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Pretty much every SEO myth in one spam email

March 11, 2014
by Gradiva Couzin

Even SEOs get silly SEO spam emails. Usually, I delete them without a backwards glance, but this one caught my eye because we recently gave a talk on SEO myths, and Boy, what a bounty this email contained!

Looking for some RSS (Really Stupid SEO?). Check out the whoppers in this spam email I received this morning:

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors,

for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, [Uh, no.]

also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. [ya’nope]

On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. [As my dad used to say: horsepucky]

No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO. [huh?]

So what is good On-Page SEO? First your keyword must appear in the title. [OK, I’ll give you this one]

Then it must appear in the URL.[not so much]

You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).[oh, my head]

Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.[Wait, didn’t you say this already?]

Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page.[Of course, Google knows that all relevant text starts AND ends with keywords!]

You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.[Sir, I think you forget yourself]

There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword…. [now this is just getting silly]

The saddest part of this? Plenty of people get these emails and take them seriously – some even dropping cash on the SEO providers behind the email. Please, for the love of all that is decent, just say no to silly SEO!

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Google’s Pirate Penalty – Any Changes Yet? [Updated]

September 20, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Over a month ago, Google announced that it would be adjusting its algorithm to reduce the presence of sites that have had a large number of DMCA takedown notices. We haven’t seen any changes since then, have you?

It’s rare for Google to announce an algorithm update, and even rarer for Google to make a change that is designed to please content creators in Hollywood, but that is what happened in early August 2012, when Google told the world that it would be adjusting its algorithm to penalize for copyright violations. Search industry insider, Danny Sullivan, dubbed it the “Emanuel” update, and those of us who work in the search space for entertainment clients waited eagerly for big changes in search results.

We haven’t seen any. Have you?

[UPDATE: October 26, 2012. We rechecked the ranks and continue to see very little change. Only two sites dropped out of the ranks, and these were not major players:

iwannawatch.net – 5 ranks last month

4shared.net – 4 ranks last month –]

Out of natural curiosity, and because of our role working with entertainment clients, we wanted to know the effect of this algorithm change. A couple days after Google’s announcement, we ran a rank check for about 35 search queries that are likely to bring up pirate sites. These included “watch movies online” and “direct download movies” as well as keywords including specific film names.

Not surprisingly, we found major pirate and torrent sites running rampant in Google’s results. Sites like Pirate Bay and isoHunt showed up in top-30 search results for the vast majority of the terms we tested.

Two weeks after Google’s announcement, we ran the same rank check again. We expected to see a drop in the presence of pirate sites, but there was almost no difference, as you can see in the before-and-after comparison, here:

(The drop from 254 to 234 in the total top Google positions for these pirate sites is well within normal ranges of rank fluctuation.)

What gives, Google? Is this the extent of the change you announced, or is the algorithm change still yet to come?

Admittedly, our search terms were focused on a single slice of the industry, Hollywood movies. If anyone else has documented a shift that we’ve missed, post a comment and fill us in – we’d love to learn about it!

Pretty much every SEO myth in one spam email

Even SEOs get silly SEO spam emails. Usually, I delete them without a backwards glance, but this one caught my eye because we recently gave a talk on SEO myths, and Boy, what a bounty this email contained!

Google’s Pirate Penalty – Any Changes Yet? [Updated]

Over a month ago, Google announced that it would be adjusting its algorithm to reduce the presence of sites that have had a large number of DMCA takedown notices. We haven’t seen any changes since then, have you?

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