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135 items tagged "SEO"

Yahoo Images Busts Your Framebusters Also

Fetched: January 30th, 2012, 6:42pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

We know Google Images deploys framebuster busting techniques to prevent sites that use framebusters from sending the user directly to the site.

Yahoo does something similar.

For example, this picture of a flower on Yahoo Images is from flowershopsflowers.com/nature-flowers, which has framebusting JavaScript on the site.

Yahoo breaks the framebuster and places in the window below the image a message that reads:

Loading the page might take you away from Yahoo! Image Search (Not recommended). Continue Anyway

This message really upsets those who use the framebusting script. These are webmasters who specifically dislike that the search engine is showing a higher resolution version of their image on the search engine as opposed to sending the user to the site to view and download the image.

Here is a picture:

A WebmasterWorld thread has some users calling this out right stealing:

I can't believe that Yahoo image search is stealing my images

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Favoring Regional Sites In Country Specific Versions

Fetched: January 25th, 2012, 5:13pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

WebmasterWorld administrator, engine, feels Bing has upped the weighting of local domains and how well they rank in the localized version of Bing search. He posted this at WebmasterWorld saying:

When using bing uk i'm noticing uk domains getting prominence over generally better ranked and better linked .com, despite being hosted in the uk.

So I used my umbrella query and tested Bing US vs Bing UK and I saw the same thing. Here are those results:

Bing US	Bing UK
umbrellas.com	wikipedia.org
umbrellas.net	simplyumbrellas.co.uk
totes-isotoner.com	umbrellaheaven.com
umbrellas-source.com	brolliesgalore.co.uk
wikipedia.org	discardedumbrellas.com
strombergbrand.com	umbrellaworld.co.uk
mjjsales.com	umbrellas.net
peerlessumbrella.com	allgoodideas.co.uk
target.com	fultonumbrellas.com
amazon.com	easy-umbrella.co.uk

Have you noticed this?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

2012 Link Building Tools

Fetched: January 16th, 2012, 8:02pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around which tools you should consider using to make the link building process easier in 2012.

With Yahoo Site Explorer dying int 2011, what other options do we have.

Here are the tools I pulled out of the WebmasterWorld thread:

Majestic SEO
Open Site Explorer
SEOmoz Tools
ScrapeBox
SEO Spyglass
SEOBook Tools
Blekko
Raven Tools
Ontolo
Excel (Good Old Microsoft Excel)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Can White Hats Use Black Hat Tactics?

Fetched: January 6th, 2012, 2:46pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A Cre8asite Forum thread has a nice deep discussion around the use of black hat SEO techniques while being a so called "white hat."

The question at hand is can a white hat SEO use some black hat tactics and still call themselves a white hat SEO?

As the conversation went on, the discussion went into definitions, as you can imagine.

What is black hat? Is it hacking? Is it stealing? Is it just using automated tools? Is it buying links? Writing a ton of content that isn't quality?

At the same time, some say that learning from black hats make you a better white hat SEO. Moderator, iamlost, said they are "pushing the envelope" and you can learn from that. But is it the black hat who is "pushing the envelope" or just the savvy marketers? Some black hats don't do anything smart, but rather use brute force. While others think up new techniques that can often not be classified as black hat at all and thus maybe they aren't black hat.

As you can see, the discussion gets into many areas, as do most of these type of threads.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forum.

Image credit via ShutterStock for white/black hat.

Bing Officially Kills Link Command Support

Fetched: December 30th, 2011, 9:05pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Let me start off by saying, I don't think this is that new but it is the first time in a long time I've seen an official response by a Bing representative that they no longer support the link commands on Bing Search.

A Bing Help thread has Duane Forrester, an official Bing representative, replying to an SEO about the link command not functioning properly on Bing.

Duane said:

Those functions have not be accurately supported for a long time. You can see a full view of known backlink sinside your Bing Webmatser Tools account. Links, domains, URLs, anchor text, etc. all available there.

Yes, Bing has a nice Webmaster Tools that provides linkage data for your site. But many SEOs liked using Microsoft's link command for competitive research.

With Yahoo Site Explorer being dead it leaves SEOs with only paid tools as an option.

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

Googlers John Mueller & Matt Cutts Working On Christmas

Fetched: December 27th, 2011, 1:03pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

Googlers are known to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, they have been doing so for as long as I can remember.

I like to give kudos to some (not all) of the Googlers who spend the time to respond to webmaster and SEO questions on and during Christmas because they could easily be spending time with family and no one would complain.

John Mueller, aka JohnMu, replied to about a dozen threads between the 23rd and 26th of December. From wishing happy holidays to IP address questions and robots.txt issues. JohnMu is known to often be around helping webmasters on Christmas and New Years.

Matt Cutts made a rare appearance in the forums, he spends most of his time in other areas but came out on Christmas day to help webmasters. He posted in three different threads all on Christmas day.

Yes, there were other Googlers responding to questions in the other forums but I wanted to point out those answering SEO and webmaster questions.

Like I said, Googlers are known for working on the Christmas and New Years break. They did in 2010, New Years 2009 New Years 2008. Also Christmas 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

I won't be writing more stories here today - since it is a day off for most and the forums were pretty slow.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Image credit to ShutterStock for working Santa.

Bing Adds Up To 8 Sitelinks

Fetched: December 23rd, 2011, 10:21am CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has SEOs noticing that Bing has increased the number of "Sitelinks" shown for a search result.

They can now show 8 sitelinks for a single search result.

Here is a picture:

I am not sure how "new" this is, but the folks at WebmasterWorld seem like there was an increase recently.

One SEO even said they may do even more:

Now Bing is showing not just one but two two sets of site lineks (one block of 8 and one of 4) on the same page of the SERPS.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing May Discount Clicks On Popular Domain Names

Fetched: December 21st, 2011, 11:54pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has a discussion around a new Microsoft research paper named Domain Bias in Web Search (PDF).

The paper describes how reputable and popular domain names have a strong bias in the search results. Searchers are more likely to click on the results from a popular domain.

What is the issue with that? Well, they say in the paper that the "existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains."

In short, if Bing uses click data for ranking purposes, which they do on some level, then they have to factor in discounting in clicks from reputable domains to reduce the bias searchers have towards them.

Why does it matter if reputable domains get clicked on more, they should? Well, according to their study, in a blind searcher test - if you remove the domain factor, searchers are much less likely to click on those results. So to remove bias in the search results, they want to dampen the click factor ranking algorithm to not artificially inflate those results.

Here is the paper's abstract:

This paper uncovers a new phenomenon in web search that we call domain bias â" a userâs propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain. We provide evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. We begin by studying the diference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, we run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a userâs opinion of which page is more relevant. We find that domains can actually flip a userâs preference about 25% of the time. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of systematic domain preferences, even after factoring out confounding issues such as position bias and relevance, two factors that have been used extensively in past work to explain user behavior. The existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains.

Note: Of course you can't go what is written in a research paper as being implemented.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock for domain image.

BingBot Hiding User Agent?

Fetched: December 21st, 2011, 1:29pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has one webmaster complaining that Microsoft is hiding the user agent for the spider, BingBot.

The webmaster said:

I'm not really sure if this is regular practice with MSN (Bing) or not. Since a few weeks back, they've been spidering my website without a proper User Agent (meaning their UA does NOT say anything about bingbot. It's just a regular browser UA). This happens from three different IP ranges. Yes, I've checked thoroughly and the IP rangers are registered under MSN.
I doubt this is manual review, since it doesn't look at all as normal human behavior.
Did they officially stop declaring their bots in User Agent strings?

So either Microsoft has a weird bug, someone is spoofing the crawler in a weird way or Microsoft is doing this on purpose?

I should note, I did not check my log files to verify this on my sites. So I am going with "zerillos" post and with no back up evidence.

However, Microsoft is known for their crawling issues. Most recently, crawling too hard, updating IPs and many more. BingBot is pretty new, coming to us just over a year ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Funniest SEO Threads Of 2011

Fetched: December 17th, 2011, 8:03am CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

The Google Webmaster Forum Top Contributors started a thread at Google Webmaster Help trying to compile the "funniest" threads of 2011 in that forum.

They came up with three, so I thought it would be fun to look back at the funniest SEO threads I found this year and share them with you. First, the three the Top Contributors came up with.

Top Contributor's Selected Funniest Threads of 2011:

How am I supposed to deal with abusive "Webmaster Bionics"? - I believe the title is self explanatory. In short, someone ranting how the top contributors, also known as bionic posters are abusive.
A MILLION DOLLAR DOMAIN NAME!!! GOOGLEBRAND.COM - someone setting themselves up with a Google lawsuit and not even knowing it.
How come a site that made me 1.7 million loses 20% of traffic in panda update? - one of the many Panda stories.

My Funniest 2011 Picks:

Scraper Site Software Site Complains Site Not Listed In Google, Seriously! - a site named scrappingexpert.com was actually upset they were not listed in Google.
Dad, Stop Spamming Google - It's Embarrassing! - a kid embarrassed by his dad's spamming tactics, calling him out in a Google forum thread.
Google Smacks Down Webmaster Over Panda Update - maybe more sad then funny - but it is funny/sad.
SEO Company Badmouthed In Google Forum But What Happens Next Is Strange - not a good way to get your site listed again.
Don't Force Google's Hand, Especially If You're Sketchy - lessons learned.

Did I miss any? Let me know.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Image credit to ShutterStock for funny horse.

Bing Webmaster Tools Showing Numbers Instead Of Keywords

Fetched: December 10th, 2011, 10:13am CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A Bing Webmaster Help thread has a user posting a weird bug in Bing Webmaster Tools.

The bug is found under the traffic reports, in the "Rank and Traffic Stats" section, under the graph where it lists out the keywords you rank for and how valuable they are on a CPC basis.

In that section, instead of just listing out keywords, Bing is also listing out weird strings of numbers. Here is a picture from my Bing Webmaster Tools account:

Bing has yet to reply with any information about this bug.

Forum discussion at Bing Webmaster Help.

Google's New Help Forum

Fetched: December 5th, 2011, 7:04pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

Google has slowly been migrating their help forums to a new platform.

I believe the first Google product to use this new help forum platform was Google Plus Help. But since then, the Google Book Search Help platform migrated over. We are expecting both the Google Maps Help forum and the Google News Help forum to switch over soon.

Personally, I am not looking forward to the change because it will make me rethink the way I track all the forum discussions. But I guess the best time to do it is over the holiday month, because I should have more time to do it than the rest of the year.

New design looks like this:

Old (current) design looks like this:

It has been about 3 years since Google went with the existing Google help forum design and feature set. Now that Google + is out, they are switching it over to something new.

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help and Google News Help.

Link Generation Idea Sharing

Fetched: December 3rd, 2011, 11:33am CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has a bunch of long time link builders sharing some of their new link generation ideas and concepts in the open thread.

I love these threads, cause sharing these ideas, lead to others to share and then new ideas can come out of it that isn't communicated in the thread.

Here are a few select ideas from the thread, but make sure to go to the thread and participate.

Look at your log files for deeper insights and new ideas
The phone. I.e. Relationships. Not cold calling - call your buddies regularly.
Broken link tool on massive ancient directories and purchase of related domains

There are dozens of ideas being shared and I don't want to copy them all down here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock for link image.

Bing Search Update - Holiday 2011

Fetched: November 22nd, 2011, 4:42pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

There is a single post at WebmasterWorld with one SEO suggesting there was a Bing Search update recently.

The WebmasterWorld member, who is a long time member, said:

Very rarely do I notice updates in Bing but this one seems to be rather huge, major shakeups across the board. From what I see it is pushing "Brands" as well, though it hasn't been pushed to Yahoo yet, can you give us an update BingDude?

I did check the stats on this site and it seemed like we had double the traffic from Bing yesterday than we typically do on a weekday. But looking at a single day compared to other days is never a good indicator. I do not run ranking reports, so hard to confirm this myself.

We do not have confirmation from Bing yet, but I will try to get it soon.

The last update we reported on was in April from Bing and then prior to that, Bing did a holiday 2010 update but after the shopping season.

To push out updates now, right during or prior to the shopping season is something most search companies avoid. At least since the Google Florida update in 2003.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Excellent Article On Duplicate Content & SEO

Fetched: November 22nd, 2011, 4:42pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

There is an outstanding post by Dr. Pete on SEOmoz named Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.

The article isn't really Panda specific, but it talks about duplicate content issues in 2011, which is the year of Panda.

Here is the outline, but make sure to check out the article:

I. What Is Duplicate Content?
II. Why Do Duplicates Matter?
(1) The Supplemental Index
(2) The Crawl "Budget"
(3) The Indexation "Cap"
(4) The Penalty Debate
(5) The Panda Update
III. Three Kinds of Duplicates
(1) True Duplicates
(2) Near Duplicates
(3) Cross-domain Duplicates
IV. Tools for Fixing Duplicates
(1) 404 (Not Found)
(2) 301 Redirect
(3) Robots.txt
(4) Meta Robots
(5) Rel=Canonical
(6) Google URL Removal
(7) Google Parameter Blocking
(8) Bing URL Removal
(9) Bing Parameter Blocking
(10) Rel=Prev & Rel=Next
(11) Syndication-Source
(12) Internal Linking
(13) Don't Do Anything
V. Examples of Duplicate Content
(1) "www" vs. Non-www
(2) Staging Servers
(3) Trailing Slashes ("/")
(4) Secure (https) Pages
(5) Home-page Duplicates
(6) Session IDs
(7) Affiliate Tracking
(8) Duplicate Paths
(9) Functional Parameters
(10) International Duplicates
(11) Search Sorts
(12) Search Filters
(13) Search Pagination
(14) Product Variations
(15) Geo-keyword Variations
(16) Other "Thin" Content
(17) Syndicated Content
(18) Scraped Content
(19) Cross-ccTLD Duplicates
VI. Which URL Is Canonical?
VII. Tools for Diagnosing Duplicates
(1) Google Webmaster Tools
(2) Google's Site: Command
(3) SEOmoz Campaign Manager
(4) Your Own Brain

Phew!

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Image credit: Bannykh Alexey Vladimirovich / ShutterStock.

BingBot IP Ranges Updated

Fetched: November 16th, 2011, 5:14pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

One of the sleuths at WebmasterWorld noticed that Microsoft updated the IP ranges for the spiders, or some of them, formerly known as MSNBot and now known as BingBot.

The DNS for IP ranges 157.55 and 157.56 have been updated. He said:

I've been keeping a desultory eye on the MS 157 ranges for some time. Not sure when it actually happened - probably within the past few weeks - but MS seem to have taken notice of complaints - or just finally got their act together.
I had a handful of IPs tagged as msnbot in my database from a previous DNS scan some time back. The new ranges/sub-ranges (about 100) extend this range but also, in some cases, extend or reduce previously logged ranges. The list I now have, taken from DNS scans of the MS DNS servers, is included below. I think the list is accurate but I cannot guarantee it.

If you are using any software that detects IPs, you may want to check out the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Introducing Marketing Land As Sphinn's Successor

Fetched: November 15th, 2011, 4:41pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

Marketing Land at marketingland.com is opening on December 11th. It is a sister site to Search Engine Land. Full disclosure, I am the News Editor at both sites.

Danny Sullivan explains the difference between the two:

Search Engine Land will continue to provide all the great coverage about search marketing and search engines that you love. Marketing Land will go beyond into other areas, including social media, affiliate marketing, email marketing and other internet marketing topics.

With that, Sphinn is going away - the content will be somewhere but the site will stop operating. Sphinn has changed directions a couple times since launching in 2007.

And one of the last times I can say this....

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

E-Commerce SEO & Out Of Stock Items

Fetched: November 11th, 2011, 7:11pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks a fairly basic SEO question that I don't think we've covered here in the almost ten years of covering SEO.

The question is, what do I do with my product pages where those items are sold out or out of stock?

One one hand, I know the item will come back in stock and hiding or deleting the page will hurt the rankings of the page. But on the other hand, customers who want the product now that go to the page and find it to be out of stock will be upset. What do you do?

My advice would be to say it is out of stock, give an estimate in stock (to be shipped date) and let customers buy it with the estimate ship date and/or sign up for an email alert for when the item comes back in stock.

Apple does this with the unlocked iPhone for sale in November, which is still not for sale yet. Many e-commerce sites do this. In fact, many don't even say it is out of stock, they make you buy it and then 2 days later you will get an email that they don't have it in stock. That is even worse.

The bigger question to me is should Google or Bing temporarily penalize (downgrade the ranking) of a product page that says "sold out" or "out of stock"? I personally would if it was my search engine - like a temporary page not available (503) but lesser extent.

What do you think?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Image credit: Oxlock / ShutterStock.

Becoming A Google Top Contributor

Fetched: November 9th, 2011, 7:18pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

Google's support forums, from AdWords to Chrome, from Mobile to Webmaster have "top contributors" helping Googlers help Google users.

