Calendar
Network
Feeds
HamletBatista
Michael - As I said, I love criticism and you bring some interesting points.
First of all, the interview was not designed primarily to promote my product as you suggest. If you read the post carefully you will learn that SEOs are not my primary market, small business owners with no SEO skills are. Sphinn is mostly SEOs and search marketers.
A lot people don't know my background, haven't been to my country or don't even know why I write about advanced stuff. I believe that Sean's primary goal with the interview was to create awareness of what I've been doing and that has to include RankSense.
It seems that you missed another interview a while ago that also went hot. Tom Critchlow also asked me about RankSense and nobody complained.
Cheers
"Hamlet, are you flat out claiming that this article was not part of any marketing campaign at all, that Sean was not acting in any sort of promotional capacity in writing this, and that neither him nor his firm received any type of compensation whatsoever for doing it?"
Michael - I hired Sean exclusively for help on our SMX presentation "The Future of SEO Automation" and some improvements I need to make to our business plan. He researched, created and delivered the presentation and based on the response he did an great job. As I said, I did not ask him for the interview and did not pay a dime for it.
Whether the interview was part of a marketing campaign, you need to ask Sean because he was not hired for that. I think it was fair enough to include the disclaimer.
Send comment HTML is disabled
Skitzzo - I think Dave was kidding. Please don't take it word for word :-)
As I said, my answers wil sound promotional because I am talking about my product. I can't help with that. You do bring an important point to the discussion. Is the Sphinn community really biased?
Story: Top 10 SEO Myths
Interesting bug. I sphunn it to test if it would go hot and it did. It only had 17 votes before I sphunn it. 21 and 9 negative ones. The counter moved to 21 and went hot.
Story: Top 10 SEO Myths
@Sebastian - I was hoping to unsphinn it if the test was successful as it did, but unfortunately it does not appear in my list of sphunn articles. I guess I uncovered another bug in the system.
I personally think there is a lot to learn from the ocnversation in the comments. The article is not front page material and unfortunatelly it will be syndicated without the critical comments. I apologize for my test.
@Danny - I think it is a good idea to pull the article.
If I read the post right, Andy is not blocking Google from the whole website. He is only blocking Google's crawler to the paid review pages. That is one of the alternative methods to "no-follow" Google recommends.
Please check the changes he did to the robots.txt file.
It is really interesting the fact that this topic keeps coming up again and again. I produce an SEO suite and I have to say that Photoshop analogy is right on the mark.
SEO software is not about replacing the human element. Photoshop doesn't replace the artists skills. Wordpress doesn't replace the writer. I can mention every piece of software in a multitude of industries and none of them are trying to replace the human element. Why do we have to expect SEO tools to do the impossible?
Answer these simple quetions:
1)Is the page indexed?
2)How old is the cache?
3)Is the page ranking for obscure terms found on its contents?
I found this little gem while following the comment thread on Matt Cutts recent blog post http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/detecting-more-undetectable-webspam/
gyutate - I am inclined to think the same way. I have to believe there are many entries where manipulation doesn't take place. Maybe it is only a very small portion that gets affected.
"Yet some bloggers are now linking to Sphinn instead of original blog posts."
This is a very interesting discussion.
I think the same can be said of some A-list bloggers that prefer to link to their friends when they are simply citing a story by a lesser known blogger, instead of linking directly to the source. ;-)
I think Mike Grehan article Filthy Linking Rich applies here. They keep getting so many links because they show up first for most research searches. A small portion of us no-folowing them will not make a difference.
Story: Ok Who Broke Feedburner?!
For a moment I thought my readers were punishing me for the slow posting rate :-)
Story: Are SEOmoz losing the plot?
tamecrow - ironically, you have handled the criticism in the comments very well ;-)
This is what I do, and I can say that it is far more profitable (and less stressful) than charging per hour.
The trick is that the SEO needs to choose the customers/affiliate deals (not the opposite).
Create your own niche site, promote it and "recommend" you customers via an affiliate links. If the sites don't convert, switch your links to ones that do.
I got the congrats email:
"-------------------------------------------------------------
Congratulations!
-------------------------------------------------------------
You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict
Quality Guidelines and criteria -- we believe you have a high-quality
blog and we are happy you're a member of our network!"
The FUNNY thing is that I've NEVER installed the widget, NEVER blog about them and never planned to do either.
He, he, he.
I like to do both PPC and SEO. Depending exclusively on SEO is too risky.
Great post and very original. As long as you don't have to pay for the untargeted traffic is a good idea.
Another benefit of untargeted traffic is branding.
Story: Does Sphinn Allow Infomercials?