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,

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.

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.

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,

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,

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 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.

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.

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,

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 .

"I am just like a robot - following only what I have been told." - Katutu, Google toolbar testimonial As long as end users get their Angry Birds they really don't care how it comes to them. But they should! Right now, an aggregated link to this entry places higher in a search of the title than my own site, which is a Page Rank 5 site )i.e. it has a lot of "strong" links in and a lot of content(.

A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy There are many approaches to online navigation & discovery. On the surface many of them look exceptionally different, but when you look a bit deeper many of them are playing the same game with the same game plan . The main differences are brand perception & marketing angle, but they all copy off of each other . New Ideas, or The Same Ideas?

Dr. Pete shared examples of the marketing funnel, highlighting how we must overcome hurdles )or break through barriers to conversion( in order to make a sale. Why People Buy Premium Domain Names The idea of an exact match domain )EMD( is that you are buying a piece of land right next to the highway. You sink in a lot of money upfront, but hope that it backs out over time by lowering your traffic acquisition costs. For many years this model was both logical and profitable.

This Shouldn't Hurt Too Bad One of the more perverse things about online markets is that since things are not done in person a lot of people are willing to work in the gray area. That allows people like Vitaly Borker to torture his customers as a marketing strategy . ;( When Stanley Milgram did his famous study on if people were willing to torture others )so long as they thought it was part of a scientific experiment(,

Consumer Finance Google recently unveiled Google Advisor, which ties together the concept of Google Comparison Ads with a better looking interface. "With Google Advisor, you enter information about what you're looking for in a mortgage, credit card, CD, or checking and savings account." And unlike Google comparison ads, Google is caching these pages When you add in BeatThatQuote , AdWords, Google affiliate network,

The New York Times has an interesting article about Cisco's roll in the Great Firewall of China + more: Cisco, the maker of Internet routing gear, customized its technology to help China track members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week by members of the movement. The lawsuit, which relies on internal sales materials,

Facebook is a Sleazy Organization Facebook recently hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant a Google smear campaign in the media : Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people's privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed,

Hit By Panda In a recent comment someone shared the fate of Patrick Jordan , owner of justanotheripadblog.com. Since the Panda update happened, some scraper websites )monetized by Google AdSense( have started outranking Patrick for his own content. Panda = No AdWords Soup for You Distraught with the traffic fall off, Patrick turned to AdWords to try to bridge the gap and drive some revenues. Unfortunately,

How to Handle Duplicate Content Here is a fun webmaster help video from March 10th of 2010, answering the following question: "If Google crawls 1,000 pages/day, Googlebot crawling many dupe content pages may slow down indexing of a large site. In that scenario, do you recommend blocking dupes using robots.txt or is using META ROBOTS NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW a better alternative?" The answer kinda jumps around a bit,

In October of 2008 Eric Schmidt announced that SEO was about to get really ugly for anyone who doesn't own a brand. He didn't word it that way though. Rather, he stated "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." - Eric Schmidt In response to that comment )& some of Google's pro-brand algorithmic updates( I created the following video.