A Blog by a career In-House SEO for all the SEO Pros and Wannabes…

I know I haven’t posted for a long time, but having to juggle many work-related and personal tasks at the same time pretty much occupied most of my free time. Then, why am I writing this post? Well, to be honest, this post is really meant to get Google to crawl this site so that I can speed up some of my seo experiments. What kind of experiments? Well, I can’t really want to go into details but these are all tied to recent changes in Google’s algorithm, as well as the way how Google treats various web technologies.

BTW, how have you guys dealt with the AJAX driven serp?

Once again, my hands have been so tied up in the past couple of weeks that I found myself either too tired or too busy to touch this blog. One of the things that got me so engaged was the weird fluctuation in the ranking for one of my company’s sites. After doing some research on SEO forums and blogs, I’ve learned a brand new term coined for this unknown phenomenon - Google Yo-Yo effect.

More on Google Yo-Yo Effect

Once again, I got to apologize to the few of you who follow this blog for the lack of updates and posts in recent weeks. My hands are so tied up with work, friends, family, watching EURO and more work these days, I’m starting to wonder how other in-house SEOs squeeze out time to blog at all. Aside from that, I also don’t feel like beating any dead horse by spilling my two cents on every SEO issue on the horizon, since I’m usually late to post my thoughts compared to other SEOs who have better time management skills than I do.

So what made me want to post today? Well, the wait is finally over, the Google announcement of their new-found ability to crawl and index flash files really is a big news and relief to me. I really couldn’t count the number of times that I have had to struggle with designers and editors and preach to them about how the gorgeous, fancy, creative and eye-catching flash content and navigation are not going to sit very well with the crawlers and myself from an SEO perspective.

More on Google Now Crawls Flash Content

If you have been following the latest buzz in the SEM industry lately, you should have noticed, or even participated in the great black hat vs. white hat vs. your hat vs. my hat debate. If you still haven’t heard, you better start subscribing to a few of the top SEM blogs to enhance your knowledge for your own sake.

More on Knowing What Tricks Are In The Black Hat Is Good For You White Hats

Duplicated content - a common problem that makes publishers cry and SEO professionals shake their head. Amongst the SEO community, the general consensus of duplicated content is that Google would pick the original page (assuming it knows which one is the original page) to display in the SERP while banishing the duplicated pages to supplementary results or simply result pages where a normal searcher would never see.

But does that rule apply to all the sites out there? Maybe not.

More on Duplicated Content… What Duplicated Content?

How and why do you use Sphinn - the social news/networking site for online marketers? Do you think it’s a dysfunctional social media site compared to other big names like Digg and Reddit?

More on How And Why Do You Use Sphinn?

This morning I routinely went on Sphinn to check out the hottest news and ideas in the search marketing industry, and was amazed to see no less than 4 most popular items on the homepage talking about Shoemaker’s “SEO has no future” comment and a similar statement from Marketing Pilgrim’s Greg Howlett. Am I surprised about the reaction? Not really, and I believe most SEOs would disagree with that the “no future” statement as well. So here’s my thoughts on this whole concept, as usual, with an in-house spin on it.

More on SEO Has A Future

Recently, I have been engaged into a huge debate about whether to report black hat SEO tactics and borderline SEO activities conducted by our competitors. You know, things like paid links, link farms, etc.

More on Do You Report Your Competitors For Black Hat SEO?

I don’t know about you, but I have often been asked the question about the best method to geo-target content to different countries or regions. Most of the time it comes down to either use country specific TLDs, or create subdomains and set a geo preference in the Google Webmaster Tools console, and as a third alternative, we can always use sub-folders in a similar fashion to the subdomain method.

More on How To Geo-Target Your .com Site With Google Webmaster Tools

It is a known fact that many websites are getting away with black hat SEO tactics like buying links, cloaking and spamming, and you would believe that, in a perfect world, Google is really serious about swinging its ban stick at sites that violate the rules.

After all, there are plenty of horrific stories about Google penalizing legitimate sites for various marginal or wrong reasons. Yet, there are miraculous stories like this one about an insurance site not only running black hat tactics under the nose of Google, but also rising to the first page in a short period of time. It really makes you wonder if Google is colour blind?

More on Is Google Colour Blind?