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/