Calendar
Network
Feeds
todd
looks like this spammer has a GREAT strategy... email all of the people who are SEO Experts.
Story: 10 Useless SEO Worries
Uh, did I miss something? The title says "10 Useless SEO Worries", but I only see #'s 6-10... what happened to 1-5?
Confirmed, once of my sites (www.csselite.com) was in Rand's article on paid links last week. Whether or not this is how google noticed that I'm selling paid links, I'm not sure, but my PR is down from 6 to 5.
@ Rand, even though everyone is saying that you "ratted" us out (one of my sites was in your post and at first I did feel a bit "ratted" out), I'll take it and hope that Google doesn't penalize me. I only make a few bucks from the links each month, they're all highly relevant links for my users, and well, they're clearly marked as sponsored links. anyway, thanks for the PR, but maybe next time I can get a link...? ;)
seriously, lol, it's no secret who those sites are, you can see the cached article in google... and the article gets syndicated all over the web. the least he could have done is give me a link out of the deal. I'm a premium SEOMoz member, isn't that $50 bucks a month worth a link from a post where you call out one of my sites? come on, it's not like having 5 or 6 links from one page on your site out to "questionable neighborhoods" (hardly!!!) is going to kill rankings or skew the weight that your 8 billion inbound links gives you...
i think the issue is that many of those sites had password protected archives that didn't rank organically or as well as the NYT. also, the case made in the article is that the editorial staff (or their interns) would spend the majority of their time figuring these things out and it's not possible to keep up with every individual case or provide just investigation of whether or not to add links, etc. to each article for correction. Also, sometimes a paper will not print/post updated information about a news topic once it has past and isn't that interesting anymore.
The best point in that article is that Google is OK with us buying from a paid directory like Yahoo!. As you all know, it's $300/year which breaks down to $25/month. So this is to say that it's OK when a quality review is behind it? Who is to judge whether or not the paid link is receiving a "quality" review? I've sold some links, and, the reason why they're wanting links on my site(s) is because they are RELEVANT links!!! So, obviously, these are links that could be of interest to my users and obviously links that would help out the site paying for the link because it is RELEVANT!!! Doesn't Google rank the relevance of an outbound link and not give much credit for irrelevant links? So, why don't they just leave it at this? If someone is that dumb to buy an "online poker" text link from a website that is about "dogs", then they're probably not going to get a very high relevance rating from the link and won't get that much google love from it anyway... correct?
You cannot tell me that Yahoo! really cares what links are in their directory... come on, of course they review them and don't accept the spammy ones, but so do people who sell links on their personal websites! When is the last time you relied on Yahoo! directory for anything other than passing some PR anyway?
nice post. clients often ask me what the perfect landing page formula is. I tell them:
- heading that matches what they just clicked on
- nice clean design (cause it gets me extra work ;) of course I believe this too)
- 4-6 bullet points highlighting the offering
- prominent call to action to the right or lead form
- more descriptive info below or a link to more info
Anything I'm missing?
same here, I think there may be a time soon when some people get weeded out, but I can't see it busting like it did 7 years ago. the internet is too powerful now and that many more people are online and reliant on it every day. I do think that certain markets will shift though and we will need to have better monetization strategies as things move along.
Great thread. Buying paid links is still relatively new for many businesses. Danny, what's your take on paid links?
Referenced in the post is another useful link from DaveN: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/why-an-xml-sitemap-is-bad.html
Yeah, i think having a sitemap is another one of those *best practice* things to do and can't hurt. Interesting point about the dynamic url/canonicalization/duplicate content issue... know of any good posts about this?
@ vanessa - hope you find time to write one, I have some theories and thoughts on that, but no personal evidence/research to prove anything just yet...
@ Danny - ah, I see, Google out smarted us... very sneaky of them to sphinn that word...
no, apparently you just have to copy and paste what's on the front page of your website... no need to actually craft a real sales pitch...
Story: Sphinn: New Features Added
Story: The Essential SEO Glossary
nice post, i thought to too! Looks like this one slipped through the filter... check out some of the other suggested glossary links at the bottom of this post: http://sphinn.com/story/1349
Here's what I think about the issue of old content... I am guilty of submitting old content myself, and like Danny said I think that it was more out of enthusiasm for the site than anything else. I think that as time goes on people are less likely to submit old stories - those really good stories will have already made it on here. And as a community of people, who are theoretically ahead of the curve in the search marketing world, we don't want to see that old content. We're looking for the new stuff that keeps us on our toes and helps us stay informed of new developments in our field. Those old posts will eventually become the "Greatest Hits" section of this site.
nice post, I would also love to see the results... valuable info.
@ #8, it is close to impossible for a smaller real estate agency to rank for the term "real estate"... did you misread?
Why would a wichita real estate firm want to rank for "real estate" anyway? For the amount of time and money it will take/cost them to rank for that term they could have eaten up all of the more targeted terms and likely gotten better leads from those more specific terms. It's not all about ranking to the big terms, it's about ranking for terms that a more qualified and have a better chance of converting once on your website.
#12, this one is a no brainer and I agree with Danny. Matt Cutts confirms this in his talk just the other day at WordCamp2007: http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2007/07/21/wordcamp-2007-days-0-and-1/
Story: I Hate Spam Email from Bad SEO Consultants