Jon Glick is one of the leading experts on search, having literally both wrote the code at leading search engines and later becoming an SEO professional. I remember speaking with him in 2004 at the Ghost Bar in Las Vegas and it was perhaps the most fascinating conversation about search I have ever been part of. I have wanted to interview him for years & just recently was able to.

In some past interviews (like this one) you have highlighted how Google’s key strength is perhaps brand rather than relevancy…

Your website may be invaded by robots at any time. If you’re lucky that is – at least if you want people to visit you from places like Google or Yahoo or Bing. And, if the visiting robots are polite.

In the early days of the Web, automated programs known as robots, or bots, [...]…

Back when I used to do hotel SEO for the Hotel de Paris, one of the things that regularly came up in my competitive research was the importance of conference and convention hall facilities and networking in that field.

Why does having conference facilities help hotels with their SEO?

For the simple reason that convention organizers typically have a website. One trusted by search engines at that…

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook! From breaking 500 million registered members to sort of breaking through the walled garden, to arguably breaking the trust of former FB evangelists, perhaps we should be unsurprised that the world’s largest social networking website is constantly making headlines. Comes with the territory of being #1, doesn’t it?… the publicity peppered with praise and sprinkled with scrutiny…

In February of 2010, Google purchased a social Q&A site, Aardvark. It seems like a great match, for a couple of reasons. One is that a paper from Aardvark that attracted a lot of attention, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine (pdf), written by Damon Horowitz and former Googler Sepandar D. Kamvar, [...]…

From the moment that Google Maps became Google Maps there has always been strong growth in the numbers of unique visitors. For period in from 2007-2009 it was growing at rates of 50 to 60% year over year. During that period it quickly passed Mapquest and Yahoo as the leading Mapping product.  Often Google would increase traffic to Maps by changes to the main page of the results page…

According to an announcement on the Google LatLong blog just today, Google is launching a "Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. " The goal is to make it easier for small businesses to find answers to all their Google questions in one central repository…

In an article on Mashable today, Facebook is continuing to build its proverbial military might, as it prepares to tackle its much larger foe, Google. In fact, Facebook acquired 18 patents in total from Friendster, for around $40 million.

Image courtesy KeyWebData.com

Understanding Google's biggest weakness, Facebook is attempting to secure the high ground in this impending battle…

This article on responding to negative reviews was first published here in March. With Google introducing their feature allowing business owners to respond to respond directly to reviews, I thought it worthwhile to reprint it. Google’s advice on how to respond to reviews in their Help section is, of necessity, too brief to cover the topic thoroughly. Things though can go wrong with the response process if the business does not have a good response plan in place…

Allowing SMBs to add responses to reviews posted on Google Maps is not the only olive branch that Google is handing to businesses. They have also upgraded the monthly Places Account Performance Update to include more information, to educate and market new features and to promote their Tags product.

The report is very useful as it includes the bulk of information that a business would need WITHOUT requiring a visit to Google Places…

Google’s recent purchase of Metaweb, who run the Freebase directory left many wondering at the motivations behind the acquisition. Did Google buy the company for its technology, for its Freebase directory, for the expertise of its employees?

A Google patent application published today hints at one reason behind the deal, with a mention [...]…

Google’s recent introduction of the ability for SMBs to respond to reviews is a welcome and surprising turn of events in the Places arena. Reviews have long been a sore point with businesses that often feel wronged by the review procedures at Google. Many SMBs think of the current arrangement as unfair and they rarely understand the why or how of Google’s non response to review issues…

According to ICrossing.co.uk, September 14th is the day when Google changes their trademark policies in the UK, Ireland, and Canada, to reflect that in the U.S. and possibly permit other companies to mention your trademarked terms in their Google Adwords/AdSense ad copy.

Currently, Google permits other companies to bid on your trademarked terms, but they CANNOT make mention of your brand in their ads without permission…

A reader alerted me to a problem with Google Places (aka LBC) where a record is currently unable to be created or edited and the lister receives the message: “Error on Page”. A number of posters (~30) have noted the problem in the forum over the past 36 hours.