These are not Googlers, but people nominated by Googlers and other top contributors, as helpful people to have slightly more 'power' in the forums to help the user out. They are not Google certified, they do not get paid but they do get the badge of honor and get to meet Googlers from time to time.

So how does one become a Top Contributor?

This week, one of Google's most active forums, the Google Webmaster Help forum, nominated a new Top Contributor. Archie Watt was nominated by Googlers and Top Contributors within the forum.

Which lead to the question, how does one become a top contributor?

John Mueller from Google explained:

No, we don't want to do any automatic "promotions." It's important to us that a user is not only active, but also very knowledgable and friendly. Sometimes this can result in people becoming Bionic Posters / Top Contributors with a lower post count / level (for example, if they are extremely knowledgeable in specific areas). We know that we (Googlers) aren't able to keep an eye on everything and every poster all the time, so we'll generally also ask for input from the existing Bionics -- they're generally all over the forum and see many active posters and the (frequently) fantastic help they post. If we can't find someone we can all agree on, then we'll generally wait ... We don't need to fill a specific quota of Top Contributors, so maybe we'll check back in a month or so, and see how things have been developing. :-) Sometimes these decisions take a lot of time :-)

It is kind of like being nominated to become a moderator at a forum but this one is at an official Google forum.

So it is not about quantity, but I am sure that has a factor. It is also about how helpful and patient you are.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Dress Up Your Profile Pic For Halloween Using Google Creative Kit

Fetched: October 29th, 2011, 6:08am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

Halloween is coming up this Monday and a Google Webmaster Help thread has Googlers and frequent forum users dressing up their profile pics for the holiday.

John Mueller from Google started off the thread by updating his profile picture, as displayed above, and posting this message:

Halloween is just around the corner, time to dress you your user photo :-)
Check out the fun & easy tweaks possible with the Google+ photos creative kit.
Who can dress up best? What's your favorite effect?
Enjoy

Here is a video on how the Google + photos creative kit works:

I am looking forward to the special Halloween logos this year. You can see the 2010 halloween logos and the previous years over here.

Happy Halloween.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

SEO Sharing Is Limited In Public Settings

Fetched: October 29th, 2011, 6:08am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

It is commonly known that when an SEO discovers something that works that most no body else knows about, they won't share it even with their best of friends. But they would never in a million years share it in a public setting, like a discussion forum or conference.

That being said, a WebmasterWorld thread has one member teasing the rest claiming to have found an awesome SEO technique that is golden. He said:

I discovered something in one of my zillions of tests I always have running, something huge. Something so huge in fact that after several additional tests has me shaking today.
I do not think it is a bug, with one change I can outrank any site in Googles index that competes with me. For all you smart arses no it is not adwords. I have never seen anything like this, not since Google was born. Not since all the web or webcrawler or av.
So if you discovered this, what would you do?

No one in their right mind would share the details right away. They would use it up for as long as possible until the technique no longer works. Once it stops working or working as well, they might share it with friends and then those friends might share it in a public setting. That is how it works.

Which often makes most SEOs claim that forums are public conferences are wasteful. I disagree that they are wasteful, because you can still learn from these things.

What would you do?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image from Oleinikova Olga/Shutterstock.

SEO Poll: Would You Work With Competitive Clients?

Fetched: October 29th, 2011, 6:08am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A Sphinn discussion asks, would you accept new work if that new work is competitive to your existing client's niche?

In short, do you offer official or non-official exclusivity to your clients?

Most of the responses in that discussion claim they would never work on a competitive project. They said it just isn't fair to their clients. Here are some of the responses:

Just imagine the situation you could get into with one doing 10 times better than another. Or one gets dinged by Panda and the other doesnât. Too much hassle for me explaining that.

No no no no not ever nohow no way. And believe me, I've been asked. In fact, none of my partners are allowed to take on a client that directly competes with one of my existing clients. That's the way we've operated since 1996, and that's the way we will continue to operate (as long as I'm calling the shots here).

But I know many companies that do, especially the larger ones. Their rational is that they have different teams working on different projects, so they won't put the same team on two competitive projects, they would just give it to a new team.

In addition, some argue, working on two clients in the same niche would benefit both clients because they learn twice as much.

In any event, please take our poll and let us know if you would take on competitors:

Would You Work With Competitive SEO Clients?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Image from bioraven/Shutterstock.

SEO: My Content Is Useless Without Traffic

Fetched: October 26th, 2011, 10:32pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A HighRankings Forum thread has an interesting post by a person who has a site that wants more traffic.

He made one statement that stood out to me, actually a few, but one more than others. The statement is:

All the design and content in the world are useless without traffic, and thus the real world need for SEO.

In today's world of SEO, this thinking seems backwards to me. All the design and content in the world leads to more traffic. Content and site design is part of SEO, it is SEO. Without the quality content, without the awesome user interface and site architecture - how do you get quality traffic from Google or Bing?

SEO 8 years ago, yea - this made sense. But nowadays, in most established niches, including insurance lead generation, you need the content first to get the traffic.

Ammon Johns, aka BlackKnight, who is an old time SEO and relatively quiet in the forums for the past few years, chimed in on this one adding:

First there seem to be the fact that you created a website without actually knowing what it is for. 'Possibly more' than a test site? It leaves me wondering if it really looks as professional as you hope, when yours apparently has no clear reason/purpose for existence other than to test some SEO ideas.
Secondly there's that whole thing of being overly concerned with what other sites are doing - researching the design, content and keywords of the top 20 websites in what field? The top 20 SEO test sites? How did you know they were top 20 before knowing what keywords they'd be ranked in the top 20 for? Do you see what I mean? There's a lot of logical fallacies involved here.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Image credit: robodread / Shutterstock.com.

SEO Link Building Job Interview Question

Fetched: October 22nd, 2011, 4:00pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

A HighRankings Forum thread has a person going on a job interview set with the task to come up with ideas on how to get "natural links" for a site in a specific niche.

The SEO job applicant said he is new to the space, only got the interview because of his/her "enthusiasm." Outside of that, the applicant needs to prepare for the task of a session of "brain storming" on "ideas about natural link building." The specific niche is a "motorcyclist company selling equipment, parts and clothes need to build natural links and i need to put suggestions forward."

The question is, is the SEO company asking a trick question? How do you naturally build links? Isn't that, by definition, unnatural?

In any event, the folks at HighRankings forums gave the applicant some advice.

The job interview is probably over by the time this story goes live but it does make for an interesting topic.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Image from SockLite/Shutterstock.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Yahoo Organic Search Now Powered By Bing Everywhere*

Fetched: October 21st, 2011, 12:44am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

Well, it is done - Yahoo, everywhere you go with the exception of Korea, even on mobile or desktop, will be fully powered by a different search engine - Microsoft Bing.

Yahoo Search is not providing their own algorithmic search results anymore, like they haven't being doing so in the U.S. in Canada since August 2010. Country after country, Yahoo has been handing over their search technology and search engine to Microsoft.

The other day, Yahoo declared the process is now complete, with the exception of Korea. Why not Korea? Because of "a three-way integration between Yahoo, Microsoft and Daum, remains, and is expected to complete by the end of the year."

That being said, this was the plan and the plan has been implemented.

Paid search is still not fully transitioned over. It is in the U.S., Canada and many other countries, but not every where, not yet.

For some reason, I remain sad about all of this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Bing Influences Many SEOs To Use Meta Keywords Tag

Fetched: October 13th, 2011, 11:54pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

About a month ago, Bing confirmed they use the meta keywords tag as part of their many ranking signals.

As we said then, Yahoo did also. Most SEOs I know, at least in the publishing business, don't bother with the meta keywords but according to my poll, most will again.

So we ran a poll and have over 300 responses, they said:

48% will now use the meta keywords tag
30% will still not use the meta keywords tag
19% said they might, depending on how much free time they have
3% said "other"

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Google & Bing See Canonical Tags Differently

Fetched: October 11th, 2011, 5:17pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Nick Roshon has an excellent post on the difference between how Google & Bing handle the canonical tag, something non of us really noticed before until he pointed it out.

The key differences are two fold:

(1) Mass use of the canonical tag and

(2) Canonical tag pointing to itself.

How does each engine differ?

(1) Google doesn't care if you use the canonical tag on hundreds or thousands of pages, where Bing says they will trust the tag less if you do.

(2) Google doesn't care if you link a canonical tag to the same page (i.e. a redirect back to the redirect), but Bing does and says don't do it.

Nick quotes Bing's Duane who wrote, "the rel=canonical is that it was never intended to appear across large numbers of pages" and "Its best to leave them [canonical tags] blank rather than point them at themselves."

Nick then quotes Google's Cutts and Ohye who say, "it doesnât hurt to have this on every page of your site," and "it's absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". "

These are very interesting distinctions between Bing.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Webmasters Love Bing Webmaster Customer Service

Fetched: October 10th, 2011, 4:22pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Every now and then I see a post from a webmaster on how Bing is outstanding with customer service on the webmaster side.

We all know how Google rarely is able to give one on one support to webmasters. But Bing prides themselves on being smaller and quicker to reply on the one on one side with webmaster communication - and they do.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a recent report from one webmaster who contacted Bing via email on a webmaster related issue. Bing replied within 12 hours and fixed the issue within 4 days!

The webmaster said:

I contacted Bing webmaster support about some of my pages that were falling in the results periodically. The problem is they were attaching my home page title to some of my other urlâs titles. I actually wanted to solve the problem myself but it probably would have taken 1-2 months of testing.
In less than 12 hours Bing responded. They detailed why this was occurring and suggested work-a-rounds. Regardless of that Bing should have been interpreting the titles correctly and this was not the result of the ODP. Four days later the same support specialist re-contacted me to let me know the problem had now been corrected. The pages sprung to the top. The support specialist also inquired if I had any additional problems they could help with because this was helping them she explained. This was not a form letter.
Bottom line is I found the support at Bing to be very cordial at that time.

Like I said, this is nothing new for Bing - often Webmasters are very happy with Bing support.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit: Michael D Brown / ShutterStock.

Some Worry & Some Don't - Go Figure

Fetched: October 1st, 2011, 3:59am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

Earlier this month, we polled our readers asking how worried are you about link spammers.

The response was pretty across the board, some are worries, some are not - isn't that just how people are?

When I asked "Do You Worry About People Link Spamming You?" the responses we received include:

38% said no, not worried
35% said yes, worried
26% said they are a little bit worried

Personally, I am a worrier but I am not worried about link spammers hurting my sites.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Are Search Query Defined Dynamic Headlines Allowed?

Fetched: October 1st, 2011, 3:59am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

There is an excellent thread at HighRankings Forum asking if it would be acceptable to change the page's headline based off the search query the user came from via the search engine.

For example, someone goes to Google, searches for [big blue widget] and clicks on your page. The page title by default reads, "Blue Widget" but in this case, the headline would dynamically change to "Big Blue Widget" because that is what the searcher search for.

Is that acceptable?

We covered a similar topic back in 2005 about highlighting search queries based on referrer data in the document. But what about changing the actual text on the page based off of it.

I think this might be a bit in the gray area. I mean, technically, what you would be serving GoogleBot would be different from what you are serving the searcher - slightly different.

Michael Martinez responded that this wouldn't be a high risk issue, he said, "In my opinion, as you propose it is probably not a high-risk practice but you'll only know for sure when you try it."

Anyway, I am not sure how Google would react to this, so if you have done this and have experience with it, do share.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Image from iQoncept/Shutterstock.

Can Google Index Disqus Comments? No But Here Is How.

Fetched: October 1st, 2011, 3:59am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Personally, one of my favorite features on my site is the commenting, which is powered by Disqus.

But this being a site on search engines and SEO, how do I get around making sure Google, Bing and other search engines can index the comments? As many people know, Disqus comments are viewable only through JavaScript - so how do you get the comments to be indexed by the search engines?

When we implemented this on version 4 of the Search Engine Roundtable, I made sure to leverage the Disqus API.

Why?

(1) I wanted to own all the comments and have them as a backup in my own database.

(2) I wanted to make them search engine friendly

(3) But I also love the user interface and ease of commenting via Disqus, so I took that

(4) I also wanted Disqus to deal with the comment spam and server load issues caused by that.

So to a user, the comments seem to be fully powered by Disqus. But I manage the comments via the API but on the CMS backend we built. So when I remove a comment for spam, it removes it from both the search engine's view and user's view.

Let me say that this is not cloaking or anything like that because users and search engines are seeing the exact same content.

That being said, let me show you how it works.

Here are some comments on the blog:

If you view source, they show in the source code as this:

And yes, Google knows about the comments, it shows up for searches for the comments:

Anyway, it works well for me and I kind of feel I get the best of both worlds with this solution. It isn't "easy" to code this all out, but I feel the approved comments add a lot to the articles I post here and thus want them indexed by the search engines.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Bing Sitemaps Files Still In Pending Status

Fetched: September 24th, 2011, 10:06am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Back in July, we reported an issue with Bing sitemaps files being stuck in pending status.

Back then, Bing confirmed there was a bug for some webmasters:

Our product team is aware of this and is being addressed at this time. Currently, we have no ETA yet due to testing and developing.

Personally, none of my sitemaps in Bing are in pending status. But for some, including one webmaster complaining in a Bing Forum thread, the issue is still there.

Will from Bing even confirmed there is still an issue and said:

Currently our team is looking into the sitemap submission and is working on a fix. There's no ETA at the moment, so please be patient.

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

Yahoo Bing Transitions In Asian Markets

Fetched: September 21st, 2011, 9:50pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

Yahoo announced they have made the transition from Yahoo powered search results to Bing powered results in the Asian markets.

These markets include Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam but exclude Korea.

Yahoo also said the transition for the organic results in Greece, Poland, Romania, Switzerland (German, French and Italian languages) and Turkey are complete.

I am not sure when the paid search side will be transitions, there have been issues on that front - from what I understand.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

How Video Content Can Hurt Your Site's Conversions

Fetched: September 10th, 2011, 12:53pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

One of the best ways to get exposure to your web site is to have video rank a page of yours and lists that ranked result with a video thumbnail.

The video image thumbnails standout in the Google results and typically result in a higher click through rate.

But is it always a good thing?

A WebmasterWorld thread says not always. One SEO said:

We recently put a few videos on our site that play from our server. Google liked those and moved the positions a couple of spots higher but replaced the normal results with a video link.
The problem is the clicks dropped 50%. Our niche is for buying people who look for certain products but they are not interested in videos.

Another one backed this user up and offered advice, saying

Same thing happened to me too. I had to move them to dedicated video pages.
Create separate pages with videos that auto-play (just like a youtube page), add video-meta-tags to those pages, and create a video-sitemaps for them.
Add links to video pages from content pages (or Google might not index them). Use javascript to invoke a lightbox to play videos within the content page.

Do you find this to be an issue for you?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing: Social Factors More Important Than Linking Factors

Fetched: September 10th, 2011, 12:53pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Eric Enge has an excellent interview with Bing's Duane Forrester. There are many excellent take aways from this interview but the key is this:

Bing says that social factors are more important that link factors for determining rankings. As Eric summarized, "The ranking of what priorities for publishers in Duaneâs eyes. #1 Content #2 Social Media #3 Links. Links were rated as the third most important area. Third."
Another major point, as Eric points out is that user interaction in the search results is looked at closely. He said, "The huge weight placed by Bing on user interaction with the search results as a ranking factor."
Another point is that Bing is relying on RSS feeds more and more for finding new content.
Bing has a very low threshold for bugs in Sitemaps files, in fact, he said, "1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap," dirt such as links leading to 404 pages and so on.

Anyway, the interview is a must read for all SEOs, so check it out over here.

Forum discussion at Google +.

Yahoo Fires Yet Another CEO, Sorry Bartz

Fetched: September 8th, 2011, 2:32am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

No one is really surprised by last night's news that Yahoo announced "leadership change" including firing Carol Bartz over the phone. I mean, she had only 33% approval rating and the stock rose 6% on the news of the firing.

Yahoo said:

Yahoo! Inc. under which the Board of Directors has appointed Timothy Morse interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately, replacing Carol Bartz, who has been removed by the Board from her role as Chief Executive Officer.
The Board has also named key senior Yahoo! executives to a newly formed Executive Leadership Council tasked with supporting Morse in managing the Company's day-to-day operations until a permanent chief executive is appointed, as well as supporting a comprehensive strategic review that the Board has initiated to position the Company for future growth.

Bartz emailed everyone via her iPad saying:

I am very sad to tell you that Iâve just been fired over the phone by Yahooâs Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.

Carol took over as the CEO of Yahoo in January 2009 after Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as CEO in 2007. It has been a rough road for Yahoo, very rough.

I am still so sad about Yahoo, so sad. But will I ever forgive Bartz for pulling Yahoo out of the search space, at least in terms of building backend search technology? I doubt it.

It is hard to see what future Yahoo has but I do hope the next CEO, not the interim, has a clear future for Yahoo.

If Carol did anything well, it was fire a lot of people and cut a tremendous amount of costs.

Do you think Yahoo will have a solid future from here on out?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Poll: Do You Worry About Link Spammers Hurting You?

