From: sitepronews.com

For those of you using advanced SEO techniques such as PageRank sculpting, you might want to listen up. Head of Google’s crime spam fighting team, Matt Cutts, put the cat amongst the pigeons last month when he answered an audience question at the SMX Advanced conference about the value of using rel=”no follow” for PageRank [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Google PageRank Sculpting is Dead

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/07/01/google-pagerank-sculpting-is-dead/

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From: sitepronews.com

Search engines algorithms are shrouded in total secrecy. So what works in SEO and what does not is merely the result of an analysis of sites that make it to page #1. Some times the keywords show up sooner than expected, at times they do not. It’s very difficult to measure the effectiveness of an [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Should You Fire Your SEO Company?

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/07/01/should-you-fire-your-seo-company/

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From: google.com

It’s easy to to adopt the policy of avoiding risk at all costs, that whenever possible, the products you launch or the engagements you have should be flawless and without downside.

Here’s the problem: in most endeavors, a small increase in risk can double the reward. It’s the second doubling of reward that brings serious risk with it. But the first leap is relatively painless.

In the chart above, notice that going from point A to point B brings almost no incremental risk. It might feel scary, but rationally, it’s not. Doubling reward again from B to C, though, brings significant incremental risk. It’s this second doubling that gets you through the Dip, that leads to a breakthrough, that makes you remarkable.

But I’m not even talking about that. I’m just hoping you’ll warm up by making the tiny leap of avoiding all risk. Riskless is hardly worth your effort.

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From: google.com

Posted by RobOusbey

We all like links from big sites right?



Whether it’s in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it’s great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it’s on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it’s strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it’s unlikely to have a great crawl rate.



The front pages of sites, on the other hand, tend to have a much greater diversity of domains pointing to them and a good crawl rate. Furthermore, Google is likely to look with suspicion at an old article that suddenly gains a new link, compared to site front pages which have new links added to them more often, and legitimately.



So, this suggests that a link from the front page of a small site may be better than a link from an inner page on a large site.







As an example, I dived into the Lifehacker archives, and found their coverage of a handy looking tool, Programmer’s Notepad 2. Let’s imagine that the site owner had done the work to contact Lifehacker, foster a relationship and ultimately get them to post coverage of the app. You can now see their link on this page:

• lifehacker.com/5105267/programmers-notepad-2-helps-you-code-wrangle (mozRank: 0*, mozTrust: 2.5)

(* N.B.: this page is fairly old, and has been rated by Linkscape - the mozRank is just very very low and rounds off to zero.)

Of course, they’ve also been mentioned by smaller sites. I imagine that these sites either found out about them through the grapevine, but I like to think that the app’s owners also fired off a few mass emails to programming / web dev websites to say ”Check this out, we built it and I think you might like it.”



So check out some of the small sites that have linked to them from the front page:

Domain	URL MozRank	URL MozTrust
www.pappons.com	1.28	1.12
www.jasonbadams.net	1.78	2.36
links.tecwiz.de	2.08	1.39
dintiradan.ermarian.net	2.49	2.54
www.deleyna.com	2.33	3.24
freeware.startingiseasy.com	3.30	3.00

(Ordering the Linkscape report for the Programmer’s Notepad 2 site, by “mozRank Passed to URL” suggests that Lifehacker.com first appears at around the 400th page in the list.)



The downside of a link on the strong-front-page-of-a-less-strong-site is that it isn’t going to be around forever, and may be removed at somepoint. However, the strength passed in the mean time, combined with the quick indexation of the links will be beneficial.



This works particularly well when you can contact smallish sites in a very relevant niche. To find those sites, I currently recommend having a drill down in these directories:

• www.Blogged.com,
• dir.Blogflux.com,

and also that you look for directories of sites in that niche. For instance, whilst trying to find some UK craft websites this week, I found that Craftyblogs.co.uk was very helpful. There are bound to be similar niche lists for almost anything you need to look for.



In summary: when planning your linkbuilding strategy, don’t forget that whilst links from strong domains can be useful, weaker domains can often pass more strength if you are linked to from the front (or other strong high level) page.

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From: google.com

You will find Matt Cutts of Google producing videos and answering questions from the SEO community daily. Most of these videos provide useful information for all the levels of SEO. Here’s one more recent video of Matt:

This video is on over optimization where Matt is answering the question Is over optimization bad for a website?

