On Black Hat SEO
So, the last few days have been interesting to say the least. I spoke in London at Distilled’s Link Building conference specifically on the issue of social media link building. It stirred up quite a bit of controversy after blog posters decided to give their own spin to what my talk was about. While I am not going to sit here and pretend that I did not discuss a wide range of SEO techniques, I want to make something clear. If you think that we use black hat techniques to promote client sites or our own properties, you are a damn fool. Hell, we run a link spam prevention service for free that blocks hundreds of thousands of spam links per day. We have a free CAPTCHA service that blocks thousands more. Do you think we came up with effective spam prevention...
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Matt Cutts
I spoke yesterday at the excellent Distilled link building conference in London and will be again in a week. While my session covered a range of white-hat to black-hat techniques in social media link building, it was certainly the darker side of marketing that drew the most attention as the conference it self in general focussed on white hat techniques. At the end of the session, someone joked if I was afraid if Matt Cutts was in the audience, and I brushed it off saying “Im not afraid of Matt Cutts” and I think it came across as a bit braggadocios. The truth is that no one needs to be afraid of Matt Cutts. His goal is not to scare people into using particular tactics – in fact, his primary agenda is to protect the integrity of google search...
Google Adsense Good Faith
A friend of mine forwarded me the email from Google after is Adsense account was disabled, pointing out that he was disabled not for invalid click activity actually happening, but because Google says “we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity”. The email goes on to say that the revenue will be returned to the advertiser. I understand that Google has a vested interest in proactively disabling Adsense accounts that have suspicious patterns to prevent future fraud, but I think they have an ethical obligation to pay out the remaining balance to the publisher if no actual invalid click activity was found. The publisher has given something of value to Google Adsense and the Advertisers in Good Faith, often...
Strong Correlation between Facebook Likes and PageRank
First, let me say that everyone should take this study with a huge grain of salt. While I believe the data is intriguing, it does not implicate anything specifically. So, here goes. I have long guffawed at the social graph and, in particular, it’s relationship to search engine optimization. I am quick to argue about anything that would imply that Google search results are meaningfully influenced by social activities. One of my most common points is that in the majority of open social websites, the social graph is closely patterned by the link graph. Take Digg for example. If you submit a story on Digg, it gets a link from your profile. If someone votes on that story, it receives a link from their vote history page. As more and more votes are tallied, more...
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.
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...
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