SEO News Blog

Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past 3 weeks:

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Posted by randfish

After my post last night and the many follow ups from around the SEO sphere, I (along with most observers from the world of search) strongly anticipated clarifying statements from Google’s representatives at the SMX Advanced conference. Unfortunately, there’s very little to report. The best I have comes from secondary sources, albeit relatively trustworthy ones:

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Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

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Do you know what attracts your readers? What headlines they respond to most? Do they respond to pictures? Do they know what your offer is?

No doubt we all agree that testing is a good thing to do. We can see clearly if our ideas are working or not. But a lot of testing is, quite frankly, tedious.

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Posted by randfish

A very simple return to the headsmacking series this week (as it’s late here in London and I’ve been up my usual 40+ hours traveling).

We’ve been noticing that a number of websites seeking to block bot access to pages on their domain have been employing robots.txt to do so. While this is certainly a fine practice, the questions we’ve been getting show that there’s a few misunderstandings about what blocking Google/Yahoo!/MSN/other search bots with robots.txt does. Here’s a quick breakdown:

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Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Google crashed between 8:40 and 9:55 ET yesterday, preventing people from Googling to find out why Google wasn’t working. Oh noes! Speaking of Google, they recently overhauled Google News as well as updated their blog search algorithm, and they’re allowing trademarks to be used in US Adwords copy. Geez, no wonder there was downtime. Methinks Google needs a little R&R.Congratulations to Barry Schwartz–he and his wife just had a baby girl. Mazel tov!Now I know what I should work on the next time Rand’s out of town at a conference (wait, that’s next week…*evil laugh*).R.I.P. 3D Realms. Your perpetual release date for Duke Nukem Forever made for a lot of Internet lulz.Ladies and gentlemen, Frankenfrog! It’s alive! It’s ALIIIIIIIIIVE!!!

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Posted by rebecca

The weather’s getting nicer, the days are getting longer and Rand’s barely in the office. You know what that means: it’s conference season! Since there are so many conferences right around the corner, I thought I’d list some upcoming events in case you’re thinking of attending a show but aren’t sure which one to book.
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Do aggressive marketing practices repel you?

Or make you more likely to buy?

Is it a cultural thing? For example, does hard sell work in some cultures, but not others?

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The following is an open letter to Michael Arrington owner of  Techcrunch.com, you still have a chance to save Techcrunch before it’s too late.
Quantity Over Quality
Last friday May 8 I took a twitter poll to see how other people felt about Techcrunch, and whether it was just me who felt the overall quality had dropped, […]

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Posted by Dr. Pete

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I’ve been suppressing the urge to write this post for a while now. It’s not that I don’t love Twitter (I suspect my wife is a few days away from scheduling my intervention); it’s just that I’m saturated by it. It’s not the tweets themselves, but the incessant whining noise made up of every second-rate media personality in the world “discovering” Twitter on a daily basis and every self-declared “social media guru” regurgitating the same How to Twitter post a thousand times a week.

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