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Bz0KQNPDUoc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="320"></p>

If you want to see all the Webmaster Central team videos, go to YouTube. You will surely find wealth of information there.

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From: google.com

Bings flash in the pan"supposed to burn out a while ago"is extending every day, at least in one important area: paid clicks. So far this month, weve seen that

• Bing might be making more per query than Google
• Bing saw an 8% increase in paid clicks and a 20% query volume lift

• Bing is taking a hardline on click fraud
• Bing is increasing its searcher penetration and overall share of SERPs (in the post with the best Bing title ever: Pre Bing Sting With a Post Bing Bang?)

Efficient Frontier is back again this week with more good news: Bing continues to see increases in their paid clicks:

According to our data analysis, Bing expanded its share of paid clicks for the two weeks post launch. Bings share of paid clicks is up 13% for the second week post launch as compared to pre-launch. And, it represents an incremental 5% lift over the first week.

So in many respects, Bing is off to a respectable start. But will it last? What do you think?

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Tag: Google, Bing, SEO





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From: google.com

Im not about to turn Marketing Pilgrim into a collection of childrens nursery rhymes, but news that three Yahoo employees have defected to Microsoft did bring this to mind:

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they run.
They all ran after the farmers wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?

It might be a little unfair to suggest that running into the open arms of Microsoft is akin to a career de-tailing but it does make you wonder how bad is it over at Yahoo? After all, they have a new CEO who appears to be saying all the right things"even if some are laced with an f-bomb or two"so why would the following simply bail?

• Kevin Timmons “ vice president of Operations
• Yongdong Wang “ vice president of international search
• Knut Risvik “ former Yahoo chief architect

Ok, so Risvik had already bailed on Yahoo for a stint at Google, but two blind mice wouldnt have worked for this post. Besides, the fact that Risvik left both Yahoo and Google for Microsoft makes you wonder what it is that the Redmond company is dangling as an incentive. Is it the promise of untold riches, or is Bing really that good?

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Tag: Yahoo, Microsoft, SEO





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From: google.com

Ask.com has come up with a positive news that would be great for the search world. It has recently unveiled the proprietary database of 300 million Q&A pairs for the users in the United Kingdom and United States.

Ask.com has used the proprietary core search technology that was launched in the end of 2008 for achieving 300 million high-quality Q&A pairs. The entire work was done by crawling and indexing questions and answers from different sources across the web. Later, the semantic search technology advancements were applied by ask.com in rephrasing, clustering and filtering about insignificant or less meaningful answer formats.

It is made sure that the result in Q&A database is fine-tuned to give the best answer to customers on the very first time. For example, if your question is How do I change a guitar chord?, Ask.com will give answers with step-by-step instructions from different authoritative sources. Thus, you will get more options to select from and to get the most relevant answer. The unique Q&A results are also blended in the standard web search results of Ask.com

Scott Kim, EVP of Technology, Ask.com said, Search industry is heading towards delivering the best answers through semantic search technology and ask is the best place to lead the industry. There are countless answers on net that make it difficult for the consumers to get what they are looking for. Our Q&A channel aims at giving the exact answers to the searchers through an advanced search technology.

comScore in a research said that visitors enter search queries on Ask.com in the form of question, which is three times more than the queries entered on any other major search engine. It is also said that the user frequency, loyalty and retention is more within Ask.com Q&A channel.

If you will click on the Lots of Answers link on the homepage of Ask.com, you will find Q&A pairing database of 300 million. To get more information about Q&A database, visit the blog post of Ask.com

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Tag: Google, Ask, SEO





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From: google.com

I know my video references are starting to seem like a homage to Mike McDonalds efforts over at WebProNews, but he just keeps delivering videos and interviews worthy of your eyes and ears.

This week we uncover the future of Search as predicted by Rebecca Lieb, Vice President of Econsultancy. Mike quizzed Rebecca at the recent SMX Advanced conference in Seattle.

So what did Rebeccas crystal ball of Search have to say? A couple of predictions and ideas that she raised which resonated with me Ive detailed below, but of course watch the video to digest it yourself.

1. The social and behavioural data will be cause for heavy investment by search engines. Rebecca sees the data available in our various social networks as the foreseeable pot of gold for the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Bing/MSN.
2. Apps will play a much bigger role in search, especially the mobile arena. Google etc, could lose their stranglehold on this space, as apps steal market share.
3. The importance of reputation management in search marketing strategies will become even more important as social media adoption balloons.

