Category Archives: SEO

Sorry for the lack of posts, here are some updates

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been quite busy the last few months and was involved in many projects day and night. Blogging isn’t the only thing I was less involved in, I also spent less time going out and also visiting friends. This is worst than not blogging. So, I’ve decided to reorganize the way I work and also try to delegate effectively and finding new partners to work with.

I should have posted that months ago but it’s better late than never (actually I did that but only on my bio page): I no longer work for Gameloft, I left about a year ago. At that time, I didn’t know if I wanted to keep doing SEO in-house or with an agency. I thought I would do some freelancing while trying to decide what I really wanted to do. It turns out I enjoyed working on my own and decided to keep providing SEO consulting services as a freelance. I’m still based in Paris, which is perfect for networking and finding new clients.

I did do some mobile SEO stuff but not much, it’s not that I didn’t want to, but at that time, not too many mobile content companies wanted to invest in mobile SEO.

I enjoy freelancing, I’ve been able to work on some exciting projects and I have decided to go to the next step create an SEO agency. Working on your own is nice but I realize I rather work with other people, it’s important to create a synergy, this leads to better ideas and more effectiveness. I have partnered with an ex-colleague of mine and we’re about to launch our company very soon.

Also, although I don’t have time for blogging, I’ve become more active on Twitter, which I’ve been using to keep in touch with different friends from the SEO industry, since I also spend less time on forums and reading blogs. Here’s my Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/nadir

I will try and post a blog post with some “tips” regarding SEO consulting and also on how to choose your clients, what you should include in your contracts, etc., I’ve learned quite a lot while working as a freelance, trust me it ain’t always that fun 🙂

Thank you.

PR Sculpting Now Obsolete: So What? Why You Shouldn’t Worry

So Google apparently hasn’t officially confirmed that yet, but now every SEO on the planet is aware of its decision to ignore PageRank sculpting.

If you used nofollow to change how PR flowed within your site, or even Javascript links, that era of easy optimization may be over.

I always knew it would be discounted one day, it was just a matter of time. This technique was so publicized and so abused that Google had to step in.

So the question is: should we start worrying about how we’re going to sculpt PageRank now? Would it be impossible to obtain the same kind of results without PR sculpting (or at least the methods we used to use)?

The answer is a straight NO. In fact, no SEO needs to worry at all.

Remember back in 2005 when every SEO was using link exchange techniques to build links and increase their PageRank? What happened when Google decided to discount these types of links? Did we all give up our optimization campaigns? Nope, we just learned the new rules of the game, we built better links which lead to better SERPs and better websites (at least outgoing links on a page were more useful to the user than reciprocate links).

Back to PR sculpting: you get the point, it’s not the end of the world. If Google really starts to depreciate it, that means that all webmasters are now on an equal footing.

To beat your competitors, you just need to be smarter. Instead of throwing nofollow tags on your “Contact” of “About Us” page links on your 5 page site (which really was useless and could raise flags easily), you’ll now have to organize links in a more clever way.

Based on your keyword research data, add links to your primary pages from your homepage and other important pages in terms of linking value (or link juice, anchor text value, PR, whatever).

At the end it will be the same, but unlike nofollow or Javascript techniques, that technique is not borderline and is perfectly acceptable by Google.

Every webmaster seemed to be using PR sculpting these days, but not all of them are going to be motivated enough to build better internal links, that’s your chance to beat them if you’re smart enough.

Google AdWords Allowing Targeting of iPhones, G1s and similar phones

If you’re a mobile content provider, then you’ll enjoy the new feature available in Google AdWords.

You can now display ads exclusively for the iPhone and Google’s G1. For example, if you are providing games for the iPhone, you can run AdWords Campaigns to only target these users, so you’ll get more targeted users when bidding for “games”, as opposed to buying the keyword “games” for all users (PC users, non-iPhone users, etc)

To do so, you need to do the following in your AdWords account:

To target ads for G1 and iPhone, go to your campaign settings tab in your AdWords account. Then for the “Device Platform” option under “Networks and Bidding,” select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers.”