Fetched: September 7th, 2011, 12:24am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster upset about someone trying to link spam their site in order to downgrade their rankings.

Even though Google has been back and forth saying bad links can't hurt you and then saying it is possible links can hurt you, SEOs are not sure what to make of them.

We ran a poll and most SEOs believe competitors can hurt you with links but still, many do not believe it. And that is the overall opinion in the thread. Most are saying, the links won't hurt, the links will just be devalued by Google.

What do you think? Not do you think they can hurt but rather, do you worry about it?

Do You Worry About People Link Spamming You?

In fact, I had a case where Square Peg Web Design was so upset with me that they tried to do all sorts of things to hurt my company, including building nasty links to my site. I wasn't too worried about it, although it encouraged me to keep my post up about what they did to my company and clients.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

TripAdvisor Forcing Hotels To Link To Them?

Fetched: September 1st, 2011, 4:43pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has a post from a member I trust. The post is about TripAdvisor's listing policies requiring those who want a listing to link back to TripAdvisor's web site.

He wrote:

I run a website for a small hotel that has just been fully refurbished and they applied to TripAdvisor UK today to be listed/linked etc.
That's fine, they said, however they would need a reciprocal link from the hotel.
It's a non-issue and has already been done however I was wondering whether this is their new way of building backlinks as a defense against current and future Panda updates.
It would make sense, has anyone else heard of such requests/demands?

TripAdvisor has a linking information page with detailed instructions on how they want you to link to them. Clearly, there is no nofollow attribute in there.

Tnooz ran a story showing that most of the listings on TripAvisor do not have links from TripAdvisor back to the hotel.

In any event, requiring a reciprocal link, if true, is a bit risky for TripAdvisor.

We know TripAdvisor and Google have had their fights in the past - will this lead to one more?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Do You Have Too Much Search Traffic?

Fetched: September 1st, 2011, 4:43pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Matt McGee started an excellent discussion thread at Sphinn asking, "How Much Search Traffic is Too Much?"

It is a good question, especially with the ups and downs sites see with Google and Bing doing algorithm updates.

How much of your overall traffic should be from search engines? Is it ever too much?

I have some clients that have over 90% of their traffic from search engines! Over 90%! My sites, like this one and others, normally get about 60% or so from search engines - we get a lot of social media traffic, direct and so on.

Is 90% excessive and borderline scary? What if Google changes their algorithm or mistakenly labels your site as a site doing something against their guidelines. What if your developer does something stupid and Google drops you from their index?

Should you rely that much on search traffic?

Now, you can easily look at your traffic overview and see how much traffic you get from search engines versus referral sites and so on. But if you drill in, often the search traffic is from people doing direct searches, looking for your company by typing in your company name. Does that count?

Let me share some of the outstanding posts at Sphinn:

Matt McGee said:

I'll go first today and begin by saying that it proably depends on the type of site involved, the industry and other factors. But ... generally speaking ... I get alarmed when I see a website getting 70% or more of its traffic from natural search. Sure, it might be a testament to the SEO's skills, but what if the algorithms change next week? Where's all that traffic gonna come from them?
Several years ago, Andy Hagans wrote a great article about the idea of "defensible traffic" -- i.e., it's good to have a variety of traffic sources so you can withstand the loss of any one of them. I'm a big believer in that, so I don't like to see too much traffic coming just from search. You?

Todd Mintz said:

I'm not sure that there is an ideal breakdown. So long as you are working all the channels in an optimum fashion, the breakdown shouldn't matter.

Jill Whalen said:

Something to consider these days is that direct referrals may appear to be lower with search referrals higher when it comes to brand terms these days. This is due to people using Google to easily get to sites they know about rather than bookmark or type them directly. Plus sometimes you just type the domain into the wrong browser box.
In other words, don't worry too much if your search traffic seems awful high, at least where branded terms are concerned.

There is a lot of other great comments in the thread and please add yours to the Sphinn thread.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Coping With Being Blamed For SEO Results

Fetched: September 1st, 2011, 4:43pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

One of the main reasons why my company does not offer SEO services is not being able to 100% deliver on what the client hires you for.

I'd say 99% of those seeking SEO services are looking to rank well for a handful of keywords. They want to see their web pages in the number one, two or three position of the organic listings for keywords like [diamond rings]. It can be done but in a second, after the result is released, Google can push out an update or hit the site with a penalty and the result is gone and what you delivered has also vanished.

Personally, I do not understand how SEO companies deal with the blame game. I know, SEO companies don't sell rankings and many won't guarantee them. But when the customer comes with the initial intention of ranking for specific keywords and ultimately, one day, you can't deliver - how would that make you feel?

A Google Webmaster Help thread has one SEO company seemingly upset that his client is blaming him for the site not ranking well anymore. The blame is specific to a client pointing out he is linking to his site with a banner ad and not using a nofollow. I honestly doubt a single link that is not nofollowed would lead to this issue. So it is something else that resulted in the downgrade of the site's ranking.

That being said, the SEO company is clearly upset and I am sure the SEO client is also upset.

Tell me, most of you who read this site are SEO companies or do SEO each day. How do you deal with the blame game and finger pointing?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

SEO Pricing: Is The Price Is Right

Fetched: August 28th, 2011, 5:59am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

There is an excellent topic at Sphinn asking how do you price your SEO projects.

Overall, many charge flat rates based on how much they anticipate the project will cost them. But some charge hourly. Some charge by feature or service. Most charge monthly.

Let me quote some of the well known SEOs who describe how they charge:

Jill Whalen:

I have been keeping track of my time for all client work for many years, so I have a good idea of how long it takes me to do things for most projects. Since I'm a solo consultant, it's fairly easy to price things out based on that knowledge and the kind of profit I want to make on each project.
A few projects will take longer than I expect, but most go the other way so it balances out in the end.
For the most part, I don't price based on an hourly rate though, but more in what I think it is worth for the client.

Julie Joyce:

We actually calculated our labor costs for 6 months in order to determine what we should be charging for labor for one link IF we buy that link. We have another range of costs for guest posts depending upon the niche, if we go that route. With anything else we do, it's usually a custom cost that depends upon how tough the niche is and how tough the method will be.

Nick LeRoy:

I'll admit, my pricing can at times be sporadic for monthly clients. I do keep in consideration my hourly rate and how many hours I estimate I would spend per month on the project. Sometimes you make an extra couple bucks if you overbid but then others you lose a couple bucks if you underbid. I also think its important to keep in consideration your level of interest in the project too.

How do you price your SEO pricing?

For me, if someone wants my SEO advice, I just bill them hourly. Although I rarely give SEO advice outside of this site.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

See A Spike In Bing Traffic Within Webmaster Tools? Here Is Why.

Fetched: August 22nd, 2011, 2:26pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Login to your Bing Webmaster Tools and click on a traffic report, you may notice a spike of twice as much traffic being report from August 13th on. I do.

The reason is because Bing has now incorporated Yahoo traffic and other data directly into the Bing Webmaster Tools.

The numbers that should inflate on these reports include:

Impressions â" will go up based on combined data numbers
Clicks â" will go up based on combined data numbers
Click Through Rates (CTR) as appropriate from above (change only due to the mathematics involved in the first two items)

Just an heads up on this, there has not been much discussion around this news except for at WebmasterWorld.

Google's Cleaner Spam Reporting Page

Fetched: August 5th, 2011, 2:07am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

Last night, Matt Cutts from Google tweeted they have "released the biggest refresh of our spam report form in, oh, say 10 years." Indeed.

Here is a picture of the new page:

As you can see, they break it down by type of "spam":

Paid links - This page is selling or buying links.
Copyright and other legal issues - This page should be removed under applicable law.
Objectionable content - This page is inappropriate.
Personal/private - This page discloses private information.
Malware - This page is infected.
Phishing - This page is trying to get sensitive information.
Other Google products - This page abuses Google products other than Search, e.g., AdSense, Google Maps, etc.
Something else is wrongThis page has other, non-webspam related issues.

Plus they have a button at the bottom that reads, "This page is really webspam. Report Spam."

Then each form has specific fields they want you to fill out related to the topic. Should make it easier for Google to route the reports to the appropriate groups, thus making it faster for Google to take action.

The old form, which Matt McGee posted a picture of is here:

Google has many ways to report spam and keeps adding new ways. They tend to work for some and while many SEOs won't use it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo Search Europe Powered By Bing Search

Fetched: August 3rd, 2011, 4:52pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

It is official, Yahoo's european properties are now powered by Bing for organic search.

As of this morning, August 3rd, Yahoo France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK are powered by Bing.

A year ago, Yahoo US and Canada switched over to Bing and now Yahoo US, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, UK, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Peru and Venezuela are now all powered by Bing.

This is just the organic results, not the paid results. Yahoo US, Canada and others are powered by adCenter for ads, but not the European properties. That comes later. Microsoft said:

With regards to the paid search transition of Yahoo! traffic into Microsoft Advertising adCenter outside North America, both companies continue to focus on meeting marketplace and product performance benchmarks we have agreed. We are making good progress, as echoed by independent third parties such as Efficient Frontier and Marin Software. We have recently extended our testing efforts to gain the learnings necessary to provide international advertisers and partners with a quality transition experience.
Once these tests completed, we will be able to provide an update on our global rollout plans for search marketing. We remain more than ever committed to providing advertisers and partners with ample notice prior to the transition of their market, and working with them to plan and prepare for a smooth transition.

I first reported this at Search Engine Land as coming on Monday.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Does More Content Mean More Search Referrals?

Fetched: August 2nd, 2011, 3:21pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion around the topic of content and SEO. In short, the webmaster wants to know why that after he has added more content, that his traffic did not pick up.

In short, the more pages you have give you more of a chance to rank well for a more diverse set of keyword phrases and thus should technically lead to more traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Makes sense, doesn't it? That is why many blogs do so well.

Truth is, it doesn't always work like that. Google, now more than ever, don't just want more content, they want content that they feel is quality.

Adding tens of thousands of pages, although a good thing, needed to be added with care and thought. Each and every one of those pages need to be quality. What is quality, I won't get into that here, I've written about it a hundred times.

So while I believe the concept of more pages should equal more traffic. The pages must be deserving of ranking well. If you have more pages that deserve to rank well, then it is a win - win.

Here are two quotes from the thread:

Having more pages that are optimized for different keywords gives you increased opportunity for traffic. It doesn't necessarily mean more traffic, though, since it depends on how popular and how competitive those new keywords are.

It's not just that you add more pages and you get more search coverage and VOILA! you get more traffic.
The pages have to create unique enough value that they can be distinguished from other similar pages by the search engines. Lacking that intrinsic value, they will have to be distinguished by inbound linkage.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Image credit Horia Varlan on Flickr.

Not Authorized For Bing Webmaster Tools?

Fetched: August 2nd, 2011, 3:21pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

I spotted on ongoing thread at Bing Help where some webmasters are receiving the error, "It appears that you are not authorized to work with this site."

The issue has been happening to various webmasters since June of this year. Several other webmasters have complained of the issue but Bing is not sure what is causing it.

Will from Bing is asking those affected by this to submit a support request over here.

I am not sure how quickly Bing will discover the issue, if it is an issue at all. But they are promising to look into it.

Bing also has a sitemap pending bug which is still a current issue with Bing Webmaster Tools.

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

Bug: Bing Sitemap Pending

Fetched: July 30th, 2011, 9:38pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A Bing Help thread has a solo report of an issue with Bing leaving new sitemaps in the "pending" status.

Sitemaps can be submitted to Bing via their Webmaster Tools interface. The issue is, if you recently submitted a sitemap file, it may just be sitting in "pending" status.

Will from Bing confirmed the issue saying:

Our product team is aware of this and is being addressed at this time. Currently, we have no ETA yet due to testing and developing.

It is hard to tell how far back the issue goes but there is an older thread on this topic from early July.

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

Link Building Via Surveys

Fetched: July 22nd, 2011, 1:54am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread talks about a link building tactic that more often than not is very successful. The tactic is conducting surveys.

Not only do you get valuable industry data from surveys, you also get "two waves," as the SEO wrote, of links. The first wave are industry people asking their readership to go to the survey and take it. The second wave are industry people sharing the results and linking to the results.

As you know, we run polls here often enough and although I rarely think of it as a link building tactic, I can definitely vouch for it in terms of linkbait, on some level.

More people are likely to link to the results than link to the request for people to take the survey, but either way, you are getting links and helping the industry.

Have you used this method pretty much just for link building?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Link Building Through Old GeoCities Links?

Fetched: July 22nd, 2011, 1:54am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has interesting discussion around a link building strategy of looking for sites that link to old GeoCities web pages.

As you know, GeoCities was shutdown by Yahoo in October 2009. There are still many sites that link to old GeoCities sites and one tactic link buildings love to use is to inform webmasters of broken links and suggest they link to their site.

That being said, do you think it is worth going through the process of discovering who is linking to old GeoCities sites and then reaching out to those webmasters to link to your site?

You have to understand that is is almost two years since GeoCities was killed and maybe the sites linking to those pages are also pretty much dead? Or maybe not?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Fire Your SEO Firm? Be Careful They Don't Take Revenge

Fetched: July 19th, 2011, 11:00pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

I spotted an upsetting thread at the Google Webmaster Help forums where one website owner claims the same day after he fired his SEO firm, his site went missing from Google - completely missing.

He said:

I gave 2 months notice to a SEO company that I was moving my services to another provider. They were obviously not very happy and I was sent an email today saying they have stopped all work and have cancelled the contract immediately. Two hours later I can't find my site in Google, when it was there this morning. This isn't fair as I was indexed before working with them. Can they do this? Could they have de-indexed my site? How can I cancel that request? My business relies on the internet for clients... I am desperate!

Can you imagine?

What did the SEO firm do to get this guy's site out of the index so quickly? Well, it depends on what access they have. They could have blocked spiders and issues a removal request via Google Webmaster Tools.

If you are firing your SEO firm, you need to make sure they do not have access to your site, your webmaster tools login or anything that can harm you. The SEO firm that the website owner switched to, should have warned the client that this can technically happen - although, not everyone thinks how evil people can be.

We've seen some SEO firms threaten to ban your site if you leave them or don't hire them. And we've seen SEOs take revenge when their clients scam them.

Let this be a lesson for both website owners and SEOs, be careful and tell your new clients to be careful.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: The support from the SEO community to help this person has been tremendous and I hope the site becomes relisted shortly.

Buying Links With Nofollows

Fetched: July 9th, 2011, 7:50am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A HighRankings Forum thread has one SEO saying he was asked by another SEO company to sell them a link, a text link. But the weird part is the SEO company specifically asked for the link to be nofollowed.

Typically when you get a request to buy a link, the person requesting specifically wants the link to be clean of nofollows but not in this case.

We have sold several nofollowed links on this site, based on request. Most of the time it has to do with testing Google and sometimes it has to with fear of being caught for buying links and even some people just don't want the link value.

But in most cases it is SEOs trying to test things.

I'd be careful when selling links and even if they do not want it to be followed, they might come back to you later and ask you to remove the nofollow. So be careful and make sure the deal is in writing and includes the nofollow portion of the deal.

That being said, Google says there is nothing wrong with selling links with nofollow - so enjoy.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Poll: Do You Provide SEO Ranking Reports

Fetched: July 7th, 2011, 8:11pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

There is an outstanding discussion taking place at Sphinn now on the topic of providing SEO clients with ranking reports. There are arguments for both side of the debate.

On one hand, to prove your worth the money your clients are paying you - they want to see what you have done for them. You can provide them basic keyword ranking reports to show them that the clients rankings have improved for X number of keywords over time.

On the other hand, you and I know that Google's search results can differ based on who is searching. Google personalizes the results based on a ton of factors including location, previous searches and clicks, web history, social metrics and so much more. So proving a ranking report really doesn't do justice to what the real searcher sees.

Finally, Google provides their own ranking reports within Google Webmaster Tools and soon, coming to Google Analytics. Other means of getting the data is often against Google's terms of service.

That being said, do you provide client's with keyword ranking report. Take our anonymous poll:

Do You Provide SEO Ranking Reports?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Email Notifications Via Bing Webmaster Tools

Fetched: July 6th, 2011, 6:19pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

I logged in this morning to Bing Webmaster Tools and noticed a pop up from Bing asking me if I want to receive email notifications of site issues and also updates.

The notification read:

Bing Webmaster may sent out emails notifying users about specific issues with their sites, as well as periodic webmaster new updates, offers and tips.

Here is a picture of the notification:

Google is big into email notifications for site issues via Google Webmaster Tools. It can't hurt to ask Bing to send you notifications as well, so I suggest you all login and set this up.

Forum discussion at Bing Webmaster Help.

Update: This was part of the recent Bing WMT update from a month or so ago.

Search Spam vs. Search Relevancy

Fetched: June 29th, 2011, 11:37pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Engine SEO Theory

This morning while brushing my teeth I began thinking of the topic of Panda.

