I would of thought with any webdesign the customer can at least expect decent page titles and headings which are relevant to their industry to be included with the webdesign.  It’s fair I think that the customer should see their web pages indexed correctly. I’m not talking about extensive SEO services here, just about the basics.

The philosopy of building a solid foundation rings true every time a website is built and through good communciation with the customer SEO services should never be an afterthought.

Dan Horton SEO

If such a statement is contained then no big deal, but if it starts spreading as common knowledge people will just assume it is true. For every person creating media there are 100 people quietly consuming it, and if you are successful and have mindshare people will try to tear you down every month.

When Unprovoked Try to Be Empathetic, if That Does Not Work, Then Consider Highlighting the Issue

If they are already creating unprovoked brand damage then they are probably angering other people too. If you can't clear it up directly it might be a legitimate strategy to call them out on it such that other people they offend down the road will discover your brand. Another popular strategy is to ask friends to clear it up if you want to keep yourself removed from the conflict.

Do Not Make The Google Engineers Editors Angry

We are all flawed, and the goalposts are always moving. One day we are at the top and the next day people are surprised at the fact that we are a spammer.

One of the things that is most likely to kill a successful SEO job is boasting about the ROI and/or how easy it was. Ever since Google started aggressively editing the search results the difference between a successful strategy and an ineffective one is often one blog post. Brent Csutoras gave a lot of great examples of strategy gone awry in his STFU post.

People Inadvertently Screw You

Back around 2004-2005 Google was having issues with 302 redirect hijacking, so I made the SEO Book affiliate program use 301 redirects. I mentioned that those links passed weight in our online SEO training program. 301 redirecting affiliate links is a popular way to build link equity, but after Rand used my site as an example in the following video those 301s no longer pass PageRank.

People Trash Your Site as Spam to Justify Their Spam

Consider Future Effects

Many years back Jill Whalen and I had a falling out because I was bidding on people's names via AdWords, and she did not like it. She thought it was scummy for me to bid on other brand names, but she had no desire to police her affiliates when they did the same. To this day she still slings mud at me, calling me a black hat, etc.

Public Online Communities Eat Their Young

Dan Thies, who wrote an ebook a couple years before me, had to battle through some nastiness as well, so I am not sure what percent of what I dealt with was natural feeding off the young or if the people complaining about me were actually mad at me. Given that they didn't mind when they profited from what they did not like, I would guess that it was mostly the former.

The big issue with eating your young is that you never know when it will come back to haunt you.

Someone Might Become a Star

Some people who get established allow their egos to grow beyond any rational limit, and are nasty to many new people entering their field. But the thing is you don't know who is going to become a star down the road, and who will have the influence to crush or embarrass you.

Consider how Shel Israel angered Loren Feldman years ago. Shel had long forgot doing so, but then Loren registered ShelIsrael.com and put up a sock puppet show that lasted for months!

That conflict just ended, but the associated brand damage will last for years. Here is Loren's take on why he did what he did:

When I first started my career, you made it a point to bury me online, and more importantly back channel as well. This is a fact. You and your crew went out of your way to take food off my plate. I never forgot that, and now you have something you’ll never forget.

Communities Are Full of Cliques

One of the things I struggle with in the SEO field is that so many of us end up doing so well that sometimes we let our egos get ahead of what made us do well and we forget where we came from. And so I hear negative stuff about interactions between many friends. Its hard to be empathetic when it seems everyone has wronged others at some point in time. I know I have screwed up more times than I can count, and much of the conflict ends up being drama for the sake of marketing.

PageRank was, is, and will always be a flawed concept. In some cases the best person wins, but in many cases the best person loses because they were not good at public relations and marketing - or because they made somebody angry, and they decided to blackball them.

Some of the top communities in the search marketing field do not get along well. Incisive Media employees and Third Door Media employees are banned from attending each other's conferences. Ever since Danny stopped doing the Search Engine Strategies conferences I have been asked to speak a grand total of 0 times. Guys like Graywolf and I were replaced by sponsored panels.

ok first things first we know Matt Cutts does not like people buying links we also now that Matt Cutts said they use cookies and Ip addresses to help them catch spam..

