Seo for your living

Microsoft Live’s new markets
The Microsoft Live team has just launched the Live search service into 34 new markets.

The new markets include:

China - Simplified Chinese
Netherlands - Dutch
Belgium - French
Belgium - Dutch
Brazil - Brazilian Portuguese
Denmark - Danish
India - English
Russia - Russian
Sweden - Swedish
Taiwan - Traditional Chinese
Arabia - English
Argentina - Spanish
Austria - German
Chile - Spanish
Finland - Finnish
Greece - Greek
Hong Kong SAR - Traditional Chinese
Hungary - Hungarian
Indonesia - English
Ireland - English
Malaysia - English
New Zealand - English
Philippines - English
Poland - Polish
Portugal - Brazilian Portuguese
Singapore - English
South Africa - English
Switzerland - German
Switzerland - French
Turkey - Turkish
Czech Republic - Czech
Slovakia - Slovak
Slovenia - Slovenian
Latin America - Spanish

Microsoft is on the run, trying to launch into as many markets as it can in an effort, im sure, to stay side by side with its main competition in the search world, Google.

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SEO for Firefox Updated to Include Compete.com Data

I just updated SEO for Firefox to include Compete.com website rank and Compete.com monthly uniques. If you leave Compete.com in on demand mode it tends to work quite well. I am also going to ping the guys at Compete.com to ensure the automatic mode gets to be pretty reliable too. Compete.com data is far better than Alexa because it has less of a webmaster bias.

[Video] SEO & Domaining: Domain Names & Search Engine Marketing

How Domain Names Play a Role in SEO & SEM

• Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic worth thousands of dollars a year. Some get type in traffic worth thousands per day. And this traffic stream is defensible from search engine algorithmic swings.

• In addition to the defensibility issue, there is a large synergy between great domain names and SEO. Domain names containing your keywords as part of the name make it easier to get your keywords in the anchor text when people reference your company by its official name. This is true even if the domain has hyphens and/or additional words. But domains with hyphens in them are harder to market than domains without hyphens.
• Exact match domains make people more likely to give you targeted anchor text when they mention your website. In some cases a strong domain name also makes a site appear more trustworthy and linkworthy.
• Exact match domains are given an algorithmic relevancy boost in Google, even if a domain name shows little other criteria that prove it trustworthy.
• Exact match domains make it easier to get Google Sitelinks to expand your listing and block out competing sites.
• Exact match domains are easier to profit from search engine arbitrage.

Enjoying Creative Destruction: a Review of Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence

After seeing Alan Greenspan’s clip on the Daily Show I figured it was worth picking up his book titled The Age of Turbulence, and I just finished it on my flight back to the United States. His book is sold as about economics, but it really is about understanding the emotions and psychology that drive markets.

Personal Property Rights

Protecting personal property rights is crucial to creating a market worth investing in or participating in. Who wants to work only to see their work arbitrarily stolen?

Frank Schilling wrote about domain names:

People flock to America to invest, build their lives and homes because it is a land of opportunity (current credit market warts and all).. People go to namespaces for the same reason.

Some of the largest and most powerful Internet companies profit handsomely by having no respect for copyright. Double talk like Youtube’s recent “we support this copyright agreement” while standing on the sidelines of the associated agreements won’t work as a strategy in 5 years.

Centrally Planned Economies Falter

The book talked about the fall of communism and how unbelievable devastated East Germany was by the time the Berlin Wall was ripped down. As markets get more complex the central networks and central regulators are less able to control markets, and instead move to a role of providing guidance and direction. Reactionary caps and regulations often end up heavy handed, setting off cascading imbalances.

Even central military planning has its limits. Greenspan highlighted how capitalism has spread to parts of the world which were unwilling to change after US military campaigns, later stating that for economic growth: “The evidence of human history strongly suggests that positive incentives are far more effective than fear and force.”

Greenspan quoted a Martin Feldstein’s article:

Cellphone service is widely available [in India] at low cost because it was regarded as a luxury and therefore left to the market, while electricity is hard to obtain because it has been regarded as a necessity and therefore managed by the government.

Google, which put search and ads at the center of their network, and bolts on lower margin stuff is using a model that is more effective and more forward looking than Yahoo’s model, which is to attempt to be a leading publisher in virtually every high value and/or high traffic field.

From a business scalability standpoint it is also better to sell access to a community that works together rather than relying too heavily on a single individual. This is a huge weakness in my current business model. My model would be far more effective if this site were more of a gathering spot than me just spouting off about whatever I felt like writing about, and selling one hit product.

Most increases in economic activity typically come from specialization and division of labor. If you try to do too many things the custom systems that once set you apart become legacy infrastructure that hold you back.

Increasingly we will rely on outsourcing, smaller start ups, and the outlook of being employed will drastically changed. Paul Graham recently wrote:

We now think of it as normal to have a job at a company, but this is the thinnest of historical veneers. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. So while it may seem surprising to propose that large numbers of people will change the way they make a living, it would be more surprising if they didn’t.

Marketing Can Make Life Meaningless

Alan wrote:

And one can seek material well-being and yet view competitive markets as subject to excessive manipulation by advertisers and marketers who trivialize life by promoting superficial and ephemeral values.

That quote reminds me of the shock I had when I learned that in the Philippines they sell skin whitening cream, while in the US the standard sales pitch is for making your skin darker.

He also referenced The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, about how people consume based on the consumption habits of others, which hints at the increasing forward value of being a top editorial channel and/or a social recommendation engine which is quick to hightlight the latest trends.

As virtually everything gets commoditized, selling in the future will require increasingly strong social proof of value. Those who have a history of recommending things of value will continue to gain relevance and distribution at the expense of those who are afraid to be biased in favor of being objective.

The Beauty of Creative Destruction

One of the things Mr. Greenspan emphasized more than just about anything else was the value of creative destruction, which is the killing of old business models and the shifting of capital toward better business ideas / models / formats. Having just got back from a month long stay in Manila, I could put the book into context by thinking of some of the business models that were relevant and prevalent in one location, but not relevant in another.

The trade-off for an efficient marketplace that keeps moving capital is that jobs are quite temporal in nature and stress levels are higher than in more socialistic societies. Online you can think of information and services as consistently moving toward free, but people will always be willing to pay for good formatting, clarity, reputation, empathy, and how well they trust you.

