1. See a webpage like a SEO

    8 months ago

    Ok the first thing I always check is server headers, a common mistake is 302ing the home page to an internal page so here is the screen shot of what a server header should look like :

    the next thing is Links and ratio of inbound to outbound links something like :

    I can see that I […]

    Dave Naylor

  2. SEO Microsoft, Yahoo or Google

    8 months ago

    Ok hands up all SEO’s who target only Google? Come on,,, Chances are the search marketing world is set to change, evolve if that’s that right terminology. Some believe that Google is likely to become the next “Microsoft.”
    Which is your favourite search engine, or does it vary on a monthly basis? Do you have clients […]

    Dave Naylor

  3. Search Gets Protection

    8 months ago

    Looks like Yahoo is rolling out technology to protect it’s search users if they click on a dubious website that hosts anything like spyware or spam. Past experiences tells us that such “helpful” additions often confuse the searcher and somewhat tarnish overall usability. Let’s just see if Yahoo can do any better than Google who […]

    Dave Naylor

  4. $100 of FREE Text Links

    Recently

    The friendly folks at Tet Link Ads are offering all new customers

    Text Link Ads

  5. Interesting SEO Links…

    8 months ago

    Roger Montti offers an insightful post on link building for new websites in 2008. If you have no traction you need to find a way to buy/beg/borrow/steal attention. Use that exposure to spread content that turns people on / gets them excited / evokes an emotional response / ties in with their worldview and identity…and watch the links flow like wine.

    Debra mentioned how she sometimes has a hard time telling people that their sites will not get links because they are boring. I actually enjoy doing that because it forces them to take some ownership over their own success (it is hard to drag a company across the finish line if you are an outside consultant - much easier to win if they are at least willingly walking in the right direction).

    The way I teach people that concept is I remove them for their ownership role. I ask “If you did not own this website why would you tell other people about and/or want to visit it at least once a week?” Once they can answer that question honestly with something that is inline with their market it means they have something worth marketing.

    Steve, an all around great guy and moderator of our forums, made a great thread in our local website marketing forums worth checking out if you are a subscriber.

    Predictably Irrational (great blog/book name) has a great post on the power of defaults in emotional transactions.

    Google is hyping image pattern recognition technology they call VisualRank in the media. Either they are about to improve their image search or they want us to think they have the most sophisticated technology.

    Here is a cool example of a nice image script that helps build links.

    Brief synopsis of how AdWords has changed over the past couple years - killing off many of the bottom feeder advertisers. The long tail of SEO keeps growing, but PPC is a winner take most game…from head to tail.

    Brent Csutoras shared his social media marketing presentation online.

    Firewall Script - a tool used to help keep sites secure, mentioned by DaveN so it is probably pretty good.

    SEW published an article about analyzing log files to audit redirects.

    The Problogger Book is out. Congrats Darren and Chris. :)

    Danny Sullivan has a nice recap of the Microsoft Yahoo fiasco. His forward to Philipp Lessen’s new book - Google Apps Hacks is also a great read. Congrats to Philipp on finishing the book. :)

    Breaking the Digg Code - free guide to getting the most out of Digg, though if you market an SEO site it is not worth marketing it on Digg. The average small-minded short-sighted Digg user thinks all SEO is spam - they are a reflection of the dumbest and loudest parts of society.

    Use Intwition to see what posts from a site got the most Twitter links.

    Why whitehats need to know blackhat SEO - as noted in the comments “nothing wrong with having a well rounded education.”

    Seed Keywords is a cool tool which allows you to pass a question on to friends or customers and ask them what they would search for to solve a particular problem.

    Aaron Wall

  6. Why is Google Buying Links From SEMPO?

    8 months ago

    Google, which has arbitrarily forced its will to use nofollow on the web (and declared link buyers and sellers who do not use the tag as spammers) is buying a PageRank 7 link from SEMPO.org.

    You would think that if Google wants to set new proprietary standards they would follow them as well. And what better spot to start following them than with a trade organization promoting search engine marketing?

    Who Should Get Penalized For The Shady SEMPO/Google Bought Link Deal

    Aaron Wall

  7. Microsoft Withdraws Yahoo! Offer

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Microsoft decided to walk on the Yahoo! deal. After the sharp Yahoo! stock decline Monday, expect many shareholder lawsuits. The press release contained the following open letter to Jerry Yang.

