WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

By the way, if you enjoyed my Straight from Google: What You Need to Know talk from WordCamp 2009, you might also enjoy my WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers.

For convenience, I’ll include the video below:

And here are the slides from the 2007 WordCamp talk:

Not everyone has seen this talk, so I hope folks enjoy this talk from 2007!

42 Responses to WordCamp 2007 talk: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers (Leave a comment)

  1. another cool video !!

  2. ‘Geocities and MySpace have a love child’ .. excellent. I’m going to sue it!

  3. Nice slideshow. Looks like there is a definitive answer on using dashes, underscores and no spaces. Awesome!

  4. Slide 27 contains a dangerously wrong recommendation. Remove the and lines or else the protection applies ONLY to the GET method, and allows through all other methods (PUT, DELETE, etc).

  5. Oops. I meant slide 26.

  6. Heh, do you still recommend we don’t use feedburner? 🙂

  7. Matt,

    I’ve noticed recently (like the last year or two) that Google is much better at finding new blog posts than new static pages, even when those static pages are added to the top of the site hierarchy. It’s to the point that Google find my new weekly blog post within seconds (or at the most, two minutes), but the occasional new static page gets ignored for two weeks or more.

    Uploading sitemaps through Webmaster Console has no effect (BTW, it would be a useful feature if Webmaster Console told us which pages it was ignoring). It makes me wonder if Google has been assigning maximum page addition rates to sites, and then automatically takes up the entire ration with blog posts. If there’s anything like that going on, it would sure be nice to have control over it, getting new blog posts indexed is not a high priority for me.

    Just as an experiment, I’ve been using robots/txt exclusions and deleting some old pages on the site to “make room”, but it’s tough to satisfy Webmaster Console on that score, Google doesn’t seem to like giving up on pages:-)

    Morris

  8. Morris, that’s probably more to do with Google getting automatically pinged when the blog is updated vs Googlebot having to ‘discover’ the static page on its own, than any rationing going on. If you’ve got a low page rank, your static page might not get crawled that often. If you’ve got high page rank, it’ll probably get picked up pretty quickly.

  9. Awesome. I hadn’t seen this before. A few things I’ll definitely be changing up…

  10. This is great! Thank you for the tips! 😀

    Now if only I had more time to focus on my blog… :'(

  11. Chris,

    I don’t ping, maybe Blogger does but Google doesn’t have to run to index a file just because a Blogger ping, I’m sure they generally don’t.

    Plenty of PageRank, but I do tell Google (in a sitemap) that static content doesn’t change more than once a month, save their bot some crawling.

    You would think that a sitemap upload in Webmaster Console would be seen as a more important ping than Blogger (if they are doing that), but maybe not.

    Morris

  12. so it’s rly come from 2007,awesome,it seems just recently,’cause those tip i just try and use,it also reflect that those tip still fresh,and seems not to out of date.

  13. Matt, I find it hard to believe that a SE, of Google’s stature, would give an edge, to the lucky few, that employ your “Whitehat SEO tips”.

    IMO, Google would simply seek out the most relevant pages to a search query, regardless of the page being “optimized” for SE’s, or not. In Fact, I would like to think that Google gives an edge to those pages optimized for *Humans* over SE’s.

    Please correct me iF I’m wrong.

  14. Not a blogger, but I still learned, 2 years later, you’re thinner.

  15. Thanks Matt for another nice post. I am not able to watch the video now but yes I read out those information on slides. But yes I will definitely watch that too when I will be at home.

  16. I guess SEO didn’t change much since 2007. Thanks

    Igor

  17. How do you keep your cats so white?

  18. Good review. I am not a big blogger but promote my business site (everything is geared to blogging!). But there are lots of good take away points.

  19. Morris, Googlebot is pretty responsive to a new Blog ping.

    I’d say Google were just trying to strike a balance between finding minty fresh blog pages that can sometimes also rank well instantly (ie the more ‘real-time’ side of the web) and finding static pages the old fashioned way that perhaps aren’t perhaps so time sensitive.

  20. Matt, you were considering using threaded comment plugin. What happened to that consideration? 🙂

    I think you should use that plugin and enable email notification when someone replies to a comment. That will be very helpful.

  21. Chris,

    Fair enough, but with Webmaster Console and sitemaps, it would be nice to get some feedback on the process, if not outright control (over the trade-off, that is:-) Thinking back on it, I’ve had pages go unindexed for many weeks to over a month, really until I use the search quality report form to complain “I can’t find this page I’m looking for.”

    Morris

  22. This was a rockin vid man!

  23. Thanks Matt for the Slideshow 🙂

    What about twitter ? I’m testing twitts in different ways :
    Through API, Twitterfeed…
    Are twitter links (bit.ly, tinyurl…) considered as blackhat linking strategy ?

  24. Hello !

    One question : As you have said I have made a mobile version of my website (mobile.wikine.fr) how to be sure google won’t see it has duplicate content of the main domain? Is there any way to say : “That is the mobile version of …” ?

    And a little tips as you speak about wp-super-cache:
    The plugin can be optimize by removing the htaccess rules associated to it and replace by a short equivalent php code (more faster than htaccess rules).

