I remember in 2nd grade when our teacher was teaching us how to do math I raced ahead and was doing lessons for today, tomorrow, and next week. The teacher rewarded my efforts by yelling at me and ripping up the pages from the book and giving me a 0 on that homework.

In fourth grade we would play around the world with math flash cards where you raced to say the answers, and I would literally go all the way around the classroom without losing…

Just for fun. But if things get much worse it might be good for utility as well

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The following is a guest post from Tom Demers.

One of the most pivotal aspects of driving large volumes of search traffic in most verticals is effectively targeting long tail keywords. While ranking for competitive phrases and developing link authority are certainly crucial aspects of SEO, much of ranking on long tail keywords is properly targeting and optimizing for them. A while ago Aaron made the following image as a conceptual example of how the relevancy algorithms may differ for different types of keywords:

This article will outline a three step process for targeting long tail keywords…

My buddies from Conversion Rate Experts have put together a review site for multivariate software called Which Multivariate. Surprisingly old school in the modern affiliate link filled web, they have made the site vendor neutral and are not planning on ever taking affiliate commissions in an attempt to gather honest reviews. Check it out. Its worth a look!

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When the internal Google remote quality rater guidelines leaked online there was a core quote inside it that defined the essence of spam:

Final Notes on Spam
When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam…

And all this, only to find out there was a missing ingredient the whole time

Of course, if Dilbert had a text version of the cartoon and perhaps a more relevant alt tag in his embed code that would help too. Just saying

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My wife used to tell me that I would give too much away…and then she pens something like this AdWords affiliate guide. It doesn’t seem fair

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One of the great things about SEO is that it allows you to see many lenses on business that you can’t normally see with most other professions (outside of perhaps something in high finance or management consulting anyhow). One day you are building a bootstrapped business from scratch wondering when it will make its first Dollar, and the next day your on the phone with McKinsey consultants or an executive from a fortune 500 company talking strategy…

The following is a guest post by Slaven Radic.

The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece…

Why Popular People May Seem Negative to Some

I was chatting with a friend today about one of our projects and he mentioned how he stopped liking a few other internet marketers recently due to their negativity. Him stating that gave me a bit of internal reflection, and I think it comes down to a few things…

• When people get from a certain level of success to say 5x or 10x, many may feel guilty about making the money and become negative about others to justify their own behaviors (after all, in *many* cases, when you grow income beyond a certain level it can require either moral flexibility and/or the ability to sharply change your internal values)…

Relevancy is a good thing. It makes search and the world more efficient. Many attempts at relevancy, like search is getting more social, may just create more noise. But computers are getting better at understanding language is a good thing “our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.”

But it seems each increase in relevancy justifies additional increases in irrelevancy to increase monetization…

Mark Cuban recently talked about how search engines and content aggregators are vampires.

There is no reason to be indexed in Google. … You haven’t gotten anything back

But he failed to disclose how his Mahalo investment loots content.

If Google is a vampire (while sending away billions of Dollars of traffic for free) then what does that make Mahalo (which borrows your titles and abstracts as content to pull search traffic into their ad cluttered pages pages, while placing your content below the fold (while using nofollow on attribution links))?

Is the following accurate?

If not, then please explain how…

HOPE is perhaps the single most lucrative thing to sell.

There are so many people in need of direction, while so few actually want to do the work required to achieve the end goal. Thus many scammers sell the end result up front while glossing over the hard work required to get there.

I was over at a friend’s house in the bathroom and saw a copy of “Your Infinite Power to be Rich” sitting on the floor & flipped open to a random page…

Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).

But when you look at the sales material that Mahalo pitches to corporations, in the 19 page PDF they read like an à la carte menu of SEO services, rather than sales material from a company ignorant of of SEO…

I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media’s CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: “what if google decides they don’t like you anymore?”

Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity…

On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model

Let’s use a different industry to illustrate what is happening. Let’s say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don’t mention who the band it and on their website, they put up a link to download the song…

Ben Edelman: “Although I had asked that the Google Toolbar be “disable[d],” and although the Google Toolbar disappeared from view, my network monitor revealed that Google Toolbar continued to transmit my browsing to its toolbarqueries.google.com server”

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Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is a bit more convoluted. But so long as they are…

• well branded
• well funded
• operating at scale
• good at public relations
• wrapped in AdSense ads

…the answer is yes, autogenerated websites full of scraped content are fine…

From a marketing and a public relations standpoint this tool is brilliant. Rand just put up a full in-depth review here.

