What exactly are IP Neighbors?  An IP neighborhood of sites is made up of every website that shares an IP.  If you have a dedicated server that just hosts your site, there’s not much to worry about, but like most people who have shared hosting, there are some things you need to know.

First, you have to find your neighbors.  There are several tools online to find out what sites share an IP.  My favorite search is provided by DnsQueries.

If you have a shared server you need to find out what other sites share that IP with you.  If some other site is malicious and spamming or distributing viruses, spyware or malware, ISPs or search engines might block the whole IP and your site would be affected.  If you find that the other sites on your shared server are spamming or doing other unsavory things, you need to move hosts.

Another reason it’s good to know who your neighbors are is because of the load they put on the server and the internet connection.  If you share a server with video sites or super-flash heavy sites with lots of traffic, your site’s performance may be reduced.  If the server admin hasn’t properly set resource limits for each site on the server, the other sites will hog the box and slow down delivery of your website.  That’s not fair.  You’re not getting what you pay for.

One final thing that I’ll say about the IP neighbor tool is that you can use it to “spy” on your competition.  If your SEO / design competition also provides hosting services, you can very quickly get a deep look into their client base.  That’s all I have to say about that.  ;-)

Most hosts won’t move your site to another server unless you really holler and complain.  Your best bet is to present strong documented proof  of why you want to move and tell them that if they don’t move you, you’re changing hosts.

In order to really understand what your IP neighbors are doing, I recommend that you hire an expert SEO to conduct the evaluation.  The SEO you choose should be able to do “forensic” style studies on your neighboring sites.  If you’re going to pin your hopes on the success of your beautiful website, you’d better have a clean place to put it.

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We’ve all seen the little “cached” link in Google results.  This link can give some useful information for an SEO such as the most recent cache date which can be nice to keep track of so you can trend when Google caches your site.  If you know how often Google caches your site, you can judge the effectiveness of new campaigns and new content based on caching frequency.  A cache is also important so you can check out the text version of your site that Google has saved.  Looking at the text cache can help you troubleshoot content presentation problems, and see what content is not visible to Google because of frames, flash etc.  You can also identify what Google and other search engines think about your site navigation, internal linking structure, and outbound links.  Basically, there is a wealth of information to a skilled SEO.

If there’s so much good info, why would anyone want to block caching?  One reason; content ownership.  If your site offers some kind of service that is required to have certain phrasing in disclaimers, disclosures, etc. the Google cache can be dangerous because it can retain stale information if your terms change.  The real danger here is quite limited, but I worked with a client once where cached legal info was a problem and their attorneys needed to know how to get rid of it.

Another problem can arise from content scrapers.  There isn’t much you can do to prevent a content scraper from grabbing text from your site, but there are a few tricks you can use.  For the example above, I came up with a system so all of the client’s sites and pages contained a call to another server that would dynamically populate their legal disclaimers for pages.  We configured the server that provided the text to only accept requests from certain IPs (the website IPs) to prevent that include from working on other websites.  Most content scrapers just pull the HTML from a site and with this call, the legal info was contained in something that didn’t present scrapeable content.  The problem this client had was that scrapers were stealing and reproducing entire websites and impersonating the company.  This led to legal confusion and the lawyers wanted a way to protect against future scraping of the legal info.  Not only did the solution above ensure every one of the sites had up-to-date legal disclaimers, but it prevented scrapers from getting the content.

Another related challenge is a site called the Internet Archive that keeps a record of your site’s changes.  This site also contains a wealth of information and content that could be used against you.  A skilled SEO can look through the history of your site and reverse-engineer all the improvements you made to increase user conversion.  It’s really not all that difficult.  I could go to a competitor’s site in the Internet Archive and look at design changes they made to improve user conversion.  If I know the competitor and their target client well, I can find out all kinds of valuable information about user conversion improvement that the competitor probably spent a lot of money and time learning.  When I conduct User Funnel Improvement Research and Conversion Improvement Studies I usually start by digging through competition to see how they drive traffic into their high-value conversion pages.  I look at their current site design as well as their change history in the Internet Archive.  Starting from scratch on a multi-variant testing (MVT) campaign can be quite expensive so I use what I learn from competitors and improve it, then start my MVT from there.  By this time in my career, most conversion improvements are intuitive for me, but it’s still nice to look at where other companies are focusing their efforts.

