SEORoundtable | Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz
On this Memorial Day weekend holiday, Barry Schwartz discusses the recent Google algorithm changes, something called ‘floating fours’, issues around case sensitivity, ‘minus X penalties’ and the local universal search change (to almost quote Barry himself).
This week Barry also mocks Microsoft Live Search’s Cashback / Affinity program, we check out Ask.com’s most recent update including a piece on Yahoo! and their search ad changes.
Plus:
SEOs are not rats, go figure.
To read the original article: Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: May 25, 2008 - please click here
SEJ | Google Search Share for April Up Again, Why are We not Surprised?
Arnold Zafra of SEJ just wrote a quick piece the comScores latest Search Engine Market Share Report:
Here you go folks, comScore has just released its search engine report for April. As expected, Google toppled its competition again, getting 61.6% of all U.S. core searches. It’s not really a big leap from previous month’s 59.8%, but what is noteable is the fact that Google’s search stat went up by 1.8%. And if you will add up all the percent change in the search stats of the other search engines, it simply adds up to Google’s gain.
And despite the 2% decline in total search numbers (10.6 billion), Google still managed to register a 1% increase (6.5 billion) in core searches. Following Google is again Yahoo (2.2 billion), Microsoft (961 million).
The decreasing trend extended even further to the total expanded search query for the top 50 Internet properties, where all but Google, registered a decrease in total searches. Google managed to register a 1% increase for all its Internet properties (including YouTube).
To read the original article: Google Search Share for April Up Again, Why are We not Surprised? on Search Engine Journal - please click here
SEOmoz | Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
Danny Dover does a phenomenal job breaking down the ownership and distribution of the Top 100 Domains online - truly fascinating stuff!
Download the complete spreadsheet here:
CSV EXCEL PDF NUMBERS
You would think that if someone didn’t know what they were searching for, they would stop looking. Yet everyday, I talk to people who aimlessly spend their time and energy looking for some far away holy grail.
As a SEO my quest for success is a little better defined. I want to work on websites that drive immense traffic, be at the top of competitive SERPs and most of all, I want to help people. I think many SEOs feel the same way. We have the advantage of knowing what we are searching for. Yet, we still have one huge problem. Where are we supposed to search to learn how to achieve the results we want? I have spent the last week trying to solve this problem…
Click here to read more from - SEOmoz | Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains
SEL | Doing A Fake Story For Linkbait? Disclose — Or Face The Wrath Of Google
Barry Schwartz has just written a good analysis of the entire ‘linkbait fraud’ situation that unfolded on Sphinn and other SEO forums. Check it out - this is for sure going to make you either laugh, be pissed, or just completely dumbfounded! Enjoy…
Link baiting entered a new area last week when Lyndon Antcliff had success with a fake story being picked up by some mainstream media sites as well as social news sites. Controversy erupted over the tactic, and now it likely will go into a second cycle after Google’s Matt Cutts has suggested that Google might penalize pages that don’t disclose stories are fake.
The story was named 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers, but it wasn’t true. Nevertheless, several news agencies picked up the story, plus it made it to the front page of Digg and many other social media sites and garnered over 1,500 inbound links in under a week.
Nick Wilsdon highlights how Matt stepped into the discussion, with his comment over at our Sphinn forums:
My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: “Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.”
There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax.
Click the following link to read more from Search Engine Land Doing A Fake Story For Linkbait? Disclose — Or Face The Wrath Of Google
Pronet Advertising | AffiliatePrograms.com Launches New Website
Neil Patel just wrote an article in regards to AffiliatePrograms.com new redesign - and a personal shout out to Warren, Arjun and Wade…
AffilatePrograms.com just launched their new website. If you visited the site in the past, it pretty much looked like a directory with a forum. But now with their new design they have made a lot of improvements.
1. The site now concentrates on making affiliate marketing “simple”. A lot of people talk about making money through affiliate marketing, but newbies have a hard time understanding how this is possible. With the new AffiliatePrograms.com, they solve this problem by creating an education section that explains how you can make money though affiliate programs.
2. Good affiliate programs are hard to come buy. Some pay out well while others don’t. Some convert well, and some don’t. Thro
Google Maps Adds Pictures & Explore Feature
Chris Silver Smith wrote a great article about the new Google Maps Pictures and Explore Features they debuted. Below is a small snippit from the article:
The new feature now displays the images by default — apparently somewhat randomly selected — along with links to some popular searches and user-created maps for the area. The photos apparently must be geo-coded in order to be associated with the mapped area, and once they’re clicked upon they then expand to provide more local pix as well as videos for the area, and it also displays a larger version of the image clicked upon at its geo-coordinates overlaying the map along with icons of the pix peppered over the map.
As you can see below there are integrated relevant images from Picasa and the new geo-tagging feature - check it out!
