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Honestly, this has been one of the biggest flaws with Google. It makes it necessary for SEO'ers to include all the synonyms in their content if they want to be in the SERP. I'll have to do some research and take a look at how this is working though, because it almost seems to dificult to do properly.
Either way, this just reinforces the idea that someday SEO only firms may someday become obsolete. If Google can determine that a great site that only uses the word "cars" in it's content should also come up for searches on "autos".... why would the site owner need to hire a company that only does SEO ;-)
http://gazebo.commonplaces.com/2008/08/why-seo-firms-may-someday-be-obsolete/
Great list. Since social media traffic is usually fairly untargeted (non-targeted?), I usually only measure traffic, conversions and of course backlinks which I find to be the most valuable metric in the long run. Most social media visitors will come and go very quickly, but if you get backlinks, at least those will last longer then the quick popularity of the actual contetnt. "Links, long-term traffic from linking sites, search ranking, and long-tail search traffic"
I just don't see any way this could be accurate based on one simple fact, Yahoo is the default search on iPhones!
I totally agree with this. I won't even touch a site that won't let me start with optimizing it for conversions first. What a waste of time & money if you don't start from the ground up.
Haha, this is a definition? That's pretty funny:
"Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical."
By that "definition" using a CSS would be a violation ;-)
I've been fighting with Yahoo over this for about a year. My argument is that they should be at least allowing advertisers to block more than 250 crappy partners with crappy traffic. Why should we be paying top dollar for traffic that comes from some craptastic site where the owner is using hitbots and spamming techniques to make a quick buck. At least once a month I see a partner's hitbot take almost lontail kw of mine and ring up about $40 a day on it. I usually just delete the kw now when that happens, send it to Yahoo and hope I get credited.
I can't believe there aren't 100's of comments on this scammy technique?
I'll tell you what this means for Yahoo: they'll be making a ton more money of their advertisers, starting immediately, and they'll also be able to sell off their lower listing traffic for more money then they were able to before the bid increase. They sell off the 2nd & 3rd page listings to companies like Enhance.com, who pays them for these lower listing spots on their search engine.
I think the worst thing about this whole minimum bid thing is that you aren't even paying for Yahoo traffic, you're paying for their crappy partners that have parked domains, and send spam traffic to them that advertisers are paying top dollar for! As an advertiser, you have to manually block these crappy sites, and there's a limit on 250 domains (when there are thousands and thousands of crappy partners) to ensure that Yahoo makes even more money on crappy traffic.
I use Google Alerts and Bloglines. It takes like 5 minutes a day, or even every other day.
Dump your Google stocks now, they're going to crash!
Can't wait to see in their next quarterly report how much income doubleclick brings in, and how much of that is performics SEO based.
Google's been getting much to much cocky these days, and I can't believe no one has mentioned how Doubleclick used to have very borderline ILLEGAL ad serving tactics back in the day...
WOW! This article scared me quite a bit since I've spent the past few weeks nofollow'ing all the privacy, contact, driving direction etc pages for over a dozen sites. Good thing after 10 minutes of research I realized that this article is COMPLETELY WRONG. I searched the MOST competitive keywords on Google and EVERY SINGLE first page listing is using nofollows in their privacy, contact etc links. So don't worry, this article is just wrong.
How many good listings could this author have if she thinks that ON SITE SEO = SEO MANIPULATION. Unless you have the privalage of dealing with the most popular brands "Auto Trader" "Best Buy" "Amazon", on-site optimization is a MUST. Anyone who says it's a moral issue is either broke, or on crack. What is immoral about doing something that will keep your valued PR from going to pages on YOUR SITES that you don't care about? It's pretty moronic to think that there's any MORAL issue, if that was the case then why don't you make all your sites in Flash because they look cooler? By these standards it's IMMORAL to make a site in XHTML because you're trying to get SEO listings hahaha
Oh well, I'll stick to my theories and let everyone else stick to theirs....
Good stuff. This is so simple but I always forget to do it on a regular basis. Flickr for example can be a great resource for ANY image content you have, just watermark everything, and have an image of your site's logo and you're set.
Story: Rev Up "About Us" Pages
Great post!
About us pages have been the topic of conversation a lot lately, and you do a great job of outlining why it's important, and how to put good content in it.
There are sooo many scammers out there these days that having a good about us page may instantly put you in a good light with your visitors.
I have to dissagree with you on this one. Obtaining the desired rankings for the desired keywords is exactly what we're all trying to do here, are we not? Sure, traffic and conversions are important, but if you have no rankings, you'll have no traffic or conversions.
I supposed this could be looked at as "What came first, the chicken or the egg", but that's if you're only doing SEO alone. Traffic and conversions are MUCH more important when you're dealing with PPC, where if you don't have the desired % you lose your shirt (or your client's shirt).
1. Knowing and uderstanding why your results are fluctuating so you can get better rankings is the job of the marketer.
2. Understanding geotargeting so you can get better rankings is the job of the marketer.
3. Understanding personalized search, local search etc. so you can get better rankings is the job of the marketer.
4. If your targeting poor kw's then you probably haven't done your research as a marketer.
5. If you're marketing a site that doesn't convert then you haven't done your research as a marketer.
I'll continue to measure my success by whether I'm 26th, or 6th, and the rest of you can look at your server stats ;-)
I still love this blog, and read it daily! :-)
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Story: Google Now Searching For Synonyms