If you test evolving formats and technology you

• learn how to apply them to older fields

• learn what markets will change before most people do
• are more likely to be considered remarkable
• enjoy effective marketing techniques before mass pollution rendered them worthless

To put this in perspective, one of the marketing techniques that I was successful with last year has been cloned by virtually all of the big competitors in that same category. If I was not first with the idea they would have destroyed the associated profit margins by saturating the market with similar ideas and a larger stack of capital than I can afford to risk.

If you think about the success of this site, much of it is due to being one of the first bloggers covering SEO stuff. Start a blog about SEO today and it would be much harder to gain traction. I also was one of the first SEOs to make publicly available extensions for modifying search results and aggregating data via widgets. All of that stuff is free though, I likely need to change the format of what I am selling away from a singular large ebook into a format that is more friendly to consume, such that I can go even deeper with providing more high value information without overwhelming people.

Even if you are using creative destruction to push your business model, profit margins, and your field it still helps to do whatever you can to offset that destruction part to appeal to “the deep human need for stability and permanence.” If people think you change too much then they might be less likely to want to invest in your business or even link at your website. When possible, small incremental changes tend to be more effective than large changes. Don’t make frequent and drastic changes to your homepage.

Economic growth is becoming more ideas oriented - less tangible and more conceptual. This means that you will not need as much capital to compete going forward. You will only be required creativity and a willingness to be wrong from time to time.

The Media

Greenspan spoke about how his support for measured tax cuts IF the budget surplus remained were reported in the media as “Greenspan to Back Tax Cuts.” He also highlighted how his quotes urging spending restraint fell on deaf ears and became about taxation.

The dumbing down and misquoting that is common in the media is yet another reason people will increasingly flock to independently published websites.

Wealth Disparity and Redistribution

When new technologies change markets rapidly there is an increase in income stratification. You and I do (or soon will) benefit from the inequality of wealth distribution based on new technologies associated with the WWW.

The low skilled US labor prices are dropping because of

• deflationary pressures from unlocking high quality laborers that were unavailable in years past due to central economic planning

• better and more sophisticated software (I have wasted many days doing junk that a software program should have been able to do far faster)
• cheaper communication

Other Economic Tidbits

• Dutch Disease - Developing countries that discover an abundance of natural resources tend to stagnate. Currency appreciation kills the competitiveness of other export based business models and revenues from the resource make people lazy.

• moral hazards - government insurance causes people to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t (like the current mortgage mess)
• Oil - prices are far more elastic than many appreciate, and Greenspan thinks there is plenty of oil, but we should be aggressive in promoting the use of alternatives like nuclear power and biofuels.
• Alan also does not think the trade deficit or foreign governments holding US dollars pose big risks

I Was Wrong

I used to think that some of the central bankers were pretty dirty based on watching a documentary about it. In years past many of them likely were, but after reading Alan Greenspan’s book I trust him, largely for the following 5 reasons:

• In his book he said his mother was “not the least bit intellectual”. Even if that statement were true about one of my parents and that parent was dead I can’t imagine being blunt enough to write that line in what amounts to a widely read autobiography.

• He was already making loads of money before working at the Fed. If it was money he was after he could have got much more of it for far less stress.
• He admitted that the Fed did once attempt to raise interest rates to pop the tech stock bubble, but doing it small enough to not hurt economy does not kill the euphoria and only further validated the run up.
• On page 463 Alan wrote “And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy. … I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
• In a recent interview he went on record and admitted that the Federal Reserve was not fully independant.

How to Create & Unlock $100 of Value Per Word

Seth Godin referenced a Steven Berlin Johnson post analyzing the word usage of various authors. Writers using short words and short sentences tend to sell more.

It is easy to think that if you just do more and add more value that you will make more money, but sometimes doing more just means simplifying and clarifying your words, or publishing in a more friendly format. If you want people to take action, to believe they can afford it, making them feel confident and comfortable works. More does not always mean better.

Some of the posts I write about the macroeconomic trends of online publishing and the search economy take 5 hours to write, get few or no comments, get few or no citations, and probably scare off potential customers. Those posts do not cater to people looking to buy SEO information. The short SEO videos I recently made are easier to create and easy to consume. Daily sales are near my all time high.

[Video] Using Google Date Based Filters to Detect Link Building & Website Indexing Trends

Tips on How to Use Google Indexing Date Filters

• The Google advanced search page allows you to search for pages that were recently indexed, letting you filter through days, weeks, months, and years. Here are pages from SeoBook.com indexed in the last week.

• In the URL they place as_qdr=w as_qdr=d (day) as_qdr=w (week) as_qdr=m (month) as_qdr=y (year). You can also search for multiples of these units, like search for pages indexed in the last 2 weeks by placing as_qdr=w2 in the URL string.
• If you change your content management system or add new sections to your site you can see how quickly they are getting indexed, and look for any duplicate content issues as the new pages are getting indexed by looking for pages indexed under multiple URLs.
• If you have never checked your site for duplicate content issues, but recently published content, that might also show any content duplication issues or Google indexed pages that you do not want in Google’s index.
• In addition to using date based filters to find how well your site is getting indexed, you can search to see who is mentioning an idea with a footprint, or use date based filters for doing link research.

Superpages now uses Microsofts Maps
Apparently the Superpages.com directory has made the change into using Microsofts Live Local virtual earth maps. Not sure when this change occurred, but Greg Sterling has recently noticed this update.

It’s a nice new feature for Superpages to ad to their local directory. It adds a nice touch for local searchers. The current version of the maps embedded into the Superpages directory has three views, standard, aerial, and birds eye.

As recently reported, Superpages.com is rumored to be up for sale from Verizon.

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Are You a Hardcore SEO?
Michael Martinez recently posted a list of 2 hardcore SEO tips in his SEO Theory and Analysis Blog. He doesn t usually give out lists of tips and as you might expect from someone who focuses on SEO theory and analysis this is not your typical list of tips. It emphasizes the one constant in the world of SEO change….
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Aesthetic Google PageRank Update in Google Toolbars Worldwide!!!

Search Engine Land recently listed a bunch of sites that had their PageRank scores manually edited for selling links. Of course, if you are the publisher of one of these sites, you don’t care about an algorithm relevancy score so meaningless that it is edited by hand. You care about traffic.

Rankings Never Changed

SERoundtable was on the list of sites which saw their toolbar PageRank scores reduced, but I just looked at some of the terms they were ranking for, and they are still right at or near the top of the results for everything they were ranking for, even the competitive terms.

Traffic Matters, PageRank Does Not

Watch the Compete.com traffic stats for the sites listed in that Search Engine Land post. Google even provides large sites like the NYT over 20% of their traffic, so if these sites were really penalized you will see a plunge in traffic. If you do not see a plunge in traffic across these sites then toolbar PageRank scores are proved irrelevant as a measure of quality and trust.

