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…

Generally I have not been a huge fan of registering all your websites with Google (profiling risks, etc.), but they keep using the carrot nicely to lead me astray. … So much so that I want to find a Googler and give them a hug.

Google recently decided to share some more data in their webmaster tools. And for many webmasters the data is enough to make it worth registering (at least 1 website)!

AOL Click Data

When speaking of keyword search volume beakdown data people have typically shared information from the leaked AOL search data…

Hi Everyone
Anita Campbell will be interviewing me on her Small Business Radio program in ~ 1 hour & 15 minutes, at 1:30 PM Eastern.

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Paid Links Are Spam

Buying links is considered spammy by Google because it is a ranking short cut which subverts search relevancy algorithms.

And so Google considers it a black hat SEO practice.

Links are somewhat hard to scale because (outside of those who create a network of spam) it is time intensive to find the right sites, negotiate a price, and then ensure appropriate placement…

A couple years ago my wife and I had our big wedding in the Philippines (we even had the mayor of Manila show up). She was so beautiful that day. And lucky for me she is just as beautiful when she wakes up each day.

But she can be hard on herself and if she gains a single pound she worries. Truth is I am the chubby one who needs to drop weight.

Beauty (and the perception of it) is a wonder commodity to sell because there is no limit…

Is DIY SEO any good? Does it work?

When I got to look at DIY SEO my first thought was: good structure & layout, lets see what is under the hood. But then after opening up the hood I found a car with no engine.

On a score of usability I would give the site a 9 or a 10, but in terms of utility it would be lucky to score as high as a 2 or a 3.

Google AdWords: The Cheapest SEM Strategy for Small & Local Businesses

Maybe there are some small businesses out there who are content being obscure, or who only want to rank for their own business name plus maybe 1 or 2 longtail keywords…

If you have been in the SEO field for any serious length of time you have probably come across (and benefited from) some of Tedster’s work – either directly, or indirectly from others who have repackaged his contributions as their own. He is perhaps a bit modest, but there are few people in the industry as universally well respected as he is. I have been meaning to interview him for a while now, and he is going to be speaking at Pubcon South on April 14th in Dallas, so I figured now was as good a time as any

How long have you been an SEO, and how did you get into the field?

I started building websites in 1995 and the word SEO hadn’t been invented…

Who is going to pay to tell people that they are good enough and their lives are fine as they are? A fundamental truth of advertising is that advertising the truth usually isn’t very profitable – which is why there is lead generation, affiliate programs, public relations, negative billing options, small print, bogus medical research, and so on…

Ever wonder how an SEO professional can charge first world rates to do do third rate, third world work and still get a top rating from a heavily advertised SEO rating website? Edward Lewis has the lowdown on Top SEOs, including TopSEOs complaints…

We recently reviewed a bunch of competitive research tools, and in that spirit I thought it would be a good idea to review Alexa. It is not that Alexa is the #1 service available, but they do provide one of the better services while being free. Every few years it seems they fall behind and become a bit of a relic, and then every few years they catch up.

Recently when using Alexa I saw they added a good number of features, so I thought it would be worth doing a run down…

Ask has removed referral data from many of their ads, leaving advertisers flying blind. Ask.com, which has long been known as one of the leading Google AdWords arbitrage plays, also syndicated their ad feed to the point where Google forced them to turn off syndication. From there Ask has look for new ways to arbitrage search. They have created an automated deals section…

Which has over a million pages indexed in Google!

And the Ask…

I will be interviewed on Mixergy in at 11AM Pacific US time today.

I love Andrew’s energy & wish I had a bit more of his optimism, but years of marketing have turned me a weee bit cynical

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I must confess to being a junky for reading economics and investing sites. A person can’t beat the market for a long period of time without having some skills, and so the level of discourse you find on top investing blogs blows other areas out of the water. And sometimes the comments are more quote-worthy and insightful than the blog posts. For instance, “The organisation of society is for one purpose only, to separate as much labor-value from the majority as is possible…

A few years ago Google’s chief economist Hal Varian explained that scale is over-rated:

We’re very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There’s a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.
…
So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes…

Anywhere there is controversy you will find many marketers who will opine and try to shine the lights on themselves about how wonderful they are and how much they help everyone else and how everyone should link to them in the controversy. But when the attention dies down it turns out few marketers hold true to their promises and stick with their principals.

It is usually the unsung heroes that make a difference, not as a cheesy marketing strategy, but because they believe in doing the right thing, even if it is at great personal cost…

Some people email you out of the blue accusing you of things that are not true while being rude and condescending. One person stated that they were certain I sold their email and that I am unethical and etc etc etc

My response was short and sweet
“go ___ yourself. we don’t sell our user information.”

To which there was a response about how I am not very professional. And the thing is, how are you supposed to respond when people falsely accuse you of criminal conduct while using your services for free AND insulting you?

Is there a professional way to respond?

Does the person who gave you no benefit of the doubt, insulted you, and wasted your time somehow deserve the benefit of the doubt? If yes, why? They certainly didn’t give you any…

When Transparency is Valuable

If you are selling a site which you just want to get rid of and lack passion for then there is nothing wrong with being fairly transparent and shopping it for the maximum amount you can get at an auction or such. And if you have high growth and contact an investment banker to get a bidding war going then limited transparency can help then. But if you have a high growth site in a high growth field and there is only one company trying to buy your site then transparency is the opposite of leverage…

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…