So what I would do  is run a search query in Google Logs for anyone that went to text link ads then find your IP and Cookie, then look at all the sites you visit, remove common sites like the BBC, Twitter Facebook and CNN etc,

Then I would look at the sites you go to the most ( those will be your own or your clients, at a wild guess) then cross reference all the other sites you have visited, the chances are if you are buying links you will be checking them at least 1 a month to make sure everything is ok, you may even be telling google via the Toolbar that you are in tla and going to sitea, then back to tla then siteb etc etc

Then I would correlate the data, find out which sites are linking to the prime sites.

but I wouldn’t do anything just yet, you see if I find a site that’s buying links, the chances are the other links the link selling sites will have been purchased, via the same network so in a few months I can watch the trades happening and I just would collect all the data, then 1 day I would just devalue all the PR on the selling sites, if the buying sites didn’t have enough links holding them up I would ban them has well

Now you would think that if you did everything possible to stop me from finding you out, well think about all the others that are buying links, how many are buying links where you are what if they are stupid and get caught, in turn I would find you

DaveN

OK there was a side bet of a £100 between the partners which made the whole project more fun, you see no one in my opinion that went to the main site would buy that 15ft beast ;), so we built www.onebigchesterfieldsofa.co.uk and tried to give the beast a character and guess what it worked, somebody found Ches ( that’s the beast’s character ), loved the idea and bought him and ordered a few more, you see you can sell anything on the Internet

DaveN

Google removes informational Videos on Google Privacy

There used to be a Video on YouTube
href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY”>here, it was on the official Google channel and it was Maile Ohye, explaining how Google uses your browser cookie..

But what’s worse is it looks like Google have removed all videos about Privacy ..

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=google+privacy

DaveN

Update: The videos are now coming back (11.57)

Use firefox clear you cache :

To clear your cache for Mozilla Firefox:

1. Open Firefox.
2. Clear your browser’s cache.
   • For Firefox version 2.0:
     1. Click Tools > Options > Advanced.
     2. Click the Network tab.
     3. Click Clear Now under the Cache heading.
   • For Firefox version 1.5 or earlier:
     1. Click Tools > Options > Privacy.
     2. Click Cache > Clear.
3. Click OK to exit.

Next step Clear you Cookies : also note this could also remove your saved settings for sites you’ve previously visited.

To clear your cookies for Mozilla Firefox:

1. Click Tools > Options > Privacy.
2. Delete your cookies.
   • For Firefox version 2.0, click Clear Now under the Private Data heading.
   • For Firefox version 1.5 or earlier, click Cookies > Clear.
3. Click OK to exit.

Now we need to make sure that we delete cookies when we Close the Browser 1

If you set tick all the the boxes like I have, you will delete the cookie when you close the browse, but if you really want to make sure, click on Exceptions and add something like :

But be Warned, Google really wants that cookie on you system.. so while you can browse Google and see Google ads !! if you want to use Gmail, Google analytics’s or Google Adwords you will see this screen

So I would advise take the Cookie but delete it when you close the browser

DaveN

She plans to make at least a couple posts a week, so please subscribe. :)

Given that Google is already biased against some domain extensions (Google dropped .info names a month ago) and trillions of dollars have been spent advertising businesses connected to current TLDs, many of the new TLDs will be fighting an uphill battle from both a search relevancy standpoint and a mindshare standpoint.

When Google's Carter Maslan was interviewed about Google Local he stated

We are experimenting with how much verification vs. how much ease of use. There are variables as to when to prompt... In the past it had been too liberal, and is becoming more stringent. We are experimenting on the quality of the listings and spam. There is no hard yes or no answer to the correct structure.

That strategy works well for Google Local, Mahalo, Squidoo, Digg, etc. but new domain extensions will struggle with growing in a similar manner though, because there is significant opportunity cost to building something great on them, and if they are too lax and spammy they might get filtered out of Google's search results.

