Aaron Wall Latest search engine news blog articles from Aaron Wall. http://www.seocentro.com/seo-archives/author/Aaron+Wall.html Aaron Wall News Archive http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=57517 Google's Take on Search Plus Your World A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World , which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized. While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:20:47 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=57430 You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one: Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large . Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:59:50 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=57180 Sharing is caring! Please share :) Embed code is here . Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:12:24 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=56438 Google announced they rolled out their anti-overly-aggressive-ads algorithm . They didn't give a specific % on how much of the above the fold content can be ads, but suggest using their browser preview tool . Using that tool on Google.com's search results would of course score it as a spam site, but for some small AdSense webmasters that avoided Panda, Google may have drew first blood. Much Quicker Updates With a limited number of recoveries nearly a year after Panda, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:32:50 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=56247 This is an interesting play: BBVA, Spain's second-largest bank by assets, is teaming up with Google to use its search engine results to provide advanced forecasts of hotel and tourism demand in the country, part of a plan to market real-time economic indicators to its clients. The bank and internet group will announce on Monday a scheme called the "BBVA-Google tourism activity in Spain indicator". Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:33:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=55937 Wow...this is pretty...um... transparent . According to this post , Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google "Get Your Business Online", disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google. A few select quotes: There are absolutely no costs, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:38:32 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=55614 "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche Everyone Except Me Should be Open Being labeled as open or transparent is a great public relations strategy. Executed effectively it gets ditto heads to feel like they are part of a movement and spread your propaganda. However actually being transparent is often a poor business strategy. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:24:15 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=55380 Sharing is caring! Please share :) Embed code is here. You can embed the above graphic on your website here . Have feedback? Please contribute in the comments. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:43:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=55308 That is what they say , typically at the bottom of the posts, in blog posts that equate Google Chrome to being the Internet & spread misinformation about how Chrome is good for small business. some of those sites are paid posts and have live links in them to Google Chrome without using nofollow & talk about SEO in the same post as well! Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:57:12 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=55147 Sharing is caring! Please share :) Embed code is here. You can embed the above graphic on your website here . Have feedback? Please contribute in the comments. Thanks to John Andrews for highlighting the above industry trend. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:05:34 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=54292 Sharing is caring! Please share :) Embed code is here. For many years it was true that SEO = links , but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals. Links are still valuable in some areas of course, but where the search results are full of listings from Google.com , Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:24:04 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=54221 Some of Google's new search results look quite alarming in terms of every single link above the fold is either a paid ad, or links to yet another Google page wrapped in ads. I have a huge monitor & it is impossible for me to click *anywhere* above the fold on some search results without going through Google's toll booth or clicking off to yet another Google ad wrapped page. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:22:21 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=54106 Since Panda has happened I (and others) have highlighted how brands have ranked doorway pages , ranked scraped 3rd party content , padded out crap "content farm" content to suck in search traffic , took their market leading position & used it to deliver inferior experiences , bought out bankrupt competitors & redirected the PageRank , engaged in off-topic affiliate extension ( Barnes & Noble , Overstock , Overstock AND Barnes & Noble ), etc etc etc At the same time, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:53:38 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=53768 Sharing is caring! Please share :) Embed code is here . Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 01 Dec 2011 04:48:26 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=53598 Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy : With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart's world is about as large as the state of Maine. That's massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it's not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:37:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=53594 Only a few hours left in the discount, but its a great deal. :) From their email: 50% Off all BOTW Products on Cyber Monday! Don't miss out on our biggest discount of the year! Promo Code: STUFFED50 Submit Today Get Listed at Half the Price! A directory listing in Best of the Web is a vote of confidence for your business website. Only today can you receive all the benefits of a BOTW listing at half the regular cost. This offer is only good for Cyber Monday, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:17:23 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=53200 Over 5 years ago I had a quick chat with the folks from Interspire about their websites, including their shopping cart at the time & offered a few tips to fix some of the obvious issues I saw. This was over a half-decade ago & under a different product name & entirely informal. Anyhow...as they later ramped up on marketing, they at some point claimed that I somehow "certified" their software, even as the version changed, their product name changed, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:50:33 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=53093 Sharing is caring! Please share :) Embed code is here . Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:21:57 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=52888 In the below video Matt Cutts states that " there is no such thing as white hat cloaking " ... ... yet Google is testing a new ad unit where users have to fill out a survey before they can view the content . How long until the surveys include something like: did you vote in 2008 what presidential candidate did you vote for how do you feel about issue x how strongly do you feel about your opinion on x Then after the survey: "Thanks for your feedback. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:38:59 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=52386 Google collects a lot of information on individuals & can have some level of confidence if the person is a real person or not based on things like their history of email usage, if they have a credit card on file, how they interact with other high confidence real accounts, how many people are friends with them on Google+, usage of an Android cell phone, their search history, etc. Google doesn't need all those signals on any individual, just some blend of them. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:42:06 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=52307 Google Hates Affiliates Years before Google broadly torched affiliates operating inside the AdWords channel I highlighted how much Google hated affiliates in their ecosystem. How was I aware of that? 2 ways: If you read any of Google's older guidelines that leaked over the years you would see a consistent disdain toward affiliate sites. This was also reflected in official advice at search engine conferences & whatnot. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:03:51 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=51989 SEM Rush has long been one of my favorite SEO tools. We wrote a review of SEM Rush years ago. They were best of breed back then & they have only added more features since, including competitive research data for many local versions of Google outside of the core US results: UK, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil. Recently they let me know that they started offering a free 2-week trial to new users. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:24:14 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=51822 Even if you are in a seedy vertical that you think Google wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, Google may still be gunning for you! Recall that when Google bought DoubleClick, Larry Page wanted to keep running the Performics SEO & SEM shop : Google would spin Performics out of DoubleClick, and sell it to holding firm Publicis. Only one major force inside of Google hated the plan. Guess who? Larry Page. According to our source, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:45:47 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=51804 Google has recently began mutating search queries far more aggressively. In the past they would change search queries if they thought there was a misspelling, but now they have taken to changing keywords that are spelled correctly to align them with more common search results. As one example, [weight loss estimator] is now highly influenced by [weight loss calculator] . The below chart compares the old weight loss estimator SERP, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Sat, 15 Oct 2011 22:42:46 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=51172 On September 28th, Google rolled out Panda 2.5 . Yet again Youtube is the #1 site on the leader board, while even some branded sites like MotorTrend were clipped, and sites that had past recovered from Panda (like Daniweb ) were hit once more . In the zero sum game of search , Google's Android.com joins YouTube on the leader board. It doesn't matter what "signals" Google chooses to use when Google also gets to score themselves however they like. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Sun, 02 Oct 2011 08:38:04 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=50564 "To thine own self be true" In a word? Prescient! 10 links in a single AdWords ad unit ! Then more ads below it. Then a single organic listing with huge sublinks too. And unless you have a huge monitor at that point you are "below the fold." Negative advertising in AdWords is not allowed. So long as you build enough brand signals & pay the Google toll booth , Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:19:22 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=50453 Another friend sent me a message today: "just got a whole swathe of non-interlinked microsites torched today. Bastard! Just watching the rank reports coming in..." I haven't seen his sites, but based on how he described them "whole swathe" I wouldn't guess the quality to be super high. One thing you could say for them was that they were unique. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:03:30 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=50381 I recently got put in a test bucket for Google's new layout with a "search results" bar near the top of the page. Generally this impacts the search results in a couple ways: First off, it is a much better looking design. In the past when the search results would move up and down with Google Instant it really felt like a hack rather than something you would see on the leading internet company's main website. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:56:43 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=50350 In the past doorway pages could be loosely defined as "low-quality pages designed to rank for highly targeted search queries, typically designed to redirect searchers to a page with other advertisements." The reason they are disliked is a click circus impact they have on web users as they keep clicking in an infinite loop of ads. This would be a perfect example of that type of website: However, ever since Google started to eat their "organic" search results , Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:59:09 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=50266 The "Best" of Big Media Large publishers who lobbied Google hard for a ranking boost got it when Panda launched: "A private understanding was reached between the OPA and Google," an office assistant with e-mail evidence told Politically Illustrated. "The organization is responsible for coordinating legal and legislative matters that impact our members, and one of the issues was applying pressure to Google to get them to adjust their search algorithm to favor our members. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:07:25 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=50166 "The future is already here " it's just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson Any Google search engineer care to have a public debate as to the legitimacy of this search result set? Not only do they monetize via AdWords, but Google has 6 listings in the "organic" search results. If an SEO gets half of the search results (for anything other than his own brand) he is an overt spammer. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:37:18 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49805 Is there such a thing as "passive" income? Generally no. A person can cash out existing brand equity and exposure, but if they cash out too aggressively and/or do not reinvest enough then they are ultimately cashing out their market position and will eventually fade. Does Google Make "Passive" Income? Online there are some network effects that are hard to beat. MySpace had them over Facebook & only lost due to years of systematic incompetence & mismanagement . Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 31 Aug 2011 05:43:45 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49697 Is Paid Search Incremental or Cannibalistic? Earlier this month Google referenced a "study" they did which showed that 89% of AdWords ad clicks were incremental (meaning that they were clicks that the website would not have received if they relied on organic search results alone). As part of that "study" they stated that "indirect navigation to the advertiser site is not considered." Why did they chose to exclude that segment of traffic? Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:13:27 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49696 Smart SEOs have been preaching brand for years and years now (& so has Google if you read between the lines). For some time Google has appended prior search queries in AdWords. In some cases they also show ads for related search queries, append your location to the search query for localization, spell-correct search results based on common search trends, and (as the Vince update showed) they can also use search query chains & brand related searches as a signal. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:51:28 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49437 Have you ever seen a naked robot? If not, you can at least hear one, as the Salty Droid tells all in a 57 minute interview. ;) Topics discussed include get rich quick, get poor quick, marketing, community building, .info domain names (s'rsly?), the wrath of robots, and a few surprises. Download the MP3 here Like reading more than listening? Transcription below. An Interview of the Salty Droid Interviewer: Today we're going to interview not a person, so much as a robot, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:32:13 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49282 Why Analytics Are So Important With SEO the most important thing to track is performance. Of course the bank account (& its growth rate) is a high level tracking mechanism, but it is the result of the combination of many ideas & efforts, the combination of multiple marketing strategies & traffic streams. To dig in further on what's working web analytics are your bread and butter. They don't give you aggregate data or could be data, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:13:01 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49186 The Big Portals Can't Grow Ad Revenues In spite of the transitioning of print Dollars to digital dimes for print media, TV advertising remains healthy and robust . Much like the decline of print media, the flow of brand ad Dollars online is skipping over even some of the largest players, leaving them out of the growth from the shift to online media. While Yahoo! Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:18:13 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=49053 Affiliates Are a Dying Breed Being an ecommerce affiliate keeps getting harder & harder unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling things with a complex sales cycle. Portable air conditioners is a pretty niche category, but when I look at it I simply don't see any opportunity on the SEO front unless you take on the significant risk of carrying inventory & drop hundreds of thousands to millions of Dollars on branding. The Corporate, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:30:21 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48934 "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat Business Ethics vs Sustainability The concept of business ethics is usually a self-serving approach to marketing. Some people would rather make money dishonestly than honestly, getting satisfaction out of screwing people over (hi Andy), Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:03:26 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48926 We live in a culture where it is far more profitable to solve symptoms than it is to solve problems. As such, the disappearance of ripoffreport.com from Google's index probably has retainer-based reputation management firms like reputation.com singing the blues. Ed Magedson, the owner of Rip Off Report, has been charged with RICO in the past and managed to come through unscathed, but he has never tackled an opponent as media savvy or powerful as Google. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:26:45 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48430 We recently interviewed Branko Rihtman. He started working in the industry in 2001, doing SEO for clients and properties in a variety of competitive niches. Over that time, he realized the importance of properly done research and experimentation and started publishing findings and experiments at http://www.seo-scientist.com . How did you get into the SEO space? Completely by accident. When I was done with my compulsory army service, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:54:57 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48420 I was just checking out the ongoing strategic meltdown in the value of the Dollar & noticed an AdWords ad with an extended headline & a 150 character ad description. Currently I believe the above extended description is a limited beta test, but if Google starts mixing that in with Google Advisor ads & ad sitelinks there might not be a single organic result above the fold on commercial keywords. The above image is even uglier when Google Instant is extended. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:43:47 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48335 Yet another problem with Google's brand first approach to search: parasitic hosting . The .co.cc subdomain was removed from the Google index due to excessive malware and spam. Since .co.cc wasn't a brand the spam on the domain was too much. But as Google keeps dialing up the "brand" piece of the algorithm there is a lot of stuff on sites like Facebook or even my.Opera that is really flat out junk. And it is dominating the search results category after category. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:27:26 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48011 Authoritative, but Often Wrong Trusting a powerful authority is easy. It allows us to have a quick shorthand for how things work without having to go through the pain, effort, & expense to figure things out. But it often leads to bogus solutions. This video does a great job of explaining how nothing replaces experience in the SEO industry. A combination of numerous parallel projects, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:35:01 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=48004 Want a good example of Google's brand-bias stuff being a bunch of bs? Niche expert value-add affiliate websites may now lack the brand signal to rank as the branded sites rise up above them, so what comes next? Off-topic brands flex their brand & bolt on thin affiliate sections. Overstock.com was penalized for having a spammy link profile (in spite of being a brand they were so spammy that they were actually penalized, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:53:20 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=47880 I am not sure how many people were holding off on updating to Firefox 5 because of our SEO extensions , however we made versions for Firefox 5 quite a while ago for Seo for Firefox , Rank Checker & the SEO Toolbar . When you first go to update it there might be a message that the extensions are not compliant. If that is the case, upgrade to Firefox 5 & then after you get Firefox 5 installed it has a check for updated versions of extensions. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:23:29 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=47814 Search is political. Google has maintained that there were no exceptions to Panda & they couldn't provide personalized advice on it, but it turns out that if you can publicly position their "algorithm" as an abuse of power by a monopoly you will soon find 1:1 support coming to you. The WSJ's Amir Efrati recently wrote : In June, a top Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Thu, 14 Jul 2011 03:19:27 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=47235 If the social sites were isolated I would comfortably ignore them as a waste of time . Unfortunately, search engines are convinced there is signal to be had on social networks (in spite of how easy they are to game with promotions). If I wasn't super busy I would run one such promotion to prove my point, but I am already drowning in email. Bing + Facebook Bing is pushing Facebook integration everywhere. TV ads , on the search results, etc. Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:31:39 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=46903 In any market where the leader has a monopolistic marketshare it is a great idea to encourage innovation elsewhere and promote further competition . In the past Blekko was a great SEO data source but I couldn't use it as a default search service because the auto-firing of their slashtags were in many cases too restrictive. They did a recent update which still fires slashtag results, Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 21 Jun 2011 23:17:48 GMT http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=46902 You Must Disclose, or Else... Matt Cutts has long stated that machine-readable disclosure of paid links is required to be within Google's guidelines. The idea behind such Cassandra calls is that the web should be graded based on merit, rather than who has the largest ad budget. The Google founders harped on this in their early research : we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers . Search Engines News SEO News Aaron Wall Aaron Wall Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:17:14 GMT