http://www.seoseonews.com en-us http://www.seoseonews.com N/A venkat@sgdndtworks.com Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:58:59 EST 20 http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/7/Why-Would-You-Display-Your-Text-Link-Ad-Inventory.html The friendly guys over at TextLinkBrokers are about to become partners of SEOmoz - they're going to be hosting our new site (slightly delayed due to Matt's Hawaiian getaway - sorry folks) and helping us run some of the tools a bit faster. I was chatting with Jarrod Hunt, who runs the business and he let me know that they just released their guide to link buying. It's a good resource, nothing outstanding, but very solid for the inexperienced link buyer. However... this piece at the bottom simply floored me (emphasis mine): What Makes TextLinkBrokers Different from Other Link Sellers? At Textlinkbrokers, we understand that it is important to keep our inventory confidential. This is essential in order to prevent the search engines from penalizing our inventory partners from passing link popularity to our clients. The search engines are actively searching for and penalizing sites that announce they are selling text links. Some of our competitors display their inventory to the public for all to see. While this helps them to increase sells it practically insures that most of their inventory has been penalized and will do nothing to help their clients increase their search engine rankings. That's a pretty heavy allegation - that other link sellers are possibly penalizing their clients and almost certainly ensuring that the links don't pass search engine value by listing their inventory publicly where Google's spam team can check it at will. I was thinking that TLB was going a bit overboard until I went over to Patrick Gavin's recently sold Text-Link-Ads company (probably the best known link brokerage) and saw for myself:_ Text Link Ads' Autos Category Inventory Page_ First off, it's really cool that I can see the inventory that I'm about to buy. From a user perspective, particularly one who isn't familar with Google's war on paid links, this is a great user experience. But (and this a huge "But"), anyone can see that website, find the URL and check the "don't pass link value" box on the fancy Google console that Matt Cutts is always running around with at conferences. I feel like I must be missing something. Is it really possible that Text Link Ads is doing such a great disservice to their customers? Why has no one called them out on this in the past? Is Google just looking the other way? Are other text link brokers showing their inventory? My big question - Given that TLA's inventory is accessible to any search engineer, would you still be willing to buy ads from the public inventory section? p.s. Reading over this, it sounds like I'm doing an ad for TLB and running an attack campaign against TLA. I just want to assure you that's not the case. We are partnering with TLB and Jarrod's note is how I found the article, but to be totally honest, when we've bought links for clients in the past (something we aren't currently doing), it was through TLA and not TLB, and the link value was pretty rockin' until Newsweek wrote about us and Matt Cutts shut down the TLA link value. I'd also consider TLA's owner, Patrick Gavin, a friend and a great guy - and recently, a very generous one, too. I'm just shocked that the inventory is out there. Update: I just got off the phone with my friend Joe Morin, who noted that TLA is really not a link selling model for PageRank anymore. In his opinion, it's really competing with contextual models like Quigo or AdSense. This could be one explanation for why TLA isn't concerned with Google discovering and devaluing the ads.  SEO News - Admin Admin Sat, 09 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/6/Search-Engines-Say-OK-to-Pay-per-Post-Services.html One of the questions I asked at the search engine Q+A on links was "how do the engines feel about pay-per-post services on blogs, where advertisers can buy links and product reviews?" The consensus answer shocked me and probably will shock you, too. On the panel were: Tim Converse from Yahoo! (smart, to-the-point, clear and genuine; I wish I could have met him in person afterwards) Adam Lasnik from Google (who seemed a bit uncomfortable and on-the-spot, but who can blame him) Vivek Pathak from Ask.com (never met him before, but we had a great chat afterwards - a truly friendly and interested individual) Eytan Seidman from MSN (whose forth-rightness is terrific, even if he comes off a bit gruff on the stage) Tim answered first and said that Yahoo! wouldn't try to pick one post out of twenty or fifty on every blog that might be running advertorials or paid reviews just to stop link value from that particular post. If the engine looked at the site and saw that in general, the outgoing links were of high quality, there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material. Adam from Google agreed, but said little in particular. Vivek from Ask was quick to note that if the link were off-topic, Ask would be likely not to give that link much weight, but I pointed out that most advertisers would buy links from highly relevant blogs, not just for the search engine value, but because they wanted the qualified, relevant traffic from click-throughs as well as branding. Eytan from MSN agreed but didn't expand and when Tim Converse from Yahoo! jumped back in to say that it really wasn't worth an engine's time to going picking out paid links with that granularity, all the other panelists were vigorously head-nodding and verbally agreeing. Why am I shocked? Not because I thought SEs really would or could discount pay-per-post on an individual level, but because I've never heard that level of straight-forwardness about a near-grey-hat subject like that before. Kudos to all of you - more direct answers like that will continue to earn the respect and admiration of attendees and industry professionals. Consider me impressed (and thankful).  