While the distance of her predictions arent all that far into the future, they do reinforce some of the discussions weve had internally with the ineedhits team. More importantly they also provide some guide as to what you should be considering in your plans for the next couple of years.

Its only a short video, so have a watch a see which of her other predictions resonate with you. Feel free to share them below!

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Tag: Google, WebProNews, SEO





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From: google.com

While not the longest timeframe to be measuring in and considering all the Bing buzz surrounding its launch, Microsoft has got to feel that at least they are keeping everyone else out of the news with Bing having some early success.

In a case of Ive got some good news and Ive got some bad news if you are Microsoft the bad news of search traffic pre-Bing in May 09, well, pretty much sucked. PCWorld Canada reports that Nielsens search engine report for the month revealed a bitter pill for any search engine to swallow

Microsofts Live/MSN search engine was the only one among the top five that saw its search usage shrink last month compared with May 2008.

Nothing worse than search engine usage shrinkage (once again for you Seinfeld fans, shrinkage does occur). What makes this number worse is the fact that overall search queries grew by just over 20% for the time period.

But like a super hero it was Never fear, Bing is here! at the end of May just in time for the summer months. The results to this point? Pretty good for Bing according to comScore.

It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week, said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.

Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny Sullivan goes a little further and sees that the celebration may be research specific. Amongst the charts and graphs of various research results is the data from Compete and

Competes figures show that the launch has created no gain in search share.

So who has the real deal? Which information is correct? Does it matter at this point in the race? Its likely that this data will be fodder for everyone to predict the demise of Google or the revealing of a chink in the armor of the search monster. Truth is that its just fun facts for now. Only a long term pattern of increased market share for Bing will tell whether the introduction of the decision engine was a seminal moment in search or just another blip on the radar of the good ship Google.

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/lvruZKrsVTA/sn-4-20090618BingBuzz.html

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From: google.com

Earlier today Nielsen Online (pdf) released the latest search share rankings. Figures are pretty much what one would expect, Google far in the lead followed by Yahoo and MSN, but this past month Google has taken another small hit.

April and May of 2009 each saw Google lose a bit of ground. Back in March their search share was 64.2%, and in April it was down to 64%. May has seen another drop, bringing them down to 63.2%, a full percentage point in 2 months. In these same two months, Yahoo has increased a total of 1.4% to 17.2.

Its no question that Google has a very strong hold on the market, and thats not going to change any time soon, and I certainly do not expect to see Yahoo spring way in front, but with the recent success and initial increases Microsofts new Bing has brought, I would not be surprised to see Google drop a bit more once the month of June has completed. In the past 2 months MS has dropped 0.9%, but I suspect they will recoup this and then some of this.

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Tag: Google, Search, SEO





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From: google.com

Last week, Yahoo blogged about yet another microformat theyll be indexing: Common Tag. Based on RDFa, Common Tag is . . . well . . . kind of like every other semantic microformat out there.

Common Tag is integrated with Zemanta, Adaptive Blue, Yahoo Search Monkey and several other services. In addition to organizing web pages by their meanings, Common Tag can also bring more related content to publishers, and possibly also greater visibility (the Yahoo connection). Yeah, it looks cool, but its going to take some serious time and effort before theyll see enough widespread adoption to make a difference.

At Search Engine Land, Vanessa Fox points out that this wave of the future is still pretty far off for search engines:

Both Google and Yahoo have told me that they could use metadata in web search in the future, if it proves to be useful and they can safeguard against spamming. So far, this hasnt happened.

She also points out that the parallels between this type of semantic tagging and an earlier version were all familiar with"the meta keywords tag (speaking of spamming!):

The idea of using meta data to tag web pages in order to describe them to search engines isnt new, of course. The meta keywords tag has been around since at least 1995. And its easier to adopt than Common Tag. . . .

Indeed, Yahoo supported the meta keywords tag initially (and to some extent, still does), but when Google launched, they did not. It was too easy for site owners to stuff that tag with anything they wanted, rather than the true focus of the page. Search engines use smarter methods (starting with the content on the page and how external sites link to it) for determining relevance.

Vanessa also points out research that indicates that link anchor text was a better signal for relevance than even the popular tagging site Delicious.