Since When Are Publishing Networks Bad?

Many network blogs had their PageRank scores dropped too. Again, you can simply check the traffic stats to see if there is any real impact, or if Google is just polluting their Toolbar PageRank scores.

Since Google is demoting PageRank’s viability as a site’s global authority score perhaps this is a time for Yahoo to bring back WebRank, or Ask to launch something like CommunityRank. The Google-webmaster relationship is fraying. This presents an opportunity for whoever wants to take it.

Publishing is About Networks

If Google is penalizing blogs for being part of a network of sites, how long until they penalize IAC for owning 20 travel sites? Or Monster.com for owning 100 thin lead generation education sites? Or BankRate for owning white label sites with similar names? Networks have always been a part of publishing based business models.

It seems someone or something inside of Google is melting down. Choppy times ahead for webmasters worldwide.

Zude Offers New Technology in Social Networking
The past couple of years have been such a fertile period for social networking ideas that words like revolutionary should be demanding hazard pay. But Fifth Generation Systems has been causing enough buzz to make one wonder if there s more than mere hype behind it. Indeed at least one observer has described the company s latest project as THE web of the future….
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Re: help people get proxy
pffr….

read this again: school…

Zude Offers New Technology in Social Networking
The past couple of years have been such a fertile period for social networking ideas that words like revolutionary should be demanding hazard pay. But Fifth Generation Systems has been causing enough buzz to make one wonder if there s more than mere hype behind it. Indeed at least one observer has described the company s latest project as THE web of the future….
Affordable Lightweight Bug Tracker J2EE, Web based. Used by Apache, NASA, 3M, MIT. JOLT award winner. Fast. Flexible. Powerful. Secure.

Enjoying Creative Destruction: a Review of Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence

After seeing Alan Greenspan’s clip on the Daily Show I figured it was worth picking up his book titled The Age of Turbulence, and I just finished it on my flight back to the United States. His book is sold as about economics, but it really is about understanding the emotions and psychology that drive markets.

Personal Property Rights

Protecting personal property rights is crucial to creating a market worth investing in or participating in. Who wants to work only to see their work arbitrarily stolen?

Frank Schilling wrote about domain names:

People flock to America to invest, build their lives and homes because it is a land of opportunity (current credit market warts and all).. People go to namespaces for the same reason.

Some of the largest and most powerful Internet companies profit handsomely by having no respect for copyright. Double talk like Youtube’s recent “we support this copyright agreement” while standing on the sidelines of the associated agreements won’t work as a strategy in 5 years.

Centrally Planned Economies Falter

The book talked about the fall of communism and how unbelievable devastated East Germany was by the time the Berlin Wall was ripped down. As markets get more complex the central networks and central regulators are less able to control markets, and instead move to a role of providing guidance and direction. Reactionary caps and regulations often end up heavy handed, setting off cascading imbalances.

Even central military planning has its limits. Greenspan highlighted how capitalism has spread to parts of the world which were unwilling to change after US military campaigns, later stating that for economic growth: “The evidence of human history strongly suggests that positive incentives are far more effective than fear and force.”

Greenspan quoted a Martin Feldstein’s article:

Cellphone service is widely available [in India] at low cost because it was regarded as a luxury and therefore left to the market, while electricity is hard to obtain because it has been regarded as a necessity and therefore managed by the government.

Google, which put search and ads at the center of their network, and bolts on lower margin stuff is using a model that is more effective and more forward looking than Yahoo’s model, which is to attempt to be a leading publisher in virtually every high value and/or high traffic field.

From a business scalability standpoint it is also better to sell access to a community that works together rather than relying too heavily on a single individual. This is a huge weakness in my current business model. My model would be far more effective if this site were more of a gathering spot than me just spouting off about whatever I felt like writing about, and selling one hit product.

Most increases in economic activity typically come from specialization and division of labor. If you try to do too many things the custom systems that once set you apart become legacy infrastructure that hold you back.

Increasingly we will rely on outsourcing, smaller start ups, and the outlook of being employed will drastically changed. Paul Graham recently wrote:

We now think of it as normal to have a job at a company, but this is the thinnest of historical veneers. Just two or three lifetimes ago, most people in what are now called industrialized countries lived by farming. So while it may seem surprising to propose that large numbers of people will change the way they make a living, it would be more surprising if they didn’t.

Marketing Can Make Life Meaningless

Alan wrote:

And one can seek material well-being and yet view competitive markets as subject to excessive manipulation by advertisers and marketers who trivialize life by promoting superficial and ephemeral values.

That quote reminds me of the shock I had when I learned that in the Philippines they sell skin whitening cream, while in the US the standard sales pitch is for making your skin darker.

He also referenced The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, about how people consume based on the consumption habits of others, which hints at the increasing forward value of being a top editorial channel and/or a social recommendation engine which is quick to hightlight the latest trends.

As virtually everything gets commoditized, selling in the future will require increasingly strong social proof of value. Those who have a history of recommending things of value will continue to gain relevance and distribution at the expense of those who are afraid to be biased in favor of being objective.

The Beauty of Creative Destruction

One of the things Mr. Greenspan emphasized more than just about anything else was the value of creative destruction, which is the killing of old business models and the shifting of capital toward better business ideas / models / formats. Having just got back from a month long stay in Manila, I could put the book into context by thinking of some of the business models that were relevant and prevalent in one location, but not relevant in another.

The trade-off for an efficient marketplace that keeps moving capital is that jobs are quite temporal in nature and stress levels are higher than in more socialistic societies. Online you can think of information and services as consistently moving toward free, but people will always be willing to pay for good formatting, clarity, reputation, empathy, and how well they trust you.

If you test evolving formats and technology you

• learn how to apply them to older fields

• learn what markets will change before most people do
• are more likely to be considered remarkable
• enjoy effective marketing techniques before mass pollution rendered them worthless

To put this in perspective, one of the marketing techniques that I was successful with last year has been cloned by virtually all of the big competitors in that same category. If I was not first with the idea they would have destroyed the associated profit margins by saturating the market with similar ideas and a larger stack of capital than I can afford to risk.

If you think about the success of this site, much of it is due to being one of the first bloggers covering SEO stuff. Start a blog about SEO today and it would be much harder to gain traction. I also was one of the first SEOs to make publicly available extensions for modifying search results and aggregating data via widgets. All of that stuff is free though, I likely need to change the format of what I am selling away from a singular large ebook into a format that is more friendly to consume, such that I can go even deeper with providing more high value information without overwhelming people.