How might the marketplace react to an increase in the number of competing domain extensions?

• This will likely increase the .com premium for domain names (and local GTLD premium for .de, .co.uk, etc.) as more TLDs lead to more confusion in the marketplace, which leads consumers back to the default
• It might provide a cap the price that some generic names without businesses trade at. As noted by a person who commentedon this Domain Name Wire post, "Why would disney spend millions on Resorts.com when they can get their own extension for MUCH MUCH less and just go with Resorts.disney."
• I suspect .org names will still remain strong because so many organizations already use them and most non-profits will not be able to justify spending 6 figures on a domain extension.
• The .net domain name might suffer a bit, while some of the less meaningful TLDs (.info, .biz) will sharply drop in value
• Decent - but not great - .com names (like 3 or 4 word domains without much exact match search volume) might lose some of their value. I suspect even more of a drop for lower end .net and .org names.

What new extensions will do well?

• A few new generics (.web and .blog) might get some traction, but most will fail. Even if .com names keep increasing at 7% a year, there is a lot of certainty on going with the established standard, and a lot of risk in going with something brand new. Who knows if an extension might eventually go away after you spent years building a brand on it?
• The new TLDs will create a great opportunity for branded community websites built around memorable ideas and causes, but the backers need to be good at public relations to gain meaningful awareness.
• Some of the new TLDs will buy sponsors (like when Demand Media partnered with Lance Armstrong on Livestrong.com) to gain awareness, while others will gain mindshare by making hosting and other paid for services free and easy.

Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results "freshness," and spam).

Whenever we create a new metric, it's essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go "back in time" and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

quote from Google :

Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam).

Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.

So where are the pitfalls here, first off the big one that jumps out here is the amazing amounts of botnets and malware that’s out there in the wild that could be set to create fake traffic..

example: botnet users

search google for : keyword phrase you want to rank for,automate page click through keep on google don’t pass you brand, if brand found fake a click. If brand not found in first 2 -5 pages, random per user, search brand + keyword, brand.com + keyword

also

log spamming has been around for years, also if you thought you need protection before from Google, set up a caching proxy, take all your own data and look at you search patterns what sites you visit, a there are couple of things you will notice,

so you might want to do or at least think about.

a) Think about work search V personal searches
b) Install, foxy proxy or another firefox proxy plugin
c) Make sure you purge your cookie on closing your browse
d) Run a dictionary on google when your not searching
e) Pray that Sergy never wants to be the president of America

DaveN

Quite a few years ago now before I became the SEO I am, I used to be like everyone else, I would go to a Search Engine, type in what I wanted clicked a few blue links and either bought something or was informed about what I was searching for, it used to take a few seconds and I was Happy, But today things are so different.

So now when I search, I still click a few blue links but do I buy or get informed NO.. I look at the links on the page I have just landed on, but I don’t see them as links, I see NoFollow and Followed links, if I landed on a page with five links and 1 is followed and the rest aren’t , I think that the followed link was a purchased link or just part of this webmasters network ( I would spend 10 - 20 minutes to prove that ) and the nofollow links are affiliate link or just wasted links. and if it was a high pagerank blog, omg I need check to see if the comments are followed or not ..

but it gets worse I have to find the H1 then copy it, and see if page ranks #1 in Google for that phrase then I start deleting words to see how it ranks for shorter tail version of it’s H1, so what’s that all about, I have even found myself shouting at my laptop, can’t you see that the Title and H1 are not SEO synchronised what is this webmaster doing….

But it doesn’t stop there I have an IP to country plugin to show me where the site is hosted, so that I can also check to see if the page I have just found also ranks just as well in the local Serps.. why I have found the page already, just Buy something or be informed I hear myself say, obviously if the site is ranking well for long and short tails queries, in both .com and localised search then have to check the back links out, I have to find the authority links. but by the time I have done all this seriously, I have forgot what I was looking for or why I was searching in the first place, but hell I know why that page was ranking so well..

