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,

Google is favoring big brands . If Google's comments and actions of late, are anything to go by, the chance of the little guy, armed only with SEO chops, being able to compete with deep-pocketed corporates are less and less likely. Google algorithms tend to reward the big players - the people everyone talks about, and links to. How can we combat this situation? Back To Business Ever notice how a page on FaceBook, or some other behemoth site,

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.

Google's Amit Singhal offered more "clarity" into Google's approach with the Panda update . However I am not convinced that any clarity was actually added, and I think a lot of the questions they ask are to a degree even a bit wrong-headed. Would you trust the information presented in this article? Sounds like this is all about promoting perceived authority.

In the Manufacturing Consent DVD a newspaper executive highlighted that they liked to have a 60/40 ratio between ads and content. Google says that if over half your page's content is ads then your pages are of insufficient value .

With Google making the life of the SEO harder and harder, it pays to add as many marketing strings to our bows as we can. In this article, we'll look at a way to brand and position using stories. Hopefully, if we have a good story, and tell it well, people are more likely to remember us, and more likely to pass the story on. Are We Special? Most people think their site is special. But, by definition, few sites in a given niche can be special. If we target a keyword term,

Before Google's Panda update an effective SEO strategy was to "make a page for everything." If you are Wikipedia that strategy may still work, but for most websites that approach is a high risk & low return approach. Clustering like keywords together and using that to help set up your site's information architecture is a lower risk and higher return strategy.

Insurance is a popular, profitable area for some SEO's. Trying to find reputable insurance for an SEO business is not so popular because many insurance agents do not have the experience to make the distinction between what a web design shop does versus what an SEO or PPC business does. Prior to entering this business I was an insurance agent and before that I was an underwriter and I still have my agent license )hey, you never know!!(.

The #1 goal for any organization is self-preservation. When people feel things are fairly just & they are just getting by they are fine with squeezing out more efficiency in what they do and figuring out ways to pay the bills. But when people feel the table is tilted at some point they stop caring and do whatever it takes .

Outiside of Google, Amazon and eBay own perhaps the 2 largest streams of ecommerce traffic. In fact, both are amongst the top 10 sites in Alexa )even though ~ 100% of their traffic is commercial while ~ 0.001% of Twitter's traffic is(. In spite of Google's prominent promotion of Wikipedia, Amazon still gets more traffic. In the leak of AdWords top spenders data last June Amazon was #5 on the list.

A Spammy Start Up Recently TechCrunch posted an article outing [link nofollowed] the Sequoia-backed start up Milanoo for ranking using paid links: Here's what Digital Due Diligence found: For a number of very valuable keywords in Google search,, Here's how Milanoo ranks for "cheap dresses" )position 2(, "evening gown" )1(, "cheap wedding dresses" )1(, and "summer dresses" )2(.

Google Implies Local Demand Based on User Location It appears that Google has just dialed up search result localization in a big way. A picture is worth a thousand words, so... Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there and there and there and there and there . The Struggle Real Businesses Face The big problem with this IMHO is all but the spammer )who is now busy working on "local" signals( loses. Legit online-only pure plays are simply wiped off the result set.

The term "competitive research" conjures up all sorts of imagery like expensive tools, shiny buttons, cute charts, and fancy )sometimes foolish( language about precise insight into a particular site or marketplace. In reality we know that such claims are usually best taken with a large grain of salt. Most competitive research data is scraped from search engines and then has custom filters applied to it. Such filters can actually be a detriment to the data because,

Changing the Cost-benefit Analysis In the last post I mentioned how the US government tried to change the cost benefit analysis for some sleazy executives at pharmaceutical corporations which continue to operate as criminal enterprises that simply view repeated fines as a calculable cost of doing business. If you think about what Google's Panda update did, it largely changed the cost-benefit analysis of many online publishing business models. Some will be frozen with fear,

A Friendly Warning I got an email the other day titled "small business SEO scam" My name is Ryan, and I head small business outreach for ConsumerAffairs.com. Recently, we started receiving a rash of complaints from small business owners concerning illegitimate SEO consulting companies they have used. These small business owners are paying hundreds )in some cases thousands( of dollars to have these SEO consulting companies remove negative comments from ConsumerAffairs.com.

We Are Not a Content Farm When Google began speaking publicly about content farms Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt stated that it would be silly to call their stuff a content farm & he emphasized the quality of their content & care that went into it. Of course, those who bothered looking at the content often saw something different Panda II Hits Demand Media When Google did the global roll out of Panda earlier this month,