    On our web server we have gain nearly 30% of CPU load !

  25. Matt, I enjoy your SEO webcasts – great content and humor. Speaking of black hat, I wanted to alert you to a spam site that is causing a commotion in the SAP software community right now. This site, http://www.sap-abap4.com, is automatically lifting content from the SAP community network blog feed which is a massive duplicate content spam situation and a violation to many individual copyright holders. SAP is moving on this as many valued contributors are angry to see their content automatically posted, including this one which was about the theft/duplication and is actually reproduced automatically on the page as well:
    http://www.sap-abap4.com/stop-thief-its-blogtheft-1309/

    Since this site has a page rank of 2, good Google indexing and is based on AdSense revenue, and since it’s a spam site with cloaked identity, though you might want to know. Also: never hurts for Google to score some big points with SAP, who has some higher level executives tracking this. I can introduce you to one of the higher level executives involved if your team decides to take care of this.

    I know you deal with content duplication a lot but this situation in terms of its corporate visibility and community hubbub may be worth a closer look for you if you have time.

    I do not expect you to post this as a blog comment unless you want to, feel free to treat this as private communication.

    Thank you for your time and good works, which have been a major asset in my own business model.

    – Jon

  26. Great info Matt. It’s also nice to see the implementation of Google Docs into a slide. I’m in total agreement about the blank index in the plugins as standard.

    Thanks for sharing,

    Karl

  27. Matt,
    in your other slide show/ 2009 vid you post an page rank algorithm as a joke… Now I’m not a mathematician but I do watch Numb3rs… LOL But I want to ask if that was the real math? If so could you just for fun break it down… Mind you I’m not asking to give away and secrets… Just put it in terms could be understood… It could be a fun green post….

    Anyway.. I’m a big fan… Thanks for all your tips… People think I know what I’m talking now and I’m only quoting you… 🙂

  28. Hi Matt,
    had a question and was hoping you could help or direct me to the right person.
    i’d got a new dedicated server in June and unfortunately the IP was still shared with a few sites, one of which was a spam site or sketchy.

    my traffic dropped in half and i had the IP changed.
    however, google crawl rate dropped to 1/10th and now one of my sites X that linked to this site, and 2 other sites that X linked to are also seeing the exact same pattern of crawl rate dropping.

    wondering what would be a solution.
    would removing links from this one hub site to all sites solve the problem?

    how could i reinstate the site that got a penalty?

    thanks

  29. am not a video guy 😉 saw a part of it but streaming takes time. more of a text and images guy .the slides are a great help, a learning experience. thank you for the post

  30. We know 2007 tips. 2009 tips. What about 2010 tips?:)

  31. Thanks for the info Matt and for sharing the same here.

  32. Matt,

    The video and presentation really helped. But i have question about URL re-writing.
    Can we use /index.php/abc, /index.php/cde e.t.c. in all URL’s for our site. As according to your statement, URL’s doesn’t matter until or unless they are writing in right form like usage of post names separated with dashes and putting limitation to special characters.
    Can anyone please advice.

  33. Hi Matt,

    You’re hilarious! I’m happy you shared this, because it showed me we should have we should have been listening to you more carefully back in 2007.

    Now I’m really mad at myself for not attending WordCamp 2009. Looking forward to those slides!

  34. When would be the next WordCamp Matt?

  35. Thanks for the tips on the WP plugins that you use, I just added them to my blogs.

  36. Ahhh, it seems as if it were just yesterday, sigh….

  37. Matt

    This thoughts in this post is shared by many…

    http://www.pingpongpie.com/2009/08/whinge-post-why-does-google-penalize-sites-that-get-updated/

    Google is contradicting itself if it wants freshly updated sites and then sandboxes them…

  38. Matt,
    I just want to thank you for making my job so much easier. Before I found you and your blog I had a very hard time explaining many of the questions you answer in your posts and videos.

    You have a way of simplifying some of the things even the most sophistacated people have a hard time understanding. Keep up the good work. I hope you do not mind that I syndicate many of your videos on my on blog here: Miva Merchant best practices blog

    Thanks again Matt.
    Eric Mandell

  39. Hey matt, not sure if you are gonna read this comment but I will probably send in an e-mail also…

    How come this site after being suspended for over 1+ years is still top 5 in serps for a certain keyword as well as others?

    http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1498392

  40. Very useful information. I made some of these changes a couple of days ago and I can already see a difference /%postname%/ is very helpful. Thanks

  41. I am so glad I found your blog when I did. You answer so many questions that I have been asking for a long time. As far as the 2009 tips – they make me see things in a totally different light. I run an article site but have so questions about what would violate Google’s policies. We make sure all articles are unique, grammatically correct and also make sure that there are not more than two links per article. Links are only allowed in the resource box etc.

    It might be too much to ask but is there anything else that we should watch out for. We are concerned about outgoing links to other sites that may have been penalized by Google. Right now we do not allow links from sites that have been gray barred by Google. Nor do we allow affiliate links.

    Thanks so much!
    Mark

  42. At last got your great tips regarding SEO, were looking for it online. Really great tips thanks for that!

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