peterdaly
The technical analysis aspects of SEO can certainly be somewhat automated with or assisted by software tools. I don’t know about specific "shrinkwrap" or downloadable tools. The tools I use, I wrote myself.
Very, very, nice. This just took away one of the major reasons I keep launching FireFox.
The ranking technology sounds like it’s loosly based on the way Ask.com ranks sites, although the UI is vastly different. Is the UI better? Not sure.Some queries I am familiar with show results very similar in quality (and sites) to Google. A couple obscure queries I am familiar with return some pretty poor results. Their algorithm seems to fall apart with low volume phrases.Pages from the same sites seem to be repeated a lot for some queries. Other search engines have the same issue, but with Cuil it is more obvious because the same site images are repeated over and over. It’s so bad it actually annoyed me to the point where I started shaking my head in distgust going through some SERPS.I think they’re on to something, but missed the mark on the details. It’s too bad, because much of what I didn’t like were minor issues that could be resolved. With a media blitz like they did, it will be hard to get many to ever come back for a second look once things improve.
On many large sites, I think this makes a lot of sense. There are a bunch of "gotta link to because we gotta link to" pages, and site-wide links, that from a search engine perspective are very low value pages, but end up being pagerank magnets.This is similar to what I wrote a couple months ago (http://www.bitworm.com/search/2007/when-to-use-nofollow-on-internal-links/), but is more thurough.Nice job. Spun.
Content has been king in my mind since about 2004 when I had a handful of "thin" affiliate sites peak, then slowly crash and burn as Google rolled out new algorithms. That was the beginning of the end for thin affiliate sites.11th hour? I thought that was a few years ago, but otherwise I agree completely.
Many people will never look at your name/nick and make an association between your posts, but they will notice the connection if your avatar appears over and over again.Excellent post.
Story: A Career in SEO? Bad Move.
Career? What’s that really mean in the web world? I have been working as a web professional since 1997. Based on my experience so far, any "career planning" best have a 4-5 year time horizon.SEO and web application security testing, my current areas of expertise, are in areas that were not even really thought of 5 or so years ago (more or less.) My career? I’m fairly certain what I will be doing 5 years from now will be very different than what I am doing today.In our world, "career" has a fairly short time horizon compared to other industries, and must be viewed in a more broad perspective. I am a Web and Internet Marketing Professional...the details of which are in constant flux.
Story: What SEO Software Means For the SEO Community