iProspect recently did a study which showed that the majority of people who respond to graphical ads do so via a latent action other than a click on the ad, like a search for the brand. Any such brand lift or indirect effect of advertising on content sites has generally been ignored by most advertisers because search driven ad networks want search to get credit for that conversion.
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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 wiep.net
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.
Although you can easily find lists with 21, 66, 69, 75, 101 or even 131 link building strategies, numbered (link building) tip lists remain very popular. Not because these articles provide shocking new insights - most of the aforementioned mentioned lists mention pretty much the same tactics - but because they remind people of how work intensive the ongoing process of link building can be, and because they make people think due to their in-depth nature. “How can I use these tactics for our website?” “Which of the listed tactics are relevant for our company?” Or, even better, “What strategies would I have added to this list?”
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Ah, DMOZ.
Whilst I was scanning through Barry’s blog at SEL, I came across this post he mentioned entitled R-E-S-P-E-C-T for DMOZ.
A DMOZ editor complains “Everybody loves Google, everybody loves Wikipedia - so why doesn’t everybody love DMOZ?”
My blog post would be rather long if I listed all the reasons why I think people don’t love DMOZ, so I’ll stick to fisking the contents of the editors post.
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Ralph Tegtmeier (aka fantomaster) has been known for many years as having one of the most insightful minds and original voices in the search game. Years ago I wanted to interview him, and only recently did we get to do that.
What did you do before you got into search?
In contrast to the maverick background and achievements my old friend Mike Grehan revealed in his recent interview with SEOBook, my life before search was positively boring. I was born in Egypt and grew up in the Middle East and Asia, where my father served terms in the German diplomatic service. Later, I mastered in Comparative Literature, English Literature and Portuguese philology at Bonn University in Germany. Even before that, I had founded and run (together with two fellow students) an occult bookshop there and went into freelance translation and writing after that.
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Posted by countrystarr
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.
Getting your website listed in the DMOZ directory in anything less than geologic time frames is next to impossible. Most SEOs submit their sites and then forget about ever getting listed. However, there is a way to guarantee that your site will be included in the DMOZ directory quickly: become a DMOZ editor for the category in which you have applied to have your website listed.
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Jeff Jarvis explained why our current media machinery does not fit the web:
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
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Posted by James Svoboda
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.
This post was written by James Svoboda of Realicity Search Marketing in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
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The above billboard’s ad inventory (behind the tree) promoted an important charity. But less than 1 in 1000 people who passed by it knew what was being advertised. They couldn’t see it even if they wanted to, but few people wanted to, which is why they could only afford the discount billboard inventory. Almost all traditional advertising is heading in that direction - noise to be ignored.
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Via an email to affiliates, Amazon.com announced they are scaling back their associates program in North America by disallowing direct linking from paid search results:
After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.
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