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HAH! asking non-seos to get educated in SEO? I don't know where you guys work but in my company they not only don't have the time but they don't have the interest and would fight against it. asking people to take these "certifications" (which are probably nonsense anyway) would cost money and lost project time, and "we already have an SEO for that!"
interesting to read the rationalizations for BH...
if every SEO was an expert blackhat who used tricks and automation to get their sites to rank at any cost, search engines would no longer return useful results. Effectively, BH would break search. I don't use search engines that don't return useful results, and neither do most consumers. The end result is having destroyed one of the most interesting and useful tools ever created, and your own livelihood along with it.
personally, I don't crap where I eat.
good article! this is no different than Starbucks deciding to put up a store across the street from a local cafe. It's fair competition.
so far, it seems that advertisers who use this tactic are ok as long as they are not intentionally misleading the searcher into thinking that they ARE the trademark holder.
here's a great post on PPCHero about the issue:
http://www.ppchero.com/ppc-tradmark-copyright-laws-how-to-play-fair-and-win/
I think that analogy works well. You're walking down the soda aisle to get your pepsi and you can see all the other drinks there. you might decide you really want the pepsi, or you might see batman on the new coke bottle and decide you want that instead. as long as the coke doesnt have the pepsi logo on it, it's fair competition.
are you kidding? im getting very good conversion rates otherwise I would not be doing it! much higher than the average adgroup.
If I start saying the sky is green, will you guys argue with me too? I bet you wouldn't bother, since such a claim would be too ridiculous to entertain, and doing so would only make you look foolish as well.
I agree that this is a smart reason to blog and one that is not as frequently emphasized. But we've all seen business blogs that are all business and no personality. A blog (or a blogger) can't exist in a vacuum, if you aren't relevant to what's going on in your blogspace, people won't read.
agree with all the above posts. the trick to this that most businesses never seem to "get" is that you can't just grab a random employee and hand them the keys to your company blog. It has to be someone with writing skills, an interest and knowledge in the topics being written about, and an understanding of the blogosphere and how to work within it (not to mention some understanding of how blog software works). You need to hire a BLOGGER, not a copywriter.
all of the objections I see to rank reports seem to be about clients getting too focused on them, losing sight of what is really important. but don't discount their value when used appropriately.
I work in house for a company and I use automated rank reports once every month. No one looks at them but me. I am able to use them effectively to identify pages that are just short of top rankings and give them a little extra push to the front page. I only check ranks for terms that are already sending me some traffic, so it's a lot more manageable than a huge time consuming rank report. If I don't see a surge in sales for pages that are ranked, I can try different keywords.
rankings are not a part of my progress reports, only traffic and sales.
it's sad that selfish people have no problem clogging the web up with this useless junk instead of creating something of value. I can easily picture a day when splogs full of crap like this make it very difficult to find real information. but hey, who cares about that, you're making money!
I am supressing the urge to despinn only because it's late on a friday...but I hope I never have to see the words "Paris Hilton" on this website again. ever.
I've had a lot of success with competitor's brand names in Adwords. Yes, the quality scores are poor, but competition is low and the CPC I'm getting now is not that much higher than the average for the rest of my campaign. It's hovering around 2% conversion rate after several months of refining ads, not amazing but definitely a positive ROI for me.
It can also have the benefit of letting you know which competitors are on the ball with their PPC and which are on autopilot: a couple of companies have contacted us and let us know they were unhappy with our bidding on their names, but most don't even seem to notice.
Story: SEO Rapper
I switched over to compete.com to get my almost useless traffic statistics.
why not just go to a cooler SEO community where everyone is an expert, all the posts are unique and insightful, and there isn't any spam? lol
I'd like to point out that the vast majority of SEOs don't post here, and don't blog at all. It seems the "rockstar" bloggers think that they ARE the industry, when really they spend more time fostering their own reputation than they do actually practicing SEO.
are a couple of flamewars on sphinn really that big of a deal? happens in every online community ive ever participated in. par for the course.
If you don't like it then why not just use RSS and read the feeds that you like? I find all of the criticism of sphinn to be somewhat strange. Can anyone show a social media site that doesn't have spam, rehashed blog posts, and power users?
The only website that was ever better than Sphinn was Threadwatch and that was only because there were few members and they were extremely knowledgeable.
it seems that the last few months have been one big "slow news day" for search marketing. that's why so many lackluster stories are going hot...there's nothing terribly fascinating to talk about lately. I don't fault sphinn for that, though.
I do think this is a little deceptive for natural search, but I use competitor domains as keywords in my PPC campaigns. That way, my competitor's organic listing will still be there for the consumer to find, but they may also want to check out the alternative I offer in PPC ads.
Hey Danny, any idea when the agenda for SMX East will be up?...the site says this week and I'm eagerly awaiting...
chris he is magical, thats how he can chat in all those windows at the same time. I'm shocked you didn't know that.
Story: How to Adopt a Pro-SEO Culture at your Company