So here we are on Tuesday, March 3 rd, and I’m still trying to fully digest the implications of Aaron’s “Heavy emphasis on Brandings” post from last Wednesday, February 25. The data that was presented, the context that was provided and the labyrinth of insightful user comments that were spawned left me reeling for days. So much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if the annals of SEO history associate February 25, 2009 as the infamous “Aaron Wall” update.
In the following video Matt Cutts highlighted that he did not feel that the update was driven by brand, but more in concepts of trust, PageRank, and authority:
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.
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:
Google announced that they are rolling out a new technology to better understand word relationships and extend their snippets on longer search queries.
Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).
Matt Cutts did a great interview with Mike MacDonald from WebPronews. The discussed Google in 2009 and answered a lot of questions that I know I’ve heard from a number of clients and confirmed a few things I believed to be true (mainly Matt’s comments on sub-domains near the end).
The video covers personalization (will it kill search results and SEO). The future of SEO and how we need to expand into other areas including usability and conversion optimization, Flash and video ranking and sub-domain and how they can be used and black hat SEO. Matt answers the often-asked question: do sub-domains work better than files in a site and when? Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had to call a few clients to proactively talk them off a ledge and I thought that perhaps I’d do well to post some recent going’s on at Google up on the blog for everyone. There is an update underway over at chez Google. There appear to be at least 3 sets of data going around and a simple Refresh can provide different results for the same search depending on the datacenter you happen to hit. Read the rest of this entry »
Since the release of the Apple’s iPhone they have pretty much sat in a class of their own winning both small business and Mac fan boys over. As always when a product gets a large market share there can be a lot of grumbling over the quality, and support of a product which the Apple iPhone has definitely see its share (and lawsuits). One of the biggest draw backs of the Apple Apple iPhone is its very closed sourced and secretive nature, and it’s application distribution system (iTunes). In fact in the past Apple has even gone as far as preventing companies from releasing training material on how to develop for the phone. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve heard from several clients today who had their page ranks change both for the better, and worse (my own hardware website went from a PR5 to a PR4). However it seems that a re-occurring bug where Google drops the page rank of internal pages that deserve to be ranked has snuck into this update. After most page rank updates I usually check out one of the previous employers websites to see how their page rank distribution is. Currently of all their pages the homepage, and two of the categories pages have page rank the rest of their website reports as being unranked so not even a PR0. Hopefully we will see a corrective page rank update in the next few weeks.
Our friends at Google are kind enough to outline on their site the do’s and don’ts of SEO. They call it their Webmaster Guidelines and it’s become the 10 Commandments of SEO.
When one reads it one can’t help but view it as a best practices list and really - there isn’t much anyone can say about it to claim it’s a bad set of rules. Basically it reads, “Don’t cheat and you’ll be OK.” which can be likened to the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Read the rest of this entry »