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SEO and the "Information Age" Relevancy is a good thing. It makes search and the world more efficient. Many attempts at relevancy, like search is getting more social, may just create more noise.
Google AdWords Tax Calculator Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system...optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google's yield...
Local SEO - A Case Study How Do You Do Local SEO? It's quite clear that local SEO will be *one* of the places to be in 2010 and beyond. Need convincing? Google and Yelp's failed deal - If local search was unlikely to see a decent ongoing up tick, Google might not have as much interest in acquiring a site like Yelp. Even if Google was just buying Yelp out to remove...
Google's Youtube Caught Cloaking to Spam Google Users... ... & Increase Ad Revenues. Google claims they try to be pretty fair with publishers and publishing business models. They are fine with indexing preview versions of a page and just showing...
Google Sitelinks Come in How Many Flavors? Google has long been known for having "10 blue links" and they have expanded far beyond that. But even amongst the traditional listings there are lots of variations in how they are displayed. Here is a regular result...
What is the Difference Between Google's Secrecy & Your Privacy? One of Google's leading marketing secrets is to appeal to power users. When describing how they designed Gmail, Google's Todd Jackson stated: "We started with the early-adopter crowd. That was on purpose. We wanted to build a product for people who were getting hundreds of e-mails a day, because we believe by focusing on the power user...
Google To Offer Hierarchical Breadcrumbs In Search Results Sorry I haven't made any posts in a while...as we recently took on a big project AND moved hosts on SEO Book (currently on a speedy quad core), and I wanted to have minimal activity...
10 Blue Links (and a Bunch of Other Stuff!) Google announced product listing ads today, a cost-per-action ad program that shows images in the search results: "Product Listing Ads is part of our effort to simplify the advertising process for merchants with large product inventories. Some of the key features of Product Listing Ads include...
Excuse Me, But Where Did Google's Organic Search Results Go? In the past many SEOs have called organic search results the results on the left side of the page and the pay-per-click / AdWords results as the results on the right side of the page. As Google has grown more aggressive witht promoting vertical/universal search I think a better way of defining the portions of the search result page are ABOVE THE FOLD...
More Ways for Google to Embed Themselves... ... in Your Conversion Stream. The Free Credit Report ads have caused such user confusion in the marketplace that the government has felt the need to create a spoof site with $100,000 worth of amateur video to mock Free Credit Report.com. And yet even if you search for the official website -Annual Credit Report- to this very day Google is cashing in showing 3 PPC ads...
Google's Conflicting Push to Move Beyond Search As Google has looked to increase revenues and move beyond being "just a search engine" they have put themselves at the top of the food chain in multiple categories. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc. ;) If you search for books their book search is the result in natural search and...
Google Second Search? Patrick Altoft highlighted how Matthew Trewhella (from Google) may have tipped Google's hand a bit about what was known as the Vince / brand update: Matthew -said- the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards...
Google Tree? Does brand matter? That seems to be a question Google wants to challenge. Eric Schmidt offers quotes like "brands are how you sort out the cesspool".
Caffeine, Search Evolved Before the last SES conference Google announced their new caffeine infrastructure: For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.
Clearing a Fog in Search Yahoo Had No Leverage... In case you didn't look at the stock market today, Bloomberg highlighted what investors think of the Yahoo! / Microsoft deal. This deal was a big disappointment, said Moran, an analyst in Boca Raton, Florida. They needed this deal, and it shows in terms of how the negotiations were concluded. ...Because Their CEO Did Not Grasp the Importance of Search.
Why Google Is Admirable I tend to be somewhat cynical toward Google because I generally do not trust authorities and they CAN and DO kill many web based businesses that are too reliant on search. But to offset such posts I figured it would be cool to do a counter post on reasons to love Google. They pushed search. Back when search was unprofitable they believed in making it better rather...
Google Sends Keyword Suggestions Through Email Google Sending Out Keyword Suggestions via Email? A few days ago Google sent me the following email, which somehow sent me keywords for other websites.
SEM Rush AdWords Advertiser Statistics Google gained popularity with advertisers in part through the accessibility and affordability of their AdWords ad program, which made it possible...
PPC Industry Becoming Far More Cut Throat iProspect recently did a study which showed that the majority of people who respond to graphical ads do so via a latent action other than a click on the ad, like a search for the brand.
Search, The Next Generation Have you seen Wolfram Alpha? Wolfram Alpha is a search service being released this month that, depending on who you listen to, will either change the internet forever, or provide another useful research tool. Either way, it does hint at the possible future direction of search services. Wolfram Alpha hasn't been launched as yet, but you can see some screen shots here.
