Kythin's Rants

A while ago a friend of mine, an SEO guy, told me about the concept of ‘spinning’ content. Basically the idea is to get many articles out of one article, by adding replacement words or phrases to the one article you write. Then, every time you refresh the page, the same – but different – article is displayed. It’s mostly a way to confuse search engines into thinking you have more content than you do, but sometimes it’s useful; E.g. if you have a summary of an article which is ripped straight from the main article, you might get a duplicate content penalty from Google every time it looks at your site.

It’s always struck me as odd than nobody seems to have written anything (freely available anyway. $97? Bugger that!) for such a simple task, so I thought what the heck, I’ve got an hour or two, why don’t I write it myself? So I did, and here it is; (more…)

“How many hits do we get?”

This question is almost as prevalent as the “How do I make a site” thing, but it’s a lot more dated. If uttered by a marketer, it instantly shows their age as nobody actually asks about ‘hits’ anymore if they know what they’re talking about.

I’ll break down the terms first so you know what I’m talking about, if you don’t already. (more…)

Google have just announced that their world famous flagship product… you know, the search thing… can now read text elements inside flash files embedded on websites. They’ve been working hard alongside Adobe to get their new algorithm working, and Adobe seems to be similarly open to the idea as I’m sure it’s one of the most requested feature updates from web developers ever since the term SEO actually started standing for something. (more…)