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It really sounds a lot to me like Dvorak searches like a "newbie", that is to say when he wants cell phone comparisons, he searches "cell phones" or maybe even "phones". Search engines will never be able to guess what you exactly mean without explicitly stating it, and nor should they. If they make too many assumptions they just end up pissing off some segment of the population 100% of the time. People who learn to properly qualify their query get considerably better results from their search activity. It's a search engine tool, not a magic 8-ball.
And not to beat a dead horse, but Dvorak should be smart enough to have put the pieces together that maybe the reason sites he expects to show at times do successfully appear is that an SEO has helped to lay out their site structure and coding standards as well as carefully ensured a clear path to indexing was maintained thoughtout the site. But no, it's easier to call SEO's spammy trickster than to actually use a brain cell or two to posit how in the heck people actually do things the right way. Here's a hint Dvorak, it's not an accident.
And this guy claims to be some kind of technology authority? What's his qualifications? What, was he the first guy in his office back in the day to learn how to hook up the printer? What a maroon.
Story: X-Browser SEO Tool
Maybe it's just me, bt I prefer to not install things on my machine when the download page doesn't give the first bit of insight as to what the tool even does. A complete description/screenshots on the download page would only make sense.
I'm glad Matt clarified, so as not to alarm people. I still think you should rewrite URLs, just be sure you do it correctly, for 2 big reasons: 1) User-Friendliness (which should be more important than Search Engine Friendliness) and 2) there are other search engines out there than Google.
I think Matt makes a good point, that when you mod-rewrite make sure the site still behaves as it should. If a page doesn't exist, it should return a 404 and 1 page should only ever have 1 URL. All can be done real easily by including a conditional call in your code right up front before a single stitch of HTML is written. Basically, if page exists, continue, else 404.
Surely those results are flawed. We all know that SEO is bogus and unneccesary. There is no reason anyone would ever need to optimize their site for the search engines.
Yeah, as both an advertiser and a publisher, this is just retarded. The content networks are just starting to come around as being useful and not just a big money suck, and here comes someone advocating turning it back into a red herring for advertisers. Remind me to put any sites Godin is involved with on my negative placements list.
Traditional news orgs are just determined to be as stupid as possible when it comes to the web. How else can you explain such previously successful content deliverers ignoring all the common knowledge of how the internet best works even in the face of everyone telling them those failings are the exact cause of them slowing eroding into collapse? Just freaking link out guys!!! It won't kill you. It's like they are trapped in this mindset that the only way they'll lose visitors is by having an outbound link. Listen, morons, people can leave your site at any time without a link, and they are exercising that ability often when you serve usability nightmares like talking about a website without providing a link, or now giving a faux link. Sometimes it makes you just want to grab a news exec publisher by the collar and shake them around, tossing a few slaps in. Next thing you know they'll complain about Google actually driving traffic to their sites! Oh, wait... that already happened.
Well, since the name of "killer" has been given it's a guarantee that it will fail. Every time people feel the need to introduce a product and position it in such a way that the measure of success is complete and total anihilation of the top competitor, then it's 99.9% likely to fail. Just put out a good product into the market and earn a market share like normal industries. You don't see Frito-Lay touting their new "Dorito Killer", do you?
Yeah, too many people jump into PPC thinking it's a push button activity. It's merely a performance based payment model for targeted ads, not a magic cash genie. You gotta be smart about your bidding, your landing pages, your keyword use, your ad copy, your budgeting, pay attention to ROI... All that stuff you businesses have (or should have) been doing for years on pulp and the airwaves... you aren't off the hook on that just because your marketing is traveling through a series of tubes now.
Because reading about people who hate a blog and can't just unsubscribe and leave it at that is far more useful content to be offering on your own blog. Sorry, couldn't resist! It just reminds me of the posts about when people subscribe to 30 SEO blogs and then complain when they get 30 posts on the same big news topic.
Last I checked Google wasn't the only search engine that values links in determining rankings. Links are just as effective in gaining traction in Yahoo and MSN and neither of those guys offer a PageRank indicator of any kind.
The point can also be made that there are a LOT of people out there selling links that have no clue what PageRank is. Sounds strange to us, but there are swarms of people who are still getting their feet wet with the internet as a business model and are considering hobby and special interest indexes and directories as a way of making some pocket change. They don't know and don't care about SEO and these unfortunate mom and pop late comers will be the only real casualty in Google's war on links.
Hah... When I read this kind of stuff I just think, somewhere successful small businesses that employ SEO, in house SEOs and the independent affiliate marketers alike think, "yeah, that's right, no benefit here, you just don't worry your pretty little head with this SEO stuff."
There is more than one way to skin a cat and not everything that is remains that way. In other words, "flowers new york" isn't the only way that service is searched and those in the top 10 aren't guaranteed those slots forever. SEO is the probably one of the few places a smal businesses efforts have a more equal playing field among the big guys, just takes hardwork, homework and little clever thinking.
Well, it looks like their ineptitude is sinking themselves. I can't get anywhere on their site right now without hitting a generic server error page.
Yeah, in regards to the Yahoo directory, I'm pretty sure they spend little to no time perusing that thing for quality. Seeing as how you really don't have to pay for renewal of links (there's stuff in there I know for a fact stopped getting renewed up to 5 years ago) and there is a cottage industry around buying up expired domains strictly for the Yahoo Directory link they still have. That directory is not at all what Matt describes.
