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jonhenshaw
My favorite part of that session was when Matt Cutts cracked his knuckles and took out his notebook out. Hilarious!
@Halfduck, your take on my entry is way too literal, which is not the tone or the intention of the article. And I share many of the views you spoke of. As for evidence, there's not a chance that I'm sharing it in any open forum. Fortunately, the purpose of my post (my purpose for writing it) revealed exactly what I wanted to know. Which is, I'm not alone in my findings (thanks to those who have emailed me personally about this). As for any take away impressions of whining, hypocrisy, ethics, etc... I really don't give a shit.
Mindy, I wish I could provide examples, but it would expose my clients and some of our methods (especially to this crowd). I can respond to some of the things you said (which make total sense to me).
The point is that you shouldn't be able to improve your SERPs via anchor text inside nofollow'd links. If Google truly isn't following or passing any link juice, you really shouldn't see much of any impact for the anchor text that's being used, in relation to the link that is nofollow'd. What I've been finding, only in the past couple of months, is that is not the case. From my experience, I would chalk it up to either being a temporary bug in the algo or shift in algo strategy by Google. Basically, a situation where they've decided that they're excluding value by completely ignoring anchor-to-url relationships when nofollow'd.
All in all, it could simply be an anomoly or maybe there are some other factors we're leaving out that are skewing our results. However, the point of writing about it was to bring attention to this and to see if anyone else was seeing this behavior.
Also, thanks to @mercylivi for sphinning this!
@Halfdeck, I have the same skepticism as you. Just bringing light to something that I was seeing happen more than once with different campaigns that we're doing. I never suggested it was fact, based on incredible empirical research or anything else for that matter. Just throwing it out there to see if I was alone. So far, I'm very alone and hear crickets chirping in the background.
@JohnWeb, when I find bigfoot, I'm keeping him for my own glory.
@Mindy, the phrases in question are not highly competitive short-tail phrases, and I'm not suggesting this as a technique. I'm only bringing to light strange behavior that I haven't seen before.
You are both in Lee's shadow, because he wrote 8 Steps to a Successful SEO Campaign: Choosing a Domain Name yesterday. Apparentley, there's something in the URL naming air.
Michael, if that's the case, maybe it's time you updated your marketing copy :P
I'm very careful with the directories I use (if any). I've had too many SERP hits directly after adding sites to "trusted" directories. The only time it makes the most sense to me to use any directories is with a locale-based campaign. Otherwise, I approach them very cautiously -- even with niche directories and sites.
A lot of people are freaking out about this, but I'm someone who thinks this may be a good thing.
http://sphinn.com/story/26317
I love StumbleUpon. It's one of my favorite social networking services for marketing and overall good content.
Thanks for Sphinning this Brian and thanks for also being one of our most active blog members. We've always liked the MyBlogLog service and have been especially interested in it after we met Ian Kennedy at PubCon Las Vegas and saw the improvements that Yahoo! was making to the service.
We're really looking forward to seeing how other bloggers use their API. There's a lot of things you can do with it. Promoting our blog members was just the first thing that popped into our mind, but there are many other things you can do with it. I would dare say you could probably create an Adobe AIR application with it too.
One of the best things to come out of working on it was the open source PHP wrapper we wrote for the API, which is available to anyone at: http://code.google.com/p/php-mybloglog/
Brian, the wrapper is used to act as an interpreter for the API and enable you to easily use data elements of the API using PHP code.
vangogh, I didn't write the code, one of our developers did. I'll talk to him and ask him what it would take to package the community code for distribution. We're also talking about creating a plugin for a platform like WordPress.
northrock, I haven't given up on it yet either. I've generally stayed away in the past, becuase I saw it as a walled community (unable to provide links that could be indexed by search engines). However, the exposure and traffic generation power of Facebook can't be ignored, which leads me to believe that along with the introduction to Facebook applications and whatever else they might have up their sleave, it's still something that I want to experiment with.
Thanks for sphinning this ViperChill. I thought Lee did a good job on this article and I think some of the images are hilarious.
Thanks for sphinning that DoshDosh. The article doesn't have any great secrets, just good common sense and practical approaches to growing your subscriber base.
I was thinking Neatorama as I started reading this, and low and behold, that was one of the sources he uses. Interesting and useful article. Thanks for sphinning it.
Even worse, they're registering domains that you lookup in their whois! http://sphinn.com/story/22374
The only people they're protecting are themselves. They're registering domains that you lookup in their whois! It's unethical in my opinion and I can't believe they're doing it without first asking permission to do so from the user. http://sphinn.com/story/22374
And it wasn't meant to be (yet). I think the entire concept of Wikia will make for an interesting experiment, and quite possibly a valuable search tool. My favorite part about it is the understated social networking features.
As for Google, even Matt Cutts has a profile on it (assuming it's the real Matt Cutts). Ultimately, if its model holds true, its value will be determined by how the users mold and influence it.
I met Ian at PubCon and he's a most excellent person. His team is also planning some excellent new features. It's fun to watch them grow and I'm glad that Yahoo! acquired them, because they helped make their network much faster and more reliable.
I also really enjoy MyBlogLog, because it's helped me get to know a lot of new people and discover some excellent blogs, like aimClear's.
I predict google will clone themself. Afterall, isn't that what cloning is for?
The question is, which one is worse, touching or googling one's self?
Story: How Twitter Rocked PubCon