I asked myself, was it aimed at fighting back at "content farms" who target the algorithm to build out content for searchers? Most say yes. If so, then is that a spam fighting technique? Most might say yes.

My question is probably what most Googlers involved in search deal with every day.

Is fighting search spam the same thing as improving search relevance? It is like asking the question, is a good defense better than a good offense.

You have to imagine that if you are constantly battling those trying to knock you down, then how much resources can you put into new and improved relevancy technology? Or is fighting spammers a relevancy tactic by itself.

A company like Google has enough resources to work on both the offense and the defense. But where should they allocate more resources towards? Where should companies that are smaller, such as Blekko or Duck Duck Go allocate resources towards?

Again, I am sure these search companies have a clearer picture of what the proper answer is. But when you think about it from a searcher or SEO point of view, it does start to make you think.

I'd also recommend reading a NY Times opinion article named Google's War on Nonsense.

Get thinking and do comment below.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.

Bing's Spider, BingBot, Crawling Too Hard?

Fetched: June 28th, 2011, 5:25pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

There are two threads with complaints from webmasters that Microsoft's search crawler, now named BingBot, is crawling way too heavily.

The threads are at BingForums and WebmasterWorld. Yes, the discussion is often very limited when you are watching over Bing, simply because many webmasters and SEOs devote 99% of their attention to Google.

That being said, some are claiming BingBot is acting out of control. Honestly, if it was really bad, I believe more people would be complaining. But Microsoft does have a history of crawling too fast, cloaking their bots and creating fake referrals.

Did you notice a spike in your BingBot traffic and crawling?

Forum discussion at BingForums and WebmasterWorld.

Journalists Upset Over Focusing On Keywords In Stories

Fetched: June 17th, 2011, 2:18pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Kim posted a new thread on Cre8asite Forums after watching the Has Weinergate reporting gone too far? on CNN.

The story was about how reporters and journalists may be going too far in their reporting.

But a little bit after 6 minutes into the video, one person said that he received an email - I have to assume from his boss - telling him to use specific keywords in his posts. The keywords included; "Anthony Weiner's Wife Pregnant", "Pregnant wife of Anthony Weiner", 'Pregnant wife out of the country",etc." The journalist admitted it made him sad to see such a request.

Here is the video, skip to 6 minutes in.

There is no doubt journalists need to focus on SEO and keywords but clearly this is not about bad SEO, but rather a style of journalism targeting people searching for sensational headlines.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

2011 Search Ranking Factors Released By SEOmoz

Fetched: June 11th, 2011, 4:39pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

SEOmoz posted the 2011 search engine rankings study they polled in 2011. The last time they did this was two years ago and it is one of the most comprehensive polls done to determine what SEOs feel the most important ranking factors are.

Rand from SEOmoz explained that they "aggregated opinions of 132 SEOs around the world with correlation data from over 10,000 results in Google."

I am not going to go through each piece here but you can at the SEOmoz blog.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Crawl Controls, Index Explorer Expanded & User Management

Fetched: June 11th, 2011, 4:39pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Duane from Bing has announced some cool new features for Bing Webmaster Tools - Bing for some reason told us they nicknamed this update the Honey Badger update.

In any event, the update touches on more flexible crawl delays and controls. A new improved index explorer and a better way to manage user access to the control and reports within Bing Webmaster Tools.

Crawl delay configurable by the hour:

Users can ask us to crawl slower during peak business hours and have us crawl faster during off-peak hours
Simple drag-and-drop functionality allows you to create a crawl graph by clicking and dragging your mouse pointer across the graph. You can easily fine tune by clicking individual columns, too.
Feature enables dedicated pre-set crawl settings for AJAX websites

Index Explorer Revamp:

Freshness
Performance
Extensibility
Reduced machine footprint
Stability and failure detection
New sites will have Index Explorer data the moment they sign up

User and role management

Site owners can now grant admin, read / write, or read-only access to other users for their site using their existing verification code
They can also grant users access to parts of their sites (subdomains or folders)

Plus, Bing improved and added more documentation for Webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Many Feel Google & Bing Should Offer Spam Report Incentives

Fetched: June 9th, 2011, 4:56pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

A couple weeks ago, we reported that Bing was considering offering spam reporting incentives.

To encourage SEOs, who are not too likely to report spam to search engines anyway - incentivize them to increase the chances that they report spam.

The results are in, with with over a hundred responses:

Should Google & Bing Offer Incentives To Report Spam?

57% said YES
43% said NO

Forum discussion continued at Bing Forums.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Three Years Later, SEOs Still Won't Rat Each Other Out

Fetched: June 9th, 2011, 4:56pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

I have to say I am completely shocked by the results of a poll I ran a few weeks ago asking would you report search spammers to Google.

Three years ago, we ran a similar poll, soon after Google began pushing SEOs and others to report spam to them, where less than 30% would report spam to Google. I totally expected the poll to reverse, where 70% would say they would report spam to Google. I was wrong.

That number only jumped up by 6-7 points, where 36% said they would now report spam to Google. 60% said they would not report spam to Google.

I am really all for an industry standing behind each other - so I am a bit happy to see this, to be honest. Loyalty is good to see. Of course, if this was illegal, that would be a different story. I would hope if I ran another poll asking if you would report hacked sites, 100% of you would say yes. Take our poll on that question over here.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Do You Report Malware In Search Results To Google?

Fetched: June 8th, 2011, 8:04pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

There is clearly a difference between search spam and hackers. Read our story from last year named Is Black Hat SEO Criminal?

SEOs can use black hat techniques to boost their rankings. And then there is going beyond black hat, hacking sites, injecting malware and harming people and computers.

That being said, we ran a poll a few weeks ago we ran a poll asking Would you report search spammers to Google?

I wanted to differentiate the question by asking - Would You Report Hacked & Malicious Sites To Google?

Please take my poll:

Would You Report Hacked & Malicious Sites To Google?

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

$1,000 SEO Link Value Reward Contest

Fetched: June 7th, 2011, 5:18pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

Michael Martinez, a frequent commenter here, posted a $1,000 reward for someone in the SEO industry to provide a clear 100% positive proof with evidence that links work to rank sites in Google.

His rules are clear:

A test that any SEO of any experience or competence can use
A test that works 100% of the time.
A test that proves to any reasonable person that an existing link IS or IS NOT passing value.
A test that works with ALL links, not just links with unique anchor text.
A test that can be performed in 10 minutes or less.

But are the rules achievable? Michael thinks not and many SEOs think not as well. And Michael is so confident, he is willing to put $1,000 of his own cash on the line to prove it (or disprove it).

You have until June 30, 2011 to prove it.

There is one forum thread discussing this contest, it is at Cre8asite Forums and I wanted to highlight one comment from administrator Ron Carnell:

Life. It's not always science, it's rarely clean or pretty, and it's never ever ever precise. But you know what else it's not? It's not always arbitrary and it's rarely as simple as pure luck. It's one choice leading to another choice leading to the next. To think otherwise is to ignore the fact there are invariably some people who do it better than others. Not just once in a while, but usually. Not every single time, but still more than most. Not scientifically, not precisely, but nonetheless ... reliably.

Up for the challenge? Details over here.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

SEO Ranking Factors As A Periodic Table

Fetched: June 6th, 2011, 6:33pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Danny Sullivan has put together a mind blowing style of inforgraphic named The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors.

Danny explained he put this together in order to "help clear away some of the mystery and fear for those new to SEO, and provide a "reset" for those who are experienced."

Here is a closer look at the details:

You can find the full size image and links for more information at searchengineland.com/seotable.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Search Engines Team Up On Rich Markup Language via Schema.org

Fetched: June 4th, 2011, 11:19pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

The big news yesterday from the major search engines was the launch of schema.org. This is the search engines uniting to make HTML markup for structured data to be used on the search results display easy and more manageable for webmasters.

This markup language is typically used by search engines to show richer content in the results. Like for recipe results, ratings, reviews, etc.

The full documentation is over here.

Google, Bing and Yahoo all jointly announced it together.

Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has a very good write up explaining why they are doing this and more importantly do you need to change anything going forward.

The quick answer is if you have already done markups, you won't have to change anything because the search engines will continue to support the old markups. But if you are building out a new site you may want to adopt the new markup schema.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.

No Data Available Bing Webmaster Tools Issue

Fetched: May 31st, 2011, 7:27pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

If you try to verify a new site with Bing Webmaster Tools you currently won't be able to see any data for that new site.

A Bing Forum thread has one webmaster complaining. Will from Bing confirmed there is a bug and Bing will work on fixing it but he doesn't know when the issue will be resolved.

I personally was able to replicate the bug and here is a screen shot:

Will from Bing said:

There's currently an issue that we are addressing right now with Bing Webmaster Tools. Currently, there's no ETA for it.
We apologize for any inconvenience.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

SEO Content Writing - Love It or Others Won't

Fetched: May 28th, 2011, 5:09pm CEST by Chris Boggs

Tags: SEO Copywriting

Writing optimized content for SEO requires more than just getting to the required word limit - if the author doesn't care about the output it is unlikely a reader will. A recent article cited at Sphinn discusses the merits of having a positive mindset when sitting down to write optimized content. The article cited is found at Nicole Beckett's Premium Content Source blog.

Nicole provides the following insight:

If youâre truly interested in what youâre talking about, other people will be, too. And if youâre just trying to âget throughâ the article so that you have something new to publish, people will feel the same way.
Remember, you are competing with thousands â" or even millions â" of other people for your target audienceâs attention.

In 2006 I wrote about the the SEO "artiste" in me. To this day I believe this still applies. Sometimes one simply doesnât feel âin the moodâ to write great content. However for an agency or anyone paying a content writer to produce optimized and compelling copy, deadlines are likely more important than allowing the writer to feel most comfortable. In my experience working with some great content developers over the years, I would recommend allowing your writers to work as "flex" of a schedule as possible. Additionally, make sure they have a variety of content to write about, ideally mixed with both interesting and more mundane topics like ball bearings. Once they have gained your trust, allow them to work in an environment that is most suited to maximizing their inner muse.

Share your thoughts at Sphinn or within the comments below.

57 Item SEO Audit Checklist

Fetched: May 25th, 2011, 9:14am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A new post at SEOmoz shared a detailed 57-point checklist for performing a technical audit on a web site for verifying the site meets many of the SEO requirements.

This checklist is extremely comprehensive and can aid new and existing SEOs on preparing a technical audit for their clients.

The checklist goes through the following areas:

Content
Duplicate Content
Accessibility
Site Architecture
Technical Issues
Canonicalization
URLs
Internal Linking
Title Tags
Meta Tags

This might be a great start for those looking to really tear apart their site from a technical and web developer point of view, when considering SEO challenges.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Bing Considering Rewards For Search Spam Reports

Fetched: May 25th, 2011, 9:14am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

It is no secret that both Google and Bing want you to report search spam to them and people do it. It helps them both manually and algorithmically tailor their search ranking algorithms to be better quality.

Google has gone to lengths to encourage users to report spam by creating chrome extensions, forms in webmaster tools, generic forms and heck even the block sites feature. But Google has never promised action on those spam reports nor have they offered any monetary reward for these reports.

A Bing Forum thread has one SEO recommending to Bing to offer an incentive or "small reward" for users who report search spam to Bing. If the spam report leads to a nice unearthing of a spam technique, give the spam reporter something nice to encourage that spam reporter and others to report spam more often.

Side note: The interesting thing about this post was that the one who suggested it dropped a anchor text rich link to his business.

Bing's response was non-committal but yet not shut down completely. Wil from Bing said:

Thank you for your feedback. While we cannot guarantee all requests to be granted, we will certainly have our team review this and consider it in future releases.

Do you think Google and Bing should offer incentives to report spam? Take our poll:

Should Google & Bing Offer Incentives To Report Spam?online survey

Forum discussion at Bing Forum.

Do You Report Search Spammers To Google?

Fetched: May 16th, 2011, 3:34am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

Just over three years ago, we polled you asking do you report competitors via spam reports to Google? And the results were that most do not report spam to Google.

But that was a different time. Three years later, I'd be surprised to see 70% of our industry claim to not report competitors for spamming Google's index in order to benefit their own sites.

Since Matt McGee created a discussion on this topic at Sphinn asking that question, I'd figure we run the poll again.

Do you report search spammers, including competitors, to Google's spam report?

Do You Report Search Spammers To Google?customer surveys

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Bing Asking Merchants To Let Them Know If They Have An Inactive FTP Account

Fetched: April 30th, 2011, 2:48am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

Justin Schmauser from the Bing support team has posted a thread in the Bing Shopping Help forums asking those merchants who have inactive FTP accounts to let him know.

Over the past weeks or so, many merchants began complaining they have inactive FTP accounts, not allowing them to upload product data to Bing Shopping.

In response to this, what appears to be, wide spread issue, Justin from Microsoft posted a thread with steps these merchants should take.

He said in the Bing Shopping Help thread:

Please reply to this thread if you have one or more of the following issues:
You signed up for an adCenter account more than 10 days ago and your FTP account is still listed as Inactive. You are moving from providing your feed via Microsoft download to providing it via Merchant upload, and your FTP account is Inactive. You had an Active account but have not updated your feed file in the last 30 days, so your account has been changed to Inactive.
Please do NOT post any of your account information! This includes your account number, user name(s), and any passwords you have for the account.
What to include in your post:
* Company name
* Day you signed up for your account
* Which of the 3 above reasons describes your situation (or give short explanation if your issue is different)

Here is a picture of what an inactive FTP account looks like in the Bing Shopping console.

Forum discussion at Bing Shopping Help.

Yahoo Search To Keep Data 18 Months

Fetched: April 24th, 2011, 10:27am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

In 2009 Yahoo made a big splash in the industry by saying they will only hold on to search data for 90 days. It was a very short amount of time to retain search queries but Yahoo did it.

Now Yahoo is reversing that decision and upping it from 3 months to 18 months.

The LA Times first reported this saying:

Yahoo Inc. said it would begin keeping records of its usersâ search engine queries for at least 18 months, abandoning an earlier policy under which it kept data for only three months.
"Over the past several years itâs clear that the Internet has changed, our business has changed, and the competitive landscape has changed," Anne Toth, a policy executive at Yahoo, wrote in a blog post. "We have gone back to the drawing board to ensure that our policies will support the innovative products we want to deliver for our consumers."

This is interesting because Microsoft has a 6 month policy. So here, Microsoft will only have 6 months of search history whereas Yahoo will hold onto it for a year or so longer. Microsoft and Yahoo are search partners.

I guess Yahoo has little to lose and a lot to gain from this policy change. At least that is the way I see it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Most SEOs Say There Are Penalty Proof Paid Links

Fetched: April 19th, 2011, 10:43pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A few months ago I ran a poll asking if you believe in penalty proof paid links?

We had over 200 responses and I am a bit surprised to see that most SEOs believe in penalty proof paid links.

53% of those who replied said there are penalty proof paid links, whereas only 26% said there is no such thing. Another 20% answered that they do not know.

I honestly felt that more SEOs would either say there is no such thing as a penalty proof paid link or say they did not know. I am a bit shocked to see so many SEOs saying they are confident that they can pay for links and not get caught.

Are you surprised?

Image credit: Jim Sher on Flickr.

This post was written earlier and scheduled to be posted today.

What To Do When Your SEO Competition Is Catching Up To You

Fetched: April 19th, 2011, 10:43pm CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

There is a great thread at Cre8asite Forums on the topic of what to do when your SEO competition is gaining on you within the search results.

It happens all the time, you watch a specific set of search results and you slowly see a specific site climbing up to your ranks. What can you do to make sure that site does not pass you?

Moderator, EGOL, replied saying that you make your site better. He said:

For an information site I would improve the content on the pages that are being defeated. Produce content that is best-on-the-web for your topic and that can attract links that will lift you in the rankings. Promote those pages to all relevant traffic on your site with the hope of collecting some links, "likes", tweets, etc.
For a retail site... I would create useful and informative content that is best-on-the-web related to my product pages that are being defeated and link to those product pages from that content. The hope is that your great content will attract links, "likes", tweets, etc. Also, your page of useful and information might pull in some traffic and that traffic might follow the link to your sales page.

He also recommended that you create more than one page on your site targeting that keyword phrase and see how it does. EGOL explained:

For especially valuable turf, and where my site is strong enough, I don't hesitate to create two or three pages that compete for the same keyword. If you can get one of your pages to #1 and a second page to #10 then the second page will be listed beneath your first page and you can have #1 and #2 for that keyword. I have seen Google award up to four positions to a website for a single keyword. That can really push your competitors down below the fold.

Administrator, Iamlost also came in and offered a defensive strategy against low quality sites gaining in the ranks. He offered five tips:

(1) First: many/most scrapers take the easy route - they scrape your RSS feed. He offered defenses with protecting your RSS feeds.

(2) Second: many/most scrapers do not always cleanse scraped links. So add links to your feeds.

(3) Third: as an increasing number of scrapers are 'reformulating, i.e. spinning, scraped content it can be impossible to prove copyright infringement. So be more specific in your content.