The Internet Archive is especially useful for keeping tabs on other SEO firms that like to brag about their big clients and their latest client acquisitions.  If I know XYZ company has a big new client, I can watch the changes they make to see if there’s anything I can learn about their methods.  A tip for you: don’t advertise your new clients until AFTER you have your SEO improvements in place and the Internet Archive blocked.  This will make it more difficult for other SEO firms to track your changes.  Better still, keep under the radar and don’t talk about clients until you’re way into their campaign.

So, how do you stop Google and the Internet Archive from caching your critical, and expensive information?   Simple.   To stop the Internet Archiver from keeping a record of your site, simply block their user-agent in your Robots.txt.  This will also remove any previous records for your site in their archive.  The fix for Google is also pretty easy and can be controlled at the page-level with a robots “nocache” tag in the HEAD section of your page.  This should really only be used on pages that contain legally sensitive information that you don’t want cached, such as a “terms & conditions” page.

It’s important to protect your site from legal problems by taking every measure you can against scrapers.  This helps ensure the most up-to-date version of your information is available online.  Blocking the Internet Archive helps erase the bread crumb trail of improvements you have spent so much time and money implementing.

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Browser what?  Browser Ubiquity Testing is testing your site in popular web browsers to ensure that each visitor has the same experience on your website.  It’s a very important, yet often overlooked step.  I’m going to share some of my experience with you today and hopefully show you what you need if you want to be serious about Browser Ubiquity Testing.

First, it helps to have a Mac and an PC at your disposal.  Better still is to have a Mac and THREE PCs at your disposal.  Why?  You need the Mac to make sure that the popular Mac browsers render your site correctly.  You need three PCs because there are currently three Windows operating systems in the market, each with a fair share of users.  Why can’t you just use a Windows 7 machine with IE 8 for your testing?  Because it doesn’t render the same as IE 8 on XP or Vista.  You may hear that it’s all the same, but it’s just not.  Each OS has its own version of Flash, Java, Silverlight, etc.  Each performs just a bit different.  Each browser renders CSS differently.  Each browser also auto-corrects bad code differently.  If you designer or developer tells you your site will look right in all browsers, ask them to prove it to you.  Make them show you the browsers they’ve tested.  Ask about mobile.  Ask about a Mac.  Ask about XP, Vista and 7.  That’s like twenty two different browsers, and unless they are a fanatic about user-experience like me, they just haven’t done the work.

Let’s take a look at the browsers I use to test websites.

I use those different browsers on the different machines because each one renders a little bit differently.  I don’t care if someone says that Safari and Firefox share the same basic rendering engine, they aren’t 100%.  Sometimes you’ll see subtle differences on how things work on a site ie. how flash works in a browser, how it renders CSS, java, etc.

Don’t forget mobile browsers!  Mobile browsers do not see the site like everyone else.  I can’t tell you how frustrated I’ve been when trying to view a site from my phone only to find that the whole thing is coded in flash, or, even MORE frustrating is to find a flash navigation!  That just makes my blood boil.  I’ve got a client right now that had a big pretty flash slideshow on their homepage and some developer thought it was a good idea to nest their main navigation in the flash.  Not one user who came to the site on a mobile device could get past the front door, let alone see any content.  The simple solution is to write a bit of code to detect flash capabilities and deliver the right content to that browser.  “What?!  Content Delivery?!?!  Isn’t that cloaking???”  Calm down.  In this example it’s perfectly fine.  I know because I had a nice conversation with Matt Cutts about this a couple years ago at a Pubcon (Or SMX Advanced I can’t remember) and Mr. Cutts said that as long as the alternate content is in the same spirit as it’s fancy counterpart, it’s ok.  Oh, by the way, guess another browser that can’t see Flash very well… Googlebot.