So, seriously, why would Yahoo want to invite what might turn out to be just more spam? Vanessa wonders if theyre getting out of the consumer search business, what with all the microformats theyre pushing these days (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, XFN, Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, RDFa, and OpenSearch). Is this indicating a move toward a structured data search or a push for third-party search engines using Yahoo BOSS? What do you think?

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Tag: Yahoo, Spam, SEO





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From: google.com

Posted by randfish

My good friend, Aaron Kahlow, posed an interesting question during the Online Marketing Summit yesterday afternoon in Portland, OR. Aaron asked:

If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?

Obviously, the question is a bit ridiculous (given that there’s no additional detail provided), but it’s designed to elicit an “off-the-cuff” response to a challenging scenario. The answer, of course, is “it depends” - and therein lies the rub. On what does it depend? Well… That’s what I hope to answer with this blog post. My goal is not to solve the issue for an individual campaign, but from a very strategic level - asking questions like “where is the company today and where does it want to get to?” then applying those answers to the selection of marketing opportunities. Let’s start by defining the macro-level channels themselves, then examine how we’d reach the right conclusions.

Internet Marketing Channels

• Display Advertising
  • The process of placing ads on third-party websites with the goal of creating branding awareness and/or generating traffic
  • Examples: Banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, overlays, interstitials, etc.
• Email Marketing
  • The process of collecting email addresses from potential leads and marketing to them via email messages
  • Examples: Email newsletters, brand building emails, conversion-focused emails, etc.
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) 
  • The process of bidding for placement at search engines (major or niche) to earn visibility and traffic when relevant queries are performed
  • Examples: Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Business.com Advertising, etc.
• Online Public Relations
  • The process of generating media from primarily online outlets in order to earn branding and traffic
  • Examples: PRNewswire, PRWeb, Internet media focused PR agency work, etc.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • The process of earning rankings in the “organic” results of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing)
  • Examples: Keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, etc.
• Affiliate Marketing
  • The process of incentivizing other sites to push your product in exchange for a share of the revenue they drive
  • Examples: Commission Junction, in-house affiliate programs, etc.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) 
  • The process of leveraging social media platforms (small and large) to earn visibility and traffic
  • Examples: Facebook Group pages, Twitter marketing, pushing content on Digg, etc.
• Viral Content Campaigns
  • The process of generating creative content that will help spread your branding/marketing message and earn traffic
  • Examples: Linkbait production, viral videos, guerrilla marketing, etc.
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) 
  • The process of improving the path from landing to conversion to get more leads/signups/customers
  • Examples: Split & multivariate testing, click-through-rate improvements, purchase-process simplification, etc.

Some of these may overlap - for example, viral content campaigns may simply be a means to an end of better search engine optimization - but as they can all be separate entities, engaged in for their own purposes, I’ve made them distinct.

Primary Variables to Use in the Selection Process

Although other factors should certainly play into the decision making, these three elements are excellent for narrowing down the options:

• Company Goals - What are the top priorities for the business to achieve?
  • Brand Awareness - the current marketplace doesn’t have enough familiarity/comfort with your brand to visit, engage or purchase from you.
  • Education - the market for your product/service needs to be created; potential customers don’t yet realize the problem they need you to solve.
  • Raw Traffic - your business is monetized with advertising and needs more traffic/page views.
  • Sales - your business has clear market demand on the web that needs to be drawn to your site and converted into leads/sales
• Budget - How much do you have to spend on your marketing effort(s)?
  • Very High: in excess of $1 million
  • High: $100K - $1 million
  • Moderate: $25K - $100K
  • Low: $5K - $25K
  • Tiny: <$5K
• Available Talent - What personnel with free bandwidth or trustworthy, outsourced vendors do you have available? 
  • Strong Dev Resources - you have technology staff ready and able to make changes to your site to support marketing goals
  • Strong Creative Resources - you have writers/artists/brainstormers poised for action
  • Strong Search Resources - you have search marketing talent prepared for battle in the results
  • Strong Social Resources - you have strong online networkers set to engage the Twit-Face-Digg-o-Sphere

General Tiers of ROI, Effort & Cost by Channel

These are based on my personal opinions (though, based on conversations, they appear to reflect the experiences of many web marketers and internal marketing departments). 

I suspect there will be lots of contention about these, particularly from marketers who specialize in non-tier 1 activities. I do think that over time, activities like social media marketing and viral may move to tier 1, but as yet, I believe that companies haven’t seen the same consistency or trackability in ROI from these as Tier 1 channels. The eMarketer research I showed this weekend certainly suggests that these newer investments may have a chance to prove themselves fairly quickly.