Google Spam Does Google LOVE.COM Spam? The bigger you are the harder you can spam. AOL recently soft-launched Love.com.
The Dark Side of SEO I recently read a story in Forbes about how Rupert Murdock thinks Google is undermining copyright "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, " 'Thanks, but no thanks.' " and came across a quote about how SEO is some dark...
Behavioral Ad Targeting Phorm/Google Phorm, a UK company that partnered with BT to run secret trials to target ads based on usage data, was roasted by the media with article titles like...
Jonathan Mendez Interview I have been a follower of Jonathan Mendez's Optimize and Prophesize for a while, and recently interviewed him. At SES in New York you are speaking on a panel titled "search becomes the display OS" - what does that mean, why is this shift happening? It is part of the Darwinian evolution of the web. Many people have viewed search as a channel when it is a behavior.
Google Search Engine Rankings Heavy on Branding Originally when we published this we were going to make it subscriber only content, but the change is so important that I thought we should share some of it with the entire SEO industry. This post starts off with a brief history of recent algorithm updates, and shows the enormous weight Google is placing on branded search results. The Google Florida Update. I got started in the search...
Mahalo Spamming Google Jason "SEO is dead" Calacanas, founder of Mahalo, used "SEO is dead" as a publicity stunt to help launch his made for AdSense scraper website. We have noted how he was caught ranking pages without any original content - in clear violation of Google's guidelines. Now he has taken his spam strategy one step further, by creating a widget that bloggers can embed on their blogs.
Google Japan Actually Penalized? After Google Japan got caught buying paid blog reviews it was claimed that Google penalized their own site. Sure their toolbar PageRank...
Yahoo Search Marketing Gone Crazy? Imagine selling web traffic as a commodity in a blind auction, while touting its value based on the traffic being targeted, relevant, precise, and trackable.
Google's .edu Domain Love: Department of Economics... ...Does NOT equal Mortgage, or Does It? Some recent Google shifts have caused a lot of .edu websites to rank for competitive keywords like mortgage and credit card.
Content, Advertising, & Commerce With Google Every listing site or review site has to start off from scratch at some point. Over the past 3 or 4 years it has got much harder to rank thin affiliate database sites, and now that is only going to get harder, with Matt Cutts asking for spam reports on empty review sites. Of course if Amazon.com or TripAdvisor or Craigslist open new sections they can probably get away with using duplicate...
Search Pre-roll Ads Added by Chrome Google Chrome's biggest change from an SEO perspective are that it combines the address bar and search box into 1, and that search box shows...
Google Continues to Expand As both an SEO and a Google shareholder, I have a love hate relationship with the company. More recently I have been feeling love when buying up shares of their stock, especially seeing how they are still buying marketshare while competitors downsize. Google has been showing more ads on search results, and accidentally leaked some AdWords click volume numbers for Cyber Monday.
Google Releases a Competitive Research Tool The Inside AdWords blog announced the beta launch of Google's Search-based Keyword Tool. To some degree the tool is a Compete.com knock off, but with a number of exceptions: This tool is free, Google has more search data than Compete.com does, This shows bid prices and search volume estimates next to keywords (like the Google Traffic Estimator), This shows your...
AdSense Ads in Google Finance Google added an ugly AdSense block to Google Finance. It looks poorly integrated and noisy. They didn't look to take a page out of Yahoo!'s book on this front.
Algorithms Change by Keyword with Google In recent years personalization, localization, universal search, search suggestion, and specialized algorithms like query deserves freshness have altered the landscape of search. But even outside of these add-ons, Google's core relevancy algorithms are (at least to some degree) query dependent.
Google Universal Search on Steroids? Another Google Glitch. I nuked a recent post about sites potentially getting filtered because it become somewhat irrelevant and speculative considering Matt Cutts stated the following in a Webmaster World thread today:I don't consider those rankings indicative of anything coming in the future...
Search Engine Submission & Link Building Years ago (well before I was an SEO, or knew what SEO was) search engine submission was a huge phrase. Only recently has search engine marketing...
Google Recommends Illegal Works? was just finishing up our guide to how to optimize for search suggestion, and noticed something worth discussing. I am not sure if safe harbor covers companies...
SEO - Evolution or Extinction? Marketing is constantly evolving and no form of marketing has evolved more over the last ten years than search engine optimization. That fact isnt going to change anytime soon. In fact, the entire search engine optimization industry is headed for a major paradigm shift over the next twelve months.