Even if you are using creative destruction to push your business model, profit margins, and your field it still helps to do whatever you can to offset that destruction part to appeal to “the deep human need for stability and permanence.” If people think you change too much then they might be less likely to want to invest in your business or even link at your website. When possible, small incremental changes tend to be more effective than large changes. Don’t make frequent and drastic changes to your homepage.

Economic growth is becoming more ideas oriented - less tangible and more conceptual. This means that you will not need as much capital to compete going forward. You will only be required creativity and a willingness to be wrong from time to time.

The Media

Greenspan spoke about how his support for measured tax cuts IF the budget surplus remained were reported in the media as “Greenspan to Back Tax Cuts.” He also highlighted how his quotes urging spending restraint fell on deaf ears and became about taxation.

The dumbing down and misquoting that is common in the media is yet another reason people will increasingly flock to independently published websites.

Wealth Disparity and Redistribution

When new technologies change markets rapidly there is an increase in income stratification. You and I do (or soon will) benefit from the inequality of wealth distribution based on new technologies associated with the WWW.

The low skilled US labor prices are dropping because of

• deflationary pressures from unlocking high quality laborers that were unavailable in years past due to central economic planning

• better and more sophisticated software (I have wasted many days doing junk that a software program should have been able to do far faster)
• cheaper communication

Other Economic Tidbits

• Dutch Disease - Developing countries that discover an abundance of natural resources tend to stagnate. Currency appreciation kills the competitiveness of other export based business models and revenues from the resource make people lazy.

• moral hazards - government insurance causes people to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t (like the current mortgage mess)
• Oil - prices are far more elastic than many appreciate, and Greenspan thinks there is plenty of oil, but we should be aggressive in promoting the use of alternatives like nuclear power and biofuels.
• Alan also does not think the trade deficit or foreign governments holding US dollars pose big risks

I Was Wrong

I used to think that some of the central bankers were pretty dirty based on watching a documentary about it. In years past many of them likely were, but after reading Alan Greenspan’s book I trust him, largely for the following 5 reasons:

• In his book he said his mother was “not the least bit intellectual”. Even if that statement were true about one of my parents and that parent was dead I can’t imagine being blunt enough to write that line in what amounts to a widely read autobiography.

• He was already making loads of money before working at the Fed. If it was money he was after he could have got much more of it for far less stress.
• He admitted that the Fed did once attempt to raise interest rates to pop the tech stock bubble, but doing it small enough to not hurt economy does not kill the euphoria and only further validated the run up.
• On page 463 Alan wrote “And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy. … I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
• In a recent interview he went on record and admitted that the Federal Reserve was not fully independant.

[Video] Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles

Tips on Page Titles

• Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results. Make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title for scan-ability. If your title goes beyond 70 characters Google may cut off the title before 69 characters and display … at the end of your page title.

• Rather than making your page title just the keyword and/or starting your page title with the keyword, sometimes it helps to add in a descriptive modifier before your core keyword. This helps ensure your page is less likely to get filtered out of the search results (and thus makes your rankings more stable) while helping you rank for additional terms.
• Page titles are used to draw in clicks from search results amongst many anonymous competing offers, thus they present an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition and qualify prospects to your offer.
• Good titles evoke an emotional response, ask a question, or promise something (that the landing page fulfills).
• Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show searchers before sending them to your site, they place significant weight on the words in the page title. In addition, some people link to pages using their official page title as the link anchor text.
• Overlapping modifiers in a reasonable and readable way allows you improve your relevancy scores for an array of keywords, but they still need to read well. Rather than loading up page titles with a keyword list it is better to write a clear compelling offer that contains your keywords and describes your services.
• Qualifying the wrong prospective clients with a bad offer will lead to a low conversion rate, or wasting time servicing non-clients. For example, if you sell something that is high end you wouldn’t necessarily want to rank for your keyword with modifiers like cheap and discount, as servicing those people will waste your time.
• Page titles should be differentiated from page to page on your site. Unless limited by the size and scope of your site, it is best not to have all your page titles follow the exact same formula across your site. You also should not use the same keyword at or near the start of every page title.
• The format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be (at least slightly) different than the words in your meta description and on page headers.
• If you have a strong brand you may want to place it at the end of your page title. If you have one of the leading trusted Internet brands (Amazon, eBay, etc.) then it might make sense to place your brand at the start of the page title. In most cases the page title should still be more focused on the page copy and searcher’s intent than on your brand.
• If you blog or are creating linkbait make sure you try to create headlines that draw clicks by using magnetic headline principals.

The SEM blog is retiring
Dear readers: The Search Engine Marketing blog is retiring. I admit to feeling sentimental about it, because this blog was originally created for me by Jason Calacanis, in the early days of Weblogs, Inc, and although I ended up contributing to several blogs in our lineup, this is where it started for me. I’m grateful to Jason, and thankful for the people I met in the SEM and SEO universes, via this blog.

Chris Gilmer, who has been posting here lately, is still with us! You can find Chris writing on Download Squad, our software and online services blog.

Although our editorial priorities have changed over the nearly three years of operation, we do not remove retired blogs. the SEM blog will remain available as an archive (and not a badly optimized one!). Thanks to everyone for reading.

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Yahoo Ads in eBay
As a result of eBay and Yahoo’s partnership, Yahoo has begun to display ads on eBay auction search results pages. The terms of the deal also include Paypal integration into Yahoo Channels and Yahoo Search.

The ads have just been starting to show up in the results pages, and I personally have yet to come across them in any pf my searches, however Loren Baker suggested searching for a misspelling “burberry rain boats” to get results. Through this search I was able to see the nicely integrated ads, offering the corrected spelling products.

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Searching Google for Girls
Search engines are popping up left and right. With people fiddling and tinkering with open source directories, and API’s. But i have never came across something like this….

Are you a girl? A girl that loves searching? Better yet, a girl that loves searching on Google? Why not try Girgle?

There is really nothing new as far as search technology goes here. Girgle is really just a pretty landing page for the AdSense search tool. Pretty might not even be the word. Its landing page is a little malformed with its heart shape thingy. The developer might have something, but they might want to spend a bit more time making it at least appear a little prettier.

Thanks to Nathan for spotting this site!

UPDATE: Girgle has changed their site to a “million dollar pixel homepage”. Thanks for the notification Orang

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Re: PR UPDATE!
OK…I gotta say this thread alm…

SEO Inc. CEO Most Admired CEO in San Diego Finalist (Marketwire via Yahoo! Finance)
Garry Grant, CEO of Search Engine Optimization Inc., a leading full-service integrated search engine marketing company, was recognized this month as one of the most admired chief executive officers that work in San Diego.

