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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,

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,

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,

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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.

We are better off if we ignore what Google is saying and follow one thing: Google wants more money for Google. When we make this assumption, everything Google does makes sense. Deception and doublespeak are logical and expected rather than shocking and upsetting. When it comes to scale, as pointed out with Groupon , all of these rules go out the window. If you look at the biggest advertisers,

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.

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.

As the co-founder of an SEO Consultancy, my biggest hurdle in business is finding more staff. Clients are lining up at our door, we have no trouble there, it's finding the staff to work with them that becomes the issue. This may not sound like the worst dilemma for a business to face, especially during the current global economic decline, but the causation is a matter of great concern to me as both an SEO and a businessman.

Recently we had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite link building experts, Melanie Nathan. Melanie has been involved in online marketing since 2003 and is a wonderful writer on all things link building in addition to being a well-respected link builder by her peers. Melanie runs CanadianSEO , an internet marketing company based in Canada. You can check out some of her posts from the web here , follow her on Twitter here , and follow her on Google Plus here .

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.

So today Google announced that they have turned on SSL by default for logged in users, a feature that has been available for a while on encrypted.google.com. The way they set it up, as explained in this post , means that your search query will not be forwarded to the website you're visiting and that they can only see that you've come from an organic Google result. If you're buying AdWords however, you still get the query data. This is what I call hypocrisy at work.

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,

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,

Link Assistant's Rank Tracker Reviewed Link Assistant offers SEO's a suite of tools, under an umbrella aptly named SEO Power Suite , which covers many aspects of an SEO campaign. Link Assistant provides the following tools inside of their Power Suite: Rank Tracker - rank tracking software WebSite Auditor - on-page optimization tool SEO Spy Glass - competitive link research tool Link Assistant - their flagship link prospecting, management,

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.

So here we are, aren't we? It's 2011, SEO is still not dead )despite a decade of claims to the contrary(, but the landscape is very, very different in this post-Panda world. Most sites that have been hit by Panda )inclusive of all iterations( are still on ice some 7 months after the initial roll out. Businesses have been destroyed, livelihoods ruined, and the future of a once thriving business is seemingly on the ropes for newcomers and seasoned veterans alike.

Useful Links: SMX Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/searchmarketingexpo Twitter # activity for the conference: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23smx Another successful SMX East is in the books. From all accounts, the event seemed to go through flawlessly and without a hitch. Kudos to Danny Sullivan, Claire Schoen, and crew as the caliber of speakers, sessions, and attendees was top notch, as always. Judging from the event,

"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 ,