Google Loses the "Great Wall" In years past Consumer Reports WebWatch studies showed that consumers struggled to differentiate ads from organic search results and that "more than 60 percent of respondents were unaware that search engines accept fees to list some sites more prominently than others in search results."
SEO For Regional Domains Webmasters are often faced with the problem of how to approach SEO on websites which have a country-specific focus. As you may have noticed, the search...
Domain Authority & Misplaced Trust Sugarrae has a great post on how Google's policing of the web and pushing nofollow are undermining the social network and links that their relevancy algorithms are based upon. Worth reading from start to finish twice, then blogging about it. I would quote it, but a quote wouldn't do it justice.
Google Insights for Search Google recently added search volume estimates to their keyword tool. They also recently launched Google Trends, Google Hot Trends, Google Trends for Websites, and the Google Ad Planner. And now Google hits the competitive research market with yet another product - Google Insights for Search.
Google Beta Testing Showing Related Phrases Near Documents While using Opera I noticed the following Google test which places related phrases near some documents in the search results. When I entered our link building page into the Google...
Microsoft Search BrowseRank Research Reviewed cNet covered a new Microsoft Search research paper on BrowseRank . The theory behind the concept of BrowseRank is that rather than using links as the backbone of a relevancy...
How Microsoft Could Compete With Google Yahoo! is back around the $20 range again today. If Microsoft could find a way to buy them they could quickly gain some search marketshare, but presuming Microsoft builds a memorable search brand they could probably catch up through other acquisitions cheaper.
Google AdPlanner Media Buy Planning Tool Google is set to announce AdPlanner, a tool to help ad agencies find where desired demographic audiences are active online. The WSJ highlighted how the new Google tool can help...
Google Website Trends & The Death of Privacy Google launched a new version of Google Trends which includes website traffic estimates, and highlights.... ( * visitor locations * top keywords * related sites) You need to be logged...
Google AdWords Price Fixing
Will Wikia Search Turn Into Spam? Wikia recently announced that their search service was finally almost worth using. It is easy to rate and vote sites up to the top of the search results. When they have limited marketshare...
Google Temporarily Purges .info Domain Names I do not own too many .info domain names, but a couple of them that I do own have quite solid link profiles. In spite of this, on May 23rd all of my .info sites disappeared from Google's...
Google to Police 'The Truth' Recently a fake story was highlighted in the mainstream media, and the SEO behind it also mentioned it on their site. The SEO space as a whole began debating the legitimacy of such tactics, and Matt Cutts even commented on the issue:
Yahoo! May Carry Google Ads Yahoo! may announce a deal to carry Google ads next week, according to the WSJ: While a broad search ad pact would likely attract intense antitrust scrutiny, the options Google and Yahoo...
Google is Quietly Consuming the Internet TechRepublic asks "Will the Google revolution engulf IT departments?" Each time I write a newsletter, about 80% of the items are about Google. They keep innovating faster than other...
Nationwide Google Wireless ISP Plan, Take #2 After they bid low and lost the C block of wireless spectrum Google has started talking to the media about using unlicensed whitespace. From the WSJ: Cheaper nationwide connectivity...
2009 Google to More Dominant in Online Ads
Striving to be (Below) Average...
Yahoo! Search Lag Google & Microsoft in Ranking Newer Websites Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform, and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo!..
Search Spikes Lower Search Quality & Value Typically each day or each week some roughly average number of people search for a specific keyword phrase or group of phrases. Some seasonal terms may have well known...
Microsoft Bids 44.6 Billion in Cash to Buy Yahoo! Here is the press release announcing a half cash / half stock offer. Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion.
Ranking Affiliate Sites vs Corporate SEM Recently a couple great videos from Gord Hotchkiss and Marshall Simmonds highlighted the corporate SEO field. Corporate SEO is about ensuring everyone creating or managing content has at least a base level knowledge of SEO and keyword strategy. Setting up general templates that are useful and optimized. Clearing away technological issues and limitations.
Do You Care About Google Glitches? Some people are saying that Google #6 issue was just a glitch and not a penalty or a filter. And sure, according to Google's current classification, that change was a glitch.
SearchGuild Domain Auction at Sedo The SearchGuild domain auction at Sedo just ended. $8,655 for a known brand, an old trusted site with references from sites like Wired.com, and 28,000+ inbound links.
Find Top Paying Keywords for Google AdSense I wanted to welcome those searchers to this site by making it easy for them to find this post when they search for related keywords on Google (hence the use of AdSense in the page title).
I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed My site was stuck ranking at #6 in Google for a lot of keywords. The site that I had that got hit was a site that I had not built links to in a year, and the on page optimization...
