Phil Muncaster reported recently in V3.co.uk that hackers will be using Harry Potter to distribute malware. Harry Potter himself won’t be waving his magic wand anytime soon to harm anyone’s PC (He’s the good guy! Come on!) but what the hackers will be doing is simply distribute malware by attaching them to bogus sites advertised as pages where one can download the upcoming movie “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” even before it is released. Black hat SEO will be playing an important part in their scheme because they will be optimizing these sites in order to rank well so as to get the fans that just can’t wait for the movie to come out.

Right now though with the would be victims on the path to unauthorized sneek peaks I can’t imagine the Harry Potter guys trying to do anything about the it. After all word of the malware distribution might even help quell illegal early distribution of the movie.

Aside from the Harry Potter movie, Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at security vendor Trend Micro, is reported to have said that he also expects black hat SEOs to use the Michael Jackson tragedy to do harm and profit.

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If you’ll be somewhere in the Washington area on August 24 and 25 make sure you sign up for SEOmoz’s PRO Training Series 2009 immediately. SEOmoz’s training seminars get sold out really quick so you’d better decide quickly. This is one of the seminars that will actually help you learn something useful about SEO providing value other than networking. Seminar’s limited to 220 participants only.
The good thing though is if you’re too far away or found out too late you can still get the knowledge they’ll be sharing on the seminar via the SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar 2009: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD, which is already available for pre-order.

Stuff you’ll learn in the seminar include:

* Content Creation
* Site Architecture
* Linkbuilding
* Keyword Research
* Social Media Marketing
* Conversion Rate Optimization
* Competitive Intelligence
* Vertical Search
* Search Engine Penalties & Guidelines

There will also be elective courses.

Those in Europe will have to wait till October for SEOmoz to go to London to hold another seminar there. Speakers will differ for the two seminars but Rand Fishkin will be present in both seminars.

Price will be $899 per person. SEOmoz PRO members of course can get in at a discounted rate of $599. The seminar DVD can be bought for $249.

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Pagerank sculpting, which as defined by Matt Cutts is simply trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using different methods such as the “nofollow” tag, is still plausible, however, in his post “PageRank Sculpting” he tells us why he doesn’t think you should bother doing it. Here’s an excerpt of his post on pagerank sculpting.

I wouldn’t recommend it [pagerank sculpting], because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

So when is pagerank sculpting useful? According to Matt Cutts it is useful to use the “nofollow” tag for some pages such as links to a shopping cart or links to log-in pages but only “because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.” Other than that it would pay more if you spent your time optimizing your site in other ways.

Again make sure you make the best use of your time by giving attention to your site architecture and to your site’s actual content. Make sure that users find the info they need just a few clicks away from the main page and make sure that all pages you want indexed are crawlable.

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Every single link counts. That’s my motto when it comes to link building. While it is true that some links pass more value than other in my opinion you still shouldn’t overlook opportunities to get a backlink, whether it’s just one or a couple or a whole load of links. This is also true whether the page rank of the linking page is zero or ten. A link is still a link.

However, when link building remember that while links always count it can count AGAINST you. We all know what I mean by this – those links that associate you to black hat methods that will get you penalized by the great Google and the other search engines. A clear example of such links is links that you got from link farms. Make sure you do not sabotage your efforts by joining link farms. Getting backlinks by paying websites to link to your page(s) is also a big no-no IF you do this to get link juice passed on to you. You can only solicit paid links if you make sure that those links don’t get to pass value to your pagerank. So I guess in SEO terms there’s absolutely no point in doing this. However if your motive is to simply generate traffic to your site or create awareness then there is no problem. Just make sure you specifically ask webmasters of the sites with paid links to your site to use the “no follow” tag.

Again, remember every link counts so make sure the back links you get count in the way you want them to.

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Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all came together early this year to support the use of canonical tags. But what are canonical tags and what’s the use to us?

Canonical tags were created to help address the problem of duplicate content. We already know that there are already existing ways to address this problem such as 301 redirects and the use of sitemaps, however, in many instances these solutions are not enough. To make life easier for webmasters canonical tags were created. The tags help with duplicate content by telling search engines what URL you want them to index in place of a page’s uglier URL version. The syntax is also very simple and makes use of only one line that needs to be typed into the HEAD part of the page document. For example if you have a page with a URL like http://www.somepage.com/ example.html?sid=54321 you of course would prefer the search engine not to index that URL, especially if you have a nicer duplicate URL like http://www.somepage.com/example.html. So what do you do? All you need to do is type in:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.somepage.com/example.html"/>

And search engines will automatically honor your wishes. No sweat. Duplicate issues resolved. Now that’s one less problem you won’t need to worry about.

You can also watch Matt Cutts’ interview with WebProNews last February to learn more about canonical tags.

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One of the most indispensable tools for any webmaster who wants to rank in Google is obviously Google’s Webmaster Tools, after all no one knows better what tools you need to keep track of your site’s statistics. Besides Webmaster Tools allows us to tweak settings so as to ensure that Google takes note of our indexing preferences. Webmaster Tools also allows us to do so many other things. Anyway Google has recently redesigned and released a new user interface for the Webmaster Tools.

For me the best feature of the new UI is the new one-stop shop dashboard. It makes it much easier to view relevant data. If you haven’t switched to the new UI you can check out the new functionalities without logging into your account by simply watching the YouTube video embedded below. You’d better start getting used to the new UI though because the final switch to the new look is coming pretty soon. No need to worry about the learning curve though because the new UI is really much more easy to use than the old one.

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We all know that stale content is not really good for your SEO efforts. An old domain is good but the content should be current. Fresh content is even more important nowadays thanks to Google’s new search options.

Search users can now filter results even better and opt to see only the most recently updated websites. Users can choose to show results from the past 24 hours, past week, and past year. Because of this you can bet that even with great content and a very high ranking site your site will NOT appear among the results if you do not have any new content that was put up within the time frame specified by the user. Of course unless you are maintaining a blog or has a website whose nature provides constant new posting material (e.g. new sites). In cases like that you will need to find a solution. The usual solutions, since they are the easiest to implement, are posting feeds and/or creating a blog. Even then it is near impossible in most cases to make sure that you have new content every 24 hours. What you need to keep in mind though is that if the reason for your site does not really require daily updates then you can be pretty sure that your target audience wouldn’t be using this new search feature to filter results. However, that doesn’t excuse having dated content on your site. Make sure you go over your site’s content from time to time and still update your content as much as possible.

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In my last post about images I gave some tips on how to optimise images. There is said that you should:

• Store images in a single directory;
• Use keywords in the file names; and
• Use Alt text.

These still hold true and are very sound ways to make sure that your images on your pages help your SEO efforts. Aside from these though here are more tips. They’re mostly common sense but like in most things the obvious once are the very things we overlook.

• Use relevant images only – Make sure each image you use is relevant to the content near it.
• Size matters – I’m talking about the actual size of the image and not the file size here. File size does matter but you want it to be smaller to make loading pages faster. On the other hand for the actual image size note that search engines think that the bigger the image is the more relevant it is to the site’s content. So do not go making a non-relevant decorative image larger than the important ones.
• Image quality is important – You want to choose good quality images over poor ones. The quality I’m referring to is the clarity, contrast, etc. Of course you have to compromise between quality and file size. Find the right compromise.
• Place important images at the top if possible – This affects not only SEO but also user-friendliness. However in cases where the images accompany a certain paragraph as illustration it is more important to place it near that paragraph since you want the image near the relevant text.

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