W-Shadow.com

If you’ve ever tried to write a program that fetches search results from Google, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the excrutiating annoyances of parsing the results and getting blocked periodically. Run a couple hundred queries in a row and bam! – your script is banned until proven innocent by entering an captcha. Even that [...]

Listing recent posts on a WordPress page is easy – there are various widgets and theme functions available just for that purpose. But what about a non-WP page, or even a different site? That’s not that hard either – simply grab some posts from the blog’s RSS feed and output them on your page. In [...]

During the last week I have ported (more or less) the famous SEO for Firefox addon to Opera. Now die-hard Opera fans can also enjoy it’s excellent market research capabilities and enhanced Google/Yahoo! search results
In case you’re not familiar with this outstanding SEO tool check out the “Features” section below.
Download & Installation [...]

Yes, I’m talking about backlinks, the spawn of evil. Everybody craves them, craves the promise of power, wealth and getting laid that links offer. And this craving is both abhorrent to and blessed by the mischievous higher powers, a dangerous path leading into the darkness. Outrageous!
Here’s further proof that links are the cause of suffering [...]

What will search engine optimization be like 30 years from now? How will the SE algorithms have evolved in this huge – from the technological perspective – time period? Will every SEO have a solar powered flying car, or will they be reduced to working at algae farms?

Google has done it again. Just today, I discovered they have banned a specific keyword Google Trends because it was being used to estimate search volume of other keywords. This makes me, as the Cheshire cat would say, vaguely discombobulated, and willing to consider some far-fetched conspiracy theories.

A review of a free Opera plugin that can highlight nofollow links, display Alexa rank and PageRank, show the number of backlinks that a page or a domain has, and more. Basically it is a full-featured SEO toolbar for the Opera web browser.

Google has a free keyword suggestion tool that is supposed find keywords related to a phrase or a website’s URL that you enter. I tried Google.com and got some weird suggestions, like “grave images”. I’m aware of the fact that Google’s bots see websites differently than humans do, but this was unexpected. So I went and tried entering some other popular websites – just for fun. Here are the results.

About two weeks ago I was browsing SEO-related sites and came upon a promising technique for getting one’s pages out of the supplemental index. It’s called “third level push” and looks particularily useful for blogs. This is an advanced technique and you should work on the basic stuff first before trying something like this.

Instead of a detailed tutorial I will offer some thoughts about the “third level push” method and some tips on implementing it (yes, this is going to be a long post).

When I use my GTrends SE tool to find good niches, I sometimes stumble upon valuable niche keywords that I can’t use myself. I simply don’t know enough about the topic and/or don’t think it’s interesting enough to start researching it, so I move on to other ideas. Since the unused kewords aren’t doing anyone [...]

Do you…

Don’t “get” Twitter, Facebook and the like?
Consider “normal” an insult?
Typically only lurk in forums and rarely or never post anything?
Are generally out of touch with popular trends?
Feel article writing or this “blogging” thing are unnatural for you?
Have no idea what the mystical “other people” want?
Don’t really care much about what they want?
Have above average [...]

The picture was taken by my sister a few months ago and I just recently realized that it can be used to represent the eternal conflict between search engines and blackhat webmasters, in a comical way. Or some such. Anyway, enjoy!

If you haven’t heard, the Thirty Day Challenge was a huge “event” happening throughout August 2007; the basic idea – how to make your first $10 online without spending anything. By the way, I’m truly sorry for not posting about it earlier – for some inexplicable reason I kept delaying. Maybe the topic just seemed [...]