(4) Fourth: build bot defences in depth including reverse DNS and blocking. Bouncing bots before they can scrape is a good thing.

(5) Fifth: attack: Use DMCA request, report spam to Google and so on.

This thread is worth a read.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Bing Search April Algorithm Update?

Fetched: April 6th, 2011, 4:17am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread is asking if anyone noticed a Bing Search update over the weekend.

There are only two posts, but for Bing, that can mean a sign of an update.

One SEO asked:

I am seeing different results for the last week. The results are substantially different. Overall traffic is about the same. But rankings are all over the place.

Has anyone else noticed a change in their Bing traffic over the weekend?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Goodbye AlltheWeb: Webmasters Loved You

Fetched: April 4th, 2011, 2:36am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

I remember back when Yahoo bought AlltheWeb. Most Webmasters and SEOs were a bit upset, because AlltheWeb was one of those upcoming search engines who really could compete with Google back in the day.

So Yahoo acquired it back in 2004 when Overture, which acquired AlltheWeb in 2003, was acquired by Yahoo. Very early 2004, Yahoo was shopping for search engines to buy, so they no longer have to be dependent on Google's search engine. They were expected to use Inktomi which they acquired earlier, but then they bought AllTheWeb and Alta Vista. They made changed to both engines and released their own flavor of Yahoo Search soon after, surprising some webmasters.

AlltheWeb had one of the largest web indexes back then and was loved by Webmasters.

Now, well, those investments are gone. They outsource their search technology to Microsoft and will redirect the technologies they acquired in 2004 to Yahoo Search, which is powered by Microsoft.

The funny thing, they are doing this on Microsoft's birthday - April 4th!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Poll: Do You Do Link Exchanges With Competitors?

Fetched: March 31st, 2011, 2:26am CEST by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread asks other link builders if they would ever do a link exchange with a competitor.

Typically, you would think you'd never want to link over to a competitor. In fact, we ran a poll on this type of topic back in 2009 and most SEOs said they would not link to a competitor. But one person said it depends, the WebmasterWorld response so far read:

If it benefits your end user, why not? Unless its a fierce competitor selling your widget for half the price you sell it for always get the link anytime its relevant and benefits your end user.
Try not to make linking decisions based on how you think its going to affect your site's search rankings.

Please take my anonymous poll and let me know if you would exchange links with competitors. I am not simply asking if you would link to competitors, I asked that already. I am not asking if you would exchange links with a competitor.

Do You Do Link Exchanges With Competitors?customer surveys

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit, Stephen on Flickr.

Research Paper On Bing Determining Web Page Credibility

Fetched: March 24th, 2011, 4:49pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Bing SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread cites a new research paper published by Microsoft Research named Augmenting Web Pages & Search Results For Improved Credibility (PDF).

In short, how does or could Bing determine the credibility of a web page based on the content and signals surrounding a specific web page. And if they can determine the credibility of a web page, how can they use that for search engine rankings in Bing search results?

Here is the abstract:

The presence (and, sometimes, prominence) of incorrect and misleading content on the Web can have serious conse-quences for people who increasingly rely on the internet as their information source for topics such as health, politics, and financial advice. In this paper, we identify and collect several page features (such as popularity among specialized user groups) that are currently difficult or impossible for end-users to assess, yet provide valuable signals regarding credibility. We then present visualizations designed to augment search results and Web pages with the most prom-ising of these features. Our lab evaluation finds that our augmented search results are particularly effective at in-creasing the accuracy of users' credibility assessments, highlighting the potential of data aggregation and simple interventions to help people make more informed decisions as they search for information online.

I was going to go through and pull out the metrics Microsoft covered in the paper, but I do not have to do that. Bill Slawski already did that at his blog, SEO By The Sea. He summarized:

Here are some of the "credibilty" signals that that they looked at:

On-Page Features

Spelling Errors
Number of Advertisements on a page
Domain Type (.com, .gov. etc.)

Off-Page Features

Awards and Certifications, such as the Webby Award, Alexa Rank, Health on the Net (HON) awards.
Toolbar PageRank, and Rankings for Queries used in generating their data set
Sharing information, from sites like Bit.ly and other shortening sites, Likes and shares and comments and clicks from Facebook, Clicks from shortened URLs on Twitter, bookmarks on Delicious.

User Aggregated Non-Public Data from Toolbar Usage

General Popularity â" unique visitors from users
Geographic Reach â" number of visitors from different geographic regions
Dwell Time â" amount of time users kept a URL open in their browser (as an estimate of how long they might have viewed a page
Revisitation patterns â" how often people revisited a page, on average
Expert Popularity â" the behavior of people who have been shown to have an expertise in a pariticular field, and user data about their visits to pages in those fields.

Very nicely done and Bill goes through it even more deeply at his blog.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo Search Direct Launches

Fetched: March 24th, 2011, 4:49pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

Yahoo made big news in search yesterday by announcing the launch of Yahoo Search Direct. It is like Google Instant but within the search suggestions box.

Now saying Yahoo is copying Google here is not fair. Why? Because Yahoo had Yahoo Instant Search back in 2005, about five years prior to Google launching Google Instant.

That being said, Search Engine Land has a nice number of articles on it that sum up what it does. Before I do that, here is a brief feature list:

Trending Searches - The moment the cursor hits the search box, top search trends appear and are updated every 10 minutes to display the latest and greatest search trends.
Search Previews - Search Direct predicts the search term as you type, providing the 10 most likely searches. You can then easily scan each option to see the related top results and find the best match for your needs.
Direct Answers - For many common searches, Search Direct provides instant answers before you click the Search button. Find an address or phone number, a three-day weather forecast, financial stock performance, the top trending stories at Yahoo! News, or when and where a movie is playing - all without going to a results page.
Direct Results - When you scan the search options and find the site you need, Search Direct provides exactly that - direct access to the site. No more overwhelming pages of links.
Rich Content - For all top searches about sports, top news stories, and finance, Search Direct displays rich content that only the world's largest digital media company can provide. For example, type "n" to get the Yahoo! News display, which always shows the top two trending stories.

Search Engine Land Stories:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorldand Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Forgotten & Underused SEO Tactics

Fetched: March 10th, 2011, 5:24pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A Sphinn thread has a nice discussion around the "most underrated SEO tactics" used by webmasters and SEOs.

I thought I'd share some of the tips and tactics given in the thread and have you add your own.

Blog comments that are properly moderated.
Clean and easy to manage site code.
Analytics to catch "low hanging" keyword phrases.
Server set up, such as proper redirects and status codes.
Unique and relevant images
Internal linking
Optimized Google Place pages
and much more...

Check out the full thread at Sphinn and share your tactics and tips.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Too Many Links Too Fast Or New Site SEO Syndrome?

Fetched: March 4th, 2011, 3:41pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

The graph below is from the SEOptimise blog showing what happened to a new site after building 10,000 spammy links to it in a single day. What happened was the site tanked in rankings just after a few weeks.

He said:

I took a new domain that I wasnât too worried about destroying, picked a reasonably competitive keyword, and built about 10,000 really nasty-looking low quality links in to the home page with a mixture of phrase and exact match anchor text.
The site ended up ranking #1 on Google.com for this keyword for about three weeks, which as you can see had a significant impact on increasing the siteâs traffic.

Is it about the bad links? Is it about the site being new and ranking due to QDF temporarily?

New data shows the site is now back in the top 10, after taking a dive in rankings.

This case study is continually building upon itself in the comments. There are just so many factors, it is hard to isolate the issue or issues. The site is new. It has 10,000 horrible links. The links are all spammy, 99% of them. The site is now ranking well again. The site may be based in the UK.

Here are some good comments from the post:

After reading your latest comment, my opinion is that the penalty was triggered by the fact that the spammy links accounted for 100% of the external inbound links of the target website (which had none beforehand). If you repeated this test on an established website with non-zero link popularity, I believe you would not get the same results. Hurting a competitor may be possible, but itâs certainly not that easy.

This is likely a failure of Googleâs QDF algorithm. They want fresh, viral news to appear in the SERPs as it comes, but itâs also perhaps very possible that they canât efficiently determine what to trust and what not to trust at certain points because of the push/pull effect trying to display âfreshâ news creates in their search results.

Anyway, if anything, it is always fun to watch people destroy things.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Poll: Are There Risk Free Paid Links?

Fetched: February 21st, 2011, 1:04pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

In light of Forbes being penalized for selling links and Google sending out link warnings to link sellers and buyers - a new topic arose at WebmasterWorld where one SEO asks if there is such a thing as a "penalty-proof paid link."

Can you buy certain links and not run any risk in being penalized for that link?

Of course, many SEOs know there are some links - paid - that won't get you banned. Links like the Yahoo Directory or Open Directory Project. Links from non-profit organizations that you are a member of. There are many cases where you can "buy" a link and not get penalized for it.

But are there ways to buy mass links and not get caught. Or better yet, are there ways to buy links specifically for Google ranking purposes and never ever run the risk of getting caught?

Take my poll below:

Are There Penalty Proof Paid Links?Market Research

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

IPv6 Coming: SEOs May Want To Prepare

Fetched: February 21st, 2011, 1:04pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

IPv6, Internet Protocol version 6, is the Internet's answer to running out of IP addresses. IPv4 had 4,294,967,296 IP addresses because it was 32 bits and ultimately was a test that became real. IPv6 is 128-bit and has approximately 340 undecillion or 3.41038 IP addresses - it's a lot and we wouldn't have to worry about running out of IP addresses.

But to make the change our computers need to update. That means your web site host needs to update things, like your servers, the routers, DNS, and so on. It also means that ISP, the way you connect to the internet, also need to update things.

Why the big rush now? Well, there is no rush but technically, the last block of IP addresses were just sold, so we are officially out of new IP addresses. Got that?

SEOs of course want to make sure that (1) the search engines can crawl, index and rank their pages and (2) searchers can click over and view their web pages from the search engines.

When IPv6, if you are not ready, it is possible you will be missing out on either one or two. But no need to panic, we are a far way from that.

The internet community is holding a World IPv6 Day and players like Google and Bing are partaking.

But again, SEOs are concerned and one expressed his concern in a Google Webmaster Help thread. I responded that this SEO should not worry but if they want to learn more, they should read the Google post and see google.com/intl/en/ipv6.

Google's JohnMu came in to confirm what I said but also add:

Even though it might not be necessary at the moment, I think it's a great idea to move forward see what you'd need to do to enable IPv6 connectivity, both where you're working (or at home) and where your site is hosted.

SEOs may want to consider joining the World IPv6 Day and prep some of their sites for this transition. There is plenty of information at the World IPv6 Day page.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Is Innovative Link Building Dead?

Fetched: February 7th, 2011, 8:21pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has conversation around the topic of link building. The question in the thread is, is there anything new to be learned on the topic? Are there any new techniques to get quality links that have no been uncovered? Is the innovation behind link building dead?

A senior member, wheel, said:

Quite frankly, there isn't anything unique or new. It's simply learning the techniques of finding places to get links and then methods to get links from those places. And those procedures are detailed in this forum repeatedly, with variations. Outside of that, if you say 'no link exchange request and no buying links', I don't believe there IS anything else.

In reply to that, moderator, martinibuster, said:

I agree that there isn't anything new being published, I agree with that. But there are new techniques being worked out. I see them in action. I hear them in confidence. And when I need one I invent a way of building links that no one else, as far as I can tell, has thought of.

I am sure those who live and breath link building have strokes of genius when coming up with new ways to get links. I mean, article building, guest posts, widget creation, social media sharing and so on are old techniques - but who knows what will come out in the future that link builders can utilize?

Future thinking is never dead.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Payback: Upset Ex-Girlfriend Spams Boyfriend In Google Images

Fetched: February 7th, 2011, 8:21pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

Upset boyfriends and girlfriends are nothing new. There are plenty of stories of girlfriends getting back at their ex-boyfriends for mistreatment and visa versa. But in the age where Google ranks supreme, you do not want to mess with a girl who knows how to manipulate Google.

One guy learned this the hard way.

Apparently, a disturbed ex-girlfriend took her ex-boyfriend's professional taken picture and polluted it all over Google Images for a search on his name. You can see the Google Image search spam yourself by clicking here or in the screen shot below:

There has to be dozens of the same image, all with little notes from the girl written all over them. I won't name the individual in text on this page (because I do not want the page to rank for his name) or the notes but it is a bit interesting to see upset ex-couples use Google Images as payback.

I suspect the images will be dropping out of Google shortly simply because it seems like the image sources have been removed from the servers they were hosted on.

As per the complaint thread started by the boy's mother at Google Webmaster Help, the mother was extremely upset about this. She said:

My minor son's ex-girlfriend took a copyrighted picture of him (we own copyright) and uploaded it more than 60 times to a website. On each image she wrote slanderous, defamatory and pornographic captions. The webmaster of the site states he removed the images 6 weeks ago, but Google Search still shows all the images. My son is so stressed out and embarrassed and we've done everything we can to get images off of Google including URL removal tool, a letter to Google Legal with all the URLs because of copyright infringement, and nothing has worked!

You see, she knew to have the source site remove the images but Google still has them in their index. The issue is that although the images appear to be gone, the URLs they are sourced via are actually returning a 200 status code, which to Google means they are still there. They need to return a page not found status code, and they do not.

Lesson? Before you upset your girlfriend or boyfriend, make sure they do not know how Google works. Oh, and never mess with an SEO.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Want Links? Build Or Buy Sites That Can Link To You

Fetched: February 7th, 2011, 8:21pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around how some sites that rank well in Google but only have links from sites they actually own.

The disturbed SEO said:

Last week, a competitor that is normally on page 3 to 4 on Google has started to rank number one or 2 for a highly competitive term. When i was evaluating their backlinks, 85% of the 20 links they have are all from blog / low content sites they own. When I say low content I mean one post on a blog with a unique url over 6 months ago. The other 15% are from low quality directories. I thought Google was trying to get rid of this type of spam links, not reward them... Anyone else seeing anything like this?

Guess what? It works. It doesn't necessarily matter if the sites that link to you are sites you technically own. If you have good quality content and the links are somewhat quality, then it will count. If you abuse it, then Google may take action, but otherwise, it is fine.

Let me quote Wheel, a Senior Member at the forums, who said I "use it myself thank you very much. Works great. And remember, that doesn't invalidate the content or usefullness of the site that is ranking."

He added other methods he uses:

I personally prefer to have a stable of high quality sites to give myself backlinks from but there's a variety of things you can do:
- lots of crap sites as you've described. I haven't personally seen this in a long time, but I'm not surprised.
- build out related but different sites in the niche and drive backlinks to them, get them hosted etc distinctly. Makes for valid backlinks and as long as Google can't connect the dots they should look good. I've got a widget site in my niche and a forum in my niche. Both are great sites on their own. I give myself links from them.
- buy dropped domains in your niche, rebuild them somewhere else. Maybe even let sit somewhere with content on them for six months or a year. I've actually got a whole bunch of pr4-6 websites with content on them that were dropped a couple of years ago. Today they're not dropped sites, they're pr4-6 2 year old sites.
- buy existing dormant websites. Go looking for dormant websites in your niche, offer them some small amount, see if they bite. If they do, leave the site as about untouched as you can and then drop yourself a link.

What do you think?

Let me be clear, this does not mean you should go out and build thousands of blogpost blogs and link them all to you. If it looks unnatural, Google will eventually get you.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's Own Content Farm: Google Translate Spam

Fetched: January 29th, 2011, 4:17am CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

Vanessa Fox covered how Google was content spamming their own index with Google Translate pages. She discovered it via a tweet from @rishil.

In short, if you searched site:translate.google.com up came thousands of pages that Google was indexing of a simply auto-translated set of search results. Here is a picture:

We know Google considers Google Translated pages as spam on some level. They do not want auto-translated content in their index. But this is exactly what Google was showing in their index, even better yet, on the Google.com domain.

This is technically a form of content spam and we know Google said they are targeting content farms and spam in 2011. Timely?

In any event, as Vanessa explains, this is a case of one division in Google not knowing that they did something wrong. As soon as Google was informed, they put in the required robots.txt commands to block these pages. If you take a look at translate.google.com/robots.txt you will see two lines, one for Disallow: /?q= and other for Disallow: /?text=. This should fix the issue and drop all these pages from the Google index.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Can You Confuse Google With Your Internal Anchor Text?

Fetched: January 28th, 2011, 12:48pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

There is an interesting conversation going on about the use of your anchor text on your internal links at WebmasterWorld forums. The topic here is that this SEO wants a specific page of his to rank for a term, so he optimizes the page for the term and links to it with the phrase in his internal anchor text. But he also links from that page to another internal page using the same anchor text he wants the current page to rank for. Got that?

For example, I want to rank a page for big blue pineapple chair, so when I link to the page, I use the anchor text big blue pineapple chair. But I also decide to link to a different page on my site, via the big blue pineapple chair page using the anchor text "big blue pineapple chair" to this other page.

