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KevinCheng
Agreed about it being a bad Google post.
Just read some of the comments of the post and you could sense a certain amount of confusion and panic from some webmasters who just blindly follow what Google says.
I just hate to think of the debates and explanation I will have to go through when some of the worried clients or some SEO-doubting web managers see these kinda posts and question the executions that we have done.
Unfortunately the Google trademark infringment report process is not as simple as we thought.
The process is somewhat tedious as it requires you to provide the exact same information as the ones in their record, which sometimes for a multi-national companies like my current company, has offices in multiple countries, as well as different legal corporate name in various countries. They also need the official trademark owner or representative to file the report, and that's where you and I, the SEM people bump into the wall as we are not in their record.
Eventually I had to ask the legal council to go through the whole process once again in order to get them to process the claim, and we are still waiting for any result. This is all for filing a complaint against competitors that use our brand name in their ad text, not just for keywords.
I've just gone through the "report trademark infringement" process with Google, and I must say that they are making as tedious and complicated as possible. Not only I had to submit all the trademark info for all the areas affected, which is fine with me as I knew I would need to prove that my company owns the trademark, but they also needed someone (not just anyone from the company) to file the claim. And I'm not even talking about competitors using our trademarks as keywords, but using them as ad text!
Story: How the SEO Bubble Will Pop
Interesting that many agency type consultants reacted to the post very defensively in the comments. I, for one, have been working in-house through my whole career, and to see some comments that simply stated that external agency is better than in-house is totally childish.
I think both in-housers and agencies are great, depending on the clients' budget. Not every company other there could afford to hire an in-house SEOs, hell, some SMEs couldn't even afford to have anyone but themselves to implement the SEO for their own business.
Maybe the site knew about the nature of the story and the risks associated with it, they probably just didn't know or expect the SEO would disclose and gloat on such "accomplishment" and created all the backlashes.
I guess this is something for all businesses to consider: branding vs SEO.
Time on hand is also another factor. I never have enough time to find new news stories for submission and I rarely have enough time to read more than a few articles on a particular day.
I would almost always report them, most probably I have always been working in-house, so I would never get the chance to mimic their tactics with my companies' sites.
It took me a long time to spot that + to expand the div... very sneaky and smart.
Wow, definitely a great list of questions. But to be honest, I have never been presented with such an extensive list of questions in any of my interviews yet. I think the answers from the candidates would prove useful to determine if they will be up to the job, but only if the person conducting the interview has some SEO background of their own.
The most important report that the business needs is the ROI report like Mike said. Ranking doesn't mean anything if it doesn't convert into page views, purchases or whatever the bottomline of the company.
Great article. I think many big brands do understand the concept of SEO, but often there is a problem in presenting the exact ROI in a business case to the upper management who gives the green light to any SEO projects.
From my experience, yes I've worked for a huge brand, it usually takes lots of effort to fight for the resources (dev, editorial, graphic, etc) and compete with other "real products or service" launch that could provide real bottomline.
And of course there is also the problem of excessive business processes that would slow down the whole implementation. SEO is a function that is most affected by this problem as most SEO executions required the collaboration between various work groups.
I, for one, am interested to see if they will in fact take over the market in China in the future as I find SEOing sites for Baidu to be an inscrutable process.
Amazing how the said site's tactic is so publicized yet their rankings still perserve at this very moment.
Nice read!
This geo-target issue becomes even more complicated when some countries that you want to taget also have multiple official language like Canada, China, and Belgian.
Coming from an in-house position myself, I totally agree with the 5 steps. I truely believe that there is alot of preparation to be made prior to hiring any in-house SEO. And what eletitor said is true, the existing teams need to agree upon the SEO direction in the company, otherwise there will only be rounds after rounds of debate and disagreement between the in-house SEOs and the other teams.
Another important point missing there is the red tapes in the company. It plays a huge role as it pretty limits what the SEO can do and how efficient the person can execute the changes. I've written a post about the how bureaucratic red tapes hinder SEO progress, check my profile.
Interesting and entertaining list, but I cannot agree with all of them.
I think I have been asked a couple of the questions before, and at the time of the interview I felt that those questions were somewhat silly. I mean, anyone could pretty much make up or memorize some of the "correct answers" without any actual experience in SEO. Any good presenter could play the whole interview perfectly and get the job.
I'm not saying the list is bad, I just think that any interview is the same, sometimes you will need to use your instinct along with the candidates' portfolios and performance in the interview to determine if he/she is a good fit in the organization.
How could I have missed this topic a few months back...
Anyways, I was recently doing some research about this very topic as my current client has been using this technique to create a scrolling promo box on the homepage. After awhile I've noticed some ranking fluctuation (mostly negative), but I could not come to conclusion if it has anything to do with the display: none technique.
So I've done some digging, and found this very link and the article on Searchengineland, but also another one that dates back to late last year ocarbone.free.fr/blog/?p=222 that basically said that Google told him via GWT that the search engine had removed his site due to the display:none code on his blog.
So, I'm still skeptical about this very techinque.
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Story: Google says Stay Away From URL Rewriting! Seriously?