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HamletBatista
Dan - Keep up the great work. I use your books to train my staff. Top of the line work!
Story: Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
"Take a look at any adwords tutorial you’d like; they all mention the fact that you should avoid “broad” match as much as you possibly can. This is because longtail searches are much much harder to convert into sales. Making a landing page or site relevant to every single search someone could possibly come up with is nearly impossible."
XMCP - Nice post/technique, but i have to disagree with this. Long tail queries convert better in my experience, provided the page closely matches what the user if looking for. It makes sense because when people type general/head queries they are not ready to take action yet, but when they type specific/long tail queries they are closer to make the deal. :-)
The reason some PPC tutorials recommend avoiding broad matches, is because most newbies don't know how to use them properly. Broad matches require a completely different strategy. They are very powerful if you monitor them closely and use a large list of negative keywords. I personally like to use a separate ad group for my broad matched keywords. Again, the key is making sure the searcher is finding what he/she is looking for.
Story: Link Mass: How to determine how much effort it takes to rank for any particular keyword phrase
Jeffrey - thanks so much for your encouraging words. Words like this from someone with your high credentials mean a lot to me.
Halfdeck - Yes, I agree. That is why I also mention that is important to factor in the update rate.
Instead of sending requests to Google to extract this information, I think that parsing the traffic log files is a more efficient and search engine friendly approach. In addition to this I can compare bot hits from different dates on a single pass and compute the rate easily.
We already have all the framework in place, so I am planning to include this feature in the next version of RankSense. With the new release I also plan to introduce a free edition so that a lot more people can benefit from the software.
I just found a couple of excellent options for monitoring your crawl rate:
http://www.seometer.com/ A crawl rate monitor
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/wordpress-crawl-rate-tracker/ A Wordpress plugin
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.
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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?
Nobody desphunn or reported the story as spam (including him), so I'd like to know what others think. I personally love constructive criticism. Should I listen to his critiques or move on and ignore his comments?
He, he, he. Thanks Dave. I agree. I met a lot of wonderful people at SMX and I felt like at home :-) It is great to be part of this community.
"Hamlet - did you help write the questions? Was the interview scripted?"
Debra - I can say in all honesty that the interview and the questions were all Sean's idea. I simply responded to the questions he asked. I didn't suggest any specific questions nor the interview format.
I did ask Sean to include a disclaimer to make our business relationship crystal clear.
If you start asking me about my product or about what I've been doing for the past few years, I am sure you will feel like I am selling to you. I have put so much effort and money into creating something really valuable that I don't see why I would respond without highlighting my goals and the merits of my product.
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/
Story: Everything You Should Never Do On Digg