Perhaps part of the “interesting data” Richard Rosenblatt was talking about was link anchor text on expired domains & cybersquatting efforts that he could redirect in bulk at high earning eHow pages.
Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search results…
The following is a guest post by Kpaul. 
A long time ago, on an Internet far, far away (when I wrote for fun – and for free), I did a piece called Portrait of a Blogger. The year was 2002 and blogging was just beginning to really hit the mainstream hard. If you’re not familiar with the audience at Kuro5hin.org, they’re a snooty version of slashdot readers if you can imagine such a thing…
Straight from the horse’s mouth:
We’ve started testing organic (also referred to as algorithmic) and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S. The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft. However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!…
Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have confirmed that they will start testing the Bing algorithm live on some Yahoo! traffic this month. One of the big questions from the SEO perspective is what happens to Yahoo! Site Explorer? If it goes away then webmasters will need to get link data from web indexes built by SEO companies, perhaps either Open Site Explorer and/or Majestic SEO.
Yahoo! also offers a link: search in their BOSS program…
Open source software is awesome, and I am much richer for it existing. But the concepts that work in widely downloaded free software may not apply as well elsewhere. One of the best books on this topic is Jason Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget, which in large part inspired this post.
Openness is one of the most widely espoused important ideals upon which to build an online business. The reasons it is preached so heavily are
But most such plays are exploitative and short term based…
As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free…
They might prefer to use different labels (so as to minimize fear in the marketplace & slow down regulators), and they might claim that aggregate statistics control the investments & thus they are not really publishers, but they plan on skimming a big piece off of the top of many big markets…
In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn’t tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value…
The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site’s visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance…
This image might need updated in the years to come, but it does a great job laying out how Google works when you type a query into their search engine. Search is so easy to do that it is hard to appreciate how complex it is unless you take a look under the hood. Which is exactly what this graphic does 
Click the image to get the full sized beefy image
A side benefit of this graphic is that it should help prospective clients realize how complex SEO & PPC campaigns can be…
I just read a WSJ article about how some hotel chains are trying to woo people leaving negative remarks publicly about their brand.
‘I Hate My Room,’ The Traveler Tweeted. Ka-Boom! An Upgrade!
Generally speaking, the idea is crap.
In essence they are spending resources trying to make the most unsatisfied segment of their market happy, and rewarding people for trashing their brands with free upgrades & other perks…
Internet success stories rarely get any sexier than the story of Johns Wu.
In 2006, while still an undergraduate research student in neuroscience, Johns started a WordPress blog he named Bankaholic.com. A one-man-show, Johns used an SEO/SEM-focused approach to build traffic and revenue. Just over 3 years later, he sold Bankaholic to BankRate for a reported $14.9 Million.
He was 22 years old…
I spoke to Loren from Search Engine Journal today and he mentioned a conference he is helping put together in Los Angeles.
The conference is BlueGlass LA.
It’s on July 19/20 in LA. The speaker line up is pretty awesome and takes a business / start up approach on top of the killer search & social media tactics he will be reviewing. Tickets are only $495, and he has put together a 15% discount for SEObook readers/members…
In the past when I claimed that the Google Maps insertion in organic search results wasn’t more organic search but rather a Google promotion, I was met with skepticism by some, who argued that Google Maps was just another flavor of organic search and visitors would still be able to go to the end ranked website.
If you search for something on Google and click on one of the end URLs you can still visit them, but Google made one step in the opposite direction today…
Back when I got into SEO part of the reason I wasn’t too into PPC back then was because I had limited cash, but another big reason I wasn’t big on it was because it seemed so simple and boring. Over the past couple years that has changed a lot!
Today Google AdWords is far more complex than SEO was in 2003.
With that complexity there are additional opportunities for some & additional expenses for others…
The third reason we really like [eNom] is because the data, right. Almost 10% of the entire web hits our servers. At least 10 million domains. In a world like the web, where everybody is everywhere, trying to figure out what people are doing, particularly in the longtail this is a really exciting source of data.
If the domain name data leakage from eNom & BulkRegister is “exciting” for him that means sharing it must be “not exiting” for their customers…
This video is a review of one of our online SEO tools – the keyword list comparison tool, which makes it easy to compare up to 10 keyword lists against each other. This can be used to help determine the quality of keyword data sources, to pool data into a handy unified list, or to help understand the overlap in keyword strategy from competing sites when using competitive research tools…
Want to Live Strong?