    Dear Jerry:
    After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

    I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

    I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

    In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

    Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

    We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

    • First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
    • Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
    • In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
    • This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
    • It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

    Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

    We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

    I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

    But clearly a deal is not to be.

    Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

    Sincerely yours,
    /s/ Steven A. Ballmer

    Steven A. Ballmer
    Chief Executive Officer
    Microsoft Corporation

    Any guess as to Yahoo!’s closing share price Moday? Vote on this poll and guess below. If you are the first person to guess within a dime you get a free month of access to our online SEO training program.

    What Price do Yahoo! Shares Trade at 4PM Eastern on Monday?
    ( polls)

    The short term upside for search marketers is that this lowers the odds of Yahoo! gutting itself by outsourcing paid search to Google.

    Aaron Wall

  8. When Your Title is Linkbait and Your Post Isn’t

    8 months, 1 week ago

    I’ve often written that using a linkbait is like signing a contract with your readers. You’re luring them in with the promise of a reward at the end of the hook. Sometime you can give people what you promise but it’s not in a soundbite format and your readers feel like they never got the […]

    Michael Gray

  9. Yahoo! May Carry Google Ads

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Yahoo! may announce a deal to carry Google ads in the next week, according to the WSJ:

    While a broad search ad pact would likely attract intense antitrust scrutiny, the options Google and Yahoo are discussing include a nonexclusive arrangement that they believe could satisfy regulators, say the people familiar with the matter.

    The basis of such an arrangement would be a real-time auction system that would choose the most lucrative ads for any given consumer query from among those sold by Yahoo, Google and any of their competitors, the people say. Microsoft, for example, could potentially connect to the Yahoo system and have search ads it sold displayed alongside Yahoo Web search results, under an arrangement where they likely would share ad revenue.

    It is easy to claim to be in support of open standards with a propriety closed-box system after you already own monopoly marketshare. Unfortunately for Yahoo! this short term revenue boost puts them in the same risk category as the common webmaster - Google is Venice; Webmasters are Constantinople.

    Will the TV networks allow Google to do the same to their ad marketplace?

    In a recent interview Eric Schmidt said

    We’re really focused on this huge opportunity before us, which is automating the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising. We won’t get all of that, for sure, but we should be able to get a significant part of that over the lifetime, certainly of my service to the company.

    Aaron Wall

  10. Search Local Search Global

    8 months, 1 week ago

    TLD’s and hosting, where would you host if you wanted prominence within serps in a certain geographic area,,,? Does it make a difference. Is it just microsoft that’s focused on localisation?
    Sounds like an easy answer to this one.
    Search engines must put weight on hosting location and im not just talking ip address.
    Dan Horton SEO

    Dave Naylor

  11. How Much is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

    8 months, 1 week ago

    I just wrote a ~15 page article aimed at helping SEOs estimate how much a top rank in Google is worth.

    I would appreciate any feedback you have on making it better. If you like it please hook me up with a Del.icio.us or Stumble. Any and all mentions are appreciated. :)

    Aaron Wall

  12. PBS MediaShift Covers SEO

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Mark Glaser recently queried me about improving the SEO of PBS’s MediaShift. The tips and advice I gave him apply to most blogging and media websites. The piece was well balanced, with information from Poynter, and he mentioned Joost’s great article on Newspaper SEO.

    Aaron Wall

  13. Sk-rt Sometimes You are Pathetic

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Hard to say which is more embarrassing or pathetic, the fact that their image hosting is over it’s bandwidth or the cheezy dating adsense banner. Sk-rt you make it hard for me to take you seriously.

    Sponsor:: Is your site broken and you don’t know what to do? Check out my SEO Services for information […]

    Michael Gray

  14. Search Twitter in Realtime, and Get Free(ish) Content

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Summize is a conversational search engine which allows you to search Twitter in realtime. Useful for finding customer feedback even when people do not provide it directly to you. For example, I just found out that for some people the Rank Checker Firefox extension stopped working after the last update. So I just reverted the extension and am awaiting another update from the developer. Summize offers RSS feeds so you can track conversations mentioning your brands and/or important topics.

    Summize offers an API which can be used to generate free content for your sidebar if you publish Mahalo-like content, though that is a bit spammy. ;)

    Aaron Wall

  15. Will Your Website Pass a Google Review?

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Welcome to GoogleNet!

    Hitwise recently mentioned that Google controls over 1/3 of UK web traffic.
    Upstream uk internet traffic from google properties to other websites in the UK 2007 2008 chart.png
    With that much usage data, if you were Google, would you use usage data in your relevancy algorithms?

