Advanced SEO - Explicitly.me

Do I Need To Know Blackhat SEO

February 15, 2024 by Romesh

Sometimes it’s important to ask questions that may have answers that you already know. One such question popped in my mind yesterday, which obviously found its way onto twitter: Ok Question tweeps: As an SEO do you NEED to know “black hat” tactics? Thoughts? To my surprise I had a phenomenal number of responses. I …

Is Your Hosting Leaving You Vulnerable To Duplicate Spam?

April 29, 2023 by Romesh

Most of us that aren’t extremely technically minded tend to fall into a series of errors that our more savvy friends would be able to help us out of. And if we, those who are in the web / online marketing industry get caught out, then I wonder what happens to the less savvy population? …

WordPress Plugins Secuirty Flaw A Blackhats Dream

April 28, 2023 by Romesh

Part of understanding Blackhat and Hacker Spam is to put yourself it their mindset. And that means asking “How Can I Use This For My Benefit?” Well I have been doing a lot of that lately. And one of the genius ideas that I had was full site takeovers. Then I toned it down. And …

PPC As An SEO Research Tool

April 28, 2023 by Romesh

Paid search gives you many options to test and play with the SERPs and Keywords in a way that SEO cant. I have used PPC on several occasions to make decisions around SEO, and quite successfully. It is often hard for businesses to understand the “value” of SEO, and I know for a fact that …

Dynamic Meta Descriptions For SEO

March 19, 2025April 28, 2022 by Romesh

I often say that you need to try new things, test new theories, play with the SERPs as often as you can. After all, if you blindly follow what others, and don’t try your own experiments, you won’t be a competitive SEO. At the same time, read others experiments, learn from them, but try and replicate …

Domain Research Plugins and Add-ons For Firefox

April 29, 2021 by Romesh

Domaining gets a pretty bad reputation. And I can understand why – you dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how dodgy some domainers are. But on the other hand, buying and selling domains, speculating or testing keyword rich domains are part and parcel of the web. If you are into Black Hat …

SEO Automation Theory and In Practice

March 19, 2025April 29, 2021 by Romesh

I have explored the theme of Black Hat SEO before. What I haven’t highlighted, is that there are many subdivisions in Blackhat too. Ranging from SERP Spamming to Autogeneration of Content, the field is immense. And there are some serious geniuses in it. I will point out three key points that should stay in your mind before you complete …

Boutiques.com Launches Googles New Fashion Portal

March 19, 2025April 29, 2021 by Romesh

I have been saying for a while that google is going for a Content Play, and in a big way. So far all the changes that have been happening, such as the Credit Card Comparison, Google Places, HotPot, are all integrated into the search properties. Of course google owns other content properties such as Youtube, Picasaweb etc. Last few weeks there …

Site Architecture For SEO

March 19, 2025April 29, 2021 by Romesh

I was very glad to catch the founder of SEO Gadget presenting what I think he is an authority on, Site Architectures. You will see why when you scroll down to the resources part of this presentation. Suffice to say, he has dealt with some heavy weight site structures and is no stranger to the optimisation and …

SEO And HTML 5

March 19, 2025April 29, 2021 by Romesh

So what’s the big news of last week? Okay, I promise not to mention the iPad. Oops. Sorry. To be perfectly honest, I am looking forward to seeing the proposed product in practice, but may not actually buy one. The huge reason for this is the lack of Flash support. Now, don’t flog me – I don’t …

SERP Sniffing – A Long Tail Keyword Strategy

March 19, 2025February 16, 2019 by Romesh

The Art Of SERP Sniffing SERP Sniffing is a technique that has been used by a number of thin affiliates, blackhats and spammers to identify profitable long tail keywords to optimise for. Typically this technique charts thousands of easy pickings across the SERPs to bring in long term, scaleable traffic. I would like to explore …

Negative SEO – 4 Killer Strategies To Look For

March 19, 2025February 15, 2019 by Romesh

Gutted I couldn’t make it to both the sessions at 10:30, I had to miss Tom Critchlows talk, Advanced Analytics for Affiliates. For those of you who know Tom, you know he really gets analytics, and in fact he recently posted for the google analytics team, no mean feat! I hope to catchup with him later if he is willing to share any tips.

Manipulating Google Suggest Results – An Alternative Theory

February 15, 2019 by Romesh

Google Suggest is a Reputation Management Nightmare at times. A number of companies have been hit and hurt by results that show up with “Company Name + Scam” for example. The problem with those results is that when users see the suggestion, they are immediately tempted to click on them, as opposed to their original query.

10 Things You Should Have Learnt from the JC Penney SEO Fiasco

February 15, 2019 by Romesh

You are probably bored reading about the JC Penney Fiasco. I know I was for a little while. But I couldn’t ignore this opportunity – it isn’t often that you get to see a Brand SEO campaign that is nearly burnt to the ground because of dodgy link building practices. You want a case study? Well it’s all in there. Intrigue, suspicion, politics, dirty PR, etc etc.