[Video] Using Google Date Based Filters to Detect Link Building & Website Indexing Trends

Tips on How to Use Google Indexing Date Filters

• The Google advanced search page allows you to search for pages that were recently indexed, letting you filter through days, weeks, months, and years. Here are pages from SeoBook.com indexed in the last week.

• In the URL they place as_qdr=w as_qdr=d (day) as_qdr=w (week) as_qdr=m (month) as_qdr=y (year). You can also search for multiples of these units, like search for pages indexed in the last 2 weeks by placing as_qdr=w2 in the URL string.
• If you change your content management system or add new sections to your site you can see how quickly they are getting indexed, and look for any duplicate content issues as the new pages are getting indexed by looking for pages indexed under multiple URLs.
• If you have never checked your site for duplicate content issues, but recently published content, that might also show any content duplication issues or Google indexed pages that you do not want in Google’s index.
• In addition to using date based filters to find how well your site is getting indexed, you can search to see who is mentioning an idea with a footprint, or use date based filters for doing link research.

The Beauty of Editorial Review Sites

Once you have a trusted brand you can create low value white label brands that are given a free pass by search engine editors based on the trust of your core brand. These can feed back profits to your main site in many ways, including allowing you to:

• filter link juice to your mother brand site, which is especially useful for temporal news or in categories where link building is tough

• create additional ad inventory that sells at the premium CPM rate of your core brand (see also: Extending the Reach / Circulation of a Web Based Content Site & Ad Network)
• extend to new markets without requiring you to risk tarnishing your main brand

There are many ways to extend, including

• subdomains (eBay is the master of subdomains)

• related brand sites (US News & World Report launched RankingsAndReviews.com, which touches virtually every high paying category)
• editorial channels tracking the marketplace of your main brand (Yahoo! Buzz published a blog post titled “About That Ringtone“)
• sites owned by fake affiliates that you claim no ownership of (use affiliate software to track your sister sites and remove blame from your company)

What tips to do you have for extending your reach while protecting your brand?

[Video] Optimizing Your Meta Description Tags for Google Searchers

Tips to Optimize Meta Descriptions

• Meta description tags may appear in the search results below your page title. Descriptions should be formatted in compete sentences so they read well to humans. Google displays about 150 to 160 characters from meta description tags in their search results. If your description runs past 160 characters they will cut it short and add … at the end of their listing.

• Each meta description should be unique on a per page basis. If you have a large website you can automatically generate descriptions using formulas to include things like item price, shipping details, or any sales offers. If your site is smaller it is best to edit each meta description by tag, especially on your key pages.
• Meta descriptions should compliment your page titles by helping you differentiate from the competition and appeal to your target audience using similar touch-points.
• Your descriptions should use slightly different word orders and keywords than what you use in the page title. Some examples:
  • If a page title uses the plural version of the word the description can use the singular version

  • If a page title uses an acronym the meta description can use the full version of the phrase
    word order should be changed where it makes sense

  • If SEO Book was in my page title my meta description might include something like leading book on search engine optimization
• If you do not have a meta description tag or your description is irrelevant to the search query search engines may grab a snippet of text from your page to describe your listing. If you do not like the snippet they grab you can either create a meta description tag or edit the part of your page that they are inserting into the search results. After their next crawl of your page they should update your snippet.

Are 404 Errors Bad for SEO? (Search Engine Roundtable)
A Cre8asite Forums member noticed that his site is reporting 404 errors when in Google Webmaster Tools . What can he do about it? Is it bad from an SEO standpoint? First of all, a bit of troubleshooting is recommended. You may want to try Xenu link sleuth to see if it finds any broken links. You may want to see if those pages are on your server and if the links to the pages are correct. …

Google Sitelinks Increase the Value of Generic Domains, … by a Lot

Google recently increased their number of sitelinks to 8 and now list them in a 2 column format. To visualize the value of this, consider that I have a decent sized monitor and only 1 listing not controlled by me appears above the fold when searching for SEO Book.
seobook.com/images/creditcards-google-sitelinks.png” alt=”Credit Cards Google Sitelinks.” height=”383″ width=”605″ />

In time I have to expect that for high value keywords (as per AdWords advertiser stats) Google will manually review generic matching names with sitelinks to determine if they are brand oriented or not. If the sites with sitelinks for high value queries are not strong brand oriented sites, is Google going to keep giving this much exposure to whoever owns the exact match domain?

Using Organic Search Profits to Fund Ad Budgets that Lock Out Competing Sites

If the results stay like they are right now, Google is creating a dominate player that will likely overspend on the associated AdWords ads to further block out competition.

Who cares if you lose a few bucks on the ads if it further increases your volume to get you better payouts AND reinforces your default status as THE market leader? Plus, exact match domains consistently get a higher CTR than non-matching domains, so in that regard the domain name not only ensures the sitemap in the search results but also subsidizes the AdWords ad costs.

Domain Names Win Fatter Margins in the Game of Arbitrage

If, after seeing the above images, you still don’t appreciate the value of domain names in search marketing, please give Frank Schilling’s post on arbitrage titled The House Always Wins a read, then go on a domain buying binge.

Life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the obvious deals! If you are a diverse publisher and domain names are not part of your SEO strategy, then hopefully you can correct that deficiency before the year is out.

Re: PR UPDATE!
Forgot to add:

:pi…

These “hi” threads are annoying
Hi, I'm Paul…

These Hi threads…

Re: These “hi” threads are annoying
yeah they are spaming these foru…

Re: These “hi” threads are annoying
shurup moaning  :r…

Re: PR UPDATE!
I got most of my sites devaluate…

SEO Keyword Translation Tool Launched (PRWeb)
A new keyword translation tool is launched to stimulate interest in website internationalization, localization and translation. (PRWeb Oct 26, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/RW1wdC1aZXRhLVpldGEtTG92ZS1UaGlyLVplcm8=

Newsletter Nightmares
Newsletters are a fine thing. They help you keep in touch with your customers and remind them how much they enjoy your products. With your brand fresh in the mind of your subscribers they re more likely to buy from you again assuming you manage the relationship correctly….
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Update to SEO for Firefox

While I was off on vacation apparently there was a childnodes error on Yahoo! SERPs with SEO for Firefox. An SEO Book reader nicknamed nastyw fixed the error and a programmer friend of mind recently updated the code. We also added phrase and exact match to the broad match values for the Google traffic estimator link at the top of the SERPs.

