How Penguin evaluates the link quality

Google's Penguin update is about links, namely about good and bad backlinks to your site. It will evaluate anchors of your backlinks and the quality of backlinking sites. Further it will look deeper into relations between your site and sites linking to you.

Further are some factors listed, which will help you to rethink your linking strategy and, maybe, enlighten you in purifying your link profile, so the Penguin gets no appetite for eating your site;)

Following characteristics do influence on how Penguin evaluates link profile quality of your site:

Solution for "stop spamming us. you're wasting your time" at Hacker News / Ycombinator

If you get this message on trying to post something at Hacker News / Ycombinator (not dependently of submitting method: bookmark or site form), it means, the site you try to post is flagged by any HN admin as spam. By mistake or not is another question - i know the case, when YouTube was flagged as spam there. Anyway our intention is not to dispute with HN admins whether our list is spam or not, but rather just to post a link, what we want to post. Deleting cookies doesn't help. But the working solution is simple:

Pro and contra of images encoding as base64 encoded data URI for performance purpose

One of the common techniques of the website performance optimization is the reducing of the HTTP requests amount. Each website asset, like image, needs a HTTP request to be loaded.  On this issue is based an idea, to embed website images as base64 encoded data URI. After an image is embedded directly into HTML or CSS of the website, no additional HTTP request is needed to load this image - it is no longer an external resource, but becomes a part of the source code. This is the good part.

Faceted search, SEO and user experience: how to and why?

Certain ecommerce sites with only few product categories and some thousands of products are able to generate thousands upon thousands useless URLs, through product search, product filter and product option URLs. Sad, but true. We can't do as if this problem wouldn't exist. To leave such URLs unhandled would bring tons of negative SEO impact. There are only few kinds of dealing with such URLs:

• to get rid of them completely,
• to turn a part of useless URLs into useful, and
• to reduce the negative SEO impact of the remaining useless URLs.

Note!
There isn't the magic method - no one of existing SEO techniques does the trick alone. What works is the combination of SEO techniques, which i collect in this article.

 Lets look →

H for htaccess: part 5 of the HASCH the OnPage SEO framework

.htaccess (hypertext access) is a text file, placed mostly in the root folder of the given site and invisible cause of the point at the begin. .htaccess contains directives for server, server software, robots and browser about handling of files, folders and paths / URLs.

Generally there are 2 topics, where .htaccess can be used for SEO purposes:

• Mod_alias and mod_rewrite directives (URL redirects and rewrites)
• load time optimization

Site security has in my opinion only indirectly to do with SEO, so i decided not to make it to a topic of this article.

The last, fifth part of my HASCH OnPage SEO framework is about the SEO mission of .htaccess. I aim to create a kind of multipurpose explained and examples-illustrated checklist about .htaccess usage for mod_rewrite and robots manipulation and load time optimization as advanced SEO objectives. This ".htaccess for SEO" tutorial will be helpful (for me and you) on performing site audits and building new strictly SEO-minded sites. Read the tutorial →