Jun 30

Search Engine Optimization Journal’s Top 20 SEO Blog ListWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 12:40 pm

We have researched and compiled our first annual list of some of the most useful Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Blogs…other than the Search Engine Optimization Journal!
Please feel free to visit these blogs as they provide excellent information! Please let us know if we missed any blogs off of this list.

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Jun 30

I was chatting with DaveN last night about Google’s spam problem. So many spammy listings are dominating Google using the following techniques:
submitting spam to a social news site (I see a lot of 1 vote Netscape and Digg listings for long tail queries in the consumer fiance vertical)
linking to a site search on an authoritative site like weather.com, limited to your target keyword and site:mysite.com. Google has had the regurgitating search result problem for at least 5 months now.
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Jun 30

SEOJs 11 Most Commented On Blog PostsWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 25 of November , 2007 at 2:36 am

After 410 posts on Search Engine Optimization Journal, I thought I’d go back and take a look at some of my most commented on blog posts. I wanted to put together a top 10 list of blog posts that have attracted the most comments. I started off counting blog posts that had at least 4 comments. After surpassing 15 popular blog posts I dropped those with only 4 comments and started focusing on posts with at least 5 comments. Again, I went over 20 posts and ended up dropping all the 5. Below are the top 11 blog posts - those SEOJ blog posts with 6 or more comments.

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Jun 29

In an SES panel yesterday Matt Cutts claims paid links pollute the web ,while he advocates off topic link bait as a useful search marketing strategy. Greg Boser is a bit more honest:
Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links.

Linkbaiting is Expensive, Time Consuming, and Unpredictable The reasons search engineers advocate link baiting are: it is expensive it is time consuming the results are hard to predict it requires social connections it provides off topic low value traffic it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for) the valuable results can take a while to show it often undermines the credibility of the source doing it (by allowing people to think of information from certain sources as link bait, which is a derogatory classification term) many companies have restrictions that prevent them from doing it Because of the above reasons, the technique of link baiting is outside the reach of most webmasters. Since few people can do it, it is highly unpredictable, time consuming, and expensive OF COURSE that is the only way search engineers recommend you build links. They might even like you to believe that almost all links are acquired that way. The more brutally tough it is to build your SEO strategy the more appealing AdWords ads look. Shopping Search? Try AdWords!!! If you can’t buy links to rank, then some irrelevant old sites and marginably relevant articles on authoritative domains (that typically gained their link based authority before Google polluted the link graph with AdSense and NoFollow) gets to clog up the organic search results, and the only way people can find commercially relevant results is if they look at Google’s AdWords ads. May I Lend You a Hand? It gets worse when you think about the uneven policing of the search results, where engineers hand edit small webmaster sites out of the search results (even ones that get free unrequested links from the US Coast Guard and US embassy), and look the other way while large corporations (which have large AdWords budgets) OWN the entire Google search result page for some keywords. The Death of Organic Links A mainstream media magazine did a spread on one of my friend’s websites, where my friend gave them virtually all the content for the article, and they refused to link to my friend’s site in the article because they felt it would be too promotional. Sorry, you already sent out 100,000 magazines with the article in it. You already were too promotional. Sadly, that is just one more example of the death of organic links caused by Google’s fearmongering. Optimize Your Account: Pay Us More I tried Google’s AdWords Campaign Optimizer yesterday. It kept telling me to increase my budget for link buying.

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Jun 29

As we head into the new year it’s difficult to determine what might be a most appropriate topic to cover. What search engine events stand to define 2007 enough to warrant being covered here. This was a question I’d asked over the last couple days: days with little going on at the Big Three. Well fortunately in doing my usual preparations for my segment on Webmaster Radio and while doing my daily rounds of some of the top SEO resources I landed on a few interesting tid-bits which fit the bill nicely.

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Jun 28

Thanks Top Rank!Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 21 of October , 2007 at 8:37 am

Thanks Top Rank!

I’m honored. TopRank has called me “one of the best blogs on the Internet.” I don’t know what his criteria is for saying that, but it’s an honor worth mentioning and I’d like to thank the Top Rank Blog for giving me the mention. I’ll do my best to continue living up to that expectation.

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Jun 28

Beanstalk is pleased to welcome Kennith Nichol to our team. Kennith brings with him a background in web design including HTML, CSS, SSI, XHTML Strict and an assortment of other important skills required to be a valuable member of our team.

Kennith will be starting out in advanced link building, where he ends up - only time will tell.

We are very pleased to have him with us and look forward to working with him for a long time.

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Jun 28

Posted by great scott!

Perusing reddit today, as I’m wont to do, I came across a story about a company that essentially gave up on its business model after falling out of the Google SERPs.

I’ve excerpted a portion of the story below:

Over the past months, however, organic traffic from Google.com dropped from an average of 1′000 or so visitors / day to exactly zero. In sympathy, sales dropped along side, resulting in perhaps one or two sales per day or less, mostly from people who stumbled over the site by chance or by recommendation. For some reasons our pages were either removed completely from Google’s index or have been tagged “supplemental result” (for a possible explanation, see below at “Other consequences”). Obviously, we could still pay for ads but that would never make up for the loss in traffic and, hence, revenue. Also, while we realize that Google owes us nothing, we are not inclined to reward Google for dropping our site. The little traffic coming from localized versions of Google or from Yahoo and MSN doesn’t convert to revenue at all. We didn’t find a way to remedy this situation because, although being a multi billion dollar company, Google doesn’t seem to have a phone number.

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Jun 28

Muhammad Saleem has written a thought provoking article on Copyblogger regarding the injection of common cultural celebrities into your headlines as a way of reaching out to a potential reader.

The post is targeted at social media submissions and how using common cultural hot spots can get your stuff noticed.

The post distills a few thoughts I have on this technique with regards to headline writing and hopefully moves my writing ability on a bit further.

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Jun 28

Posted by Oatmeal

Seeing as how I don’t have enough to do today, I thought I’d run a database query that wiped out the login information for all our users.

Luckily I had a backup but it was from before we launched the new site, so if you registered before then (Feb. 2nd, 2007) your account is fine.

If you were a premium member or purchased an article, I had this information backed up as well so your account is fine and you do not need to do anything.

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