Hobo SEO Blog

Republished from Oct 20, 2008 – As this post is getting talked about in forums at the moment I thought I’d bring to the front of the blog so comments can be added if you wish

Anchor Text Optimisation

As a seo I wanted to know – how many words or characters does Google count in a link? What’s best practice when creating links – internal, or external? What is the optimal length of a HTML link?

It appears the answer to the question ‘how many words in a text link” is 55 characters, about 8-10 words.

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We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....

Google used to say:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.

Now it’s guidelines recommend: (more…)

Shortly, I’ll be killing nofollow on this blog. I’ve already started hacking Hobo Custom Link Love For WordPress (free to download). (more…)

That last post was about s*&t links.

This is a quick tip which has worked for me in the past loads of times to get an example of a good link. (more…)

When you build a wall, you do it bit by bit, with the same kind of identical bricks until you have a lot of bricks that all look the same… presto, you have a wall. That’s building. My mate does that. (more…)

Part of linkbuilding month for beginners At Hobo!

Don’t just accept a link from “links” pages on sites as these are about 1% as useful as your signature link on the 10th page of a forum thread – e.g. next to useless! – unless of course the Page is a PR 9 with a lot of back-links itself! (more…)

Part of linkbuilding month for beginners At Hobo!

A bit later than I thought, but I thought I’d kick of linkbuilding month for beginners stating an obvious – Getting other sites to link to yours is easy when you have content worth linking to. it really is that simple in some cases. Your content should be original, but it doesn’t need to set the world on fire. (more…)

With the release of our new FREE wordpress plugin for comments yesterday, it appears we’re a dofollow blog again! Remember that? (more…)

Warning – Major Rambling Works Ahead – Wanted A break from the onpage seo tips serial.

I once said to my boss (who was a dick) I wanted full access to the internet and fully paid home internet access. I was heavily abusing Napster & Limewire at the time. I also wanted a mobile phone as I was handling clients on a pay as you go. He nearly spat his coffee over his face onto his desk over the presentation he’d been working on all week. That sorta thing used to happen with me and him in the advertising agency I worked in.

I also told the management at a later meeting I wanted to bring my dog to work and start and finish whenever I wanted. I’m an animal lover. Either that or I was off to do the business plan I came up with on my own (OK with a mate).

And so, after I won the only award the agency won that year (the same day the MD tried to sack me) Hobo was born. Thank f*ck!

I work on the internet. I would not work for a company that stopped me going on the internet whenever I wanted to. To do anything legal I wanted to do.

Caveat – I ‘work’ about 18-20 hours a day.

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NOTE – Some have noted this free plugin is not working correctly in the latest version of WordPress 3.0 – will try and update shortly - well it works on our install of the latest WP

Recent announcements with the way Google Pagerank flows via nofollow links at Google has bloggers all a flutter. I asked Marty if he could sit down and modify a WordPress plugin that basically rewarded regular contributers with a link, but removed the actual link from comments from those that haven’t bothered to continue participating on your blog past that first comment. (more…)