SEO for Firefox Updated to Include Compete.com Data

I just updated SEO for Firefox to include Compete.com website rank and Compete.com monthly uniques. If you leave Compete.com in on demand mode it tends to work quite well. I am also going to ping the guys at Compete.com to ensure the automatic mode gets to be pretty reliable too. Compete.com data is far better than Alexa because it has less of a webmaster bias.

I Only Have 5 YouTube Channel Subscribers!

Yesterday I created 9 SEO videos and posted them to YouTube, but so far I only have about 5 YouTube subscribers, including my wife, mom, dog, and self. Can you give a few videos a look, and subscribe if you like them to help me increase that number? If you think they could use some improvements please offer those tips too.

Should I make individual post pages for each video on SEO Book and offer texual background like I did on some of my past videos?

I think I am getting a bit better at doing the speaking part of creating videos, and am getting better at keeping them succinct, but could greatly improve at the visual formatting part. For some reason the end format looks ok on my monitor, but the stills are fuzzy. Many people made video suggestions here, but I still have to get to doing about 100 more of these real quick…hopefully after I figure out how to make the still look cleaner.

Should I Launch My Website With an Affiliate Program?

Question: I am new to the market and have a product I am going to launch soon at a similar price-point to SEO Book. I am wondering if I should launch with an affiliate program, and if it will provide a substantial return prior to

Answer: I would say off the start don’t enable an affiliate program until you have a better feel for the amount of effort required per purchaser and have brand awareness. I like launching without an affiliate program because it makes citations appear more natural. If you are launching a MLM hype program then a multi tiered affiliate program is a must, but if not the best option is to wait until you better learn your market and are well integrated into your market.

Why it is Best to Launch Without an Affiliate Program

• If you test your marketing first you are going to be able to achieve a higher customer value and attract better affiliates.

• If you are uncertain as to how to best sell your product and you have a new brand then it is going to be pretty tough for affiliates to sell it for you.
• The best marketing looks organic. With a new product it is best to get reviewed by top editorial channels and earn a few organic citations to help others see your product as more than just hype. If a product is primarily or only hyped by affiliates off the start that can undermine your brand.
• Some of my customers who did not sign up as affiliates have read my book and misquoted me to make me sound dumber than I am, and have misquoted to make me sound much smarter than I am. If others have profit incentive behind describing who you are or what you offer many will take the low road and use empty hype. Repositioning a brand after others have positioned it incorrectly is tougher than positioning it correctly off the start.
• Another advantage of waiting on establishing an affiliate program is that by the time you launch it you have built enough trust that people will be willing to sign up with you directly.

The Dangers of a Loose Affiliate Program

If you start off with an affiliate program I think your best best is to make the affiliate program invite only off the start to ensure your brand is not dragged through the mud before you were able to build brand equity. Some of my affiliates have done things like

• stealing content from my friends and wrapping it in banners for my site

• mass email spamming (while signing my name to it)
• a list of other dirty things I will not mention

Because affiliates are hard to control, it is best to have a direct affiliate program rather than going through a third party website. This takes more time to manage, but enables you to

• immediately warn affiliates and/or remove the profit incentive if they are doing things that are illegal and/or undermine your brand value

• altert affiliates in advance of price changes, special promotions, or other changes to your offerings
• keep in contact with your affiliates, protecting you from drastic cost increases seen at third party affiliate management firms like MyAffiliateProgram
• more easily track historical trends
• create your own dirty affiliate sites without risking your main brand

Some affiliate software also tracks referrals, which enables you to learn the difference between what sorts of traffic streams and marketing sell and which do not.

Corporations have sued other corporations based on ad targeting. Even if the lawsuits are bogus they still eat up time and valuable resources. Affiliate control is useful for mitigating some such conflicts.

A few years back a well known SEO said that I was deplorable for bidding on a broad basket of keywords including their name. One of their affiliates was bidding on my name, amongst others. Once questioned about the hypocrisy, this person eventually admitted that they were too lazy to police their own affiliates, which showed their complaint had no validity. If their complaint had validity they would have better been able to claim it by hosting their own affiliate program and holding their own affiliates to the same expectations they try to hold others to.

Affiliate Software Options

• Some of the larger affiliate networks (like CJ) have a wide array of affiliates, but typically the best affiliates will hunt out the best affiliate programs wherever they are (instead of staying inside third party networks), so it might be just as easy to attract the best affiliates by ranking well for your keywords + affiliate program.

• Google offers cost per action based referral ads, but they don’t have much inventory, and most of the best affiliates do not like using Javascript or sharing their business model with Google.
• Some of the smaller affiliate networks (like shareasale.com, as an example) have pitched me as a merchant for rates far below their published rates, but after seeing what happened with MyAffiliateProgram it does not make sense for me to pay a third party to place a roadblock between me and my affiliates.
• ClickBank does not cost much to set up, but I have found that I get an extraordinary return rate there when compared with Paypal. Paypal does not have affiliate features baked into it, but does work with many affiliate software programs.
• I use Idevaffiliate on Seo Book. Fully featured it costs $300.
• As ShoeMoney recently highlighted, BOTW has a custom affiliate program which even tracks direct links to any page on their site. Creating such a program would probably only cost about $1,000 at most. And that link for BOTW may have been an affiliate link, and Google has no way of knowing.

How to Make Better User Profile Pages

I am not sure if many readers here know about it, but this site has profile pages. Here is my profile, for example.

A few updates worth making:

• allow you to insert your RSS feed of your blog on the page

• track all comments from a user
• allow adding additional widgets / gadgets to profile pages
• layout improvements, but I am not sure how as of yet

What updates would you like to see made? Should any of the fields be expanded? Should any of them be killed?

You can edit your profile page under the my account section of the right sidebar.

Yahoo! Search Now Supports Bogus Webmaster Stats

I was sad to see Barry’s post about Yahoo! showing garbage stats to unauthenticated users.

Not that they asked for it, but here is my advice for Yahoo! Search:

• Following Google’s moves from last year is no way to catch them.

• How about marketing yourself on your key properties.
• Invest in Wikia search and share technology with them to attack Google from multiple fronts. Google engineers have openly admitted to frequently hand editing the search results. Now that search is back to being about people tell the USER that it is their web and THEY own it.
• What if you assumed you already lost the search battle and decided to counter Google by being open about search, and being actively involved with the webmaster community? What is the worse that can happen? People start talking about you, trying your product, giving you feedback to improve your product, talk about you, and you gain marketshare. Oh no!

