Search Engine Wiki site

Make sure to check out Kalena Jordan's new website Search Engine Wiki. Kalena's been involved in search engine marketing forever and has compiled a great deal of information on the site. Here's your chance to become a Wiki editor and add quality information to this new Wiki site:

Search Engine Wiki

Search Engine Guide - 9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment

Good series by Stoney deGeyter, parts I, II and III:
Search Engine Guide - 9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment, Part I

Search Engine Guide - 9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment, Part II
and
Search Engine Guide - 9 Paths of SEO Enlightenment, Part III

Search Engine Roundtable - Google Declares War on Paid Links: But Why Now?

Extensive list of discussions about Google's Paid Links strategies. One of the newest changes is that Google is disallowing AdWords ads that mention selling PageRank:
Search Engine Roundtable - Google Declares War on Paid Links: But Why Now?

Search Engine Journal - How to Add Content to Wikipedia the “White Hat” Way?

Good overview on adding information to Wikipedia:
Search Engine Journal - How to Add Content to Wikipedia the “White Hat” Way?

SEO by the SEA - Google Patent on Web Spam, Doorway Pages, and Manipulative Articles

Detailed information from Bill Slawski on a newly approved Google patent. I found the information under the section Individual Document Signals / History of the document very interesting. This certainly points to the algorithm picking up changes an SEO might make to the text of a web page. The "history of the document" and "anchor text" sections were very interesting as to what level of change on the page might trigger a flag by the search engines.
SEO by the SEA - Google Patent on Web Spam, Doorway Pages, and Manipulative Articles

Cre8pc.com - Are We Designing For The Human Experience?

Very interesting article by Kim Krause Berg on SEO and usability:
Are We Designing For The Human Experience?

Search Engine Guide - Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign

Good overview of the mistakes new PPC users can make when starting up a PPC campaign. Another great article by Jennifer Laycock:
Search Engine Guide - Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign

Search Engine Land - When Link Building Is Pointless

Another good post by Eric Ward, this one is about deciding when to stop link building on a project:
Search Engine Land - When Link Building Is Pointless

Search Engine Guide - Search Engine Guide Publisher Responds to PageRank Drop

Robert Clough's article about Search Engine Guide's recent Google PageRank drop and discussion on paid ads. Search Engine Guide has been around long before Google was created and is a great resource for small businesses.

Search Engine Guide - Search Engine Guide Publisher Responds to PageRank Drop

Search Engine Guide - Where Does the Responsibility of the SEO End and the Client's Begin?

I liked this article quite a bit, having had numerous clients who really didn't know what they were getting into in creating their online business. We work with a number of small businesses that go through major growing pains while we work on a project with them. One of our clients discovered just how much there was to having a viable business online, they had no idea what it took to make it work. Quite a learning process educating the client and a study in patience for us and the client.

Where Does the Responsibility of the SEO End and the Client's Begin?

WebmasterWorld - Is Webmaster-SEO Stuff Flatlining

Interesting discussion in the Paid Supporters Forum at WebmasterWorld about the status of SEO (Paid Subscription):

Is Webmaster-SEO Stuff Flatlining

Search Engine Guide: NoFollow is for Blog Spam...

Comprehensive series on Google's no follow rules and paid links from searchengineguide's Jennifer Laycock.

NoFollow is for Blog Spam...no Paid Text Links, wait...Paid Ads...Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Google's Paid Link Crisis

I remember when I worked at O'Reilly and Associates as their in-house SEO many years ago I found out about this new search engine called Google. Most companies didn't know what SEO was and they certainly had never heard of Google search engine back then. When I discovered Google's new search engine I had a gut feeling they were going to be big so I made sure O'Reilly's pages were submitted early on back in the day of search engine submissions.

In the late 1990's things were simple. A link was a link. In fact, links were around long before Google ever was born. Too bad Google doesn't remember this. In fact webmasters linked to each other with no concern because they wanted to link to each other. Webmasters saw a great article they liked and linked to it. Webmasters even sold ads because it was their website and they were trying to make a profit. Pretty simple concept.

Google's crisis is the PageRank icon they created. Not so simple to tear down now apparently. They created it but can't control it. The world wide web is a growing entity. New ideas, new methods of providing users information and making a living off the web has been changing with the times. Google's initial idea of using link popularity to rank was built into their algorithm and the other search engines followed the leader.