Then I remember what it was I looking for, not to fall into the same trap I use a different keyword phrase, and sure enough I hear myself swearing under my breath #1 the WIKI the next 3 sites are MFA’s or comparison sites, so I get on my MSN messenger ping a friend and ask them !! and that’s why SEO destroys the internet

For each link you put on a page online, before May 30th, 2008 midnight you could have entered into a draw for the cash prizes. For example; if you put up 5 links on various sites, blogs, or even in a forum... you get 5 tickets into the draw. We did not accept 5 links on one URL as 5 tickets to the draw; it needs to be 5 separate URLs.

It is much harder for Google to kill paid links when those links come as a side effect of a contest or promotion.

Email lists of would be internet marketers have grown less responsive as blogs offering free information have sprung up, but having an email list or other audience that is not public will be a valuable tool for running contests through such that you can buy links without being called a spammer.

The beauty of having a list or large RSS subscriber base is that even if Google tries to take away your PageRank they can't take away your audience, which is already sold on you and do not care about your PageRank.

9 days ago me and Becky adopted a little black cat, from a friend of Rory (my hardware engineer). We already have a 13 – 14 year old cat (cork) so I don’t quite know what we were thinking bringing a little 1 year old cat into the house thinking all would be well. We did have plans to get a kitten when Cork has Karked it but we just happened upon this homeless little cat.

Our first thought last week when we first got Poppy (we renamed her from Salem) was that we’d just introduce the 2 cats to each other and all would be well. How wrong we were when the mother of all cat fights started! They say that cats fighting is the worst noise there is and it’s pretty horrific. Needless to say we decided that it was a bad option…. so what were we to do?

The answer is that when you introduce a new cat you have to do it slowly, and create an isolation room for the new cat (includes food, bed, litter tray), while the existing cat has the run of the house. Slowly you introduce the scent of the new cat to the old cat and vice versa. You can also put the existing cat in the isolation room while the new cat gets some freedom in the house. We had some hissing and spitting when the cats happened to see or smell each other but this has gradually subsided. The new cat was even out in the garden at the weekend and caught a bird … so was definitely settling in.

Anyway after a careful week of slowly introducing the 2 cats together it is amazing how adaptable they are. I was amazed how my old grumpy cat has just accepted the new cat, and amazed how the new cat has got used to us and got into a routine.

A complete overhaul of the way in which people register domain names on the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris. at present we have country level tld, but now business and cities can request their own TLDs, so TLDs such as .sco for Scotland, or .ldn for London, and .nyc for New York could be come place but I bet on .news, .porn .kids and so on will be the ones where the bidding on land grab will happen.

also domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved.

But I always check a few things, I identify myself as various spiders, use a slightly different variety of the SEO page tool and to see how the server responds, ibl’s etc etc and this server was well … misbehaving a little

Now the question I would be asking if I was Matt is why when I look at the page that is listed in your Sitemap XML from home computer I get a 301 but if I a GoogleBbot goes it gets a 404, shouldn’t you be serving the same content to everyone :) and lets say if I was Matt would I be digging a little into the Press Releases and the content on the database side ?

I not blaming Rand don’t get me wrong I’m sure he asked the owner first I mean in this day and age you really have to be careful cause Google is everywhere and knows everything… well 98%

DaveN

It's the work on your desk.... It's the work on your desk. Do well with what you already have and more will come in.

When you look at some of the most successful companies many of them live and die by that. In spite of Microsoft's monopoly position in many markets Bill Gates still views his product through the eyes of consumers.

Gord Hotchkiss recently posted an article about how many of the newer mega-companies (like Google and Apple Computers) are built not just by viewing customers as an asset, but because the founders are customers of their own products and services, who built the service they wanted to use.

