The Amazing Power of Domains! A couple days ago there was a blog post on TheDomains about "how stupid SEOs are" and "the amazing power of domaining" where they highlighted how awesome domaining was because a guy registered a domain name he saw in a comic and it sent a bunch of traffic. What that article failed to mention was: That traffic wasn't from the power of the domain name'that was the power of free advertising & the distribution of the comic strip.

Somewhere at MountainView. Late afternoon. Google Guy: Sigh. Our algo really does suck, sometimes..... Other Google Guy: How so, dude? GoogleGuy: It keeps returning low-quality farmer garbage Other Google Guy: Mahalo! Google Guy: Huh? Other Google Guy: Sorry, just shouting out "Thanks!" to Marissa. She left me a cup cake this morning. You were saying? GoogleGuy: Our algo, it keeps returning low-quality farmer garbage Other Google Guy: Ah, right.

With some lower traffic smaller sites it is easy to get outlier data that is skewed & somewhat irrelevant )especially true if you have a website which happens to have relevant content in a category that Ask is spamming the heck out of Google in(, but one nice thing about comparing Yahoo! and Bing against each other is that they are generally driven by the same relevancy algorithm. Of course Yahoo!

Starting the Process Cash )lots of it(. Work in PJ's from Home. Fame. Fake Twitter Friends. For many folks who decide to give SEO the good ol' college try those are likely some of the major reasons why they decide to dive into the industry. Those same tenets are typically reinforced by slimy internet marketers most new entrants run across in their travels around the SEO world. They are strong selling points, no question about it,

Interesting post from Matt Cutts, talking about how Google is so much better now than it was in 2000. But it's a misconception that there was no spam on Google back then. Google in 2000 looked great in comparison with other engines at the time, but Google 2011 is much better than Google 2000. I know because back in October 2000 I sent 40,000+ queries to google.com and saved the results as a sort of search time capsule 40,000+ queries!

An "Algorithmic" Approach When it comes to buying links, Google not only fights it with algorithms, but also ran a 5-year long FUD campaign, introduced nofollow as a proprietary filter, encouraged webmasters to rat on each other , and has engineers hunting for paid links. On top of that, Google's link penalties range from subtle to overt . Google claims that they do not want to police low quality content by trying to judge intent,

Since switching over our site design some folks have asked us what we were doing with the old design. I spoke with Chris Pearson )of Thesis fame( who made our old site design and he said it was cool if I turned it into a free Wordpress theme. And given the number of folks liked our old site design enough to use it without permission , we decided that we may as well turn the theme into a free Wordpress theme, so that everyone can benefit from it.

Is the following an SEO strategy? Research keywords Select keywords that have existing traffic Write pages based on those keywords Publish pages Get those pages ranked against those keywords How is this different to what a Content Farm does? So, if Content Farm pages are undesirable, so too is SEO content? Low Quality Content? Perhaps people take issue with low-quality content. The problem with arguments about quality is that such arguments are subjective.

Quite Similar Results A few months back I was running Advanced Web Ranking and noticed that Google and Bing were really starting to come in line on some keywords. Major Differences Of course there are still differences between Bing and Google. Google has far more usage data built up over the years & a huge market share advantage over Bing in literally every global market.

Search can be used as a wedge in a variety of ways. Most are perhaps poorly understood by the media and market regulators. Woot! Check Out Our Bundling Discounts When Google Checkout rolled out, it was free. Not only was it free, but it came with a badge that appears near AdWords ads to make the ads stand out. That boosts ad clickthrough rates, which feeds into ad quality score & acts as a discount for advertisers who used Google Checkout.

There are pushes to minimize the need for passwords , but after the Gawker leak fiasco who wants to have a common shared single point of failure for passwords? Sure managing passwords sucks. But friction is a tool that helps cleanse demand & make it more pure. It is why paid communities have a higher signal to noise ratio than free for all sites. Any barriers will annoy people, but those same barriers will also prevent some people from wasting your time.

Bloggers as Media Have you ever noticed that a lot of blogs want to be seen as being the same as the media? And media companies are responding by hiring bloggers . But why is emulating the media so exciting? After all, the same media is so big, bloated & redundant that it is buried in debt . How is it possible that a humor blog network built on open source software would ever need to raise $30 million ? The problem is that it is hard to stay different and operate at scale .

One of my favorite approaches to save time online is to use multiple web browsers for different purposes. It allows you to combine speed + reliability with also having quick access to tons of valuable tools & data. Firefox I set up Firefox fully loaded with bookmarks and extensions ) all our free & premium ones , User Agent Switcher , Web Developer , Greasemonkey , Roboform , Colorzilla (, but realize that as a result it will often be a bit slower & crash more frequently.

In the past I have highlighted how hype-driven hard launches often lead to hard landings . But what is even more challenging than launches is relaunches. Some relaunches are just flicking a switch, done mostly as a marketing gimmick. But those that are real changes are brutal, largely because you have already built up expectations in the past and have to manage expectations, even while everything is changing, and many things are not in your clear control.

I have never been a huge fan of correlation analysis. The reason being is that how things behave in aggregate may not have anything to do with how they would behave in your market for your keywords on your website. Harmful High Quality Links? A fairly new website was ranked amazingly quickly on Google.com for a highly competitive keyword. It wasn't on the first page,

Times are tough. In times like these, clients tend to focus on the value proposition. "Throw it at the wall, see if it sticks" is not a phrase you hear a lot in recessions. Instead, your customers will tend to have their eyes transfixed on your value proposition. "How does this spend make me better off?" Whilst we may think search marketing services are essential, the spend on search services typically comes out of marketing budgets,

A new year brings new resolutions. Some readers might be considering taking that giant leap from their boring day job into the wonderfest that is full-time SEO. Huge money! Party central! Hangin' at conferences with Matt Cutts! What could possibly go wrong? Let's take a serious look at what your new life will look like. It's Going To Hurt SEO is a world of hurt. When you start, you'll have little money. Your bills don't stop coming in. Google, rather uncooperatively,

Over the past year or 2 there have been lots of changes with Google pushing vertical integration, but outside of localization and verticalization, core relevancy algorithms )especially in terms of spam fighting( haven't changed too much recently. There have been a few tricky bits , but when you consider how much more powerful Google has grown, their approach to core search hasn't been as adversarial as it was a few years back )outside of pushing more self promotion(.

Here's an interesting study , conducted by Benjamin Edelman and Benjamin Lockwood, from the Harvard Business School. The study measures how much search engines, Google in particular, favor their own web services. We find that each search engine favors its own services in that each search engine links to its own services more often than other search engines do so. But some search engines promote their own services significantly more than others.

Google's Take On SEOs Google likes to make SEOs look like fools. Some are , but some are simply privy to less information. Or, in some cases, thrown under the bus by a new wave editorial policy in the gray area. Inconsistent enforcement is a major issue, but even if you go beyond that, the truth is most businesses have a range of revenue streams from pure as can be to entirely parasitic .