Search Engine News

Posted by randfish

Intuit recently authored a report on the state of US businesses in 2017 - Future of Small Business Report - in which they suggest that by 2017, the number of unique businesses will triple. SmallBusinessHub pointed me to this article (via Reddit) and noted some very interesting takeaways:

The main theme of the report was that we are in the midst of an economic revolution that started in the 1980’s when 80% of American workers were at companies with greater than 1000 employees to today where 40% of American workers are at companies with greater than 1000 employees to some percentage far less than that 10 years from now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ghostwriters, SEO, And The Vast Right ConspiracyWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 2 of January , 2008 at 9:25 am

I can’t say that ghostwriters are all bad. I can’t say they’re all good either. But if you’re going to use a ghostwriter then I’d suggest that you do three things before you let your ghostwriter start writing your blog or website content for you:

Interview your potential ghostwriter extensively. Don’t let any ghostwriter touch your stuff until you are absolutely sure that your ghostwriter understands the basic principles of ghostwriting - he or she should be in the background while you are in the front (otherwise, why hire a ghostwriter?) - and make sure that your potential ghostwriter understands your business.Make your any ghostwriter you hire to write online content for you understands SEO. If they don’t understand SEO better than you do then they probably don’t understand it enough. This might not be true if you are an SEO, but most of you aren’t so make sure your ghostwriter knows SEO at least as much as you do.Thirdly, don’t just make sure that your ghostwriters knows your business, but your industry. And make sure that your ghostwriter and you agree, at the very least, on the central philosophy of your business. In other words, he or she has to be able to write from your perspective. If you’ve been writing your own content for awhile then you’ve established your own voice and your readers will know it. They will know your prejudices, your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your fourth child’s name. Does your ghostwriter? He’d better, because he’s pretending to be you.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by randfish

Mr. Cutts recently wrote a story about so-called “undetectable spam,” in which he countered any paid link building service’s claim that it could be truly undetectable to search engine spam sniffers like himself. I’d agree with most of what Matt says - almost any large-scale link development operation that’s designed to boost your rankings will eventually stop passing value. This cat-and-mouse game has gone on for years, and even the black/gray-hat folks I know who are the most cautious have reported that Google eventually finds and eliminates the value of what they build.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shoemoney pointed out that the Rick Jerk website is for sale, alleging that the sale is required to avoid bankruptcy. Was the Rich Jerk just a marketing scheme?

I have been seeing numerous others claiming the selling of snake oil recently.

Dr Garcia flamed a whole slew of honest SEOs because we incorrectly refer to semantics as latent semantic stuff or call tools that show word co-occurrence as LSI like:
In an effort to save face and avoid litigation from consumers, some of these purveyors of falsehood as other crooks and their friends play with words and call theirs “LSI-like”, “LSI-based”, “LSI-driven” technology or use similar snaky phrases.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today I made mention of the fact that on our weekly Webmaster Radio show Jim and I would be interviewing Neil Patel, Presellpageman and Eric Ward. Unfortunately Eric had to cancel at the last minute due to a prior engagement. Fortunately Rebecca Kelly from SEOMoz came to our rescue and more than filled the shoes left empty.

A huge thanks to Rebecca and the SEOMoz team for coming to our rescue on such short notice (5 minutes to be specific). And what’s more - she was great and added huge value to a show dedicated to link building.

Read the rest of this entry »

What Domain Name Extensions are Worth RegisteringWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 16 of December , 2007 at 6:00 pm

Not all extensions are equal, half the domain extensions are worthless when it comes to SEO. If you are registering domain names then you ought to be aiming for any of the following in the order that they appear:

dot comdot netdot org

I prefer to run a dot info in preference to a sub domain. Dot info sites are great for hosting blogs or support forums. Nothing looks worse than a crumby /blog or blog.domainname.com. Putting in the parent directory of a .info that is linked to from your main site seems to have a little bit more class. .info is worthless as a commercial domain extension on its own, but in conjunction with any of the big three is very good.

Read the rest of this entry »

The NoArchive Command: Hey, What’s It Good For?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 16 of January , 2008 at 2:22 pm

You’ve heard of robots meta tags. But how do you use them? If you’ve been online for very long you likely no about robots “nofollow” tags and maybe even “noindex” tags. But what about “noarchive?” Are you familiar with that one? Should you be?

SiteProNews today published an article by Scott Buresh explaining all the different robots meta tags and when you should use them. The last one on the list is the “noarchive” tag. He hit the nail right on the head:

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog SEO: Journalism And Your Business 101Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 14 of January , 2008 at 1:17 pm

You might think there is no reason to have a blog. You’d be wrong. If you haven’t considered it before, here’s one more reason to start a blog today.

This new study by Brodeur and Marketwire shows that 75% of journalists read blogs on a regular basis. That’s great, and the study has some useful information in it. But what’s not included in the study, and I think it should be, is just what kind of blogs journalists are following?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by rebecca

That was my first attempt at one of Rand’s SEO comics, so hopefully I did the Boss Man proud. I really don’t have much to offer in this blog post except DEAR GOD, these social media sites’ names are getting totally absurd. Seriously.

What happened to the good ol’ days of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and LiveJournal? Remember those happier times? When the name of a site indicated what it was? From there it started to get a little rid.iculo.us (I checked, and that URL currently isn’t a site, so we’re safe…for now…): there’s Etsy, Wazima, Darmik, Django (was his name-o?), Mochikit, Zoto…they all sound like characters from The Dark Crystal. Or like Scientology overlords.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google will purchase Panoramio, a very cool site with interesting functionality. Not an SEO tool, but a tool for your life if you like taking photos on vacation. Of course since Google is going to buy it, that makes is somewhat SEO-worthy.

Panoramio allows you to locate photos exactly over the place they were taken. You can read more about how this works.

From Google: Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs — and to view those photographs in Google Earth. Other users can search and browse Panoramio photos and suggest edits to the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites.

Read the rest of this entry »