Pharmaceutical Research Information Properly Optimized The WSJ published an article about the fraudulent research sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies which push antidepressant drugs on children:
General SEM Trends, From Spam to Highbrow Straight Up Spamming... The economics of spam. Thin Arbitrage In regards to that $130 million investment in Geosign by American Capital... it turns out to be the arbitrage investment that was not: American Capital CEO Malon Wilkus told TheStreet.com that as a result of the split-up, his firm recovered a "substantial" amount of its original investment in the form of cash proceeds. He declined to give the amount.
SEMPO is Worse than Search Marketing Associations Search Engine Watch lost its magic glow the day it got scummed by SEMPO. A friend pointed me to a 3 part series on Search Engine Watch about...
Google Ranking #6 Penalty / Filter In early December some astute webmasters noticed that some of their longterm (in some cases many years) #1 or #2 ranking pages in Google now rank at #6.
Many Big SEO Firms Make Chicken Scratch I recently got a copy of AdAge's year in review. Since the 2001 web bust almost every job field in advertising is flat or down, with the exception of a sharp growth in the number of people working as marketing consultants. AdAge also listed the top 20 search marketing firms. I think the 2006 numbers for the 20th firm had like 5 million in revenues with something like 260 employees.
Wal Mart SEO Services Anyone surprised that Sam's Club offers SEO services?
SearchGuild, My Favorite SEO Forum, Goes Offline My buddy Patrick Mnzinger just informed me that SearchGuild went offline - forever. SearchGuild is the forum that (along with NFFC, a few other mentors, and a few lucky breaks)
Why Many of the Best SEO Ideas Are Not Found on Popular SEO Blogs People who are well established can trade on reputation and attract strong enough clients to not need to perform tests to learn the algorithms intimately well.Recently another well known marketer put out a video saying domain names were irrelevant to SEO. Then they got feedback from viewers who said they thought that statement was wrong.
Results Oriented Thinking & Marketing Advice for SEOs Cygnus offered this quote on Rich Skrenta's blog post about PageRank: I like all the traffic types coming in; in order to get that traffic on a couple of sources I have to jump through a few hoops. Big deal. So long as the requirements cost less than the expected revenue from ranking, I'll meet the requirements.
Scams, Spam, & Search ShoeMoney highlights how marketing for some mobile packages are even scammier than ringtones.
Search Engine Marketing & Brand Lift Enquiro performed research sponsored by Google which aimed to determine if search marketing could cause a brand lift. The research stated that buying...
Is Result Diversity Enough? Search Offers a Reflection of What? Search engines toe the company line fighting against spam, but are paid posts any worse than sponsored research? The day before Matt posted about some lowbrow PPP ads used to equate paid post with bogus information on brain tumors, I posted about how some scientific research is polluted by commercial interests, and an SEO Book contributor by the nickname of RFK left this great comment:
Link Buying Crimes vs Sponsored Scientific Research A friend of mine sent me a link to The Kept University, a great article about how corporations are increasingly turning universities into cheap biased research labs. Companies give researchers stock options for conducting research on product development, censor negative reviews, and see a much higher rate of positive reviews.
SEOs Should Use the Meta Keywords On Their Homepage Should the MarketingSherpa's guide to landing pages use an effective landing page? Should a company touting the value of statistics use statistically relevant datasets?
Understanding Google's Mindset on Classifying Spam If... people would not notice it when Google removes your site from the search results. Google can clone your business model without paying writers...
Linkbait is the New Reciprocal Links Page I have been a big fan of linkbait, but for all its upsides it does have many potential risks that are rarely discussed by most marketers. Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.
New SEO Tool: Website Health Check Tool The Website Health Check tool aims to provide a simple and intuitive interface to seeing if your site has any major SEO issues. The site queries Google to grab...
How Natural is Your Site's Growth? Michael Jenson from Solo SEO recently emailed me about a cool new free SEO tool he created called Index Rank. After seeing my post about Google date based filters...
Creating Your Site's Internal Link Structure for Google The Dual Roles of Navigation: Navigation needs to be user friendly and search engine friendly. If you want a user to pay attention to an offer you have to link to it with a call to action in the content...
Google's Search Results Dominated by Doorway Pages & Other Spam The people from SEO Digger recently put together some research on search spam. Some of the terminology they use (like using the word illicit) is inaccurate, but the trends they discovered align well with what one would expect.
