Removing or Blocking Your Content from Google

Here's a good list of resources on removing content from Google.

SEO Contract Template

SEO contract template.

This Blew Me Away

Craigslist.org - according to Compete.com, has ranked for the last 6 months between the 15-20th most trafficked site on the internet in the US. They receive about 28 million visitors a month. None of this is surprising.

But this, wow. In a recent interview at the Real Estate Connect NYC 2008 conference, the founder Craig Newmark was asked the following question and gave this response:

AW: Do you find that social news sites like Digg (which often promote your Best of Craigslist content) help your traffic or user involvement at all?



CN: We don't have the stats for referrers, so no real clue, but I'd guess they don't help significantly.

Google URL Removal Feature Works for 90 Days

I was surprised to find out that the Google URL removal feature only functions for 90 days. The intention of this according to a Google engineer is to avoid any accidental removals. The short of it is, you still need to handle properly blocking internally in your back end via robots.txt and NoIndex tags.

Optimizing Porn Sites

I actually thought this was a really interesting topic, how to optimize a porn site. There are huge challenges there, bad neighborhoods, no text, no one wants to link to you, huge reciprocal linking issues. I did a search to try to find any info how how porn SEOs (if there is such a thing) or porn webmasters do it and found a serious lack of info. SEO4fun did this nice post on the subject of the challenges of porn optimization, based on a login crawling study that Sebastian is trying.

I guess the big enlightening point was that porn IS based on images and video, so you have to target Google image search and heavily optimize your photo content. By the way, Google is truly the largest single collection of porn on the internet.

SEO Interview Questions

This is a good list of questions to ask a candidate in an SEO or SEM interview.

The SEMMYS

The top SEO and SEM blog posts of 2007 voted on by the best in the industry. Certainly worth a look.