Calendar
Network
Feeds
MarketingGuy
Agreed link building is part of SEO and not specifically SEM. It is after all a necessity for SEO success.
What an odd point for the discussion to be dwelling on! :)
Desphunn simply because it's yet another regurgitated article that doesn't say anything particularly interesting. The original thread on HighRankings should have been sphunn IMO.
Some of the few conclusions drawn on the article are dubious at best:
"50 subdomains would be not much easier to manage and promote than in the above case plus you have more chances to be penalized for spamming the index."
Really? Since when? 50 crap internal pages have as much chance of being penalised as 50 crap sub domain pages - and 50 good internal pages have as much chance of ranking well as 50 good sub domains.
If it hadn't been posted on SEJ it probably wouldn't have made it to the Sphinn homepage IMO.
Scott
I have to admit, I wasn't convinced about his claims until he used all caps to reinforce the point at the end there. ;)
Flip side - I hate "startups" who go about the place selling their service on the back of "good Google rankings" when they have none. Seen some guy churning out a 100k page affiliate feed site (no rankings to speak of) but going around small business forums try to rip off small businesses to list their products on the back of non existent traffic (that they were "assured" would happen). Some arguing goes by and it transpires that this national venture had a £500 per month PPC budget supplying traffic to 100,000 pages lol.
There must be a sweet spot inbetween surely lol? :)
Scott
Help me out here - news aggregrator from a search professional that doesn't actually disseminate, categorise or organise information in any particularly useful, new or inspiring way. What's the point?
Re: the about page - "A table of contents" would at least list information in a meaningful order. "A dashboard" would have some function. "A digital magazine rack" is probably the most accurate description, but given we *browse" magazine racks and are already using a *browser* what more does this actually bring to user experience?
Basically a scraper site that hand picks the sites it scrapes from? Someone correct me if I'm missing some spectacular meaning to the project. If the brand goal is the "cessation of Internet stagnation", how does it actually achieve that goal?
The FAQ is just plain arrogant:
Q: What if I want my site removed?
A: Because you have to much traffic? Just send us an email.
Lol!
Desphunn for what it's worth - press release for a glorified scraper site doesn't constitute front page news IMO.
MG
Agreed incrediblehelp.
While I think there is some relative benefit to sculpting in certain areas, I'm already seeing SEOs suggesting it as a solution to bad site structure which is just a step in the wrong direction.
It is a problem if the site has bad internal linking structure. If you have 100k pages needing to rank for 100k terms then they need to be interlinked properly. Hording link juice through nofollow is no solution to that problem. It might result in some ranking improvements, but on that scale the knock on effect will hurt the site more than help it.
The issue is that if the site has a fragmented link juice distribution, then nofollow will just make that issue worse, while proper site structure would resolve the problem.
I think it's worth noting though that sculpting strategies can have varying level of effectiveness depending on the site size. A 200 page site nofollowing links to 10% of its pages is very different to a 500k page site doing the same. The former will result in a fairly smooth transition - the latter will result in an almost unpredictible manner.
If rankings are so important to clients that they want to go to the level of sculpting link juice then they should be given a kick in the backside to fix the underlying problems first. Bandaid solutions are insanely stupid for critical areas of business - the first time your arm gets wet the solution falls right off.
If you need to solve a problem - then solve it. A bandaid just leaves the risk of the problem occuring again. Why spend time sculping link juice in this way if search engines can just flick a switch and remove the value you get from it?
Fads come and go but I'll happily stake my entire business on the benefits of good site structure - i.e. the ability to weather any algo update.
Hey Jeremy - wasn't suggesting that you said that - I just waffled on a little more than usual because this situation came up recently in talks with a client. :)
I agree if A, B or C aren't doable than taking D (nofollow) for positive benefit is an option. The problem I see occurring more than anything though is that A, B and C are just too much hard work to implement so D is taken as the easy way out, which is the wrong approach and it isn't without risk either.
Funny thing about the Google ban was the spammy homepage thing came from the top when it was introduced but blamed on a "new employee that has now left" after it went public. Even funnier, the same technique was being used on client sites even after the ban. >.
Spin has always been rife in bigmouthmedia in my experience, be it external or internal. Say something enough times and people end up taking it as fact.
Hat's off to Aaron for not only sharing his vast amount of SEO experience on the matter, but also having the business acumen to take it seriously. Penalty or bug, dropping from 1st to 6th impacts your business in the same way - from a business point of view you need to approach it as such.
>> He called it a penalty and it wasn't.
And many others said it didn't exist when it did. Does the label you put on it really matter? The result for website affected is just the same.
Matt Cutts blogged about this back in Aug 2006 where he said that Google doesn't treat different TLDs (or specific sites) any differently - it's all down to the PR (and presumably other non site specific factors):
- http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/another-two-videos/
- (where he discusses it - near the end of the video) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1756437348670651505
Off topic, but is the SEO Roundtable page really Sphinn worthy? It's two lines of text and a link to the Google Groups thread which itself only has two posts... (http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/8356d3581ce67211/).
I'm not saying it wasn't interesting - clearly if people don't know about this then it's worthy of being here. All I'm saying is that perhaps linking to one short article (in this case) holds no value as the source of the story is the Google Groups thread.
I should probably have started a new discussion on the topic so apologies for hijacking this one. :)
Hang on...
- Superman style logo
- many pictures of girls in tight t-shirts
- cheesy American sports presenter style intro for an otheriwse geeky chat
- some name dropping
- repeated references to knowing no decent SEOs in the local area
...could Jeremy be over compensating a little? ;) We get it - yer the big man on campus! :P
I'd be a little worried about seeing Jeremy speak at a conference for fear he might try to mark his territory on the front row! :)
I agree with the points in general, particularly David's comment at the end of the article, "if we would spend more time making our sites the very best they can be, we might not have to worry about what the competition is doing" - never a truer word spoken!
But business is business and if you can leverage an advantage against a competitor within the realms of the law and personal / society's ethics, then why not take it?
Sphinn has a "report as spam" button that people regularly use, yet no one has any issues with that (the people you are reporting are just trying to market their own interests as is a lot of the rest of the community - they just choose to do it in a different way). Is that different because our profressions aren't so reliant on Sphinn for success (and we aren't hit by "Sphinn updates" and "loss of Sphinn traffic" issues)? No bitterness towards Sphinn like some SEOs have for Google?
I'm still in the same camp as David - make good sites and don't worry so much about the competition. But if the opportunity arises to take market share from the competiton then I think anyone working in marketing would be doing themselves a disservice not to take it.
Scott
From the post (my emphasis) - "A quarter of those surveyed had a manager job title and they earned between $60,000 and $90,000 – but despite the title, almost half did not directly manage people."
That made me laugh - it's so true! Nothing like a jumped up job title to help employers avoid paying entry or low-mid level staff more money! ;) I always have a chuckle when people boast about a new "managerial" promotion - when asked how many people they manage or how much their budget is, they respond, "er none". :)
"Webmasters scared to link out" - seriously?
I have a hunch that a hotel chain running a promotional campaign or a web dev firm waiving a fee isn't going to give a second thought to the fact Google might destroy them in some paid link misunderstanding. Just a hunch mind...
..and another teeeeeeensy hunch that maybe, just maybe, the hordes of PHDs at Google might consider for a second that not every action on the web relates to SEOs whoring links.
And
that's
Paarraa-nooooii-AAAAH! ;)
My prediction for 2008 is that business will continue as it always has done, paying limited notice to SEO in the grand scheme of things (granted, perhaps less than they should). The only thing that will continue to change is the acceptance of SEO as an integral part of marketing and maybe come closer to requiring SEOs to not approach their jobs in quite the Wild West manner is has been done in the past.
Link whoring out. Marketing in. Google will compliment that, not act as a barrier.
Scott
Well, I'm a marketer and while I don't have a great deal of hard tech skills, I do have experience with the tech project management process. I always position my consultancy towards management level and early stages of project development. Anything else and you need to fight to get even minor changes made. Actually, I'm so confident of the benefits of this I've got a client to put worldwide expansion on hold to accomodate a full site redesign where I expect to see their 1 million visits a month increase dramatically!
I agree Tim - in fact I would guess most in house SEOs are generally from a tech background and if anything could stand to expand their business skills base. The marketing people that deal with SEO inhouse tend to be more responsible for managing external agencies in my experience.
Cheers nsmseo. :)
Sorry adam - the only dirt I'm dishing on this one is my own - I'm guilty of some of those sins! ;)
There are loads of SEO consultants and agencies out there who will happily take money from naive clients and then provide them with a service that the know fine well can put the site at risk. No different from a builder using sub par materials then doing a runner.
At one point back in my agency days, I reckon about 40% of my clients came through the door with a penalised site - sometimes from DIY SEO; mostly from sub par services they paid for.
Story: Account Management is Dead
I think the suggestion is more a reflection of the size and scope of SEO agencies, in that most tend to have SEO savvy people servicing what would traditionally have been account management roles. SEO is much easier to churn out en masse than any traditional marketing strategy - a lot of the larger agencies end up being no more than glorified call centres selling templated documents.
Smaller SEO agencies usually have a solid core of technical SEOs supporting all areas of the business from pitches to end product. Larger agencies can't really recruit a large number of experienced (SEO) staff so need to pad out their client offerings with traditional account management "roles".
The 3-martini lunch thing still happens all the time - it's just blurred with some networking, some pitches and also includes more technical staff (who wouldn't have necessarily been needed when pitching a more traditional marketing job). Sure, lots of roles needed to be revised to accomodate the SEO agency business model, but I don't think anything has been killed off. More evolved than anything - if your competition is sending technical people to pitches then you need to send more than kiss ass accountant managers to keep up! :)
MG
Story: Sphinn's search
Funnily enough I just noticed this earlier on as well. :) A sort by Sphinn count option would be pretty good as well. Maybe also filters for only results you've Sphinned or commented on (makes it easier to find stuff you didn't bookmark at the time).
Story: Teaching Advanced Link Building and Why Pagerank Will Never Die