The question is, will this confuse Google in thinking the page that is all about big blue pineapple chairs is actually linking off to another page about big blue pineapple chair and they should rank that page instead.

Nothing like a good deep linking topic to make link builders salavate. :)

Tedster replied to the thread saying, "Theoretically, it does sound like this might become an issue in some cases. In reality, I've never run into it. I think I'd still avoid using the exact same phrase I was targeting in the outbound anchor text."

Personally, I have no clue. Logically, you would think it might cause confusion. But I do not have practical examples of either, so I have no clue. Tedster said he has never seen it, have you?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

How To Train Your Link Building Team

Fetched: January 28th, 2011, 12:48pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Link Building tips SEO

A WebmasterWorld thread has nice discussion on the topic of how to train a link building team or link builder. The thread doesn't get good until the content after the 2011, so skip down to that portion.

Professional link builders obviously have different ideas on how to train and sculpt the supreme link builder. So the thread has some of those thoughts in there. Let me pull out a few quotes:

Is it necessary to train the link builders? All you really need to train is the point person, the manager, for the overall strategy. Everyone else below them can use scripted actions, much like Google support employees do.

Link Development vs. Traffic Development and Staying with the Times Popularity Has a Whole New Meaning
[www.webmasterworld.com]
Link Cliques - Rethinking Link Acquisition Tactics for 2009 How to Assert Your Relevance Among Established Sites
Membership required...
[www.webmasterworld.com]
Have you read any Good Link Development Blogs/Articles?
[www.webmasterworld.com]

Why not hire a person who already have an experienced? It's a time consuming if you will need to train the person instead of looking for more experienced staff.

If it was me and these link builders had no knowledge at all, I'd start with the basic of SEO. Then show examples of why links are important. Train them on good links versus bad links. Then show them some pointers on how to find good links with various tactical tools. Make sure they do it within a system that tracks the links, requests, successes, and so on. Then do weekly reviews of their techniques and keep adding pointers.

I am not a link builder. I never request links. I don't do SEO. But this is how I would approach it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google's Thoughts On Link Building Through Comment Spamming

Fetched: January 28th, 2011, 12:48pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Search Web SEO Spam

If the nofollow attribute was built for anything, it was built for comment spam. Yes, if you do not remember, Google and the search engines worked closely with MovableType, WordPress and other blog and forum systems to help them build in the nofollow attributes to help save their search index and to help reduce comment spam. That was one, if not the single most important, reason behind introducing the nofollow attribute. It has thus been expanded for other things, such as any paid link or PageRank sculpting (it gets more complicated).

Anyway, I found an interesting thread at Google Webmaster Help which talks about the nofollow and link building through comment spamming. One thing you do not want to do is ask Google if it is okay to drop comments on blogs with the sole intent of building links. But people do crazy and wild things in official Google forums.

I was initially going to name this post, Google's final word on what the nofollow attribute blocks, but then I saw JohnMu at Google somewhat mocking the use of comment spam for link building. Hence the new focus. Let me pull out the reply from John.

Going back to the original question, commenting only with the goal of getting links is a bit lame, in my opinion. Do you honestly think that any site owner appreciates comments like "I really enjoyed the article. It proved to be Very helpful to me and I am sure to all the commenter here! It's always nice when you can be informed In such way,I'm sure you had fun reading and watching this post. san diego wrongful death attorney" or "It would also be useful have the plugins categorized a little better on the website. Browsing them is a pain the backside, since you have to go thru about 10 million social plugins that are a waste of time when you specifically need web dev tools. Domain Names Australia" (both taken from our blog's spam queue this morning)? That's just pure spam, and if you're contributing to it by posting more comments like that, then I know a few people who would like to talk to you out back...

He gives two examples of poor comment spam. You and I see it every day, it is nothing new. If they get passed my spam filters, I try to manually block them - some always slip by.

But then John ends with the line that I love, "if you're contributing to it by posting more comments like that, then I know a few people who would like to talk to you out back..."

Sometimes I love the honesty here.

And what is Google's official word on how the nofollow works?

Let's be absolutely clear about this: Links that use the rel=nofollow microformat do not pass PageRank and are not used in our ranking algorithms.
This does not mean that the target URL will never be crawled. By adding a rel=nofollow to a link, you're essentially removing a sign pointing to the restroom. Just because that sign is gone does not mean that Googlebot will never find the restroom. Using rel=nofollow is not a way to block crawling altogether -- if you need to do that, then use the robots.txt file.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Yahoo UK Powered By Bing Soon

Fetched: January 19th, 2011, 1:02pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: Yahoo Search Engine SEO

Currently Yahoo Search in the UK is still running off the original Yahoo index and algorithm.

As you know, Bing is powering Yahoo's organic and paid results in the US and Canada. Last week, Yahoo and Bing announced they migrated over the organic results in Australia, Brazil and Mexico to Bing.

So what is next?

A WebmasterWorld has some speculation that Yahoo UK is next. Some webmasters and SEOs are noticing that the Yahoo UK results have "two different indexes" on refreshes. By that, if a person searches once and then again, they are seeing two completely different set of results. In addition, when they compare one of those sets, it seems to match up with the Bing results. This shows me that Bing and Yahoo are heavily testing the UK migration and it might be next up on the list.

Are you ready for Bing to power Yahoo in the UK? I assume so, at least by now.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Poll: The Yearly Cost Of SEO Education

Fetched: January 19th, 2011, 1:02pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread asks how much does it cost to learn SEO.

As you can imagine, I am sure the answers run from nothing to thousands of dollars. I think I personally learned from testing and reading a book that cost $15.

But most SEOs have annual education on some level. Either they go to conferences, do webinars, pay for access to exclusive forums or just spend their own time testing things out.

For the sake of the poll below, please assume any time you spend is not worth anything. Instead, what is the true annual cost in terms of dollars you spend out of your pocket or your company's pocket, on SEO education. This can be in the form of going to conferences, having SEO training, buying books and so on.

How Much Do You Spend On Learning SEO Annually?online surveys

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Overstock.com Organic Search Rankings on the Rise

Fetched: January 17th, 2011, 10:51pm CET by Chris Boggs

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a marathon, not a sprint, when properly strategized and implemented. The most effective SEO case studies look at periods greater than one year, and measure sustained improvements in organic search exposure. Typical metrics that I enjoy tracking include growth in the number of unique keywords used to enter the domain, as well as unique entry pages. Bounce rate is another one to keep an eye on to determine how effectively search engines are ranking the "right" pages of a site.

In order to get the most of competitive assessments, you should be monitoring top performers for a long time. Obviously when looking at others you can't have all of the above data, although tools such as the SpyFu Recon report and from more robust competitive intelligence such as Hitwise do help to do case studies of competitors within a more condensed time frame. Additionally, monitoring rankings and getting a "feel" for improved performance happens when you are closely following a certain vertical or set of keywords.

A recent discussion at Webmaster World Forums describes one such observation, when a new member notes improved Overstock.com Google Rankings and wonders: any ideas on what they did?

WMW Admin "Tedster" (Ted Ulle - one of the leading Google experts not actually working for Google) typically doesn't allow case studies and site reviews at WMW, but makes an exception in this case. He doubts a sizeable 2010 influx in inbound links as being the likely cause, but does suggest micro-formatting may have something to do with it:

What they apparently did do last year is add rich meta-data in the RDFa format to all their product pages

Ironically, I have actually used Overstock over the past few years as a "go-to" example for a good way to add content to eCommerce pages. A few years back I noticed their use of descriptive content at the very bottom of pages, and found that those mostly category-level pages were improving in relevant "head and shoulder" search results. This strategy seems to still exist on some pages, however a "site:" Google operator for the site also tells an interesting story: "Guides" seem to be highly listed in the order of returned pages.

Upon very early inspection, I feel the continued growth of relevant content coupled with internal linking is likely the strongest factor in their improvement. What are your thoughts? Please share at Webmaster World Forums or in the comments below.

2011 Search Ranking Signals

Fetched: January 5th, 2011, 10:23am CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

A WebmasterWorld thread has a discussion around what these SEOs feel will be the most important ranking factors in 2011. Guess what? In this 2011 SEO thread, no one is talking about links or link popularity.

Instead they are discussing social factors, brand factors and human factors. The three main things SEOs think 2011 will be about include:

Social Factors such as Facebook and Twitter
Brand Factors & Prominence
Less Ranking Factors, More People Factors

Yes, the first and the last go hand in hand but there are ways of not using social factors to think human factors.

Join the 2011 SEO factors discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

WebmasterWorld Tries Out Heavier Home Page

Fetched: January 3rd, 2011, 6:44pm CET by Barry Schwartz

Tags: SEO SEM Forum News

WebmasterWorld, a popular forum we cover here a lot, is testing out a new home page look.

The new look incorporates more banner ads, brand new image spots to highlight featured threads and additional content from the featured thread. Here is a picture with notes on what exactly has changed.

In a WebmasterWorld Brett Tabke, the owner and founder of WebmasterWorld said:

Just trying out some stuff. Dunno if spaghetti is going to stick unless you throw it.

Yea, it can use a bit of clean up, but I have a feeling this is the direction WebmasterWorld might be going in the future.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Getting Started in the SEO Field

Fetched: December 30th, 2010, 8:14am CET by Chris Boggs

Tags: SEO Search Engine Optimization

Education is always a step towards a rewarding career, but as any recent college graduate can attest - getting a job right out of school can be difficult these days. There are some fields that are hiring at a rapid pace, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of them. A recent post at High Ranking Forums from a new member asks what are the best first steps into career in SEO.

The poster describes having just completed a certification program at Search Engine College(SEC), and needing to find work without much "real life" experience under her (his?) belt.

The city where I live only has 1 SEO firm that isn't currently recruiting, and I'm wondering the best way to gain some experience so that I can eventually turn this into a full time career. I know there is a lot of SEO work available on freelance sites... but I don't think I have the experience yet to attempt to bid for those kind of jobs.

First of all I have to congratulate "Gena" for not trying to fake experience. Some of the resumes I have seen are filled with downright lies when it comes to past experience. I even saw one where the person claimed to be a former Director of SEO at the agency where I work! (No one had ever heard of him)

SEO and other search engine marketing certification programs from entities such as SEC, SEMPO (disclosure: I serve on the Board of SEMPO), and Bruce Clay provide the necessary education to get started in the field, but most fall short when it comes to job placement, based on my observations. SEC does state on its domain that there is access to job seeker forums, and SEMPO promises similar support, but frankly once you get the degree, you are still on your own when it comes to getting a job in the field.

Gena's frustration is partially because of living in a town with only one SEO practitioner. I hate to say it, but one shrewd move would be to consider moving to a more marketing agency-centric location. Of course, not many agencies are going to foot the bill for that travel, given low experience level. Perhaps Gena can go pitch a local design or marketing firm and convince them that they need to add SEO to their suite of services.

I can tell you from personal experience (and sometime anguish) that it is very difficult to find a junior resource that has any SEO training, and is willing to move on their own dime. Of course, more experienced SEOs are even harder to find, so in this case being green may be less of a hindrance than for other industries.

I would recommend that Gena keeps networking and perhaps can find a job remotely. Please share your thoughts, experience, and advice at the High Rankings Forums or in the comment below.

Sphinn Now Accepting Submissions Via Twitter

Posted: October 18th, 2010, 2:37pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Sphinn is trying something new, Twitter submissions. You can tweet tips to @sphinn and moderators will monitor the account and review all submissions sent via Twitter.

How does it work? Just send a tweet in the format of [tip @sphinn]. For example to submit a tip to Sphinn for my last video recap, all you need to do is tweet:

tip @sphinn http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023103.html

This is not a new idea. I believe Techmeme was the first to make this submission technique popular.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Can You Lose Your Job If Your SEO Doesn't Translate To Conversions?

Posted: October 13th, 2010, 3:04pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Many of you work as SEOs in-house, many as independent contractors and many for yourselves on your own web sites. Those who have to answer to a boss, does your SEO work get judged on ranking of pages or based on if those rankings ultimately lead to a conversion?

Kim Krause Berg posted a thread at the Cre8asite Forums asking this question. She asked, "Does Your Job Depend On Conversions?"

She asks specific questions based on her experience working for management:

Is your dependent on ROI? In other words, if your SEO work does not translate into a certain set of criteria, do you lose the job?
What are the criteria for ROI as managers see it? Is it higher revenue, rank, traffic, what?
Anyone: What are the typical expectations for meeting ROI? For ex., if an organic plan doesn't seem to be working, how long does it take to decide this?
Anyone: Are conversions just something SEO's make happen or does user experience web design play a part in the overall marketing plan?

Let me make it simple. If you rank your client/boss in the first position for all the keywords he wants to rank well for, but ultimately the conversions are not there, do you think you'll still have a job in a year for now?

Here is my more basic poll:

Does Your SEO Job Depend On Conversions?online survey

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

70% Say Sphinn Is Dead Or Simply Don't Care

Posted: September 24th, 2010, 3:17pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Earlier this month, Sphinn (disclosure, I am extremely involved with the company behind Sphinn) dropped user voting on stories and the industry revolted. It was a big deal for a couple days and now you don't hear much about it. So I felt it was a good time to start up the controversy, especially since I am offline right now (scheduled post).

Back then, I posted a poll asking if removing voting from Sphinn essentially kills the site? I'll tell you that I responded, "not sure," but most people are confident. 70% said either Sphinn is dead without voting or they don't care either way, which may be the same thing - Sphinn is dead.

Personally, I don't know. Here are the 150 or so responses:

40% said Sphinn Is Dead
30% said Don't Care
15% said Sphinn Is NOT Dead
8% said they are Not Sure
Rest said "Other answer..."

Most the other comments said that Sphinn "was already dead." But my favorite comment, although it makes me sad, was "I bet this gets more voted than the best Sphinn today."

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

Note: This post was written September 21st and scheduled to go live today.

Update: On September 22nd, Sphinn announced the Sphinn 3.0 changes, which make non-voting official, amongst other things.

Google Doesn't Pay Forum "Top Contributors"

Posted: September 17th, 2010, 2:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

I spotted an unusual thread at the Google Webmaster Help forums. The thread had an individual ask how he can a job as a "top contributor" in the Google Forums.

Top contributors are those who spend a nice amount of time helping others in the Google support forums. It can range from the webmaster forum, web search forum, AdSense forum, Chrome forum and so on. Anyone who spends a lot of time helping webmasters and Google deems they worthy are labeled "top contributors."

I believe top contributors have special privileges, such as being able to flag certain posts for a real Google employee to review. I suspect they also have their own private discussion forum to chat with Google employees. Plus they get the label, "top contributor" added to their names. I also believe they may receive a t-shirt or something, as a thank you.

Outside of that, they get zero compensation. Google doesn't pay them in any way.

So the guy looking to get paid to be a top contributor is out of luck. At first this guy didn't believe they didn't get paid. He said:

Why people spend so much of valuable time on browsing scrap sites and write hundreds of pages. That too for 24x7x365. All this just for a title "Top Contributor"? It's not convincing...

Yes, it is true. As Sasch, a top contributor said:

We're here to help webmasters... that's it.

It is true, most are there to help - like it or not.

But that doesn't mean Google doesn't pay people to help their users. For example, if you want to help webmasters with their Google problems, you can and you can get paid. You have to apply to be a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, which is a job based in Zurich, Switzerland. I believe they may make exceptions for certain people to work from other Google offices. I suspect many do already.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Billable SEO Time Survey Results

Posted: September 10th, 2010, 3:20pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Many SEOs bill by the hour or offer monthly pricing plans. I asked the SEO industry months ago how much of your time is billable.

I wanted to share the breakdown of the 140 results we collected.

How Much Of Your SEO Time Is Billable?

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forums.

Note: This post was scheduled to be automatically posted today.

SEOs Tell Newspapers To Stay Out of SEO Business

Posted: September 9th, 2010, 2:35pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Remember how the starving newspapers began to try to revitalize their dying businesses by offering SEO services?

Well, we ran a poll asking our readers if newspapers should sell SEO services. The results are not that surprising.

Most SEOs don't want the newspapers to get involved in SEO. Some for competitive reasons, some for professional integrity reasons and some for other reasons. But some surprisingly don't care, they find more competition useful.

64% said they do not want newspapers in the SEO business, whereas the rest said sure, let them in.

The one "other answer" was:

is there still such a thing as print newspapers?

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

Note: This post was scheduled to be automatically posted today.

Sphinn Drops Voting & SEO Community Revolts

Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 3:39pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

I doubt you missed the big SEO community news from yesterday. Danny Sullivan announced in a Sphinn thread that Sphinn will be going the editorial route and be removing voting. Instead, editors will decide what should be on the front page and not users.

Users can still submit content, but editors have the final say on what makes it to the front page of Sphinn. The goal is to have hand picked content that the community can discuss, as opposed to have users vote on content submitted by anyone. Read Danny's full explanation for more details.

The community, at least the ones upset with the decision, were extremely vocal about their dislike of this decision. Some are saying that the moderators will only allow their "friends" content on the front page. Some are saying that taking away voting removes the core of the Sphinn site. Some are saying that this just makes it one more discussion forum. Personally, I have no idea - but I'd like to see how this model works.

