Google’s current dependence on link popularity inherently favors hub sites. Will future algorithms be any more equitable, or will sites with a relatively small search presence be forever fighting an up-hill battle? In this post, I take a look at a law of networks called the Matthew Effect (or the Law of Preferential Attachment) and consider its implications for the future of search engine optimization (SEO).

In today’s blog post at Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty reveals results indicating that Google penalizes sites with over-optimized internal links.
Specifically, she examined the effect of linking to the Home page using keyword rich anchor text. These results are very instructive (thanks Ann!), and they make a lot of sense. Google is right to [...]

“Out him! Out him! Out him! People have a right to know!” Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? But if you think I’m talking about lifting the lid on the personal lives of the Neil Patrick Harrises and T. R. Knights of this world, think again.
I’m talking about exposing black-hat SEOs for the depraved, oiled-up, muscular, [...]

I read an interesting blog post today: Low value content is destroying your website.
The guts of the post: most pages of most websites are low value. People hardly ever visit them, and if they do stumble upon them, they tend not to return. Only a handful of pages are visited often. Furthermore, “… what I [...]

When I first checked Twitter out, I didn’t get it. Like you, I’m always too busy. So I had one quick look, couldn’t see the immediate benefit, and (much to my own misfortune) I didn’t come back for months.
It wasn’t until I had the privilege of seeing Darren Rowse present at a Search Engine [...]

Article marketing, article PR, article submission, article distribution… Whatever you want to call it, it’s a great way to generate backlinks. But are those backlinks really of any use? I decided to find out.
For quite a few years now, I’ve been using article PR as a link building method. For an SEO copywriter, it was [...]

I’ve just upgraded FreeCopywriting.com. Here’s how it works:

You write some copy and submit it to FreeCopywriting.com
Google automatically displays ads whenever someone views that copy
Google pays a commission whenever someone clicks on one those ads
Half the time, that commission goes to me. The other half of the time, it goes to you (assuming you’ve told us [...]

One of the best ways to build the link popularity of your site (thereby increasing your search engine rank) is to check where your competitors’ links are coming from, and try to get links from those sites yourself. (You’ll be surprised where some of their links come from.)
Yes, it’s a simple idea, but when you [...]

Probably the most well known method of generating inbound links is to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways:

ask customers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
ask suppliers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
look for relevant high [...]

There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate.
NOTE: Link generation is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be [...]