To only target iPhone, G1, and other phones with full HTML browsers, unselect “Destop and laptop computers”. This way only these kind of phones will see your ads.

Also note that if you’re currently running “regular” AdWords campaign, they will be displayed on iPhones, G1s, and other mobile phones with full internet browsers. You’ll need to opt-out in your AdWords account if you do not want to have your ads displayed on these devices.

I wish Google allowed to target even more, for example, only iPhones, only G1’s, etc. This could be very handy for content providers.

Also, I hope that this kind of customization will be applied to organic search, for example giving more weight to sites designed for the iPhone when people are searching from an iPhone…

Source : Google Mobile Blog.

How to Open a File with Google Chrome?

In this post about Google Chrome, I mentioned that there is no “Open File” function like in Firefox or other browsers.

But there’s actually a way to do it right from your toolbar. You need to use the file: URL scheme

In Google Chrome’s Toolbar, type “c:” and enter (or whatever letter that corresponds to your hard drive), it’s actually a shortcut that will open file:///C:/.
google chrome file url scheme

From there you can browse your folders and find your HTML page or whatever document you want to open with Google Chrome.

UPDATE: It turns out that there is actually a keyboard shortcut to open a file: Ctrl+O. I just found this on Google Chrome Help page, which lists all shortcuts available, more info here. But, well, you can still use the file URL sheme if you want to convince yourself that you’re a geek 🙂

Introduction to GoogleBot Mobile: How does Google build its Mobile Sites Index?

When you use Google Search from your mobile phone, you see two kinds of web pages results: traditional web pages (the same ones that you’ll see from your desktop) and mobile web pages.

To build its index of mobile web sites, Google uses a different bot than the traditional GoogleBot. The bot, named Googlebot-Mobile, actually crawls any website it finds and if it is considered as mobile friendly, it will then be included in Google mobile web index.

So if your mobile site is linked from other sites (be it mobile sites or regular web sites), Googlebot-Mobile has probably already found it and it is included in its mobile web index.

If that’s not the case, you can create a Mobile Sitemap of your site and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools.

Now, regarding the crawl frequency of Google Mobile Bot, it is of course less frequent than the regular one. While Googlebot usually comes to a website everyday, you can sometimes see Googlebot-Mobile not coming to back to your site before a period of 2 weeks.

The chart below is an example of the crawl rate made by Googlebot-Mobile on of the mobile sites that I manage over the last 4 months. As you can see, Googlebot-Mobile came more often in the recent months, but I don’t know if it’s a natural increase on their side or due to the site having more links (that’s the only factor that changed).

Click to enlarge:

googlebot mobile crawl rate

Mobile site owners should be aware of Googlebot-Mobile’s user agent. In fact, it behaves as a mobile phone, because sometimes only accesses made via a mobile phone are allowed to a site (for example, you sometimes can’t log on to a mobile web site from your PC) Google has chosen to identify its mobile bot as a cell phone.

Googlebot-Mobile’s full user agent is currently this one:

Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

As you can see, it behaves as a Nokia 6820, so you will need to remove this user agent in your mobile visits report to make sure you only count those made by real mobile phone users.

Note Regarding Comments On This Blog

The readers of this blog know that links on comments do not have the nofollow tag. I’ve decided to do so because all comments are manually moderated, and Akismet does a good job of filtering spammy comments. So I find it fair to give credit to people who are adding valuable comments to my posts.

But the thing is, sometimes the comments are valuable, but people use keywords in the “Name” field, for example this guy. These comments will never be approved, sorry. It’s funny to see that the author of this comment is from a SEO company (didn’t even think of using an anonymous email address) whose owner is a writer at SEOmoz…

Confirmed: Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo! for $44.6 Billion

This day has come my friends. Microsoft just offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 Billion, or $31 a share. According to the press release:

Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

This could be huge and really shakes up the search industry. Go for it Yahoo! !!!