I think Google is getting the message on what the search results would look like in a couple years if they let the above continue…
When Google enters a field sometimes they do so quietly, but when they decide they want to own something there is nothing quiet about their approach. They are not content to pick one niche and one model (the way that Netflix does):
Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down.
Google wants to turn Youtube watchers into mindless drones who are spared the expense of thought:
“If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder…
Yesterday someone emailed me this quote
“People that pay for things never complain. It’s the guy you give something to that you can’t please.” ~Will Rogers
and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage.
But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value…
Now that big media practices keyword stuffing, engage in link selling, are invested in SEO start ups, and are selling SEO services perhaps they won’t publish ill-informed pablum when writing about SEO.
Don’t hold your breath waiting on that, but…
Now that newspapers are looking to sell SEO services, Google is rumored to be out and about asking them to remove links:
We understand that newspapers are currently being contacted by Google and being asked to remove links (especially those placed after the articles have been written – ie comment links and links that are placed for payment in articles weeks or months after it had gone live)…
I was recently talking to my buddy Chris from Warlock Media, and he mentioned a blog post where he wrote “There are more sharks and less fish these days and the trend looks to continue for many years to come.” I think as winners accumulate capital and markets consolidate being involved as a person well known in online marketing will become less enjoyable. I explained some of my thoughts on that front in the most recent Ruud questions interview…
Yahoo! & Associated Content @ Yahoo! Video
The backfill content business model has had a great run over the past 5 years, but with today’s announcement of Yahoo! acquiring Associated Content, it certainly feels like it is getting toward the beginning of the end for that model for most folks.
When Teoma launched in 2002 GoogleGuy made the following comment:
“I just have one question. Are the Overture results on top an April Fool’s Day joke, or is that for real? 
“
Since then Google has put ads above their organic search results, done selective self-serving within their “organic” results, and built a business that is pulling in over $20 billion a year. It turns out aggressively carpet-bombing the web with ads is no joke…
We updated rank checker this morning – sortable columns, faster code, works with the new Google SERPs, etc. If you are one of the dozens of people who filled out a support ticket and didn’t get a reply…always check to see if updates are available before filling out a support ticket. And even then we probably don’t need support tickets, because it rarely takes us more than a day to update our plug-ins as Google changes…
In much the same way that people have developed banner blindness there will be an eventual blindness toward other forms of ads.
People only need to be screwed by a gem like the following about once before they lose trust in sharing *any* personal data with anybody.
The above example is a great example of the scumbag affiliate mindset. Find whatever loopholes in the law exist, and exploit them right up until they are illegal and you risk a fine…
Originally Link Diagnosis was a fairly well received free link analysis tool. But since its launch its role in the SEO game may have quietly changed.
While surfing around the SEO space I checked out the iAcquire white paper, which explained that they own LinkDiagnosis. iAcquire, which claims to be a corporate link building tool, apparently states that they use your research to service their clients…
Has a competitor launched a new feature that concerns you? If so, how do you react?
Google, well known for their public relations expertise, does not like the idea of Facebook creating an (eventual) distributed ad network based on demographics data. In spite of Google personalizing search by default (without asking), Google opting you into behavioral targeting (without asking), & automatically opting you into Google Buzz (without asking), suddenly they are a company concerned with the privacy of people on *other* networks…
A lot of people who are well known as SEOs spend too much time on self promotion and not enough time on business development. BTW I would classify myself as being in that camp, though I have been slowly migrating since meeting my wife
So much of SEO stuff is sorta ego in place of performance IMHO. And the problem when you hire top SEOs is that even if they have a strong brand and do great work on their own sites, the market pricing for services tends to be so dysfunctionally under-priced that…
A common practice in the marketing space is for people to diminish what you do, state that it is below them, help rebrand your stuff in a negative light, and then at some point in the future basically clone the idea (maybe with a few new features, maybe not) and then push their clone job aggressively as though it is revolutionary.
Another shady practice is when you ask people for advice and they say “no don’t do that” and then as soon as they hang up the phone they send off emails to their workers telling them to do that which they told you was a bad idea…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