    An Army of Google Search Editors

    They could easily use algorithms to detect

    • sites that they send a lot of traffic to relative to its total traffic (comparing ratios between toolbar data and search traffic)
    • sites which have seen a rapid spike in traffic from Google
    • sites which people quickly bounce away from (and do not later return to)
    • sites which get a lot of traffic from Google but get few navigational queries

    and flag anything out of the ordinary for human review. Marissa Mayer stated they have 10,000 reviewers.

    Does Your Site Look Good to Google’s Relevancy Algorithm?

    As the web keeps getting richer and deeper, and Google increasingly uses human review for demoting spam, all the aesthetic things matter:

    • domain name
    • site design
    • content formatting
    • branding and public relations

    As search evolves so too will spam. Some spam sites will LOOK and FEEL better than most non-spam sites. And so the remote quality raters will be given more data to look at - perhaps eventually even a sample of backlinks or other related data.

    False positives will occur - sites and careers built around Google without proper support stilts will crumble. Unless your site is of social significance (you are a big corporation, a non-profit organization, a government institution, an educational institution, a top blogger, an official Google partner, or Youtube/Google house content) then part of the optimization process revolves around not only creating sites that pass a hand review, but also trying to create sites that do not get flagged for review - especially if you are a thin affiliate site.

    How do you not get flagged for review?

    • Build enough quality signals and direct traffic that your site looks like a real part of the web.
    • Build something people keep coming back to.
    • Do not make drastic changes to your site unless you are comfortable with it going under review.

    How do you pass a review?

    Short term I think the aesthetic things matter a lot. Longer term it is best if your site satisfies a few criteria

    • exclusive content that people value and keep coming back to (Google loses if they remove the best content from their index)
    • a brand that people care about and search for (Google looks dumb if they do not rank your site)
    • a meaningful and reliable traffic stream outside of Google (many quality signals may stem from this exposure, which will help keep your overall profile more organic)
    • you could cause public relations harm to Google and diminish their brand value in the eyes of thousands of people (removing your site has real opportunity cost)

    Usage Data for Algorithmic Site Promotion

    Creating Fake User Accounts is Harder Than it Sounds

    If usage data was ever used to promote sites, they could look at regional data and help promote sites based on what is popular locally. Searchers reveal their location by IP address and the queries they search for.

    The Trusted Few

    Google could use a subset of their users when using usage data to affect relevancy (perhaps users with 6 months account history, credit card on file via Google Checkout, and a normal email profile).

    Why Usage Data is Tricky

    Much of the signal from usage data is likely mirrored by PageRank, so the lift might not be that great until they really refine the technology.

    Some tricky parts with promoting sites based on usage data are:

    • usage data is quite noisy, and
    • it may not favor informational sites over commercial intent the way that PageRank does. That informational bias to the organic search results is a large part of why AdWords is so profitable.

    Microsoft recently presented a paper on finding authority pages based on browsing habits.

    Aaron Wall

  16. Google unveils new prototype image search system “VisualRank”

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Google has revealed a new page ranking system for images called VisualRank. The biggest search engine in the world today uses PageRank and this determines a websites value, based on its content and is scored from 0-10. The higher the websites PageRank, the higher the site appears on Google’s listings for the related keyword if […]

    Dave Naylor

  17. Sponsored Links

    Recently

    Google

  18. Leeds United get all 15 points back

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Or at least we all hope! Leeds United have entered the final stage of their fight to gain back the 15 points deducted at the start of the season, due to going into administration. The arbitration committee met over a week ago to decide the fate of the points and announced that a verdict would […]

    Dave Naylor

  19. US Justice Department investigates Yahoo and Google collaboration

    8 months, 1 week ago

    The Us Justice Department have initiated an investigation into Yahoo and Google’s advertising sharing trial. The two week test, which allows Google to place its adverts alongside 3% of Yahoo’s search results, has been criticized since it was announced. The Department of Justice is looking into whether it violates any antitrust laws.
    Although The Justice Department […]

    Dave Naylor

  20. SMX Social Media 2008 Recap

    8 months, 1 week ago

    Last week I attended the SMX Social Media Conference in Long Beach California, here are some of my thoughts about the event.
    The one thing that really stood out about this conference was the “focus” or “intensity” most of the attendees had about coming to learn and take in as much information as they could about […]

    Michael Gray


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