And here we are today with Google deciding webmasters can't use paid links to make a living while Google makes its living from paid links. Its a sad statement really. From the beginning Google was focused on the search engine user. Things have changed. The reality is it is too difficult for Google to tell which ads are paid and which are not unless they use human evaluation. Imagine the number of pages they would have to evaluate manually. As webmasters and SEO's become more clever about linking its just going to get worse trying to detect paid links. Detecting paid links is not easy now, much less when paid links go underground.

My advice to Google is to share the wealth with folks trying to make a living on the web. Considering the web was around before Google appeared it seems like the user friendly thing to do.

Search Engine Land - The Big Paid Link Debate Roundup

List of discussions about Google's paid link crusade:
The Big Paid Link Debate Roundup

Forbes article: Google Purges The Payola

This article from Forbes quotes a number of SEM industry professionals about Google vs paid links. What I found most interesting is at the end of the article the Ask representative talks about the specific difference in how the Ask algorithm evaluates links compared to Google:
Google Purges The Payola

Kalena Jordan: How to Turn Around an Unprofitable PPC Campaign

Kalena Jordan's excellent article about dissecting problems in PPC campaigns.
How to Turn Around an Unprofitable PPC Campaign

e3internet: Search Engine Cheatsheet V.2 Free PDF Download

Good cheatsheet for Google, Yahoo! and MSN search engine queries, download the pdf here:
Search Engine Cheatsheet V.2 Free PDF Download

Lisa Barone of Bruceclay.com: You Can’t Automate Search Engine Optimization

A good post by Lisa Barone of Bruceclay.com. I agree you can use some automated tools to gather or parse information, but the thought of a company that automates SEO just doesn't wash with me. Without the "art", the human touch, its not the real deal and probably a bad investment for clients.
You Can’t Automate Search Engine Optimization

SEOMoz: What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones

This article by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz is pretty interesting, I especially like the "Twelve Attributes of Obviously Manipulative Directories" list. Its a good guideline for looking over the quality of directories you are thinking of submitting your website to.
What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones

SEO Theory and SEOptimise blogs: Link Building Posts

Here are a few interesting posts about link building, one focusing on the difficulties of link building and the other on external links and how they help you:

SEO External Links - How do external links help SEO?

6 reasons why link building is so hard

Search Innovation: Visit Our New SEM Research Directory: SEOExplore.com

Our new directory, SEOExplore.com is live as of today. SEOExplore.com provides information on every aspect of search engine optimization research available to the new and long time search engine marketing professional. The directory has information about search engine patents to link building. We've spent a few years working on this research site for search engine marketers and plan on adding new information often.

SEO Fast Start blog: Lies, Damn Lies, & SEO: Statistical Analysis of SERPs

Dan Thies debunks the myth of keyword density in an easy to understand post, its a good read:
Lies, Damn Lies, & SEO: Statistical Analysis of SERPs

14th Colony Web Development blog: Google plexed over link buying

Well written post on the Google Paid Links debate. Matt Cutts spoke at the recent San Jose SES and again addressed this issue. To me it seems strange for an independent business to tell another an independent business what to do. Paid links from online websites have nothing to do with the organic search engine results in Google. Link building, yes; paid links, no.

Google plexed over link buying

Search Innovation: Talking vs Doing SEM

Over the years I've kept up on the latest research and articles offered up by the SEM industry. I tend to read a lot of information but I don't spend much time posting to forums or writing articles. I'm just too busy workwise. There are industry SEO's that spend huge amounts of time talking about SEM. It always makes me wonder who's doing the work for them? Yeah, if you've got a team of people doing the work of course you have time to talk. Me, I guess I'm more of the hands on type. There is nothing wrong with having a team of SEO's to build a strong SEM company. Personally I've always opted for keeping our business small. The SEO work is provided by me and the technical website review by my husband. Frankly we don't want to expand our business with staff members. I need to know exactly what is happening with my clients step by step. More to the point I'd miss the hands on experience. Our company has outsourced optimization and technical website reviews for another company in the past. It was clear to me the company was big enough that the real work was being done by people like us. I have to say I just don't want that for myself. Granted it is harder to keep things organized, dealing directly with the clients and all, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Don't get me wrong, I do it all as the owner of Search Innovation Marketing. There is something to be said for being the visionary as president of the company and the person creating the source code hands on. So if you don't see me posting much in the forums or writing new articles it is because I'm too busy making client's websites successful in the search engines.

