SEO News Blog

Posted by rebecca

As a special pre-holiday treat, we decided to share our more long tail search terms from last month (November 2007). Enjoy!

How to read minds: 225 searches. Ever wonder how Rand seems to have so many eerily accurate predictions about the future of search engine algorithm changes? Well, so do 225 other people…Titties: 52 searches (thank Lucas for that one)Better than google: 51 searches. Meh, we already knew that SEOmoz was better than Google, sliced bread, and real butter combined (mmmmm, butter and Google sandwich…)How to speak English: 41 searches. Sadly, we only offer a course on “How to Speak English with the Occasional Injections of Superfluous U’s into Words,” taught by our favo(u)rite Kiwi, Jane.Barry bonds before and after: 22 searches. Sounds like a Jeopardy category waiting to happen…Good questions to ask: 22 searches. If you have to search for this, then you fail as a human being.Mud wrestling: 19 searches. How did they know about our team building exercises?Simpsonized pictures: 18 searches. I only threw this in because I geekily think it’s cool that we rank for something Simpsons-related.What is an encyclopedia: 13 searches. Seriously? Seriously?!20 questions to ask a guy: 10 searches. Um, ask them anything. It’s not like Jane Goodall with the apes, for crying out loud.the incredibles: 10 searches. Hooray, we rank for a Pixar film! list of every website: 9 searches. Google returns a page saying “Displaying one of eleventy billion results.”
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Popularity: unranked [?]

In my last post about how contextual advertising targets the weak and poor, I promoted the idea of niche publishers shifting to sell niche products and services directly as a better means of monetization. Dan Rootasked why many of the leading news sites are dropping their pay walls. The answer is that future relevancy is driven by the point to economy, and news is a commodity.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Wikipedia ranks #1 in Google for SEO, public relations, and marketing. What would it take to displace Wikipedia from a #1 ranking if you were in a field that bloggers, designers, and web developers generally had a distaste for, hated, or misunderstood?

If only Google, Wikipedia, and a couple other sites outranked you for SEO, what would you do to push past them? Could anything short of an act of God or a hand edit move you past them?

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Popularity: unranked [?]

As an advertiser and a publisher I have ad CTR data spanning hundreds of millions of impressions and about a million ad clicks across a wide array of verticals. One of my early opinions on contextual ads and search ads was that people are far more likely to click ads if they are desperate, stupid, or ignorant. While I was flamed for my opinion, this opinion has only been confirmed from talking to friends who have much more data than I do, and Dave Morgan from AOL also confirmed it.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

If you have not yet heard of Drupal, it is the open source CMS that powers this site (and many sites far more robust and popular than this one). I think I am pretty good at predicting web trends, and 2 or 3 years from now Drupal will be about as popular and well known as Wordpress and Wikipedia are today.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Bad Dated Advice

People who are well established can trade on reputation and attract strong enough clients to not need to perform tests to learn the algorithms intimately well.

Recently another well known marketer put out a video saying domain names were irrelevant to SEO. Then they got feedback from viewers who said they thought that statement was wrong. And then their reply sent to thousands of members on their list included

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Popularity: unranked [?]

As the web grows users are getting better at tuning out obvious ads. So ads will get more insidious, and more and more businesses will be built off a missing features and shadow brand built on the back of the goodwill from sharing and open source.

One guy got angry at me claiming that I was providing conflicting information, because he read the blogger’s guide to seo and saw that I recommended using Wordpress but also recommended avoiding using Wordpress.com. I am not the one who created that shadow brand, but I do realize that is has the potential to be enormously profitable.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by great scott!

Hey Gang! This week Rand talks to NetConcepts’ CEO, Stephan Spencer, about cloaking and redirection via black hat, gray hat, and white hat methods.  This is pretty high-level stuff but incredibly interesting, even if it is of questionable Glegality (that’s Google Legality, heyooo!).  Is it effective? It sure as hell can be. Will it get you into trouble? Well, only if you get caught I suppose, which is why Google is rumored to have the “Boser Tool” that they use to try and keep an eye out for this stuff.
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by randfish

A great many tech-specific site owners consistently bemoan the fact that market share stats like these:

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Oct.-07

Sept.-07

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Last week with the announcement of Google Knols, much of the conversation centered around how this was going to affect sites like Wikipedia. However what the announcement also revealed was Google’s philosophy about how they interact with the world.
According to Google’s mission statement (more…)

Popularity: unranked [?]