SEO News - Admin Admin Sat, 09 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/5/Tear-it-Apart---You-Know-You-Wanna.html One of the fun things about being a black hat that's somewhat well known is that I get to try out various bits of software before they're actually released to the public.  In some cases I put my input into it and get a few things coded that I'm too lazy to do right now... For the past couple of months I've been working with Levi on a new keyword research tool.  Of course, it does the usual things including letting you find keywords and their search count.  But what I like even better is the dig feature that actually lets you dig into the keyword and find related keywords.  I can't won't tell you how the data is obtained but I've been using it to get keywords for lots of my misc projects and I'll say that I like it quite a bit. Another cool feature that Levi's site has is a new way to track the difficulty of ranking for a term based on the number of links you'd need to build per month.  This is the thing that I'm sure a lot of you will want to tear apart and figure out how he's doing it - I know I'm still trying to figure this one out! :)  (added by Rand - I thought a screenshot would be helpful) Anyhow, check it out if you want to see the latest in keyword research :)  SEO News - Admin Admin Sat, 09 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/4/Keyword-Research-Tool-Accuracy.html  For a long time, the SEO world has revolved around the idea that KW volume prediction tools could only give relative levels of accuracy, i.e. term X is more popular than term Y. These tools have never been good at fulfilling their true claim - predicting search volume. I set up a campaign to test the predictions of KW research tools like KeywordDiscovery, Overture, Wordtracker, MSN, etc. It won't be ready to give up the data until the end of November (perhaps even later), but in the meantime, I thought it would be valuable to ask and discuss the various KW tools. Loading...Which KW Research Tool Do You Find Most Valuable? Overture KW Selector Tool Wordtracker KeywordDiscovery MSN AdCenter Google AdWords Estimator Other – Please list in Comments Discuss this poll at Quimble.com Show results without voting This poll powered by Quimble var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName('quimble_poll_div'); for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) { all_polls[i].style.width = '450px'; } Obviously, there are lots of tools that pull from these primary data sources, but I'm more interested in which you generally find to be most accurate in predicting actual search volume. I just accidentally deleted my first post here at SEOmoz (while trying to edit it), but luckily, it was also one of my worst posts ever, so it almost feels like fate... SEO News - Admin Admin Sat, 09 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/3/SEO-and-the-news-today.html A few interesting stories make the presses today...1. Google funds terrorism!Or so you'd think from the headlines. A story about clickbot networks in PPC fraud that mentioned illicit groups profiting from it - got mixed in as a terrorism story.According to Jerry Schoemaker (Shoemoney) [blog post now removed?], reporters have been fielding questions all day about the terrorism aspect - as the PPC fraud/clickbot story just isn't sexy enough to sell. Apparently.2. Google does ArbitrageSpeaking of which, Google's recent changes to PPC quality scoring sees Shoemoney and Michael Gray (Graywolf) interviewed in Forbes.Interesting to read where it states this is a:"new Google policy to wipe out questionable advertisers who are raking in millions while sending users to worthless Web sites".No prizes for guessing which advertiser is profiting from these "worthless websites". Does this mean Google are cleaning up Adsense algorithmically?3. And now the Adsense tipsBarry Schwatrz does his usual job of doodling words during SES conferences - this time during a session where Jen Slegg (Jensense) and Shoemoney (again!) give out some pretty neat tips on maximising revenue from Adsense.4. Oh, Danny boy what a showSpeaking of SES, Danny Sullivan is launching a rival search engine conference circuit - and it looks like the SEO old-guard are following him into it. If you need a partner to go with, feel free to contact Google...5. Safety firstBad news now - seriously. CNET editor James Kim has been found dead, but his family is safe. He went to get help after the car got stuck in a snowstorm. RC Jordan reminds us of safety procedures.6. Yahoo! touched downAnd Yahoo!'s woes continue - NFL star Tom Brady says Yahoo! used his image without permission to endorse their slice of the $4 billion fantasy football market.Not many "search engine sued" stories have merit, but this could be one of the damaging ones...7. London touch downSpeaking of damage, London see's a rare touchdown - a small tornado running through the UK capital, damaging more than 150 houses.That's the news today. :)  SEO News - Admin Admin Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/2/5-Website-Traffic-Alternatives-to-Search-Engines.html Search this, search that. All you hear about is search engines in the web marketing publications, forums and events. New owners of web sites are often told, "You're going to have to wait a year before you can rank in Google. There's a sandbox you know. You're stuck using pay per click until your organic rankings pick up." BALONEYBefore I get on too much of a hypocritical rant, I must admit that I am one of those search engine optimization practitioners that used to give the above advice. It's true for some types of sites, but for many IT