Bill Slawski who blogs as SEO By the Sea is one of the very best SEO Brains. A frequent posting method of his takes search engine patents or whitepapers and analyses them for insights into the search engine’s algorithms.

His recent post How a Search Engine Might Distinguish Between Queries from Bots and from Humans is typical Bill. Insightful and very useful.

If you’re interested in learning more about how search engines work “under the hood”, then add Bill’s site to your feed reader and follow him on Twitter.

Sometimes I want to know when the Googlebot has visited a page. The following script will:

• Check the referrer for the Googlebot
• Cross check the IP that it’s really Google IP
• Email you with the details.

Continue reading “PHP Script for checking when Googlebot visits”

Posts from Ari Ozick are a little like a London bus. You wait ages for anything then a bunch come along at once.

First Ari posted on a subject dear to me, How to Up Your SEO Income by a Factor of 10: Testing over on SEO Book.

Then I notice this absolute gem The SEM Toolbox: 79 Tools and Tips Every Search Marketer Must Have on his SEO Contrarian site.

Lets hope like the 94 there’s a few more around the corner.

Zach Daniel at Dallas Internet Marketing has published 17 Motivations for Linking, the second in a series about finding the “Linkerati”.

Interestingly Zach has looked at studies behind the giving of citations in academic books and compared the motivation there with website linking.