The Great Google Data Grab of 2007 If your Google AdWords quality score is too low, Google will allow you to compete in the auction with reasonable ad pricing ONLY if you give them your conversion data:
Google Lies: Oh My _______ Google PageRank Penalty In October Google updated toolbar PageRank values at least 3 times to scare people away from buying links. Sites that had their PageRank values appear penalized did not lose any traffic.
Domain Names & Search Engine Marketing Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic...
[Video] Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results. Make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title for scan-ability. If your title goes beyond 70 characters...
Google PageRank Update in Google Toolbars Worldwide!!! Search Engine Land recently listed a bunch of sites that had their PageRank scores manually edited for selling links. Of course, if you are the publisher of one of these sites, you don't care about an algorithm relevancy score so meaningless that it is edited by hand. You care about traffic.
Google Sitelinks Increases Value of Generic Domain Google recently increased their number of sitelinks to 8 and now list them in a 2 column format. To visualize the value of this, consider that I have a decent sized monitor and only 1 listing not controlled by me appears above the fold when searching for SEO Book.
Google Corrects Domain Name Spelling Errors SEL highlighted that Google is correcting domain spelling errors. Which works to block some typos, but in some instances is pushing...
Yahoo! Search Supports Bogus Webmaster Stats I was sad to see Barry's post about Yahoo! showing garbage stats to unauthenticated users.
Google Lowered My PageRank, Was My Website Penalized? A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if his site was penalized for selling links. The same email went on to say that he is ranking better than ever in Google...
Understanding the Psychology of the Google User Frank Schilling and Shoemoney recently had two great posts about Google. When combined I think they paint a picture of Google that skips past the rhetoric and double talk. Frank said: As a publisher, I've always viewed Google as a bit of a predator in this context.. taking publishers in, convincing them to serve Google ads...
Buy Old Trusted DMOZ Listed Domains & Sites for $8 Justin Laing recently emailed me to let me know about his SEO sitefinder tool, which uses the ODP and the Internet Archive to find DMOZ listed websites that have not been updated in a while.
5 Differences Between Google.com & International Google Having searched hundreds of times on google.ca and google.com.ph I see some subtle differences in how the top ranked global / US results are mixed into international results.
What do You Call Yourself? Google can't catch most paid links. They can't even catch large malware networks that have existed long enough to be reported in the mainstream media. But they can go after business models...
Why Google Hand Editing Seems Random Many people wonder why Google hand editing seems random or incomplete, and why some of the best channels get edited while worse stuff is left untouched.
Fresh Link Building Tips: New Search Filters = Easy Link Research If you are looking to build links one of the easiest ways to do so is to place yourself inside a conversation that is already wildly spreading. Sites like Techmeme and Del.icio.us show what stories were recently hot, and you can find some bloggers who cited those stories using Technorati and Google Blogsearch.
Ride New Verticals or Go Against Trends of the Web A friend of mine just posted about trying to build a business by creating 5,000 sites. Everything I know about the trends of the web tells me that there are far easier ways to make money online, especially if you are willing to grow with the latest trends.
Keynoting a SEM Conference for My Honeymoon I mentioned offhandedly in a blog post earlier, but I recently got married and am going to have a big wedding on October 5th in Manila.
Google Books Vertical Getting a Big Push in Search Results, Clogging Up SERPs Much like Google created a onebox for music, Seth Godin noticed they are now aggressively pushing onebox results for book searches. With Universal search, these verticals not only hit the top of the results, but also backfill in the organic results.
Supplemental Results & Rankings vs Internal Link Weight Over at Seo4fun, Halfdeck created some free tools to estimate your internal PageRank flow based on your internal linkage data and how you link out to other sites.
Just Get People to Talk About You Outside of hand edits, most search engine relevancy and trust scores come from looking at third party votes. You don't even have to be a subject matter expert...
Defending Your Site Against a Google Proxy Hack Dan Thies published a post about how people have been hacking Google's search results using proxies to get the original sites nuked as duplicate content.
Question Copyright Video A friend recently sent me a link to this Google Video about the history of copyright law, where Karl Fogel, of Question Copyright.org, debunks some myths surrounding copyright.
Inside the Mind of a Google Search Engineer A large part of the search marketing game that gets little discussion is perception. Are the search results relevant?
How Google Helps Build & Reinforce Monopolies Should one company own 10 first page results for a commercial non-brand keyword?
Google Caught Selling High PageRank Links, Again Google is buying marketshare for Google Checkout by profiling merchants who use it, and giving them free high PageRank links from Google sites. The Google Checkout blog, currently a PageRank 8 site, recently posted about the success of GolfBalls.com on their blog.