This should encourage EVERY SEO and Webmaster to always remember to optimize your image/media files with proper nomenclature, and tagging where applicable. Please check out the original post here on Search Engine Land Google Maps Adds Pictures & Explore Feature
Yahoo Launches ‘Glue Pages’ in India
Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land wrote an article about Yahoo India launching a beta of their “glue pages”, which most folks are making an analog comparison to Googles Universal Search. The pages have a very nice look and feel, displaying the ‘classic’ search results on the left hand column, additional visual information in the center column (images etc) and bottom right hand corner (in addition to articles), Yahoo! Answers integration and relevant sponsored results.
SEO Has No Future | ShoeMoney® - What the Heck?
Okay, I am sorry to say this but I need to strongly disagree with Shoemoney’s post today about “SEO has No Future,” it’s logical yes - but honestly shows a lack of SEO client and problem solving experience.
Shoe quotes Googles Lead Spam Engineer:
“Web spam is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their Web site shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up,” - Matt Cutts
And then says:
That is most SEO at its core.
Pardon me? “when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts” is the core of SEO? Come on Shoe, you must know there is a TON more to it than that.
Having worked on SEO projects for many Fortune 100 companies, and encountering problems like: having to turn their entire site into SSL in a week, launching 30K local landing pages in a month, reputation management for billion dollar lawsuits, repairing IIS and Apache rewrites (seriously millions of them now), CMS migrations etc. all of these take lots of time and careful planned execution. I can tell you with confidence SEO is not DEAD, and in contrary, has a very promising future growth curve.
Jeremy’s post seems like a loose definition of “SEO”, focusing on the ‘blackhat’ methodologies out there, and is not encompassing large scale ‘white hat’ SEO projects like - CMS template optimization, giant ecommerce inventory coverage, or technology platform migration issues (.NET to LAMP / ASP /ASPx etc) which can seriously impact a sites rankings across the board.
*I know Shoe says at the footer “Please keep in mind I am not a professional SEO and have never claimed to be. My opinions above are purely based on my experiences.” but still.
Check out Shoes article here: SEO Has No Future - ShoeMoney®
How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?
Aaron Wall just wrote a amazing article laying out concisely the value of a #1 Google ranking. The SEOBook article is segmented into 9 categories; and lays out all the research and footnotes all the forum discussions that point out the importance of a #1 Google ranking - simply: it can break businesses. Aaron also breaks out the 6 steps any webmaster/SEO can take to help boost rankings and take charge of your market SERPs.
1. Establishing a Baseline Keyword Value - Given a fairly constant ranking position and traffic stream you should be able to estimate visitor value AND how much additional value would be created by improving your rankings.
2. Review Typical Click Distribution Profiles - A friend recently said “whether we’re 15 or 150 doesn’t make much a difference.” Indeed, search clicks are heavily concentrated on the top portion of the first page of search results. And this trend toward traffic consolidation has accelerated as time has passed.
3. Considering factors that modify click distribution - A variety of factors must be taken in account for when estimating overall search volume distribution. While this list is not exhaustive, it contains many of the common factors worth considering. Whenever possible we also offer tips for how to overcome these data biases.
4. Tapping the Long Tail - People search for everything under the sun. When the leaked AOL search data was manually classified into 20 different categories the category with the leading volume was other!
5. Improve monetization Via Scale - With more scale you can test and improve monetization faster, be more selective with what customers you are willing to work with, have leverage over suppliers, and/or negotiate direct ad deals that allow you to drastically increase the profits from your website. To put this in perspective.
6. Take action Today!
Aaron has some amazing tips and also completely outlines the extreme importance and value of having the #1 result in Google. I personally recommend every user of SEOi and SEO Guru prints this out and puts it on their office wall or uses it as part of any whitepaper to sell clients on the value of Search Engine Optimization.
Check out Aarons original article ‘How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?’ here…
MediaShift | PBS - 9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Mark Glaser wrote a great piece over at MediaShift about the new redesign he is undergoing of their website. He enlisted the advice of Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com for the redesign, and is blogging/writing about the entire process.
See Marks quote below:
Over the next few months, I’ll be redesigning MediaShift in conjunction with adding new video and audio features. One of my goals for the redesign is, not surprisingly, to increase traffic; and with nearly 50% of MediaShift traffic coming from Google, getting more traffic means doing more SEO.
The Top 9 SEO Suggestions are listed below:
1. Get inbound links and link out as well.
2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated.
5. Highlight your best content on every page.
6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.
7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.
8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.
9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.
I think this is a really awesome article and it also marks a pivotal point for the SEO industry as well - it’s not often when BIG media is covering topics like this on their site, about their site.
Kudos go out to Mark for such a great piece, I encourage all SEOi users and readers to check it out here.
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