Google Corrects Domain Name Spelling Errors (Sometimes, Anyway)

SEL highlighted that Google is correcting domain spelling errors. Which works to block some typos, but in some instances is pushing traffic away from smaller domains toward more authoritative websites.

Good Job Google

Here is an example of the spell correction working right…

Lets say you want to go to my blog located at search for www.seobook.com/nodd they offer the correct URL as a suggestion.

Bad Job Google

Now lets say that I misspell a filename. What if I typed www.seibook.com/bok (If you add a second o to the word book in the filename this URL exists). What does Google do? Even when I am not signed in, Google STILL recommends people go to SeoBook.com, to the URL seobook.com/images/spellcheck.png”>

[Video] Domain Names & Search Engine Marketing

How Domain Names Play a Role in SEO & SEM

• Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic worth thousands of dollars a year. Some get type in traffic worth thousands per day. And this traffic stream is defensible from search engine algorithmic swings.

• In addition to the defensibility issue, there is a large synergy between great domain names and SEO. Domain names containing your keywords as part of the name make it easier to get your keywords in the anchor text when people reference your company by its official name. This is true even if the domain has hyphens and/or additional words. But domains with hyphens in them are harder to market than domains without hyphens.
• Exact match domains make people more likely to give you targeted anchor text when they mention your website. In some cases a strong domain name also makes a site appear more trustworthy and linkworthy.
• Exact match domains are given an algorithmic relevancy boost in Google, even if a domain name shows little other criteria that prove it trustworthy.
• Exact match domains make it easier to get Google Sitelinks to expand your listing and block out competing sites.
• Exact match domains are easier to profit from search engine arbitrage.

Warning: New Google Webmaster’s Guidelines

I just found another Google webmaster guideline worth sharing…

According to Matt Cutts, the FTC thinks you should clearly mark paid links. If you do clearly mark paid links Google editors will penalize you for buying / selling links, then they will pay an AdSense spammer to steal all your content. Don’t worry though, as Google doesn’t clearly mark their own ads.

Look at how closely timed the above posts were. Why would any webmaster mark their own sites to be penalized and stolen? Clear language is a wonderful thing.

Find All My Domain Names

Some of my domain names were registered as a joke (haggisdiet.com was a bet against Andy Hagans), and it wouldn’t be hard to register domains in the name of another person. Having said that, I doubt few people put my name on their domain names, and now you can look up a list of domains owned by a person by using Registrant Search. If you have thin affiliate sites that rank well in Google and are not using fake whois data then now might be a little late to start.

Via Domain Name News I recently discovered Sold Names, which aggregates publicly available price data for domain sales. You can also view last week’s sales at DN Journal. If you find someone underselling a domain name browse through their inventory and see if they have any others worth buying.

Re: Hello i am Earl Grey
[quote author=dnk link=topic=135…

Zude Offers New Technology in Social Networking
The past couple of years have been such a fertile period for social networking ideas that words like revolutionary should be demanding hazard pay. But Fifth Generation Systems has been causing enough buzz to make one wonder if there s more than mere hype behind it. Indeed at least one observer has described the company s latest project as THE web of the future….
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Blind Student Hits Target with Class Action Lawsuit
Using alt tags on your web site is good for SEO purposes and improves site accessibility. If you need another reason to convince you or your clients to use alt tags how does avoiding a lawsuit strike you Discount retailer Target found itself on the wrong end of one early last year that just received class action status thanks to the inaccessibility of its web site to certain users….
Refurbished and Used Networking Equipment Network Liquidators sells refurbished and used networking equipment for up to 95% off list, with a 1 year warranty. We buy and sell top brands like Cisco, Extreme, Foundry, and more. Call us for best pricing.

Newsletter Nightmares
Newsletters are a fine thing. They help you keep in touch with your customers and remind them how much they enjoy your products. With your brand fresh in the mind of your subscribers they re more likely to buy from you again assuming you manage the relationship correctly….
Get your FREE 30 day VMware Workstation trial Now! Virtualize your desktop today with VMware Workstation.

Zude Pages and the Future of Social Networks
In the previous article I gave you a taste of Zude the new offering from Fifth Generation Systems that some claim will revolutionize social networking and the web. In this article I will actually build a Zude profile and speculate on the uses and possible pitfalls of this technology….
Discover Innovative Ways to Succeed in Business FREE access to Webcasts, Podcasts, and Videos from industry thought leaders and top companies.

Re: Hello!
It was weird to me to hear these…

Re: Enumerate local IPs and return one at random
jesus and I thought I read the P…

SEO Keyword Translation Tool Launched (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)
A new keyword translation tool is launched to stimulate interest in website internationalization, localization and translation.

How Offline Messages Influence Online Behavior
You own a web site and you optimize it for the search engines. You may also do some offline advertising. This means that you probably wonder if your offline messages are inspiring potential customers to search for you and find your web site. Fortunately iProspect and JupiterResearch wondered the same thing….
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Whoisagap.com and SEO Consultants join forces to help marketers find reputable search engine marketing suppliers. (e-Consultancy)
With companies throughout the world realising that search engine marketing is an essential part of the marketing mix, the need to enlist a reputable agency has never been more pressing. Whoisagap.com a UK based website has gained a reputation as the world’s primary resource for locating Google Qualified…

Tracking a package through MSN Search
MSN has just announced that you can track packages through its MSN Search portal.

To track packages with MSN Search, simply head to search.msn.com, and enter your FedEx, DHL, UPS, or USPS tracking number.

MSN package tracker is one of the MSN Instant Answer search tools. Its great that search engines are providing all of these additional features to make our lives even more easier. But as the features grow, so does the competition and battle for the top search engine.

Who knew that search could be this exciting?

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Zude Offers New Technology in Social Networking
The past couple of years have been such a fertile period for social networking ideas that words like revolutionary should be demanding hazard pay. But Fifth Generation Systems has been causing enough buzz to make one wonder if there s more than mere hype behind it. Indeed at least one observer has described the company s latest project as THE web of the future….
Get your FREE 30 day VMware Workstation trial Now! Virtualize your desktop today with VMware Workstation.

Kayak’s New Ad Campaign
Kayak.com the travel site, by the creators Expedia, have launched a brand new ad campaign that had a price tag of $10 million.

Kayak is a travel search engine, not a travel agency, design to give customers the best deal possible, and help finding travel related products and supplies.

Kayak gets paid through clickage on ads that are displayed on their system, for anything from hotels, airlines, and rental cars. Kayak’s whole deal is that they are not trying to sell their visitors anything, they are just providing the best information for them to make their own decisions.