Redflymarketing.com PPC Articles

Three detailed PPC articles from Redflymarketing.com make good reading for those providing PPC services:

Do You Make These 12 AdWords Mistakes?

Dynamic Keyword Insertion - The Ultimate Guide

10 Ways To Increase Your Adwords Quality Score - A Mini Case Study

Search Rank blog: SEO Patterns, Ad Patterns and Search Engines

The article I posted yesterday http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2007/08/link-seller-caveats.html talks about not making link buying obvious. It got me thinking about how search engines are able to spot the obvious. When it comes to SEO we all know to vary the link anchor text coming from external links when link building. The same is true of paid ads. I've always thought (as David pointed out in his article) using a graphic would be a good way to keep ad information away from indexing robots. My take on paid ads and optimization being found by robots is to break the pattern.

Search engine robots are automated programs, there is only so much a software program is able to detect. Humans created the program, however clever it is. If your optimization pattern is broken up, how can an automated program detect exactly what is going on? The same is true of paid ads. If the ad text cannot be found on the page, if the ad text is not in the text links, if the ALT text has no ad information then common sense says detection is difficult at best.

Human programming is fallible and automated detection of text on the web page is based on recognizing patterns. Human detection may be part of what Google would use to find ads in their newfound mission to eradicate paid ads from websites. How feasible is it for Google to detect ads manually compared to automatically? You know the answer to that one. So the choice is, be clever and break the pattern.

Search Rank blog: Things That Bug Me Regarding Those Who Sell Links

David Wallace of SearchRank has an interesting article about link buying. I agree with his concepts on keeping things less obvious when selling links:
Things That Bug Me Regarding Those Who Sell Links

Google Webmaster blog: Supplemental goes mainstream

Results labels on Google supplemental pages are being eliminated.

Supplemental goes mainstream

SEOMoz: Answers to Ten SEO Questions & Some New Questions from Danny Sullivan

This is a clever list of answers to SEO questions for marketers from the original post at SEOMoz "Answer these Ten Questions Before You Charge for SEO Services".

Ten SEO Questions & Some New Questions from Danny Sullivan

SEOMoz: A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon

Nice glossary of SEO terms at SEOMoz, some I've never seen in glossaries before:
A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon

SEOBook Tool - SEO for Firefox

Cool tool created by SEOBook for Firefox. This extension shows all sorts of SEO information available when searching. Toggle the application on and off as needed:
SEO for Firefox

Stonetemple blog: 15 Things About How Google Handles Duplicate Content

Good overview of how Google handles duplicate content:
15 Things About How Google Handles Duplicate Content

Sphinn - The difference between Employed and Independent SEOs

Interesting conversation about good vs bad of being an in-house SEO vs an independent SEO:
The difference between Employed and Independent SEOs

Sphinn - Social Media for SEO's

Sphinn is the new social media site for search engine marketers created by Danny Sullivan. If you haven't been by yet be sure to check it out:

Sphinn

Search Innovation: Yahoo Backlinks Theory

I've long used Yahoo to look over the backlinks showing to our site and clients websites as many SEO's have done over the years. I've noticed over these last few months that no follow links show up our business backlink search results. I'd noticed years before that our website URL would show up as a backlink in Yahoo results even though the link was not an active link on the page. Now with no follow links showing up my guess is there is some sort of link power in no follow links and non-active links on the page. No testing done as of yet as this is just a theory of sorts. Two of the no follow links we have to our business site are from high authority websites and show up in our Yahoo backlink results. I've long wondered if identifying text on the page or text without an active link had something to do with the overall score of the link popularity of the web page. It is an interesting concept since links are a major focus, but any SEO knows text on the page matters when it comes to optimization. It certainly would change the concept of no follow and how little those links are worth in marketers eyes.

Stonetemple blog: 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection

Stonetemple blog: Nice overview in this post on paid link detection:

15 Methods for Paid Link Detection

Firefox SearchStatus 1.20 - No Follow Link Tool

I downloaded the updated version of Firefox's extension SearchStatus 1.20 today. This version has a no follow highlighter which comes in handy. You turn on the no follow highlighter by right clicking the symbol next to the SearchStatus toolbar at the bottom of your web page and check it. Once the no follow is checked when you visit a page you can see which links are no follow links. Should be helpful for link builders. It also includes a keyword highlighter, number of indexed pages, meta tags source code and more:
SearchStatus 1.20 for Firefox

*While working with the SearchStatus tool I've noticed some buggy behavior, some of the no follows highlighted are showing false positives. Be aware of this in any case, in my situation it could be my use of multiple toolbars causing the problem, hard to say.

