At the Google Dance this evening, Gillian (SEOmoz’s co-founder and president), found the employee badge of a James N. She tried looking around for someone to give it to, but was distracted and slipped it into her bag. I’ll try to drop it off with a Googler tomorrow at the conference, but we just want you to know James - your badge is safe and sound.
Don’t worry, Mr. N; your barcode and last name are safe with us. If only we had less scruples, we’d give Rebecca plastic surgery to look like you and send her to inflitrate…
p.s. Almost forgot to give this out - drinks for links! Pass it around…
Continue Reading August 9th, 2006
A new phrase seems to be catching fire at SES San Jose this year - "Spamming on the Square." First off, a bit of background is in order; the phrase "kidding on the square," popularized recently by Al Franken, refers to when an individual who pokes fun or makes jokes has a hint of seriousness behind them. For example, in the following exchange:
Rand: Hey, Matt, how are you?
Matt Cutts: Good, good - and you? How’s scraping Google treating you?
Rand: Oh… low blow, but fair enough, fair enough.
Matt Cutts is "kidding on the square" with me - he’s just giving me a hard time and laughing and smiling, but we both know that SEOmoz might occasionally scrape results from Google. Likewise, spamming on the square is when you leave a "spammy" link, but do it in a way that also provides enough value or creates a relationship. Here’s some examples:
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Adding lots of good, relevant, useful content to Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal of getting your user profile page important enough to where links from it will help you get spidered and ranked.
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Posting in a blog’s comments a relevant link, that just happens to be about your own site - knowing that with a bit of luck, the blogger might write about it.
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Creating a Squidoo lens or Ma.gnolia page - ostensibly to build on the concept of social media, but also because you know you can get a link out of it.
In some ways, once the Pandora’s Box of how links help rankings has been opened, it’s almost impossible for any action an SEO takes on the marketing/promotion side to be considered anything but "spamming on the square."
BTW - Here are today’s slides from today’s presentation on Search Algorithms.
Continue Reading August 9th, 2006
Recent developments in the SE world have led to massive changes in MFA (Made For Adsense) sites. Basically they’ve been banned by Google Adwords with their new quality system that’s in place.
While there are a few ways to get around these changes, it’s caused quite a few people to see significant drops in their earnings.
Google has also been rather effective lately at dumping spam sites - although there are some networks out there that are doing just fine it is certainly more difficult than it was - say - 6 months ago.
I believe the next target by the search engines will be Thin Article Sites. What are these? These are basically 20-30 page sites that have an article on each page along with Adsense and/or affiliate links. They’ve already seen a decrease with the quality algorithms for Adwords so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Google target them next.
If you’re shopping for a spam program, my suggestion to you would be to make sure you do plenty of research. There have been quite a few programs released lately that are either copies of stuff that was effective over a year ago and no longer works or programs that work in small doses.
G-Man
Continue Reading August 8th, 2006
I don’t know if you’ve noticed the calendar in my sidebar, if not, it’s a very recent addition that is currently pleasing me very much.
Calendar comes as a plugin from the Nucleus guys and it has just added 10,000 pages to Blog SEO. I was at first shocked that Google has over 15,000 pages indexed (I haven’t written nearly as much material), but now I’m beginning to realise how effective a CMS can be if used properly.
Results are already seen as Googlebot is crawling my blog at least two or three times daily. I’ve been seeing visitors to pages only added by the advent of this little calendar plug-in. Perhaps in the future I will write a little more on SEO for Nucleus based blogs since so much is already written on Wordpress.
Now I’m just curious, how many of my blog readers use Nucleus as a CMS of choice?
Continue Reading August 8th, 2006
As SEOs and webmasters we re always looking for ways to get the search engine spiders to crawl our sites and the deeper the better. This article shows you how to target Yahoo s crawler and convince it to stop by regularly….
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Continue Reading August 8th, 2006
I was watching an episode of Strong Medicine the other day. This particular episode was about a rape victim who had a daughter from the rape that needed a kidney transplant. The only match was the man who raped the mother who was in jail for 25 years.
In true Hollywood fashion they glossed over the details of the transplant and had everything worked out and the transplant done within a day or two.
Having gone through a stem cell transplant recently (second time and I survived thank you very much!) I know that it’s not quite so simple. There’s lots of testing to be done along with a long recovery period.
But it got me to thinking and wondering if Google should release their algorithm?
Usually I’m in the camp that’s attacking Google and their decisions…in this particular case, however, I think that they’re doing the right thing and here’s why:
- I’m sure that the algorithm is extremely complicated at this point having had tweaks for years and several major rewrites. Communicating that type of information would certainly water it down unless you released actual numbers which leads me to reason #2.
- We already know that Google does frequent updates to their index on a weekly or even daily basis. There’s no way that they could actually keep the public informed of all of the changes in the algorithm even if they wanted to.
I would certainly love to know what’s in the algorithm but we’re going to have to continue to play with the black box and see what affects the listings.
G-Man
Continue Reading August 8th, 2006
I’ve just completed tweaking CSS on Blog SEO and results are pleasing as far as I can tell. Drop by and say what you think of the new-ish design. As far as I know everything should work fine in both IE and Firefox. I am also opened to any tweaking suggestions to make Blog SEO pages more readable and eye-pleasing.
Continue Reading August 8th, 2006
A complete marketing genius at Aviva Directory ran the page strength tool on 100+ directories and lists the results here. I spoke today at SES on the SEM via Wikipedia & Tagging panel (slides here) and fielded more than a few question on a related subject - how to get your content noticed if you don’t have a large distribution channel. I think Aviva’s hit the nail on its head with this one. They left a comment in the page strength tool blog post and made some very compelling, useful, relevant content.
BTW - Sorry for the slow blogging. There’s 3 parties every night with way too many free drinks and sessions start at 9am. Even my blog-addicted self can’t find the time necessary to make posts happen. I’ll have to rely on EGOL, 2K, Guillaume & Michael (as Kat, Matt, Rebecca, Gillian and I are all here in San Jose). Don’t worry, though - as always, we’ll have lots of tasty wrap-up tidbits to report on Friday.
Continue Reading August 8th, 2006
Yahoo! Search blog has finally announced one of the coolest and easiest to use applications available, Yahoo! Search Builder.
In a nutshell, Yahoo! Search Builder allows one to own and build a niche targeted search engine.
With Yahoo! Search Builder you can create a custom Web search engine by selecting a set of trusted sites to search across or you can tune the search algorithm to the topic of your choice. Beyond Web search, Search Builder includes Site search and News search.
Then generate the code youÂ’ll need to add your search engine to your site. You also have control over the look and feel of the search box and search results page. Voila! Instant search engine!
This can be a very useful experiment especially to those companies looking to add something cool to catch the geeky wavelength of an audience.
Continue Reading August 7th, 2006
Yet another reason why Google should be paying more attention to search. Whoops, search and advertising seems to go hand in hand. Via Hitwise:
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the first time Google broke 60%.
Continue Reading August 7th, 2006
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