When Does a Google AdWords Advertiser... Become a Can't Ban Whitelist Top Ranking Organic Search Result? Question: I am reading your book. On page 53 you mention using different...
Wrong Page Ranking at the Top of Google's Search Results Question: I have recently launched a new site and got it a few authoritative links. For my search queries related to my brand Google is ranking an internal page instead of the home page. Why?
Customizing Blog Page Titles & Fixing Common Blogger Template SEO Errors If you have sites you have not looked at in years you might be missing out on a lot of profit.
Estimate the Length & Value of the Long Tail for Your Target Market's Keywords Question: How do you determine how much value there is in the head of a keyword space compared to the tail of the same marketplace?
Interview of Danny Sullivan... ... Publisher of Search Engine Land Fame. Danny Sullivan has been covering search for over a decade and is known as the leading expert in the field of search. I recently asked Danny for an interview and he said sure. We talked about search, marketing, and doughnuts.
Meta Spam: Search Results in the Search Results I was chatting with DaveN last night about Google's spam problem. So many spammy listings are dominating Google using the following techniques...
Why Your Google Rankings May Tank Question: I have a client that frequently ranks at the top of the search results then sharply drops. His website's Google rankings keep bouncing back and forth. Why do they fluctuate so much?
How Easily do Authoritative Sites Rank for New Keywords? All you have to do is look at all the spammy .edu pages that rank for stuff like ringtones and prescription drugs to know that if you have an authoritative site it does not take much...
Why Do My Google Rankings Stick After Losing Inbound Links? Question: About a year ago I bought a bunch of links to help build my link popularity and get my site more exposure.
How to Determine if a Link Passes Reputation / Authority / etc... Question: I have been buying many links but it is hard to know which ones count and which ones do not. Is there any way to test if a link is clean and passes link authority?
The $10,000 Robots.txt File I recently changed one of my robots.txt files pruning duplicate content pages to help more of the internal PageRank flow to the higher quality and better earning pages. In the process of doing...
Benefits of Google's Custom Search Engine I recently installed the new business edition of Google's custom search engine. It took about 5 minutes to set up and will likely pay for itself many times over. You can use it by using the search box in the right rail.
Google Ringtone Search (Beta) Google recently announced they are offering an ad free search service to small businesses for as little as $100 a year. They are also rumored to be working on creating ...
Compete.com's Search Analytics I recently got a beta account to the upcoming Compete.com Search Analytics tool. I am not sure of their pricing yet, but Jay Meattle, from Compete.com, told me "the price points will be...
Does Search Disrupt the Business World? When Brin and Page wrote The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine they noted that advertising biases search engines toward the needs and wants of advertisers, and against the best interest of consumers.
Synergy Between Domain Names & Keyword Based Search Engine Optimization Strategies SEO Question: Do domain names play a role in SEO? Do search engines understand that the words are in the URL even if they are ran together without hyphens in between them? What techniques are best for registering a domain name that search engines like Google will like?
Do Article Submissions Work for SEO? Michael Gray recently asked what people thought of using article syndication as an SEO technique. While it may have some upside if the articles get picked up and syndicated outside...
Search, Advertising, Gatekeepers, & The Pending Online Security Wars As email filtering gets better many of the true scammers of the web are shifting to distributing adware on websites. As terrorism is used to help politicians push their agendas, fear marketing and the concept of security are only going to grow in importance online as well.
Leveraging Your Search Knowledge to Market to Different Communities The type of person who reads this blog and other blogs about search marketing knows far more than the average webmaster (or web user) about search.
What Percent of Your Traffic Comes From Search Engines? As an SEO one of our primary goals is to get more search traffic for targeted search terms. Search traffic is typically far more valuable than other traffic sources because it is so targeted.
Buying Sites for Search Engine Ranking Domination Frank mentioned this NYP article about how some companies are buying sites outright rather than increasing their AdWords bid prices.
Inside Google's Black Box A bit slow to mention an article that came out while at SMX, but it is worth mentioning. The NYT ran an article about Google's relevancy algorithms titled, Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine...
Undeserved Ranking Some top ranking sites do not deserve to. When one is lucky enough to be in such a situation it allows us to get away with being lazy, because a site does not have to be too efficient to make money if it is well represented...
Effectiveness Timeline of Search Spam By the time people are looking to automate a no cost SEO technique, as a competitive strategy it is already dead.
Quality Based Pricing from Yahoo! Yahoo! announced their Panama API Monday. They also announced the beginning roll out of their quality based pricing for content websites: Previously, you were charged the same for traffic...