Formulas for Choosing the Right Channel

Once again, I’m using my own opinions and experiences, but you can use this same format to help with your own decisions, even if the ordering is somewhat different:

And of course, last, but not least, there’s the strengths of your organization to consider. If you have amazing talent in these fields, that might sway you to lean more towards particular activities as shown below:

• Strong Dev Resources - lean towards:
  • CRO
  • SEO
  • Viral Content (particularly dev intensive stuff like tools, widgets, etc.)
• Strong Creative Resources - lean towards:
  • Viral Content (particularly written/graphic content that can be produced in a standard CMS)
  • Email (great copywriters write great emails)
  • Display (great designers make great ads)
• Strong Search Marketing Resources - lean towards:
  • SEO
  • PPC
• Strong Social Resources - lean towards:
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Viral Content
  • Online PR

That wraps up my brief, high level summation of this tough question, and hopefully it can help some marketers and marketing departments to find the right paths for their organizations/clients.

I’d, of course, love to hear your feedback and ideas as well.

p.s. OMS Seattle is tomorrow, and I’ll be speaking there in the afternoon - hope to see some of you there!

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From: searchenginewatch.com

If you are searching for a good current “real-time” example of how twitter can help publicize your cause celebre, look no further than the latest being tweeted out today by the likes of such “twitterers” as @wholefoods

@WholeFoods - tomorrow, July 1st, is the monthly Twitter for Food event - it would be great for you to join in again! http://tr.im/m1Pq

And what are your instructions once you click on the link?

Post this message to your twitter account on June 30th and July 1st:

#twitterforfood Skip a meal July 1st and fund local or global hunger relief. http://tr.im/m1Pq

Now imagine that. Skip one meal and donate to any one of the great organizations listed on the landing page featured.

Want a snapshot of how many people have so far been tweeting #twitterforfood?

And this is only page 6 of a Twitter search on #twitterfood.

@WholeFoods grabbed hold of this contest and tweeted it to their nearly 800,000 followers! But the idea for skipping a meal and donating money to an organization which serves the hungry came from Tim Blair.

Tim had this to say to me about using Twitter to promote a cause:

“This is a personal passion of mine, so I am absolutely thrilled with the response. I started it last month and plan to run it once a month until it is no longer getting traction. My plan was that it would grow over the next few months as word got out. Humanitarians and philanthropists are a large demographic on Twitter from my experience.

I run twitter accounts for people and have 6 of my own for different causes. I find that it is easy to connect with locals and with specific demographics if you know what you’re doing. I have accounts in green, religious, personal security, books, social marketing and have been able to connect well with people - especially people at high levels in organizations.

Results for some of the promos I have done have been good. Nothing earth shattering yet, but certainly worth the effort and growing. I am definitely sold on the value of using Twitter for promotions and will continue to refine how it is done.”

It will be interesting to see how much $$$ is indeed donated to food organizations from this Twitter campaign. But no one can deny the immediate impact Twitter can have to promote a cause or campaign.

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/jYVLZ3P4YDE/090630-174639

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Chris Crum at WebProNews.com has pieced together some very interesting pieces of information regarding Facebook, a former Googler and a new payment system.

Facebook in May announced that it was testing a new payments system that would deal in real money, rather than virtual currencies that it had been using for any number of applications. This might work fine for Mafia Wars and other light games that Facebook has increasingly added, but if you were to want to move into, say, storefronts or product comparisons, you’d clearly want to be able to deal in real currency.

Enter announcement two: Facebook has hired an ex-Google Checkout director to develop these payment systems. Given Facebook’s immense and growing popularity, its standing as place for sharing opinions and favorites, its open platform and an army of marketers desperate to monetize work on Facebook, it could wind up being an absolute perfect storm.

Imagine classified ads or, bigger yet, entire storefronts integrated directly into a social networking site a la A Small World - except instead of a half million very exclusive members considering five and six-digit purchases in between their social networking activities, it’s 200 million+ people worldwide who could have their friends’ opinions of a product just a click away from being able to purchase it.

Chris has screenshots and more details - worth checking out.

What do you think? Would you purchase or shop on Facebook? Would your customers?

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/5dZoVfIlzHU/090630-171445

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