ll always have a 7 day supply on the server.

I scheduled an FTP app to pull the logs and archive them locally. When the proverbial shit hits the fan and I’m left wondering when the last time X happened… I crack open the log file analyzers and start tracking historical patterns.

In August of 2001 there was a massive spread of the Code Red Worm that was running wild  and generating bogus traffic in analytical reports. The firm I co founded with Andrew Gerhart, Top Site Listings saw a crazy spike in traffic that we knew was suspect:

Without any major or radical changes in link popularity campaigns, without any new submissions, advertisements, or email distributions, TSL saw this:

• A 400% increase in daily visitor sessions
• Over 25 newly identified TOP 10 traffic referrers – in one week
• An increase of over 2000% of overall site hits

And on that note… I’m finally tired. Download some log files and have fun though. Seriously. There’s too much information crammed in there not have fun. Be warned though, as Stephan Spencer would say… You may find yourself trying to drink from the fire hose.

I’ve recently begun challenging the annoying mantra of “content is king”. It really is a load of BS and I’m pretty sure we’ve all known it for years. In the very least, be specific. Do you mean that the amount of content is king? Is it the depth of content that matters? Is unique content king?

I’m just tired of hearing more and more people throw around this “advice” like that know what they’re talking about. They, and we – don’t. Algorithms are simply that… Computer driven formulas that retrieve, archive, parse and ultimately rank web documents to match potential search queries.

Is content a factor? Sure it is. It’s just not the king.

At the Boston SEO meetup Monday night I used an analogy I’ve thrown around in the office for a while. That being, if you were take all of the ingredients needed to make a cake and throw them in a pan together… Would you have a cake?

Of course not.

You can pile up your ingredients all day long, but it’s what you do with them that makes a difference. It’s how you mix and blend them together, and, how you bake and frost those ingredients that will make the cake delicious.

Rather than feeding people with cake, in the world of SEO you’re tasked with feeding spiders with content.

If you came over to visit and I told you I baked you a cake you could eat… Would you want to eat it off the bathroom floor? Hell no. Just like the spiders don’t want to sift through 20kb of worthless code only to find some potentially awesome content buried in the midst of some poor markup.

There is no Easy Bake Oven. It’s up to you to find ways to create, organize, format and deliver your content in a manner in which the engines can not only digest… but appreciate.

And the next time someone tries to dismiss you with a comment like “content is king” – make them clarify what they’re talking about. It could prove to be an interesting conversation.