What do you think? Here is an anonymous poll:

Does Removing Voting From Sphinn Kill It?online survey

There are many threads and blog posts about it, most linked to in the primary Sphinn thread.

Forum discussion at several Sphinn threads.

Sphinn Threads Make Their Way on Search Engine Land

Posted: August 3rd, 2010, 3:26pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

If you visit Search Engine Land and scroll down and look on the right hand side, you will see a box named "Hot At Sphinn." Yep, Search Engine Land's social sharing site, Sphinn, now has more of a presence on the Search Engine Land site.

Not only that, but weekly, there will be a Hot on Sphinn post on Search Engine Land promoting the best posts on Sphinn.

Matt McGee announced this on the Sphinn blog. Matt said:

Obviously, we're hoping this helps Sphinn gain some more exposure among Search Engine Land readers - and we're also hoping it rewards you for sharing great content on Sphinn. (Not to mention the little extra SEO benefit from the inbound links that will flow to the original authors/articles.)

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

How Much Of Your SEO Consulting Is Billable?

Posted: July 20th, 2010, 2:55pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

A thread at HighRankings Forum asks members, how much of their time is billable. Some may work 10 hours per day and some may work 2 hours per day, of the time you work, how much of it is billable?

The person asked:

If you spend 50 hours/week doing SEO consulting, how much of that time do you get paid for @ your regular fee?
just head this question in my mind again after someone told me over a year ago that up to 50% of their time wasn't even billed..wondering if it's the same for SEO consultants.

A good questions. Personally, close to none of my time is billable. I run a web development company and my employee's time is billable, not mine. I run stats on how much of their time is billable and, for them at least, most of my guys are over 6 hours per 8 hours of billable work, which is good.

Here is a poll, of the time you are "working" (i.e. at work, doing seo, reading educational material, etc), how much of that time is billable?

How Much Of Your SEO Time Is Billable?Market Research

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Bing Forums Top Contributor Quits Over Frustration

Posted: May 27th, 2010, 3:05pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Every forum lives and dies based on their members and how active and helpful they are. That is why it is critical for forums to make sure their top members (the most giving members) are heard and listened to.

Recently, a Bing Forum thread has one of the top contributing members publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with the forum, ultimately leading in him announcing he is done with helping out in the forums. Let me quote his message:

this forum is just deliberately trying to annoy me - I just spent over half an hour writing a response to a thread, and when I attempted to post it, guess what? Yes, I get the BLOODY ANNOYING MODERATION MESSAGE!!!!!!!
Meaning that my post wasn't published and my time was completely wasted.

And it's not as though it's the first time... this has been going on for AGES!!!

I've tried to patiently wait for the numerous issues with this forum to be fixed; I'm not waiting any longer - I am wasted hours of my time if I try to help people here and my posts don't get published.

I will be posting in Google's forums from now on

Goodbye Bing

Brett Yount the Program Manager of Bing Webmaster Center emailed this member offline, which is likely his best move. But the damage has been done. I know many moderators who leave forums, most over getting too busy with work but some over frustrations similar to this.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.

Should Newspapers Sell SEO Services?

Posted: May 25th, 2010, 3:42pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Matt McGee at Search Engine Land reported that U.S. newspapers are now selling SEO services. Honestly, I am not surprised for a few reasons:

(1) They are in the content business and most content businesses should know how valuable SEO is.
(2) Newspapers sell ads, and many of them have sold text ads or been asked to. So they know something about SEO.
(3) I would hope newspapers have in-house SEO teams they can put on client projects.

I deal every now and then with newspapers for my clients and I often have my clients forward me SEO details (both good and bad) from their newspaper contacts. So again, this does not surprise me.

Should newspapers sell SEO services? A Sphinn thread's comments seem very against it. Jill Whalen said in a joking maner, "Since they can't make any money in the publishing biz, I guess they figured they'd jump onto the SEO bandwagon. After all, anyone can do SEO, right?"

But honestly, if they know SEO, why not sell it? What do you think?

Should Newspapers Get Into Selling SEO?customer surveys

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

AdWords Product Managers To Post In Google AdWords Forums

Posted: May 5th, 2010, 3:21pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

AdWordsPro Sarah, an official Google AdWords representative announced in the Google AdWords Help forums that Google AdWords Product Managers, also known as PMs, will be posting in the forums soon.

Sarah said:

In order to better understand top advertiser issues, AdWords Product Managers (PMs) will be posting on the forum for the next few months. Product Managers work closely with our engineering team to organize and launch new features, tools, upgrades etc. so it will be exciting to have them around!

All of the PMs will be posting as AdWordsPM(name), so if you see them around, please give them a warm welcome.

This should be interesting and I will do my best to track them down and follow every single word they write in the forums. It is what we do here and the PMs know it, which is why AdWordsPro said later in that thread that we should give the PMs some space and let them get accustomed to posting. AdWordsPro explained why:

Truth is, I recall the first 25 or so posts as being pretty nerve-wracking - and I kept checking and re-checking every nuance of what I'd written, before I would finally post it. Then I'd go to the live post and read it and re-read it about a half dozen times - often finding typos...

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

WebmasterWorld Builds Their Own Search Engine

Posted: April 20th, 2010, 3:09pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Brett Tabke, owner and founder of the popular WebmasterWorld forums, announced in a thread that they have built their own search engine to help forum users locate content within the forums. Brett explained that this new search engine took them about a "couple months work" and they are "very proud of it."

You can access the new search feature at webmasterworld.com/newsearch.cgi. Keep in mind, non-subscribers are allowed a maximum of 10 searches per day. According to the search page, the current size of the index is 954,078,091 bytes (909.87MB). It also is neat in that AltaVista standard boolean syntax is indeed supported.

Again, this is not WebmasterWorld competing with Google or Bing, but rather them building an internal search engine to help their users find content on WebmasterWorld. I have captured two screenshots for archival purposes.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Will My SEO Company End Up Competing With Me?

Posted: March 22nd, 2010, 2:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

A WebmasterWorld thread has an individual that almost hired an SEO company asking himself if it is asking for trouble when hiring such an SEO company. This person's understanding or thought process is that if he hires an SEO company that sees the success his site is achieving in the search results, that ultimately, that SEO company might decide to get into the business themselves.

It is an interesting question and I have had clients and prospects ask me this exact question on the web development front. For me, the answer is, we hope that your success would lead to more work for us and we would both be successful for a profitable web venture. SEO companies, web development companies and so on - they like to specialize in what they do best - make better web sites. They don't always deal best with specific niches and dealing with customers and customer service, but they do a great job at helping those who do a great job at that build a web site that can handle it.

This member posted at WebmasterWorld saying:

I've reached a point where I am wondering if the hiring of an SEO company could easily wind up being a competitor in disguise. It took a while before the SEO company was ultimately determined to be in direct competition.

Some clients make contractors sign non-compete agreements - that is always a solution. But ultimately you need to be comfortable sharing your business's most intimate details with your contractors and if you cannot do that, then it might be hard to ask for outside help.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Help Forums To Change Member Ranking System

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

The Google Web Search Help, Google News Help & Google Merchant Center Help forums all are announcing new changes coming to how forum members are ranked in these forums.

Currently, the member titles or levels are from Level 1 to Level 4. Some users get special titles, such as top contributors and/or certified professionals, or even Googler's get a special label, labeling them as Googlers. I do not believe the labels will be changing, but the levels will.

Instead of the 4 levels, there will be 20 levels. Your level will increase based on"

Posting an answer
Having your answer selected as the "best answer"
Having your post rated as helpful
Rating a post (either as helpful or not)
Correctly marking a question or answer as spam.

I believe the levels determine what rights you have in the forums. By rights, I mean, can the profile show an avatar? Can they have clickable links? Stuff like that. Each forum sets the rights per level themselves and how hard it is to reach a level as well. So while the Google News forum might be easier to get to a higher level, it might take longer to post a clickable link.

The levels are by forum, so if you have a Level 15 in the Google Webmaster forum, it doesn't mean you have the same level in the Google AdWords forum.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help, Google News Help & Google Merchant Center Help.

Selling SEO: Pitching Page Rank As a Metric Over Conversions?

Posted: January 18th, 2010, 2:44pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

An interesting Cre8asite Forums thread has discussion started by someone looking to hire an SEO company. The person is responsible to find an SEO company that can achieve his CEO's requirements. The issue this person has is that no-reputable SEO company would guarantee rankings (that is his qualifier). So if you cannot use rankings as a metric when trying to measure one SEO proposal to another, what do you use?

Clearly, in my mind, SEO is often (not always) about fixing sites that were built in an not search engine friendly manner. But SEO has adapted to conversions and increasing sales not just by building new leads, but building targeted leads that will convert.

The issue is, when a CEO hires someone to improve their search engine listings - they want to see improved search engine listings. If no-reputable SEO company can guarantee rankings, then what is one to do? How can you convince your CEO to hire an SEO company based on no guarantees? How can you hire an SEO company that will guarantee SEO rankings?

This dilemma is nothing new to the SEO space - but I thought I cover it again, in light of this thread.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums?

Sphinn Closes Submissions Over New Years Weekend

Posted: December 31st, 2009, 2:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Sphinn announced they are closing the site to submissions from 5:00 pm PT on December 31st through about 9:00 am PT on Monday, January 4th.

Matt McGee, the Sphinn Editor, explained the reason for them taking down the submissions capability:

Over the Christmas weekend, we found that just about the only things being submitted to Sphinn were spam. Since we're expecting the New Year's weekend to be similar, we've decided to just turn the submission form off for a few days.

Also, it means - just relax - enjoy the down time and rest up for an awesome 2010! Easier said then done, eh?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Tony Ruscoe, Popular SEM Personality, to Join Google

Posted: December 8th, 2009, 3:13pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Tony Ruscoe, the co-editor at Google Blogoscoped has confirmed he will be joining the Google team next month. Tony has been writing at Google Blogoscoped since 2006, he has broken so many stories by digging deep into Google and finding tons of hidden treasures.

Tony is becoming a Googler in January 2010. He will be working in Google's London office as part of the Google Webmaster Team. He said he is not exactly sure what he will be working on at Google yet, but likely in the same role as JohnMu who also joined Google from the webmaster ranks back in August 2007. John has been a huge asset to the webmaster community before and even more so after joining Google.

Googlers are obviously delighted to have Tony join the team there. A Google Blogoscoped Forums thread has comments from Googlers. Matt Cutts said, "w00t! I'm so excited that you're joining Google. :) I can see it now: "Day 1: Clean up the home page a bit. Make sure it's smaller but validates. Day 2: ..." :)" JohnMu said:

Congratulations, Tony! I'm excited to see that you're coming aboard & really looking forward to catching you in London or perhaps on a visit to the Zuerich office :-).
Tom, if you have worked out how cloning works, I have a list of names ... :-)

Tony, the webmasters will miss you as being part of the team but I am sure we will all benefit more from you moving over to Google.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Sphinn's New Editor, Matt McGee & Rob Kerry Steps Down

Posted: December 2nd, 2009, 2:45pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Sphinn has a new News Editor, his name is Matt McGee, I am sure you have heard of him. Matt is a huge U2 fan, loves SEO (especially local SEO), he is the assignment editor at Search Engine Land and is now the new Sphinn News Editor. He replaces Rob Kerry who has been Sphinn's news editor for over two years now.

Both Rob and Matt are loved in the community. Rob promises in a Sphinn thread that he will continue to be active in the community. Rob said:

I'm sad to announce that I will be stepping down as Editor of Sphinn, as of today. I will however continue to take an active part in the Sphinn community and will stay on as part of the Moderator team.

Rob then announced Matt as his successor in another Sphinn thread:

Please join me in welcoming Sphinn's new Editor, Matt McGee. Matt is a familiar face to Sphinn, having already served as a Moderator and now moving up to manage the site overall.

Good to know Rob isn't going far! Best of luck Matt in the new role!

Forum discussion at Sphinn - Rob Leaving & Sphinn - Matt Joining.

New Google Support Forums Turns One & Adds Profile Answers

Posted: September 29th, 2009, 4:51pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

It has been just over a year since Google opened the new Google help forums. The official date seemed to be the Google Talkabout forum in September 25, 2008, but most Google services didn't move over until later. The Google Webmaster Help forum didn't move until December 2008 and the Google Reader forum didn't move until last week.

The forum received many updates since the launch. The most significant was the redesign last August. Today, I was told by Googler, JohnMu that one of my pet peeves of the forum has been resolved.

Now, Google support forum profiles have not just questions asked, but also answered posts. So if you leave answers on other people's threads, they are included in the profile of the user. There is no RSS feed yet, but this is a major benefit to me and helping me bring you some of the best discussions in these forums. For example, see JohnMu's profile and you will see both questions he started, plus threads he replied to (but did not start).

Forum discussion continued in the original welcome thread at Google Webmaster Help.

Why "SEO Experts" Get a Bad Rep from Newbies

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 3:54pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

I follow tons and tons of threads on SEO, SEM, Google, etc. I have been doing this for just about six years. One thing I often see is that there are people who want quick answers to why they don't rank well or how they can become rich in days. When they don't get the answer they like, they rant on how unhelpful the "experts" in the field are.

A WebmasterWorld thread member, wheel, was very smart about his post. He initially posted a teaser saying, I built a site five years ago, did SEO for a month on it and it still ranks in the top ten for a competitive keyword with zero additional work. Of course, we all wanted to know how he did it and he strung us along. But that was part of his plan, his plan to get us listening so he can follow up and blast all us newbies. He said:

The secret is, there is no secret. There are two themes that run through this and all the other forums, for years. The first is, everyone's looking for the latest trick or secret to ranking. The second theme is all the experts (at least the ones that I read) tell us to forget the glitter and develop proper backlinks.
And people repeatedly don't like the answers from the experts - to forget the glitter and develop proper backlinks. We want a quick technical answer. We don't want to hear what basically means 'try working hard yourself'. The experts actually aren't holding back some big secret or the latest trick. They ARE telling you directly and specifically what to do. Hard work marketing your website is what gives high long term rankings, not some technical gimmick.

It is true - SEO, money, happiness, etc, doesn't come easy - it requires work. Wheel, did explain how he got the site and his other sites to succeed in the search results, but it wasn't over night and it took work. For more on how he did it, read the thread and get to work.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

GoogleGuy Retire From WebmasterWorld Again?

Posted: July 23rd, 2009, 4:12pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

The infamous and legendary GoogleGuy at WebmasterWorld has gone almost a full year without posting at WebmasterWorld. GoogleGuy's last post was in a WebmasterWorld thread on July 24, 2008 at about 6:30pm (EST). He replied to confirm a PageRank toolbar update.

GoogleGuy use to be extremely active in the WebmasterWorld forums, ranking up 2,882 posts over the year. But for the past few years, he/she has been very quiet. Why? Well, now GoogleGuy is not the only Google Guy in the forums, there are plenty of Google representatives that go under aliases, i.e. AdSenseAdvisor or their own names, i.e. MattCutts, in both WebmasterWorld, other forums and the official Google forums.

But we would hate to see GoogleGuy expire. So please, GoogleGuy, just say hello, like you did in the past, to let us know you are still out there. If you do want to unmask yourself, that would be fine, but personally, I like the mask. ;-)

Sadly, no forum discussion here to link to.

Sphinn 2.0 Launches On Two Year Anniversary

Posted: July 14th, 2009, 3:38pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

A day after Sphinn's two year birthday, that is right, Sphinn was launched on July 12, 2007, version 2.0 of Sphinn was pushed live. Sphinn is the social forum-like site where SEOs and SEMs can submit stories or discussions, members can then vote and comment on those stores. It is a fairly popular site and it is pretty fun to use.

The Sphinn Blog has the details on version 2.0 of Sphinn. Here are the main points:

New, cleaner look
Much improved moderation and spam controls
The removal of the “Discussion” option for submissions
My Network – Friend and follow the people you like
"Show Me" Filters – Only show submissions from My Network, or your favourite categories
Subscribe/Unsubcribe to stories that you’re interested in, with email notifications
Save stories that you enjoyed or want to come back to
My Sphinn – A one-stop dashboard for your network, important topics and an expanding list of blog content

Also coming soon, but not yet live, are Private Discussions, Live Chat and a Members-Only directory.

Here is a picture of Sphinn soon after it first launched in 2007:

Here is Sphinn 2.0:

Happy Birthday Sphinn!

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

SEO Company Caught By Client Using Google Support Forums

Posted: July 9th, 2009, 4:16pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

It is not uncommon to find SEOs asking other SEOs questions in the SEO discussion forums. But it is not everyday where you find the clients of an SEO coming in an asking questions about their own site, only to find out that his SEO previously asked the same question in the same discussion forum, to the same people. That is exactly what happened, as pointed out by Autocrat in a Google Webmaster Help thread. The real shocker is what the client discovered his SEO said about his own abilities.