Faults of Human Review Danny Sullivan's recently made a post highlighting the downside of human review for search engines: -Tim- Mayer reminded that what's relevant for a query can often change over time...
Mind Mapping and Internal Link Equity Bill Slawski recently made a post about using mind mapping to think of types of people who would be interested in a site and types of content one would want to create to appeal to them.
2nd Tier Search Engines & Clean Traffic Sources WatchMojo recently posted about their experiences with GoClick: Looking at Google Analytics, I saw that initially -GoClick's- traffic came from sources such as searchportal.information.com...
Information Architecture - The Most Underrated SEM Component Information architecture is probably the single most important and most under-rated aspect of the search marketing strategy for large websites.
Arbitrage and Macro-Trends As an entrepreneur the biggest advantage you have over big businesses is that you can spot trends early and invest in them before they have a chance to tamper with the market.
Google Cleaning Up AdSense Network eBay recently banned search arbitrage, and Google is also trying to clean up their network. eWhisper posted that he thought the recent clean up may be an attempt to make the network...
Cutts Does a Rewrite on Link Advice Matt Cutts posted a series of anti-link buying posts on his blog then quickly moved on to cat blogging. One of his posts gained a lot of attention because it was controversial.
SEO: The Bubble I was just interviewed about SEO for articles by Forbes and the Wall Street Journal last week. This week Forbes, which hosts doorway mesothelioma pages, has another one titled "Should You Hire a Search Engine Consultant?"
Search Engines Give You Tools to Kill Yourself Many publishers hide additional information sections that they want people to be able to select viewing if they show interest in the topic.
Why I Love Google's Supplemental Index Forbes recently wrote an article about Google's supplemental results, painting it as webpage hell. Forbes recently wrote an article about Google's supplemental results, painting it as webpage hell.
Insurance/Real Estate Markets Getting More Competitive Google plans to announce today that they are partnering with state governments to help make their public records more accessible:
Are Google's Search Results Algorithmic or Editorial? Google has been progressively eating their own search results with...Google.
Merging SEO and Domaining Frank Schilling posts his thoughts on SEO while Brian Provost posts how to turn a .org into a .com:
Ask.com to Launches Ad Network SEL reports that Ask will soon roll out a contextual ad network, starting with their own premium branded sites:
Google is Closing the Window of Opportunity Danny reported that Google is moving away from listing news articles in a OneBox, and instead places news results directly in the search results.
The Reason Google Doesn't Like Paid Links Being a (Near) Monopoly is Expensive The more I think about it the more I realize why Google doesn't like the various flavors of paid links.
Yahoo! Search Submit Basic Returns Not talked about much, but my partner noticed Yahoo! once again shifted paid inclusion to a yearly flat rate.
The Invisible Hand of the Online Economy So I just got approved for Google's pay per action advertising account. It was exceptionally easy to sign up, perhaps frighteningly so. Currently there is little risk to using Google cost per action ads, but long-term I think the risk proposition is much uglier than most people appreciate.
SEO for Firefox Update I just updated SEO for Firefox again. Now it numbers the search results, and it allows you to sort the results by any of the selected variables.
Information Quality Wikipedia ranks #2 for Aaron right now. They also rank for millions of other queries.
The Shifting Sea of Search Results Google can never show the most relevant results for everything. No matter what algorithmic loopholes they close they inadvertently open up others.
Eye Tracking - Search to Recall There have recently been a couple eye tracking studies in the news. Jakob Nielson did a study on the effects of clean content organization:
Getting Out of a Bad Community SEO Question: When I did a related search on Google it said that my site was related to some gambling sites. How do I help my site no longer be related to these sites?
Selling SEO Services on a Performance Basis SEO Question: Some prospective customers have offered to pay me on a performance basis. Should I consider providing search engine marketing services for these types of clients?
Keyword Research for Niche Terms SEO Question: I am trying to do keyword research for a client, and he is focused on a niche phrase that does not show up on any of the major keyword research tools.
Is Google Paying You to Edit Their Search Results? Google works so well because they are scalable, but they are not adverse to paying people to review content quality...
Google Algorithm Update / Refresh Not sure if it is correct to call it an algorithm update, but a number of keywords I watch have seen large authority sites get demoted in favor of smaller niche players with spammy keyword rich backlink profiles.
If Links Didn't Matter... David Berkowitz recently wrote an article asking what if links lost their value? Over the past year real editorial links have only increased in value, as Google has been more aggressively requiring some minimum PageRank threshold to even index a page.
