Every blackhat tactic can and will be detected one day. As long as you keep under the radar everything is fine, but you’re bound to get caught at least once in your career. And when you do get caught, you need to make sure only one of your projects will be affected. Search engines like Google are very good at linking different accounts to the same person, so a blackhat SEO needs multiple identities.

How do you hide connections between websites?

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So far Google was all about reading what normal users could read. If you made your website accessible to all visitors (including visually impaired), you had a perfect site for Google. Every guideline in the Webmaster guidelines has always been focussed on making a good website for users and forgetting about (spamming) search engines.
But now Google wants us to do the complete opposite. If links are extremely relevant to your users, but not contextual enough to search engines, you need to nofollow them or completely remove them to be able to score. Matt Cutts has written a few blog posts on nofollowing paid links.
What will they think of next? From now on you have to make your website for search engines and hope that it is ok for your visitors?!

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What can you do when search results on your name are full of negative comments? Potential customers are increasingly checking for online references before they trust a website, company or person. Your own website is the most important factor, but directly after that people use search engines to see what other sites say about you. In this article I will give tips how you can cleanse your online reputation.

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How up-to-date does your SEO knowledge need to be?
I frequently talk to people that aren’t convinced that they need to keep their SEO knowledge up-to-date. “Old whitehat knowledge works just fine!” is what they say. And in some cases I think they have a point. Most SEOs don’t need to read all the SEO news everyday. But what changes do you need to check on a regular basis?

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A valuable link has Relevant Authority Transfer or RAT. This means it should convey authority on a particular subject to the website it is linking to. When searching for the right links, you can assess the value of a link by using the following checklist.

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Yes, it is possible to send data to Google Analytics without executing javascript! In this tutorial I will try to explain how this can be done and I will give some good examples. Server side analytics enables you to measure data like rss, image or pdf visits.

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Google Analytics is a fairly complete webanalytics program, but it has some flaws. As I showed in my article on Google Analytics tweaks, you can overcome many of these flaws with the use of tweaks. In this article I will show what you can do with custom filters and extra profiles on the same website.

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Yeah! At last Google shows most or all backlinks to sites I control. Webmaster central (a.k.a. Google Sitemaps) gives a relatively good impression of the links to your website. This is what most SEO’s should have been waiting for.
Read Matt Cutts his blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-provides-backlink-tool-for-site-owners/

Quickly add all your (legal) sites that you want to be associated to you and to each other:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

update:
Yesterday Google accidentally made it possible to check backlinks to pages outside the verified domain, just by entering the url in the address bar. After this beginner mistake Google took down the backlinks checker and fixed it. I just got time to check about twenty websites and download the CSV, but the data was definitely better than that of the Yahoo! backlink checker. Thanks Google!

Finding the right search terms to target with your website isn’t just about finding the most popular queries. “The Long Tail” in search is all about finding large amounts of search terms with little or no competition. The importance of the long tail is known to many search engine marketeers, but what do they really know? In this article I will unvail some misconceptions that exist on the long tail.

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The behaviour of people using search engines and vertical search is different for every target audience. As a search engine marketer you should always know the target audience and how they search. In this article I will share some of my experience on the subject of “searcher behaviour”.
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