When you find a difference in a browser, and you will, what can you do about it?  Some tools are available to help troubleshoot the code of the page to fix the problem.  99% of the time the issue is caused because a browser’s rendering engine decides that some code is “wrong” and then it makes a decision about how to “fix” it.  Since each browser’s rendering engine makes different decisions about how to fix the code it doesn’t like, it displays differently.  That’s when a tool like Firebug comes in handy.  Trouble is that it only works well in Firefox right now.  Not to worry, you can usually make the corrections in there and it’ll work for other browsers.  The reason the corrections will work in other browsers is because you are fixing problems that are messing up the rendering. The problems can be HTML issues, CSS hierarchy problems, etc.  Since you are fixing the code the browsers don’t have to decide how to do it for you, which is what messes up the page!

Unless you’re pretty technical, you might have some trouble fixing errant code.  Best to just test the site in the different browsers as possible, and tell your developer that there are problems, what they are, and even provide screenshots so they can figure it out.  Also, keep in mind that there are some issues with older versions of browsers because they just don’t render code correctly – even if the code is correct.  You should consult with your developer about how to fix this type of issue.  If they don’t know, find one that does.

Check your analytics.  Users come from all different operating systems with all different browsers and devices.  If they can’t get in your site because you haven’t done your due diligence, you’re not going to get their business.

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One thing that is often overlooked is how important it is to have fresh content on your website.  I recently decided that I would test this notion and leave my twitter account alone for a while to see if it drops out of the results for SEOMike.  After a few weeks, it did drop off as expected.  I decided to make post a few tweets about some SEO stuff and in no time the twitter results were back up to numbers three and four.  Just goes to show, if you don’t keep your profiles active and your site fresh, you’re not going to dominate the listings for your brand.

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I’m pretty excited about the new Canonical URL Tag, or as I’ve nicknamed it, the CURL-T tag. (pronounced curl-tee) If you haven’t seen it yet you can check out a good post about it at SEOmoz here: Canonical URL Tag There is a lot to this tag that I find exciting but most exciting is the fact that it will help protect against getting the search engines confused about content for different countries. There are a lot of businesses that have “unique” sites for individual countries when they really mean that they have unique PRICES for individual countries. The content on these sites is pretty much the same as every other country’s content, but has different prices and currencies. Using the CURL-T will help alleviate the duplicate content problems that the sites have. (Sidenote: I’ve always wondered how good the search engines are at translating content. Would content that is in English but duplicated in German count as duplicate content and need to use this tag?) I also like that Yahoo says that the tag is transitive, but the other engines have not commented that I can find. I’m sure I’ll have more to write on this subject as I experiment with the tag further.

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So, how cool is cuil.com? Not very. For those who don’t know what Cuil is, allow me to explain a little. Cuil.com is a search engine that launched yesterday amid a whirlwind of publicity. Cuil employs some past Google folks and was touted as the Google slayer. Unfortunately, I think they bit off more than they could chew. Cuil had major bandwidth problems yesterday from the flood of traffic they recieved. Their servers just couldn’t keep up. I appluad their back-end folks for doing some awesome load balancing and never allowing it to return a 203, 204, 400, 404 or 500. They always had something up there, even if all it said was something to the effect of “found no results.”

So, what’s so un-cuil? The results. Take a look at this screenshot of the results that are returned for a search on “seomike.” Do you see this site anywhere? Nope. The only result on the page that is me is the DMOZ profile. That’s pretty sad. Oh, and I’m pretty sure the dude from the 1700’s isn’t SEOMike either. Another thing about the results is the organization. There are 11 results on the first page, some with pictures some without, all of them jumbled together. I suppose the first result in the first column on the left is the most relevant to my search, but where do you go from there? Down or across?

Lastly, with it’s current index, Cuil returns garbage results. Most commercial searchers produce result after result of Chinese and Russian scrapers and irrelevant results. Cuil.com fails the most crucial test of a search engine; quality results delivered in a concise manner.
Overall, Cuil.com has a long way to go to become a market contender, and it takes a lot to make up for a poor first impression. I hope they get their act together soon!

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