Blog & Portfolio of Leland Fiegel

Why Google Doesn’t Care About Validation

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One time I got an email from a “SEO expert” telling me that my site was doing so poorly in search engines because one of my pages had a few validation errors and that I needed to hire an “expert” like him to “optimize” my site so it would rank better. Here are the facts:

• The site ranked in the top 10 for phrases like “free wordpress themes” and “wordpress themes” which are pretty sought after keywords in that niche.
• The site averaged about 30,000 total visits per month from search engines (mostly Google) for other various long tail keywords.
• The site had about 400,000 incoming links from various websites, quality content, and a good reputation within its niche.
• The XHTML validation errors were because of a YouTube video I embedded. The default code YouTube provided caused a few errors in validation.

Anyone with half a brain when it comes to SEO will know that a strong link profile, quality content, and a solid reputation will trump a few validation errors on a page (with the exception of a few edge cases).

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Stop Whining About Digg

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First it was the DiggBar, now it’s the “hijacking” of Digg shortened URLs. Here’s my opinion on this whole controversy, summed up into two words:

Who Cares?

To be fair, it seems a lot of people do, but I don’t. Here’s a few questions you should ask yourself before whining about Digg.

Is anyone forcing you to use Digg or their URL shortener? You can use tr.im, TinyURL, bit.ly, and many others for your URL shortening needs.

Did you notice there’s a little “X” button in the top right corner that users can click to remove the frame?

And to all the SEO people out there: do you realize there are other things you can do to improve your rankings besides getting a direct link from Digg?

I wonder what would happen if Digg decided to nofollow all their outgoing links. What a firestorm that would create in the SEO community.

Common Sense SEO Tips by Matt Cutts

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To those of you who don’t know Matt Cutts – he’s the head of Google’s Webspam team. I found this video of an interview with him, which I’ll embed below.

It goes over link building, social media, onsite SEO, and some common misconceptions – like having to pay Google to be listed in the results (which isn’t true).