May 2010

What Google calls “the buzzing blogger community” has been blogging about SES Toronto 2010, which will be held June 9-11 at the Hyatt Regency Toronto. So, what’s the buzz?

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What Google calls “the buzzing blogger community” has been blogging about SES Toronto 2010, which will be held June 9-11 at the Hyatt Regency Toronto. So, what’s the buzz?

Click to read the rest of this post…

What Google calls “the buzzing blogger community” has been blogging about SES Toronto 2010, which will be held June 9-11 at the Hyatt Regency Toronto. So, what’s the buzz?

Click to read the rest of this post…

Google announced it has closed its acquisition of AdMob, in a move that will likely open wide the doors of mobile online advertising in emerging markets.

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Bits and bobs to keep up with search agency news: Rosetta, Kenshoo and WebVisible

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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). As a company, we have been aware that placing links in articles once they have picked up PR is not an uncommon practice in the industry, and we also knew that it would probably come to no good which is why we stayed well away. However, we do have some legitimate links on these sites that were placed as part of a press release or an interview and these are slowly being removed through no fault of our own. So much for all the hard work eh?

Google is warning newspapers from linking out and is warning webmasters not to do guest posts. It turns out that any and every link is a bad link in their warped mental model of the web.

The random surfer must be quite inebriated. And lost.

As Google controls more traffic and the value of a #1 ranking increases Google continues to filter filter filter the web graph.

The good news is that as Google’s view of reality is increasingly warped & their guidelines reflect reality less and less they create a greater opportunity for some competing company to come along and build something better. And for any professional SEO who reads between the lines there is value in Google misleading the rest of the herd.

About a decade ago Sergey Brin stated they didn’t believe in spam. A decade later they don’t believe in the media and don’t believe in links. What happened?

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.

What a lot of SEO professionals don’t realize is that when they rent text links many of them are paying for their own demise. If you go through a central link broker that operates at scale you are telling them:

• what areas your business is focused on
• what keywords are important to you
• what links you are buying
• how much you think you will make from the marketing

That is fine if you are a huge company with tons of other quality signals which can’t be replicated. But if you are a smaller company, what happens when that link broker is also a web publisher? Hmm… xyz is spending $5,000 a month with us to promote that site…well they must be making some good money off it – lets clone it.

The equivalent to trusting most your link buying to a single link broker would be doing a public export of all your bids and conversion data for PPC. You wouldn’t stay profitable very long with that strategy, and if you share your link purchase data with some of the shadier (and more well known) link brokers you can expect the same result.

A friend of mine recently mentioned buying some links and then seeing a number of sites pop up which seemed suspiciously associated with people who work behind the scenes at their link broker. Oooops!

Buying links from a central network is not only risky from a Google risk management perspective, but also from a “thanks for the data, fool” perspective.

This is huge. Literally. At the close of the stock market on Wednesday, Apple became the first company of the Nasdaq, meaning its value finally surpassed that of rival Microsoft.

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Starting today, YouTube has integrated the ability to use Google Moderator into your YouTube channel. Moderator is a social platform that allows you to solicit ideas or questions on any topic, and have the community vote the best ones up to the top in real-time. YouTube previously used Google Moderator as part of its interviews with American President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

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Magnetic announced integration of its search data marketplace with leading ad networks on Monday. This partnership will enable display ad buyers on the Collective, interCLICK and Undertone ad networks to retarget users of second-tier search engines who have performed a search in the last 30 days.

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