The more I think about it, the more I don’t believe customer-centricity is the key. It’s not a goal, it’s a by-product. It comes as part of the package (often unconsciously) with another principle that is a little more concrete: product-centricity. Product-centric leaders, the ones that are obsessive about what gets shipped out the door, are customer-centric by nature. They understand the importance of that magical intersection between product and person, the sheer power of amazing experiences. The iPhone is amazing. Disney classics are amazing. My first search on Google was amazing. Steve, Walt, Larry and Sergey wouldn’t have it any other way.

That strategy of investing in people who build things for themselves has been a guiding thought behind many investments for years. Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital on how he chooses what companies to invest in:

It’s the idea that the founders are doing something that they think is useful for themselves, And, then, eventually perhaps, coincidentally, perhaps accidentally, they discover that the product or service that they have built because they wanted to use something like this is that of great interest to lots of other people.

When you build for yourself you can build a product for one (ie: no demand), but the cost of failure is low, one of the core ideas in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. It is so fast and cheap to test things online that if you are passionate and aggressive success often happens accidentally. PageRank was an academic project for finding authoritative citations that just happened to turn into a search engine.

The other thing is the IP address I get is Polish !! go figure, anyway I just found a new game… It called mess with everyone on the train, while the wifi keeps coming on and off, I switch SEO for firefox on, set it to pull Pagerank and started searching with num set to 100 hehehe..

The funny thing is it took 10 minutes for Google to banned the IP address and now everyone is complaining to about the service, Me I just keep saying it’s Live.com is working fine for me.. ;) sorry Matt but this game is too funny..  but they should offer a decent service I paid 240 quid for this journey

Starbucks next see how long before I get kicked out of Google there as well.. oh the fun..

DaveN

Please read this site for a laugh, but do not link at it: dollarseo.com

And here is the summary of the service provided by one well known search engine submission service (which lead to email spam, bait & switch offers, and spammy MFA sites that did not even have a submission link)

January 5, 2008: Bought $29.99 _______ SEO service from a second shady search engine submission service provider.

• After entering keywords that I came up with, _______'s meta tag generator came up with the following meta tags for me
  <title>dollar seo search engine optimization services inc.</title>
  <meta name="description" content="No information was found">
  <meta name="keywords" content="No information was found">
  which prompted me to use my meta tag generator, which offers real useful advice on how to generate a good page title and good meta tags.
• Submissions are done manually or semi-manually. They list the big 3 engines, Alexa, DMOZ, Librarian's Internet Index, and the Yahoo! Directory.
• I submitted to the engines, but did not submit to the major directories because I doubt they would list this site there, and did not want to risk them removing some of my other sites because they were angry I submitted this one. The Yahoo! Directory may have listed this site if I paid their fee, which is $299 a year. Paying that extra $299 fee removes DollarSEO from its roots though ($299 for one link sure takes the $30 SEO project out of the $30 category), and again, I did not want to risk them removing my other sites from their directory.
• Beyond that they list something like 200 more directories and search engines. Since many of these directories are free, their business model is hidden on the back end. You will find that they send you no traffic, but do spam the crap out of your email inbox for submitting to them.
  • Some of these emails say click here to confirm, and then if you click through and submit your email address and website details they offer a Paypal button for you to spend $20 on the submission, even though it is to a search engine with poor relevancy that nobody uses. Even if you do not pay you can bet they will email you.
  • Some try to upsell you on more "submit your site to thousands of additional search engines" programs.
  • Ask yourself why so many of them need to validate and revalidate your email address to take your listing. It is because they want to pound the crap out of your inbox with spammy offers. I remember being on the receiving end of this crap when I started out on the web about 5 years ago.
• Some of the listings have errors.
  • Skaffe (the directory) was listed as a search engine.
  • The additional search engines category includes AltaVista and Alltheweb, which are powered by Yahoo Search.
  • The first additional search engine link I clicked on was in German, had no actual submission form that I could see, and included a huge AdSense ad block in the content area.

Update: For driveby searchers here are some free search engine submission links, though you will probably need to build links to rank for anything competitive.

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
• Microsoft Live Search: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
• Yahoo!: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit