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Story: Am I an Advanced SEO?
This is possibly true, your rarely researched ill thought out flame bait seems to do well, while mine seem to never gain traction :D so yes there is something to be said for what you do is 'advanced' its certainly brave and I think you have some great forward thinking (read brave) clients to let you do it and certainly don't decry the results.
The question was not exclusive though, I didn't say I do this it's advanced what you do is not :) indeed I'm trying to reach a general consensus on if anything is advanced so Tad here is the obvious question at what point does your stuff become advanced? Maybe if we can pin down the skill or knowledge level for link baiters we can compare it to say SEO Programmers to see if we can have consensus!
Story: Am I an Advanced SEO?
Interestingly when I come visiting with my useragent set to Googlebot mysteriously I can't comment ;)
Just to point out it wasn't so much Danny comments though amusing he felt the need to apologise but the comments throughout the search marketers blogs that wound me up.
Story: Am I an Advanced SEO?
But who wants to eb the UK SEO Pimp Daddy when I can be simple the SEO Pimp?
http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+pimp&btnG=Search
Story: Am I an Advanced SEO?
That's Streko work, demonstrating Google Bombing is alive and well :D all bit on a rather uncompetitive term. What is worrying is their appears to be people attempting to rank for it....
cheers guys I hope its at least readable for people new to the industry, but I leave "newbie" articles to the experts. It's also worth just reiterating this is not really an article on search engines but some of the very basic theory behind one of the tools we use.
@hugoguzman I'm glad we are not the only ones who use these sort of calculations and would be curious as to your variables, though I don't think we could call it Link Potency I'm old enough that LP means something else :)
yes Tad you approach certainly works but if I may make one small analogy :)
Super Market sweep (I presume everyone is familiar with the game) two people with different trolleys both have the same amount of time in the supermarket to choose any items they want. At the end of the time they get to keep the items in their trolley.
Your approach is very much to sweep everything you can off the shelf and proceed as fast as you can down the aisle until the trolley is full at the end of the 60seconds you have a trolley full of stuff of all weights and sizes.
Our approach is to target high value items even if this means running around the store a bit we might have a smaller haul at the end but inevitably the value of each individual item is going to be higher then the random average.
Niether approach is wrong just different we don't spend time obsessing and if you read the article you would have realised that it as much to do with on our own sites and clients site data layer we are interested in then anything elkse, but I guess you only read half way before writing the comment and chasing after your next link :) but do you have any idea how much it was worth?
Story: Announcing the Sphinn Survey
Well I gave up on the survey as it simply didn't represent anything relating to me, my occupation or indeed the major part of the industry I'm involved in...
Q2 which represents your company - none they are all targetting marketing
Q3 How long have you been involved with internet/search marketing - never I am not a marketer
Q4 How are you involved in internet/search engine marketing? - I'm not a Flipping marketer!
Please don't get me wrong this is not a rant on internet marketing and those people who are marketers which may well make up the bulk of Sphinn but for the small and diminsihing group of SEOs and Information Architects who at one point were prevalent on Sphinn this survey is useless its questions are biased and leading how do you expect to get meaningful results? The answer is you won't so perhaps you should sack the marketer who wrote it and get a analyst in to do the job just a thought.
Everytime I come to Sphinn recently I seem to have left a grumpy comment maybe it's just me but judging from the under currents I don't think so.
Thanks for the Sphinn, its very rare what I happen to be discussing on the blog matches some of my current teaching but I managed to use the weekends work twice.
Sort of though the article was referencing a reference to any change of ownership, apparently a second blogger at the event clarified that the reference was to expired domains which as you say Matt has spoken about previously. However the post is morphing into my new crusade to find people who can genuinely say they have had their inbound links removed from a domain ownership change even a newly expired one.
I never used movable type so don't know its suitability as an "enterprise" level blogging software perhaps it would be worth compiling a list of such scripts, I see a project
I think that says more about you then the people in the room ;)
Teasing aside, education does have a cost associated with it, but spending time educating potential clients and indeed existing ones IMO saves you money in the long run. 2 people from that night have since contacted me asking for names of people to contact. So that 30 minute education snagged 2 potential leads for some one. Now they are going into the discussion with an open mind even if they are less keen on opening their bank wallet and should be easy to convert. All of the people in the room saw the need to expand online after the 30 minutes, even if they have forgotten the next morning.
So I think what I'm trying to say is there is no point marketing until you have educated, but remember once you have they are far more likely to come back to you again and again at least that is my experience.
Just thought I should add I never went into the room with the intention of marketing to them but if I had I would have done exactly the same thing, education as a loss leader is for me a sensible strategy.
You would be surprised but many of the business in the room just were not interested in marketing online, either because they thought they were primary a local business but more because tightening of their belts and the first thing to go was the peripheral marketing. But to answer your question out of the 40% that said they wouldn't be budgeting for online marketing it was probably 80|20 no, don't know but that is based more on what people were saying then concrete figure.
The vast majority of people in the room started the evening with, "I have a website what else do I need?" attitude remember the poll was also done at the start of the evening with the exception of the final question.
Do remember this was a straw poll, done in a room which had cheese and wine.
Auto-Sphunn SEL posts would be sweet. We already know they are not spam so they wouldn't require much moderation, and it may stimulate more comment activity.
Sorry but I think its a terrible idea, while I am aware SEL and Sphinn are owned by the same company and so are unique why should SEL be treated differently, if you saw yet another round up of daily links, which SEL does at least once a day on Sphinn from a different site would you sphinn it? and while SEL might not produce spam they don't always have articles people want to vote on the volume of noise would increase but at what benefit.
Of course if they do go through, then the obvious next step is to let "partners" be auto submitted lets say SEOMoz after all they never spam, maybe greywolf blog or to stop any call of bias SEG?
Its a terrible slope, after all once you start down it you end up asking shouldn't noted bloggers like Michael Grey be auto submitted what about people critical of sphinn, Andy Beard for example would he be allowed to be auto submitted?
Is it really so hard to click submit? maybe rather then auto submitting, perhaps they can work on a method to make submits from SEL a 1 click process, so pre programmed title, url and category.
Story: YABL Trusted Google sites
I think the chances that they were there pre Google take over were fairly high :) Still its interesting to see how Google seems to have not worried to take them down. Maybe to busy with global domination or something.
Interesting I suspect this might make http://sphinn.com/story/40009 a bit more relevant though it should be pointed out this could potentially effect other versions as well.
Cough moderators can we get a moderator !
:) no oh well,
when the comment above this one is deleted this comment will no longer make sense.
While I agree blindly upgrading is not a wise idea security by obscurity is not exactly a wise idea either ;)
The irony http://sphinn.com/story/40051
However it should be stated that this may effect previous versions as well
That's an interesting idea RedEvo but ask yourself a simple question how do they make money out of their free services because its unlikely in this day to be a loss leader?
Anyway as I said in the article I'm not seriously suggesting not using Corporations Services but it's worth stopping and thinking about who's providing services to them.
Story: International Multilingual SEO and Duplicate Content Concerns around English Speaking Countries
Ok I wanted to formulate some more comprehensive notes so this is a "rough" how we do it thing.
Presuming you have a corporation with central offices in let's say UK to make things easier but you also deal with Australia, Canada and that colony in the americas.
The way we do it,
A central .com which contains all the common information, general documentation etc, non country specific products also containing some country specific information like headquaters in each country info basically a person should be able to arrive on this site and be able to understand about the company, who runs it, how to contact them, and if they are in your region and if appropriate find support for the product and service.
Each country then has it's own site, with country specific information, contact details, promotions and if appropriate country store if selling online. Because the main site is the one you will be using as your big heavy weight in search engines (and as all the countries we are targeting are English speaking) our mini sites really have to just rank well for the basics.
At this point you introduce IP based targeting to throw people to their correct regional areas, but always supply a method of getting them back to the main site and the ability to select another location. I would suggest a cookie as well to remember their last country should they be the jet setting type. The big issue is the eccomerce side which in this scenario is where you are likely to have duplicate content issues. Within regional SERPs this is unlikely to be a problem after all if your search .co.uk version of Google it won't(shouldn't) include the .au version of the site so as long as you are not selling from the main .com (which we do want to appear in the regionals but won't appear in the "search only in country option of such searches) we have only a very limited problem.
An alternative is simply to have a single store with currency price changes but this is not normally suitable for example here in the UK importers like to add the 150% "because we can" markup on goods compared to our US counterparts.
Add a multiple languages and you start to get in real fun.
This perhaps isn't very clear explanation so I think I will grab some diagrams and try and explain a bit more clearly.
I would also put my hand in for desphinn comments to be in with normal comments, but perhaps the introduction of requiring a comment before sphinning of course this would mean you would lose the majority of your membership but the up side you might have a half decent conversations and people might have to think about why they are sphinning it and not just because person X told them to.
"Google Snippets Or Twitter"
That sounds like a comparison to me, contrasting still requires there to be something to compare with. Twitter use is just not the same as Google Snippets they do not do the same function or indeed have any similarities other then the length of text. it's like me comparing Apples and a glass of Coke or a Fridge and a Car.
The study wasn't really about the type of client in the local area though its an interesting idea to compare smaller mom and pop companies with medium to large businesses and if locality makes a difference to them.
The study was simply many SEO firms certainly here in the UK are regionally targetting but I wanted to know if there was any point to it!
No offense taken, the more people have been discussing the more I think perhaps I should have spent more time discussing the benefits and justifications behind looking to your local community and not just looking at if such targetting has been successful.
I started the process in many respects the wrong way round, by looking at who was targetting local communities and rather then asking the question why asked did it work. Of course the answer is not black and white.
Story: Don't End Your URLs in .0 - If You Do Google Won't Index Them