In the past I have not been a fan of certain outing policies, but of late I have seen that practice has went away…and if it stays that way how could I not recommend the above tool?

Sometimes it is hard to appreciate how spoiled we are as SEOs with cheap to free keyword data, cheap to free great link data, and lots of useful tools to help us organize and make sense of it all…

Dennis Goedegebuure, aka DennisG, is the head of eBay’s in-house SEO team. After seeing him make some great posts in our forums and chatting a bit back and forth I asked if he would be up for doing an interview about SEO. And the result is the following 12 pages full of great actionable tips for anyone looking to learn more about in-house SEO best practices.

What is your background and how did you get into SEO?

After I finished a master in Economics at the University of Amsterdam, I started at eBay in April 2002 in the Internet marketing team for eBay Netherlands and Belgium…

Of course all ranking systems are biased and whatnot (I get paid to influence Google’s search results & even within the realm of academia colleges try to game the US News & World Report rankings), but I love all the kind comments from our community members here. Thanks guys

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So remarkably bad, that I had to share it!

I don’t know who Demand(ed) that Media, but could I please get my minute and six seconds back?

With 50,000+ views, that 1 video has wasted over a month of human life, so far. How many man-years are wasted watching such garbage? And yet they are just getting started! Demand Media’s goal is to create a million pieces of “content” each month…

Recently SEOmoz posted about running a test that proved their thesis that nofollow PageRank sculpting still works (while actually only proving issues with sample size & methodology). But the issue of “proving” things with SEO publicly is typically a misguided one.

It is so hard to control variables in tests, and even if you could set up a control set many test types would be isolated to fictional words…

Google claims they try to be pretty fair with publishers and publishing business models. They are fine with indexing preview versions of a page and just showing a user that, you can make the full article free, you can make the first x clicks free.

OR you can put it all behind a paywall and not get any search exposure.

UNLESS you are Youtube.

In which case you can put whatever you want behind a subscribe wall, still have that registration-required/paywall content fully indexed in Google, and then force users to sign in to view the content…

Google has long been known for having “10 blue links” and they have expanded far beyond that.

But even amongst the traditional listings there are lots of variations in how they are displayed.

Here is a regular result

with a second indented result

sometimes the second indented result can show inline sitelinks

traditional single listing with 2 indented results under it (and then sometimes a non-indented 4th listing)

traditional single listing with 3 or 4 inline sitelinks

sometimes that has a second indented listing as well

traditional single listing with 8 sublinks below it (and this often has the second intented results below it too…

I am still behind on a couple major writing projects, but one of the writing projects that was hardest for me was trying to write something for Seth Godin’s new project – What Matters Now. A killer PDF full of ideas from some of the leading thinkers in technology*

*and me

When I got started online I ended up having to get a job because I had plenty of debt and no experience…

One of Google’s leading marketing secrets is to appeal to power users. When describing how they designed Gmail, Google’s Todd Jackson stated:

We started with the early-adopter crowd. That was on purpose. We wanted to build a product for people who were getting hundreds of e-mails a day, because we believe by focusing on the power user, you’re designing the product the rest of the market will want in a couple years when everyone’s usage habits catch up to the most active users…

The Media Strawman Argument: SEO is Bogus

Lots of people in desperate positions like to create a common enemy and rally against them, even if/when their position is utter non-sense.

Watching the big co. media vs Google interaction has been entertaining, largely because they claim search is an either/or game.

Matt Kelly, from the Daily Mirror, exclaimed how SEO was a dead end and how they were only able to grow by not worrying about SEO:

three months ago, we launched two new websites – and actually stripped out from Mirror…

In the past I have vented email frustrations in many ways (and truth be told I am still way behind on email to this day) but I thought it would be worth sharing why forums are a way better business model than personalized emails for helping people.

I am not sure if all my thoughts and analysis are 100% spot on, but this is why I like private forums so much.

Instant Feedback on Value Perception

One of the first reasons is that you instantly have a yes/no answer on if the person values your time…

Google recently announced their fade in homepage. From a marketing perspective I think it is interesting to try to figure out why they did that. Marissa Mayer wrote:

the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change…