Yesterday, Gary from Manchester, posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help asking for advice about a client's site. The client noticed a major drop in rankings and hired Gary to fix the issue. Gary then offered his findings in a thread and asked other SEOs for advice and other tips. Again, this is common and often done, either in a public forum or offline, with SEO's who are friends.

Later on in the day, Mike, the webmaster from the company that Gary is proposing SEO to, posted his own thread at Google Webmaster Help asking the same question. What is kind of funny is that one member who replied to Mike said that he should stop posting duplicate threads. Mike replied that he "had no idea Gary had come to a forum for answers."

The issue is, Gary, the SEO, said in the thread, "I personally don't think this will get them their rankings back." Now, Mike saw this and was very upset that Gary would offer an SEO proposal "between £2,500 & £5000 to produce a report on the problems YOU have outlined." A report that, Gary himself thinks would not solve the site's problem. Mike added, "I will look forward to talking to him tomorrow!"

A tip to you SEOs out there. If you are asking for advice in a public forum, please be more discrete. Use URL shortening services, to mask the URL and be upfront with those helping you that you don't want the client to know you are asking for advice. But more importantly, do not say you think the site is doomed. But even more importantly, above that, if you think the site is doomed and you can't fix it, don't charge the client money when you think you can't help - that just seems ethically wrong.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Big List of Interview Questions for SEO Candidates

Posted: May 20th, 2009, 3:37pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

We covered this topic twice in the past, including January 2008 and December 2007. A post by Ben McKay has 80+ SEO Job Interview Questions, which may be the biggest list of questions I have seen to date.

I am not sure asking 80 questions to an interviewee is good. But clearly, have 80 questions you can ask and fine tune based on how the interview is going, is nice to have. Since we figure there is roughly 7% unemployment in the SEO industry, there are clearly talented SEOs out there looking for work. There are also many companies still hiring SEO talent, so getting the best talent should be key. Interviewing is just on step of that process.

There are many blog posts on the SEO interview, just see Google.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

SEO Companies Springing Up "Like Dandelions"

Posted: May 19th, 2009, 9:53pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Jill Whalen, in her High Ranking Advisor wrote a piece named Setting Up an SEO Shop Overnight! Jill goes on a well-deserved rant about how SEO companies are popping up left and right, even thought the people running these SEO companies know very little about SEO and have no real experience offering SEO services.

Here is a blurb:

What I don't understand is why people think that SEO is something they can perform as a business without knowing anything about it!
Certainly I give this person props for wanting to know about SEO *before* they set up shop. But what is it about SEO that attracts people with no knowledge or skills? While it's definitely not rocket science, if SEO were so easy that any hack could successfully start an SEO biz overnight, then every webmaster and company owner could easily learn it and do it themselves.

Regardless, new SEO companies keep popping up like dandelions in Spring.

I love that last line there, too funny. SEO is a great business these days. Organic search is surpassing paid search according to Hitwise and advertisers and marketers know this.

So what gives people the right to start a company offering a service that they have no skill in? Well, it is a free world. Trust me, I see plenty of companies selling things from SEO to postal stamps, and they nothing about it. It is how come so many companies fail and how come people have a distaste for certain professions.

Ultimately, it is not about people getting into businesses they have no business being in. It is more about people hiring these businesses to save a buck and ultimately getting burned by them.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Google AdSense Advisor Heads to Barbados for Vacation

Posted: May 18th, 2009, 8:30pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

I love it how personal some people are in the SEO/SEM forums. It reminds me of the old days when the forums were like extended family for most of us. It many cases, that is still true, but as the industry has grown, we feel less of that.

Case in points, a Googler, AdSenseAdvisor in WebmasterWorld first tells us that he/she will be on vacation for a week and there will be a fill in during that time. Here is the post:

I'm taking some vacation next week, so I'll be away from Webmaster World 5/16-5/25. I have someone covering for me if you need anything in my absence, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case you notice a significant drop in snark compared to your usual ASA. :)

Later on, he/she tells us that the vacation is in Barbados. Just reading the back and forth in the thread, reminds me of how forums should be.

In any event, enjoy your trip AdSenseAdvisor, we will miss you - but you deserve the time off.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

SEO Consultants: Do You Have SEO Liability Strategy?

Posted: May 18th, 2009, 8:20pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

In any business field, making sure to protect your business from being taken advantage of through the legal arena is something that every company must be prepared for. The larger you are, the more chances you are to be hit up with a lawsuit.

John Andrews started a Sphinn thread discussing the topic of SEO liability. He sums it up as follows:

I bet you never saw this kind of lawsuit coming! As a professional service provider you obviously know you can be held liable for your performance, for negligence, and for making mistakes. You probably include something in your consulting agreements that addresses that. Your clients want assurances that you are responsible for your actions, and you want to be free to act in good faith on behalf of your clients, working to gain a competitive advantage in the search engine results pages. But the very nature of SEO is competition. For every winner in the SERPs, there are going to be losers. Are you ready to be sued by the losers?

Whenever I think of SEO liability, I always think of Jill Whalen. Why? Well, I am pretty sure her husband is a lawyer and she has been in the SEO space for longer than some of us owned computers. In addition, Ian McAnerin is very active in the forum and he has a degree in law. In any event, if you are looking for some legal advice, I might recommend High Rankings Forum for that reason.

The discussion at Sphinn is just getting started. I suggest anyone with both experience and knowledge to get involved in the thread because for many people, being sued is a scary thing that can have a serious impact on one's business and family.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Optimizing Sites For Search Engines For 10 Years

Posted: April 24th, 2009, 3:52pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

There aren't many people out there that can say they have been in the SEO industry and optimizing sites for search engines since 1999. But there are probably a hundred or so people who can say that. Personally, I joined the "SEO industry" in 2002 (been in the internet industry since 1995), what is known as the second wave of personalities who joined the industry. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Daron Babin, Greg Boser (I better stop naming names before I insult people) were part of the first wave - people who were in the industry before it may have been known as SEO.

That being said, a YouMoz post named SEO Since 1999 takes you through the history of one quiet SEO, who was optimizing sites for ten plus years. Can you imagine? In any event, this write up should interest anyone who loves the industry.

Here is the introductory paragraph:

Monday, April 20th, 2009: Today I celebrate the completion of my first decade in search. I have been waiting for this day with some trepidation for the past 6 months or so. I am not really sure why or even what this anniversary really means. Does it mean that I am some sort of expert? Well, anything is possible. Or does it mean that I have wasted the past decade with little to show in an industry that my friends and family can hardly even understand? Hmm, I hope not. In truth, it means I not only have a job that I like, but a career that I love.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

80% Say SEOs Need Some Coding Abilities

Posted: April 16th, 2009, 2:15pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Last week we asked if SEOs need coding capabilities based on a controversial Sphinn thread. The results are now in and I am surprised to see just about 80% of the responses said that to be considered an SEO, you need some coding abilities.

Here is the break down of results for the question, Do You Need Coding Skills to be an SEO?

:: Yes, Some Coding Abilities To Be Called An SEO said 100 respondents or 65%
:: No, No Coding Abilities To Be Called An SEO said 33 respondents or 21%
:: Yes, Expert Coding Abilities To Be Called An SEO said 21 respondents or 14%

I would have thought more would say that SEOs need no coding experience to be labelled an "SEO." Of course, having coding skills helps, but a requirement?

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 16th.

What To Do When Clients Mess Up Your Portfolio?

Posted: March 24th, 2009, 1:11pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

A HighRankings Forum thread asks a question that likely applies to most professions on the web, what does one do when a client messes up your portfolio. For example, you provide SEO copywriting services and that content is used on client X's web site. Then a few months later, the client updates the content here and there and forgets to consult you for those changes. Now, when you want to show your work to future prospects, they are reviewing work that has been mangled by your client.

The same issue applies to when clients make design changes to web sites or when they make SEO changes in terms of title tags, content, and even link building. This can apply to other industries, including even building homes.

The big question is, how do you keep your portfolio in order?

The simple answer is to screen capture the work you have done. A local Wayback Machine, if you will. There is nothing wrong in taking a local copy down of the web site and using that to demo to prospects. In addition, it is always good to have a local copy, that you can use for staging the changes you made to the site, before uploading those changes to production.

Personally, I typically demo sites we built to prospects on our test servers. Why? (1) The content is sometimes cleaner. (2) I can safely make changes to the site without impacting the live site. (3) I don't run the risk of sharing real information and intellectual property with potential competitors.

Do you run into this issue?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

55% Of SEO Companies Won't Offer Pay For Performance Deals

Posted: March 10th, 2009, 4:38pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

A week ago, we polled our audience asking Are You Still Offering SEO Services Paid By Performance? For example, are you willing to exchange direct payment in exchange for payment on the basis of rankings, or traffic or on revenue earned.

The majority of respondents said they never will or have taken this type of payment in exchange for SEO services.

Here is a breakdown of the seventy-five or so responses to the question "Do You Offer Pay For Performance SEO Packages?"
:: Never said 41 respondents or 55%
:: Very Rarely said 13 respondents or 18%
:: Sometimes, Only Great Ideas said 10 respondents or 14%
:: Very Often, But Depends said 5 respondents or 7%
:: Only Do Pay For Performance said 3 respondents or 4%
:: Other answer said 2 respondents or 3%

I wish we would of had more responses, I guess I should have pushed this poll more. But I do think these numbers make sense and likely represent the industry as a whole.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

Business Improving Recently? Poll: How Are You Weathering The Recession

Posted: March 6th, 2009, 3:04pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

I was hoping to reach out to our audience and find out, via an anonymous poll, how your companies are weathering the recession.

Why now? Well, I noticed a HighRankings Forum thread that discusses some SEO companies noticing a recent "jump" in business. In fact, the new thread has three people saying they noticed a recent spike in leads and sales over the past two weeks. One explained:

I work by referral only and in the past 5 months or so, it was dead, very little came in, but in the past two weeks, wow. Is it a trend here? I'm trying to figure out why all of a sudden I'm getting all this new work? I love it, don't get me wrong, but why now? Anyone else notice the phone ringing a bit more these past few weeks?

It is funny, because I said the same thing about my business just the other day. We don't do SEO, but we do provide extensive web development services and in the past week or two, I have been going into more and more prospects, including closing some. The previous month, was pretty dead.

Heck, I listen to the financial news every day and it is very sad. Yesterday was incredibly depressing. But maybe we are starting to see the first signs, via the grassroots, that things may be turning around? Not spending money is important during a recession, but you cannot close your business down and stop innovating and improving.

Please share with us how your business is doing. Check all that apply:

How Is Business Doing For You Now?
( surveys)

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum .

Are You Still Offering SEO Services Paid By Performance?

Posted: March 5th, 2009, 2:03pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

There are many ways to price your services. In the SEO world, you can charge a monthly fee, you can charge by hour, you can charge for results, you can take a piece of the action and so on. The Pay for Performance model is popular amongst some SEO firms, while others prefer the steady and secure income of other pricing models.

Search Engine Guide has a very nice write up on this model named Is the Pay-for-Performance SEO Model Still Viable? The article goes into the various forms of Pay for Performance, including (1) Pay Per Ranking (2) Pay for Traffic and (3) Pay Based on Revenue. Stoney deGeyter shares his personal experience with these models and concludes "while some SEOs have figured out how to make the pay-for-performance pricing model work for them, I remain skeptical."

There are over twenty comments on that article and it went hot on Sphinn. I thought we run a poll, asking you guys, do you still offer Pay for Performance payment models in this new economy? Take the poll:

Do You Offer Pay For Performance SEO Packages?
( surveys)

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Many SEOs Get Their Hands Dirty By Coding Web Sites

Posted: February 26th, 2009, 2:58pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

Two days ago, I ran a poll asking if SEO companies implement SEO changes or just recommend changes to be implemented. Meaning, does your SEO company normally start with coding changes and upload files to the web server.

I now have the poll results, which shows the majority of SEO companies do both. They will make coding changes and/or offer recommendations, based on what their client wants them to do.

Here is the break down of 170+ responses to the question, Do You Implement SEO Recommendations or Just Make Recommendations?

:: Both, Implement When Asked & Offer Recommendations When Asked said 121 respondents or 70%
:: Offer Recommendations Only said 41 respondents or 24%
:: Implement Changes on Site Only said 10 respondents or 6%

The numbers seem logical to me. I wonder why 6% would only conduct SEO services if they can make the changes themselves on the site. I assume it gives them more control and thus makes them more secure in getting the changes they need done, so they can see results?

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

Google Webmaster Helps Tries Live Lively Event, Before Lively Shuts Down

Posted: December 31st, 2008, 2:15pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Googler, JohnMu, suggested in a Google Webmaster Help thread that they give Google's Lively, Google's failed attempt at a SecondLife virtual world, a shot before it closes down.

Yesterday, John posted a thread announcing an "Informal End Of Year live-chat over at Lively." I missed it, and so did most people. In fact, I don't think it actually worked.

Looking over the thread, it seems like the event really never happened. I did see a chat room URL in there, but I don't see it anymore. So it seems like the Lively event, wasn't too lively. But it was a great idea to give Google's Lively a last whirl.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Letting of Newbie SEO Steam at Google Webmaster Help Groups

Posted: December 24th, 2008, 2:16pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

I see them every day, the newbie SEO post. Almost every SEO goes through it at one point. They ask a newbie question and people in the industry are nice enough to answer it. Some mock others, but overwhelming, the community responds in good kind.

I spotted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help discussion forum, where long time members are letting off steam. In short, one member writes this long post mocking, with extreme sarcasm, some of the posts he typically sees in the forum. Of course he put in a lot of exaggeration into his post, which makes it incredibly funny.

Here is a brief snippet of just part of his post, where he asks like a person seeking Google webmaster help:

My friend, who's cousin Nora, once went out with someone who's brother built the stand at Seomoz said he heard someone saying that they oveheard someone else saying that Mattt Cutts said Google are going to stop indexing websites with less than 20 pages, is this true?

A while back, I installed the seo for lemons plug in on my blog, which might have helped, so I also added the seo made ez tool, the get google by the balls widget, the mega meta tag generator and the google number one blaster. The only hitch is that my home page now has 5 titles, 10 description tags, 7128 keywords, 233 h1 tags and 300 outbound links to the tool makers sites. This was so heavy, I had to remove all the actual content, do you think this will matter?

It goes on and on and it pretty funny if you are an active forum goer. It might insult some people, but I assume these folks who reply to twenty questions per day just need to let off some steam some time.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

How Many of You Meet with SEO Clients?

Posted: August 6th, 2008, 5:07pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

In a High Rankings Forums thread, forum members discuss whether they meet with their SEO clients or not. It must depend on how the business is structured (and if the client is local), but in the latter case, if the client is local and you're charging hourly, most people don't see why this would be a problem.

The frequency of meetings is also discussed. Again, the geographic location plays a role here, but it also depends on how deep you are on the project. One forum member says that if they're in the middle of working on changes, their meetings are more frequent than if they are in maintenance mode.

Some others don't take local clients at all because such meetings are too time consuming. Can you relate to that?

How many of you meet with your clients in person?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

YahooSarah Goes MIA - Blame Yahoo Publisher Network?

Posted: July 16th, 2008, 2:45pm CEST by rustybrick

Tags: SEO Forum News

Yahoo has been having a rough time over the course of the past several months. But that doesn't mean the company stops working and competing, at least that is what you would think.

YahooSarah, the official Yahoo representative at WebmasterWorld, has not posted a response at WebmasterWorld in exactly a year from today. YahooSarah's last post was in a thread named Publisher broken? on July 16, 2007 at 3:50 pm (EST). She said:

I wanted to chime in briefly to let you know that we are aware of the problems you are experiencing and are working to resolve as soon as possible. Apologies for the inconvenience.
I'll post again when I can confirm that we have resolution.

But not post came after that. Yes, YPN was fixed, but no confirmation from Yahoo was received - even a year later.

Yes, we still have YahooPete posting in the forums. His last post was about three weeks ago. But YahooPete is responsible for Yahoo Search Marketing topics, while YahooSarah is responsible for Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) topics. Maybe YPN is dead and there is no need for YahooSarah's posts?

Questions You Should Ask When Hiring an SEO Guru

Posted: April 8th, 2008, 4:33pm CEST by Tamar Weinberg

Tags: SEM SEO Companies

When you're in the hiring phase for an SEO expert, you should get to know a little about the potential candidate you're considering by asking the right questions. The SEOpranos blog has 10 questions that should be asked at every interview. One of them in particular resounds well for webmasters:

Can you tear this website apart?

Chance are, if they don't find anything wrong with the site, they're not ready for "SEO expert" work. That's not to say they can't be trained, but they're beginners, not experts.

Other questions include asking what types of blogs they read, how would they go about building links, how they track results to prove success, and others.

While some folks have trouble believing that the list is accurate at Sphinn, a good number of Sphinners believe it to be very useful. And if you're not an SEO expert, it definitely provides advice on how to hone your craft. You can't really go wrong with having some knowledge of these questions and their answers.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

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