Articles by Ian Lurie

If you make a living selling stuff to consumers, chances are the next few months are pretty important. Here’s a quick list of things you need to get in order before Hanuchristmakwanzaa: 1: Get to work on local search In case you’ve been under a rock, Google has released a new blended search results page [...]

How’s internet marketing doing these days? I give it a B-. An 80%. The other 20% got lost in the noise. Good stuff Internet marketing is growing up! Marketers with multi-million dollar budgets no longer look at me like a cockroach when I walk into their boardrooms. My relatives no longer think I sell porn [...]

I’m off to ad:tech Tokyo to participate in the “Search Marketing Strategies: Local vs. Global” panel. I’m very excited – it’s my first ad:tech, and my first time headed to Japan. I may miss a few blog posts here and there, but will try to Tweet/blog sessions as I attend.

Last week I wrote about duplicate content sin #1 – screwy pagination. Today I’m going to explain a much simpler, but bigger problem: The inconsistent default page link. When I say ‘default page’, I mean whatever page you’d first see if you navigated to a folder on a web site. So the default page for [...]

Yes, some of the links in this article are affiliate links, I might be evil and biased and out to rip you off, FCC requires me to say this, etc. blah blah. I’ve been rejiggering my SEO toolbox lately: I used to focus on the ‘cool’ stuff – things I thought would impress clients, generate [...]

We spend all our time hand-wringing over Google and Microsoft’s intrusions into our private lives. We freak out over the Patriot Act. Well, they’re all pikers compared to Facebook. Facebook has allowed companies like Rapleaf to match up our Facebook user IDs with web browsing histories. Yep. They can now match up your browsing habits [...]

This may surprise you, but I tend to dwell on the negative. Here are the ten cringe-inducers I spend the most time pondering. In chronological order, no less: 1990. I went to law school. OK, it wasn’t a marketing mistake, but it cost me several layers of stomach lining. Law school also nearly killed my [...]

Just what is the long tail, in SEO? I do lots of writing about SEO and keywords, and I throw all kinds of terms around. But sometimes I suddenly realize I don’t define them. I’m building a glossary for The Fat Free Guide – one of the first terms I’m working on is the long [...]

Well, after spending 45 minutes trying to figure out github, I’ve realized I’m not as much of a nerd as I thought. So, in the mean time, here’s a nice ZIPped archive of the code for the Levenshtein link redirector I’ve written in PHP. I’ve named it the Levinator – Dr. Doofenshmirtz would be proud. [...]

Earlier this week I wrote about why duplicate content sucks in SEO. I’m going to start mixing in tutorials/explanations of common ways folks end up duplicating content on their sites, too. Today’s topic: Pagination. It’s oh-so-easy to generate duplicates with those little 1 2 3 4 >> at the bottom of the page. The setup [...]