An Unsettling Trend Among Search Agencies
For the second time in the last two months, I have received reports from clients both previous and current that other search agencies are refusing to disclose the links they have built for their clients. Let me say this clearly and concisely: If your SEO company refuses to disclose the links they build on your behalf, it is because they are either embarrassed by them, or they don’t exist at all. Call them out. They will say some BS like “we can’t reveal our secrets”. Tell them you “can’t reveal your money”. Seriously, links can be just as damaging as they are helpful. Paying for their services is like trusting a random person on the street to inject your arm with some unknown substance to make you stronger. No tags for...
Once Again, it is about the links, not the tweets…
SEOMoz has posted another piece of anecdotal evidence linking tweets to rankings that must be taken with a grain of salt. I hate to continue to harp on this issue because I am still a big fan of SEOMoz, but the reality is that a tweet generating links is not a social signal. The issue in question was that smashingmagazine.com tweeted out a recommendation for SEOMoz’s excellent beginner’s guide to SEO. I highly recommend you check it out. After the tweet, their guide shot to the front page for the keyword “Beginner’s Guide”. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to jump to the conclusion that the retweets and social weight of smashing magazine’s twitter profile were responsible for the jump. What is the more likely culprit? A...
Pretty Spam Sites
Numerous search information outlets have been recounting over the last several months that Google’s search results seem to have hit some sort of brick wall in terms of spam. Matt Cutts recently rebutted these claims in a recent article on the official Google blog, pointing out that “Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness”. Search engine marketers should really take a look at that last sentence carefully. Notice that Matt does not say there is “less spam than ever before”, rather that relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness are greater than ever before. Ultimately, Google is interested in the user. The overwhelming majority of Google users will never check...
Putting Social Media for SEO Back in Its Place
SEOMoz’s recent social media SEO piece is is informative and worth reading, but please don’t forget priorities. I dropped a simple link in the sidebar with the correct anchor text and within 24 hours the #2 listing (Ciplex.com) is outranking SEOMoz. See here. A screenshot is here. While Social Media can be a valuable part of your SEO strategy (hell, get every link you can get), don’t rely upon it. Your smarter competitors certainly wont. No tags for this...
New Tool: LDA Content Optimizer
After much hullabaloo and disagreement regarding SEOMoz’s studies into the relationship between the topic modeling concept of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and rankings, the dust has settled and we can start talking about what does this mean for me as a webmaster. Our own studies indicated that there is a relationship between LDA Cosine values and ranking especially among long-tail keywords. I don’t pretend to know what this means exactly, but I do know how to boost LDA scores. And if the two are correlated – LDA and Ranking – it certainly wouldn’t hurt to do so. So, without any further adieu, I would like to introduce the new Virante LDA Content Optimizer. Essentially, the tool finds keywords that you should include in your...
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