IS NOT.Marketing channels like social media marketing and new media press releases are generating an increasing amount of buzz and there's a reason for that. There are a variety of alternative channels, both new and innovative and older tried and true. Here's a list of five:Social Networking - Build a social network of influential bloggers and marketers. When you announce news to this group, they'll "sneeze it" to their networks and so on and so on.Ride the Digg Wave - Subscribe to relevant category RSS feeds and watch those that are rising. Be one of the first to make relevant comments if it's a blog and you'll benefit from all the traffic as that post hits the first page of Digg. Same goes for del.icio.us and slashdot.Tag it up - Watch your web logs for keyword trends in the referrer data and use a tool like Hittail to identify long tail phrases. Use these phrases as your Technorati tags and for the tags you use with social bookmark and news site like del.icio.us and Digg.New Media Press Release - The more media you have, the wider the net you can cast for capturing an audience. One of the best tools for distributing information with multiple media formats is the new media press release. Create a compelling news announcement, then record a 5-10 min interview (audio or video) talking about the announcement. Post the announcement details to your blog. Combine all this along with subscriptions and social bookmark options into a social media release and distribute through a savvy service like PRWeb. A strong call to action, a compelling landing page and metrics are key to the success of such a press release.Links - Yeah, that's right links. Get links from every relevant source you can whether it's a directory or a blog or a news web site. The great thing about links is that they can send traffic and influence your search engine rankings. But for this post, we only care about the traffic. How do you get the best links? Create something clever, useful or controversial. Create content that is really worth linking to and then use the ideas above to promote it. The best links come from others that recognize on their own, that your resource is something truly valuable.  SEO News - Admin Admin Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.seoseonews.com/blogs/1/More-Information-on-Page-Rank.html Every few months we update the PageRank data that we show in the toolbar, and every few months I see a few repeated questions, so let me take a pass at some of them. Note: I wrote this kinda quickly, so I think this is pretty good, but if I spot something incorrect later, I’ll change it. Philipp Lenssen asks: “Matt, I often wonder, how is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?” It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar. viggen says: “Do i need to know that? What does it tell me when i know it? Why would i care? Meaning, what purpose has the Pagerank for the mom and pop site out there?” viggen, I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me. Andrew Hunter asks: “Will the data centers using the slightly older infrastructure be updated in due course, or will my PR be split by data center for the next couple of months?” The latter. I think most data centers are running the newer infrastructure for things like info:, related:, link: and PageRank, and I believe every data center that has that newer infrastructure has the recent snapshot of PageRank now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took at least 1-2 months for the other data center IPs to get the newer infrastructure in some way. (Yes, this is smaller, different infrastructure than the stuff that made site: queries have more accurate results estimates.) Lots of folks ask questions like: “Is this PageRank from day X or day Y? And it looks like backlinks are from day Z?” Really, I wouldn’t worry about it–I’m not even sure myself. At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users. If you’re splitting hairs about the exact date that backlinks were taken from, you’re probably suffering from “B.O.” (backlink obsession) and should stop and go do something else for a bit until the backlink obsession passes. I highly recommend keyword analysis, looking at server logs to figure out new content to add, thinking of new hooks to make your site attract more word-of-mouth buzz, pondering how to improve conversion once visitors land on your site, etc. I’ll do a follow-up. Supplemental Challenged said: “The fact that Google can only create a PR update that is a full quarter behind the times is awfully troubling.” I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users (see the question below for more details on the timing). Matt Crouch asks: “Actually, I am just curious why you are bothering telling us about a new PR update…. is this the first time you ever did?” Well asked, Matt Crouch; I’m not sure if I’ve given the official word on a PageRank export before. It’s not a big event here at Google. Frankly, I didn’t even know we’d done our 3-4 month-ish push of this data. When I saw people talking about it online, I went to check and see whether it was a real push or not. In the past few months, people have noticed when an engineer grabs an obscure data center and tinkers around with things like backlinks or info: queries (e.g. when “Update Pluto” got downgraded because it was just an engineer tinkering at one data center). So I figured I’d let people know that this was a real PageRank export and not just one person doing something. New Jersey SEO asked: “Will this PR update affect SERPs? Are we going to have also a SERP data refresh / update?” Great question. By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export. Find more information on page rank at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/ SEO News - Admin Admin Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EDT