And really, it's none of Google's business the quality of a site they don't own. Just don't value the backlink, problem solved. No need to try and turn webmasters into tattle-tale rats and label people and whole business models as crooks when the reality is you just can't figure out how to improve the issue from an engineering standpoint like you are supposed to. Stop whining and fix your own algo.
#1, okay, I can see that goes to quality... #2, totally not a definable variable, 100% opinion and open to too much abuse by The Watchers... #3, welcome to the free market economy Google, you know, that thing that changed you from a fun little search tool into an international advertising juggernaut. I find it completely reprehensible that Google can be making such big forays into the advertising world, making it's stock prices soar to incredible heights as a result, but then turn around and tell people they can't sell links. It makes sense to ask people to review their links and not accept them outright, but it is none of their business how much or if at all people charge for them.
Again, if you don't want that affect your link-based algo, then figure out how to devalue their affect, but don't go around penalizing the sites themselves that run directories. Believe it or not Google, people, as in humans and not bots, click on links and travel around the internet in ways other than your search results.
Hmm... yeah, but Chris Crocker, Britany Spears and Rosie ODonnell all get a lot of attention too. Doesn't mean we could/should derive any kind of positive lesson from them.
Use the search query report in your AdWords reports area often. You will find everything you need to add right there. Well, everything except for whatever hides in those "...and 38 more keywords" enries hat drive me nuts. Add what you don't want there and then check it the following week, wash rinse and repeat. And yes, adult terms are a must. Your negative keyword list is not complete unless it makes a George Carlin routine look like an episode of Elmo.
King256 has hit on the true "whys" of buying these domains. It isn't the domain really, you'll probably just 301 it to something worthwhile anyhow. It's that snail trail of links from ancient old sites that older domains have accumulated that are just entirely impossible to replicate on a new domain. Think about how many geocities pages and old directories whose owners themselves have forgotten about them point to dead links of expired domains, waiting to be 301'ed to a new lean mean SEO'ed machine... It's not "crusty old domains" as much as it's crusty old links!
Putting my bias for web services aside, whenever I hear about a Web 2.0 high value acquisition or venture captial funding my thoughts drift to the economy as a whole. We are now valuing companies that do virtually nothing useful for 99% of the population higher than industry giants that produce tangible goods used by 100% of the population. Ask any person who does not work online what Digg, Mahalo or Twitter is and they'll look at you with a blank stare. These things are all basing their value on the ability to monetize traffic from a small niche segment of society using a system that's not even their own. What if a fault slips in Cali and Google's servers drop into a pit (I know they have datacenters all over, it's an analogy), what happens to the business model of all the paper companies our investment capital is sunk into?
Just a thought that when we get all a Twitter about these kewl sites we Digg, are these really solid investments or just Bubble 2.0 building up steam to once again flood the ranks of the fast food industry with former tech moguls.
I'd love to drop using www myself, because to ME it would be more human friendly, but I approach it from a tech/branding/dev mindset like many here. Unfortunately, for the majority of people that's not your audience. Think of it this way: Have you ever tried to get a client or other standard internet user to type in a subdomain.domain.com type address? 9 times out of 10 they had issues that ended up being them still trying to throw www in front of the subdomain. To many people www is not an optional parameter that will get redirected in most cases, but a required thing to type in that will break things if they don't. At least, that's what's in their head.
If you cover your bases with redirects you should have little problems, but be aware, people EXPECT the www.
This paid link witch hunt can't hold water. Google overstepped and they really need to start playing damage control like yesterday. Who cares if the link is paid? Seems to me Google has always approached things from a quality standpoint, and if you have links from junk directories or sites, then they don't count positively towards your ranking. This problem should have been solved with that policy years ago. So now should we expect Yahoo to get penalized? How about sponsor lists on conference websites? Customer lists in your profile? Is Google trying to convince us that they can't identify a link farm accurately enough anymore, but we can trust them to determine the intent of a sponsored link? Bullshit.
What this tells me is that Google's algo isn't as good at doing this as they wanted us to believe, in fact, most people know that having a bunch of links you can 301 around from crusty old domains is a pretty consistent way of gaming Google for some time now. Fix your algo you twerps, don't try to villanize other people's businesses and try to make the general public turn on them for you. Do no evil, indeed.
It's time for Google to take a reality check and redefine their role. This in my opinion is crap:
"Buying links in order to improve a site's ranking is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."
Becomes:
"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."
What I find more troubling than that "or selling" is added is that the intent statement is removed "in order to improve a site's ranking". Not that Google could ever really determine intent, but this just goes to show they don't even care about that anymore, they simply want to stop all paid links. Problem is, if they couldn't determine intent with their algorithm, then I don't think they can determine if something is flat out paid or sold anyhow, without some kind of blatant "buy a link" statement. So in effect, it's FUD because they aren't going to devalue the factor of links in ranking since that's the core of their algortihm and what set them apart from other engines in the first place.
The reality is that Google is attempting to eliminate an industry, whether that reason is because they want to boost AdWords or just that they reached the limitations of their algo and realize that they AREN'T smarter than everyone else, regardless of how many PHDs are on staff. No matter how you slice it that's some grade A fodder for a law suit, attempting to push an entire industry out the door using their market dominance. Google, why don't you just put your PHDs to work and leave people alone, it's not your place to tell people what they can and can't sell. Contrary to what your vanity tells you, links are not always bought to game your engine, there is a such thing as paid advertisement outside of your world.
Why don't they just ignore them in regards to how they rank sites. Penalizing opens up that box, ignoring elements they disagree with always seemed to me to be the best approach.
Story: Why Google Must Die - Column by PC Magazine