Here are a sampling of the posts taken from my RSS feed:

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Google’s Joel Headly has responded to the posters, acknowledged the issue and consolidated the postings here…

Small businesses are engaged (and often enraged) with reviews on their Google Places Pages. Understandably, the SMB posters at the Places Help forums have a great deal invested in their businesses and the reviews about their business. As a result they often respond with great passion about Google’s handling of them. The forums are rife with over the top pleas, cajolings and complaints about reviews on their Places Page…

Reviews have long been a sore spot between SMBs and Google. But Google Places has added a new feature that will go part of the way in providing SMBS salve for some of their “review wounds”. Google is now allowing business owners to respond directly to reviews.

Starting today, if you’re a verified Google Places business owner, you can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the Place Page for your business…

RSS Subsciber-Only Downloads:

• Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO’s Data

Andrew Warner Interview (Mixergy Founder)

Mixergy…

Over the past few months a number of clients and readers have emailed me and asked if Google ever called to check on listings. Apparently callers (often from India) would ask the business for information like street address. The callers when queried would claim to be from Google but would refuse to provide call back information to the businesses.  The calls struck an odd note with the businesses and when asked I advised them that historically Google had never made such calls and that the calls were likely from scammers…

When you enter a set of keywords into Google, the search engine attempts to find all the pages that it can which contain those keywords, and return a set of results ordered based upon a combination of relevance and importance scores. But it’s possible that many of the pages that could possibly be returned [...]…

Rel=nofollow to the Rescue

Years ago Google introduced rel=nofollow, claiming it as a cure-all for comment spam. Once in place, it was quickly promoted as a tool to use on any paid link. Google scared webmasters about selling links so much that many webmasters simply became afraid to link out to anyone for fear of falling out of favor with Google.

If You Don’t Disclose You Are a Spammer

As the pool of links dried up due to the launch & spread of nofollow any ad network which used direct links was supposed to adopt nofollow or feel the wrath…

Over the years we’ve tried dozens of ways to monitor rankings on the major search engines and none of them have ever been able to deliver accurate results, apart from Advanced Web Ranking.

I have very little patience with rank checkers that don’t show accurate search engine rankings because there is no point in reporting on incorrect information. We used to have an in-house tool for monitoring rankings but Google managed to spot all the IP addresses and started to return strange results…

Google Tags rolled out nationally at the end of June. Several questions that have been often asked about Tags are: How well do they perform? & How do searchers respond to them? Do they attract additional business?

I have one client, Moses and Rooth Attorneys at Law in Orlando, that added the tags immediately after their national rollout on June 28th. We now have 4 weeks of before and after data so as to be able to compare results…

Let’s start with some notes and free-association thoughts on the text of Ontolo’s link building book:

A – The first chapter got off to a good start with some clever ideas.

1) See how link building can support various departments. Makes me think of the interaction between links and sales (e.g. rank the lead gen whitepaper page) or links and PR (linkbait, publicity stunts, contests…)…

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at…

While UGC and Reviews can often be a mixed blessing, as long as Google continues to reward rich snippets with enhanced visual listings, it’s probably a good idea to try to make reviews part of your website strategy.For those of you who haven’t seen rich snippets and reviews in action, here’s a sample of what they currently look like

To qualify for this program you have to have reviews, format your data using microformats, and submit your website for inclusion in the rich snippet program…

A recent comment here noted that the core algorithm behind how Google works hasn’t changed very much since its earliest days. I’m not sure that I agree. Many of the posts I’ve made over the past five years that involve Google patents and whitepapers describe ways that Google may be changing how it determines [...]…

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page?

This is true both in sales-driven businesses and in lead-driven businesses…

When you arrive at a web page, the owner of that page might start collecting information about your visit for a number of reasons. One of the most commonly collected pieces of information is an internet protocol (or IP) address. An IP address is a number that can be associated with the way and [...]…

A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button …

Here’s a secret … I LOVE Aaron Wall’s Keyword List Generator Concatenator tool.

You take keywords, input them in a series of boxes, and it concatenates them together. If that sounds like gibberish, play with the tool. It’s super intuitive and you’ll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

In short, it’s a shortcut to building long keyword lists for exact or phrase matched ad groups…