Search Engine Land Article: SEO Do's and Don'ts for Small Businesses

There is a well written two part series posted in Search Engine Land's "Small is Beautiful" column about SEO and small businesses, its a good read:

Part I
SEO "Don'ts": 20 Fatal Mistakes You Must Avoid To Succeed

Part II
21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques

Threadwatch.org site: Threadwatch is closing...

At least thats what one of the latest posts at threadwatch.org says. I'm hoping someone steps up to take the site over and keeps it going. Its one of my daily resources for news, interesting threads and comments, some of which are not found in the SEM forums.

SEO Service Pricing

There is a post at SEOmoz that is pretty interesting on SEO pricing. I guess what startled me most was the $1k an hour price that the SEOMoz company charges. Now that's an hourly fee.

The other prices listed in the post are a good range of pricing for projects per hour. I really prefer pricing the project at a flat fee. I usually look at it as equal to an hourly rate if I break out the cost compared to the services rendered then add a little to cover unforeseen work costs that always come up. Still I prefer a flat fee for clients which seems to work best for our company.

SEO Pricing & Costs - What Should You Charge / How Much Should You Pay?

Corporate vs Small Businesses

I've been at the computer for a few hours this morning in SEOLand, checking SEM news and my regular research spots. I'm tired. Long week so far. You know, you wish it was Friday but its Thursday. You've got a new client you are working with and another client who needs a lot of extra attention, along with piles of work waiting for you. I'm not complaining though.

Working with small businesses can be a real challenge. I do prefer it to corporate SEM work, been there, done that. Seems that the higher up in the food chain the more difficult it is to get things done. Too many people to go through to get the ok to proceed. I've run into some corporate types who know just enough about SEM to think they know enough to tell you how to do things. And no, they usually don't know enough, just enough to cause problems with the project. If they are smart they listen, if they aren't they insist on what they want. Never ceases to amaze me when people hire you as the expert but do not put their trust in you.

Small businesses I find more reasonable overall. Yes, there is a lot of hand holding at times, more contact and more concerns but these folks are putting their income on the line in most cases, their business and its success reflects on them directly.

I work with small businesses because I like them. I like the idea that anyone can open a business and run it online with little funding and sheer determination. My parents both lived through and worked during the depression. Hard work. You find that happening with small business owners. It takes guts to believe you can be successful and take the challenge on your own. Its always interesting to me to see small businesses grow and succeed over time.

Social Media Marketing and Link Baiting

If you are looking for information on Social Media Marketing and Link Baiting Andy Hagen's Tropical SEO blog has good info available:

http://tropicalseo.com/category/link-baiting/

Yahoo! CEO Steps Down

Changes in store for Yahoo as their CEO steps down:

Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/070618-162931.php

Threadwatch
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/15684

Google Analytics New Features

Google Analytics has added some new features according to Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land
Google Analytics Leaves Beta & Adds Requested Features
http://searchengineland.com/070613-085738.php

Google Analytics Help Center
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=69588

Google's crusade against paid ads

Google's crusade against paid ads has been in search engine marketing news a lot lately. Search engine marketing folks starting talking about this back when no follow was suggested for links. I wrote an article about no follow and text link ads back in 2005. In the end numerous businesses online will be penalized because they didn't realize there was a problem with paid ads. Not every webmaster is up on what's ok to do in the search engines.

Its one thing for Google to tell users what will happen in Google's search results if spammy techniques are used for ranking. It is different when Google starts telling webmasters what to do with their websites and how to run their businesses. Paid banner ads and links were around long before Google existed. How do you close Pandora's box after Google's PageRank opened it? Google can't, but that's their problem. I don't think webmasters should be responsible for fixing Google's paid link problem.

Search Engine Watch
Google Goes to War on Paid Text Links

johnon.com
Google Buys DoubleClick, Announces Penalties for Non-Google Advertising

Threadwatch
The Real Reason Google Doesn't Like Paid Links

Matt Cutts Blog
How to Report Paid Links

Matt Cutts Blog
Hidden Links

Matt Cutts Blog
Text links and PageRank

Social media marketing

Eric Ward had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land today about Social Link Manipulation. His comments about the popularity of social linking and the possibility of spamming overtaking the medium sounded about right. If you link for links instead of quality of links, its bound to happen over time.

Search Innovation Marketing Blog Privacy Policy

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