Reading Challenge 2014

I came across a good post on Reddit that got me thinking about what some of my goals are for 2014. I’ve already got some fitness goals (first triathlon) as well as personal goals (done with an office job by August). But, being a fairly avid reader when time allows, I thought this was a good idea:

  • The goal is to read as many books as you can written by authors from different US states.

  • An author’s state is the state in which he was born; Hemingway lived in Florida and Idaho, but he was born in Illinois.

… Read the rest

Interesting state of affairs

As I was researching some local results for SEO services in the upstate area, I came across a wide range of services and quality. It was a little scary to think of a business owner wading into this, although my instinct is that most people would go with a service recommended by an associate or business partner.

For some of the smaller areas in upstate NY I came across SEO “firms” on the first page of results that were offering package directory submissions for hundreds of dollars per month – not a bad gig if you can land it, but certainly not a way to make your client rank!… Read the rest

Duplicate Content Is Not Spam

I’m glad I came across this article in Search Engine Land today – I’ve seen tons of forum posts, articles, and heated debates about whether or not duplicate content will negatively affect your site or rankings.

The actual value (25 to 30 percent) seemed high to me, but is not really surprising when you take into account summaries or curation (what the next part of this article is!), product descriptions, and general distribution of information.

Here is the relevant part of the article on duplicate content:

Matt [Cutts] said that somewhere between 25% to 30% of the content on the web is duplicative.

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Overuse Of Schema Markup

There is an interesting question that I have seen asked in several locations without a clear answer – what is considered overuse of Schema.org markup? For example, would a local business owner be in trouble with search engines if their NAP was marked up in the footer of every page of their site?

 Initial Reaction

My initial reaction is that this is ridiculous. It’s common, and sensible, for business owners to have their contact andschema markup for smaller businesses location information on their pages.… Read the rest