If People Hate Your Writing Google Hates Your Website I recently got asked to review a couple articles to see which one was better for Google. But the problem was that it was obvious that the writer did not know much about the subject they were writing about, based their content around a keyword list, and was not structuring the content for Google.
View All Your Google Supplemental Index Results A person by the nickname DigitalAngle left the following tip in a recent comment...
Get Your Blog Out of Google's Supplemental Result Hell Blog Indexing Question: My ranking for my core keyword went up, but most of my site was recently put in Google's Supplemental Index, and I saw my income and traffic drop sharply.
Google Using Search Engine Scrapers If something ranks and it shouldn't, why not come up with a natural and easy way to demote it? What if Google could come up with a way to allow scrapers to actually improve the quality of the search results? I think they can, and here is how.
Historical Search Spam Patterns Some people are wildly speculating that Google and other engines may create historical databases of SEOs and site relationships to identify spam.
Hidden Content Costs Ever since Google has got more selective with what they will index, the model for profitable SEO changed from chucking up pages and hoping some of them are profitable, to where it makes sense to put more strategy into what you are willing to publish.
Is Page Length Important for SEO? SEO Question: When writing content for our websites what is the optimal copy length? Is page length important for search engine optimization?
Getting Good SEO Clients SEO Question: I have been submitting my articles to article directories and submitting my site to directory after directory, but I am not getting anywhere in the search results. What should I do to promote my SEO site and services?
Search Personalization's Effect on SEO Many people are syndicating the story that search personalization will kill SEO. Nothing could be further from the truth. When search engines update their ranking algorithms they create opportunity.
The "Google Doesn't Like My Site" Penalty Are you suffering from the Google Sandbox, the -30 penalty, the -950 penalty, too many reciprical link partners, an anchor text or link spam related penalty, or duplicate content issues?
Shallow Branded Searches vs. Searches with Depth Certain types of searches distribute the bulk of the leads to the top few listed sites, while other types of searches distribute traffic further down the search results.
Unique Data Source Value in SEO The more closed off a data source is the greater potential value you can exploit from understanding it.
Comparing Google, MSN, and Yahoo I recently read Gord Hotchkiss's second eye tracking study, and it rocks. It is quite meaty in nature, and well worth a read for any serious search marketer.
New Update to SEO for Firefox SEO for Firefox was recently updated. The new features include scraping Google cache dates, and allowing you to CSV export the data.
Google's Model for Paid Inclusion BusinessWeek published an article about small advertisers being priced out of AdWords. Given quality score adjustments that may boost ads for sites which have strong...
Scared of the Nofollow Attribute SEO Question: Our site has an about us section which links to press coverage of our site. We are worried about bleeding PageRank, and are wondering if we should use nofollow.
Know When To Emulate SEO Question: A top ranked competitor of mine has a few good links, and many low quality links. I don't think they should be ranking, but they are. Should I duplicate what they are doing?
Digital Ghost Interview DigitalGhost is an odd fellow, in a good way. He is always a blast to chat with, and is a smart guy who quite often gives me lots of good advice.
How to Use SEO to Market a Search Engine or Platform SEO Question: I recently set up a local search site, and was wondering if it made sense to use SEO to market it?
Thousands of Reciprocal Links, Nowhere in Google SEO Question: I have traded hundreds (maybe thousands) of links. I am ranking great on MSN, but am nowhere on Google. What gives?
How AdWords Ads Manipulate Google's Organic Results SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?
Finding Authoritative Links SEO Question: Many people tell me to get authoritative links. How do I find authoritative links?
Google Code Speak - Do You Add Value? Google representatives often make statements like make sites that are good for users, but they don't tell you what specifically they are looking for to determine...
SEO and the Static VS. Active Web A while ago I made a bunch of posts about search (and the web as a whole) being about communication, but I think the posts were so verbose that nobody cared. :)
Can New Domains Outrank Old Websites in Google? SEO Question: I have the same content as a top ranked competing site. Are they outranking me because of their domain age? What can I do to outrank them?
Getting Large Sites Indexed by Google & Other SEs SEO Question: I have a 100,000+ page website. Is there any easy way to ensure all major search engines completely index my website?
SEO Tool Updates I recently updated a number of my SEO tools, and a few other people recently launched some interesting new search engine marketing tools.
Free Competitive Research Tools Rand recently posted a comparison of traffic volumes and competitive research data for various SEO Blogs. Here is a brief overview of the other free competitive anaysis tools available.
Why Get Marginalized? So the web is becoming far more social in nature. Many clients insist on owning a 6 page brochure site (or maybe 100 of them) and expect the SEO to rank them for crumbs.
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