SEO News Blog

when I got on the web one of the first mistakes I made was trying to go after the cheap traffic on the second and third tier networks. I arbitraged one of them and was pulling a 300% ROI selling them back their own traffic - but the wankers never paid me a cent.

It can be appealing to think of how to do things cheaper…and sure in the short term it might make sense to do something half-way to get it up and going and then to keep making incremental improvements. But people like Philip M. Parker have created automated technologies to write books. Cheaper is a hard way to compete in the content business.

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Did you know that search.twitter.com/search?q=%23superbowl currently ranks #9 in Google for superbowl (it was #7 earlier today). Think how much PageRank & link equity is needed to rank for that keyword!!!

All that PageRank must come from somewhere. When people mention you on that silly network, you probably don’t get anything of lasting value…it simply steals links that would have occurred on the real web, and replaces them with junk rel=nofollow links, surrounded by trivial bits of content.

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I have been a follower of Jonathan Mendez’s Optimize and Prophesize for a while, and recently interviewed him.

At SES in New York you are speaking on a panel titled “search becomes the display OS” - what does that mean, why is this shift happening?

The shift is part of the Darwinian evolution of the web. Many people have mistakenly viewed search as a channel when in reality it is a behavior. It is the way people use the web. This is clear as YouTube is now the #2 search engine, Facebook, eBay & Craigslist are in the top 10 search engines and Twitter is trying to position itself as a real-time search. Search is integral to the web experience.

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As paid search’s growth slows, marketers are looking to invest more into organic SEO strategies.

There are a lot of SEO conferences in the next month. One of the easiest ways to grow in a down market is to network. Why? The web is a social network, and sometimes just a few links separates the top player from a #3 ranking, and the people who can afford to invest in education and marketing in a down market are clearly successful (and, thus, worth networking with and learning from).

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Danny highlighted how many aggregators of aggregators and content cesspools are bogusly clogging up Google’s search results with sites that would be viewed as spam if the owner was not socially well connected:

You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe. Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

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I have been saving these links up since January 21st. Time to share about 50 of them.

Niche SEO GuidesShane Pike shared advice on how to sell a website for $1 million.Cell Phones.org offers a guide to mobile search optimization.Rick Schwartz has a killer post about questions to ask when buying domain names.Tons and tons and tons of great posts highlighted by Matt McGee on Semmys.org…make sure to use their site search when searching for a topic new to you.Joost has a wonderful guide to Magento SEO.Garrett French created a new link building guide.Nick Wilson offers his Virtual Worlds for Business free.The Rising Commoditization of Everything But Experience

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In February I wrote a post about how for many people (who actually care about the quality of their work), low self esteem is one of the largest competitors to getting a fair market rate for the work they do. And low self-esteem can happen to anyone at any level of business:

What should have been asked, but wasn’t, is this: A-Rod, putting aside the Y&S line — since you weren’t that young, and you certainly aren’t that stupid — where does your low self-esteem fit into this equation?

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Phorm, a UK company that partnered with BT to run secret trials to target ads based on usage data, was roasted by the media with article titles like Phorm’s All-Seeing Parasite Cookie.

Google, which has long stayed away from behavioral targeting due to privacy (and negative publicity) concerns, announced they are jumping into the behavioral ad targeting market:

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Some larger online publishers are facing declining display ads with a bold strategy: bigger, louder, and more obnoxious ad units. AdWeek reports:

The fixed panel, a 336-by-860-pixel banner that is wider than the standard skyscraper and follows users as they scroll down the page. The XXL box, a 468-by-648-pixel unit that can expand with video. The pushdown, a 970-by-418-pixel placement that takes up over half of the page before rolling up.

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About to go to jury duty here in about 15 minutes…which got me thinking about the concept of justice.

I don’t mind paying a lot of taxes if it goes toward creating a better society, but in California when you get toward the upper end of the tax bracket you can pay ~ 60% (federal + state + local + self employment/social security) of your income in taxes. And those tax payments probably do not even offset the handouts we are giving to bankers that gambled with trillions of dollars and lost.

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