In this first new ad campaign of Kayak’s, they take a satirical campaign that supposedly isnt at a location where others would go. The campaign uses a provocative approach to humor.

All of Kayak’s new ads can be seen on their corporate website.

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Top Keyword Terms Companies are Buying
Nielson Netrating has done some homework and developed a list on the Top 25 Companies By Sponsored Link Impressions list.

Its a pretty interesting list that shows the top 3 keywords that are bought by some major companies.

Here is a sample of that list:

• eBay - myspace, ebay, maps
• NexTag.com - dell, airlines, ipod
• Vonage - verizon+dsl, at&t, sprint
• Time Warner - mapquest, dictionary, maps
• Amazon.com - books, haunted+lighthouses, log+splitters
• Microsoft - hotmail, mortgage+calculator, movies

I think by far, Amazon.com has the best list.

Clickz has some other charts from the report that show the Advertising Breakdown by Industry, Advertising Breakdown by Ad Unit Types, and Top 25 Companies by Sponsored Link Impressions.

[via ZDnet ]

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• Top 5 SEO Terms Any Beginner Should Be Familiar With (Turks.US)
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is generally used to refer to the industry or process of optimizing websites to be well interpreted by the search engines. A SEO is a SEO expert or anyone practicing search engine optimization. But those were the basics.

Whoisagap.com and SEO Consultants join forces to help marketers find reputable search engine marketing suppliers. (e-Consultancy)
With companies throughout the world realising that search engine marketing is an essential part of the marketing mix, the need to enlist a reputable agency has never been more pressing. Whoisagap.com a UK based website has gained a reputation as the world’s primary resource for locating Google Qualified…

• Criteria You Should Look For In Professional SEO Firms (Turks.US)
Acquiring the services of a respectable and professional SEO company is sometimes a mind-boggling and challenging episode.

Matt Cutts Answers some questions on Google Video

Google’s Matt Cutts answered some questions recently on Google Video. Check these videos out if you are really into search, Matt has some good thoughts down.

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SEO Keyword Translation Tool Launched (PRWeb)
A new keyword translation tool is launched to stimulate interest in website internationalization, localization and translation. (PRWeb Oct 26, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/RW1wdC1aZXRhLVpldGEtTG92ZS1UaGlyLVplcm8=

Google Lowered My PageRank, Was My Website Penalized?

A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if his site was penalized for selling links. The same email went on to say that he is ranking better than ever in Google, even for his core category single word query, but his toolbar PageRank score dropped by one.

Google Stats Are Wonky

Many of Google’s webmaster stats are rarely updated and/or intentionally inaccurate. And many stats change on a whim, while reflecting no real change in the structure of the web.

PageRank is the Wonkiest Stat of Them All

Toolbar PageRank scores are only updated about once every three months. In between updates hundreds of millions or billions of web pages are added to Google’s index. These new pages absorb PageRank and generally cause the PageRank of existing pages to be lowered. Pages that were a high PR 7 might become a low PR7, pages that were a low PR7 might become a high PR6, and so on. The one exception to this rule is that if your site’s inbound link authority grows faster than the web does then your PageRank score goes up.

PageRank is recomputed in near real time and toolbar PageRank scores are perpetually outdated. If you are starting from a PR0 and get a few quality links then of course you should expect a PageRank greater than 0 on the next update, but even the fact that your pages are getting indexed means you have some share of PageRank even if the toolbar does not show anything. In some cases the toolbar not only shows outdated data, but sometimes it even sticks, showing you the PageRank score of another site or showing all pages as 0.

It is no coincidence that Google chose not to update toolbar PageRank scores in a great deal of time before spreading more propaganda against paid links, and then launched a partial data push (how often do they do that)? This way when they finally update PageRank and many pages have a slightly lower PageRank score many webmasters will wonder “was I penalized?”

Why the Hate for Paid Links?

As Michael Gray rightly points out:

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to “know a guy” to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any “gaming theory” to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

If making PageRank function requires hand editing isn’t that an indication that PageRank is irrelevant? Why not change they relevancy algorithms rather than trying to scare people?

Deflecting Blowback

Danny Sullivan posted about Google’s latest battle against paid links. I followed up on the absurdity of the situation, and in response to our posts Danny and I were both called liars. Which might seem like a fair assessment of the situation to a person new to search marketing.

Why would Google make an official webmaster announcement, but provide no quotes for the story and not publish it on any of their own websites? Probably because they know what they are doing is illegal, and want to be detached from the story to not look like overzealous dictators.

What Google Can’t Cloak

The two things Google can’t cloak are the visitors they are sending you and how much they charge you for a click. Sure their ad auctions have a hidden “quality” factor to them, but that is just an indication of how much they trust your ad account and your site. If Google is sending you more traffic and ranking your site better then you have nothing to worry about.

My friend’s lower PageRank score was an anomaly. It was irrelevant, because at the core, his site is ranking better and Google is sending him more traffic. At the end of the day Google can put smoke an mirrors wherever they like, but if your search traffic trend is up you are not penalized.

Why Search Traffic Can Go Down Without a Penalty

1. Competition: if the competition is out-marketing you then your site might slip.

2. Seasonal traffic patterns: if you go out of a high demand season it makes sense that your traffic may drop even if rankings improve.
3. Automated filters: In some cased individual pages might get automatically filtered for being too closely aligned with a particular term, but they can usually overcome that by loosening the focus of those pages and their inbound anchor text. That is why it is important for an SEO to track their statistics, to know where they are and how reliant they are on each phrase. In some cases I have seen sites which ranked for many additional new queries but got filtered for one of their highest traffic terms. The page focus and anchor text was loosened and the page came back ranking better than ever.

Social Media Marketing: The New SEO? (Search Engine Land)
Fall is the time of year when we start to look at where search marketing is heading. Looking at the latest search marketing conference agendas, articles, and online news in the SEM space, it certainly appears that social media marketing and networking are the wave of the future. To a certain extent, they are. Social media, and social networking in particular, create a back-and-forth …

SEO for Firefox Updated to Include Compete.com Data

I just updated SEO for Firefox to include Compete.com website rank and Compete.com monthly uniques. If you leave Compete.com in on demand mode it tends to work quite well. I am also going to ping the guys at Compete.com to ensure the automatic mode gets to be pretty reliable too. Compete.com data is far better than Alexa because it has less of a webmaster bias.

Google Corrects Domain Name Spelling Errors (Sometimes, Anyway)

SEL highlighted that