Found a great website this morning, via a post by Chris Allen in the LED Digest. Robert Middleton’s Action Plan Marketing is primarily focused at service professionals, but a lot of the information in his free samples would be useful for anyone.
I’m looking forward to receiving Robert’s newsletter, and the fact that I didn’t get an issue as soon as I subscribed reminds me of yet another item
Every search I’ve run on Google this morning through Internet Explorer has generated redirectional URLs in the Google SERPs. I thought at first, “Okay, another random test”. We’ve all seen these click-tracking URLs before.But they wouldn’t go away.I closed all my browser windows. I deleted my files (cleared the cache). I cleared my history. I suspect there is a cookie tied in to it but I don’t want to clear my cookies or manually edit the list right now.I also changed my Google settings (I had the results opening in a new browser window).Nothing makes the icky URLs go away. So I opened up FireFox.&n…
I have been whining over the past few weeks about my inability to verify my long-standing domain with Google Sitemaps. Today when I decided to log in and see how things are doing, I saw a change in status. They say I am “Pending Verification” and there is a link to a page that says they are a bit overwhelmed.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35231&hl=en
Cool. At least now we know there is an official “Something may be wrong” position.
Meanwhile, they have rolled out a whole new look, according to their bl…
To many, the CPM (Cost-per-Thousand impressions) model is what kindled over-valued companies in the late ’90’s and created the dot-com crash. The savior, conversely, was Overture’s cost-per-click model that resulted in greater accountability and profitability across the web. So, why would Rand be proposing a comeback of the tried-and-failed CPM model?
Because it has value and a purpose.
CPM is an ad model that relies on brand visibility and brand awareness. It’s not the kind of campaign that Joe’s Custom Electronics should run, but it is the kind of campaign that Motorola, Dell, HP, Compaq and Apple should run. The problems these big advertisers encounter with TV, radio an…
I figured that some creative Silicon Valley types could use a prod in the right direction about areas of search verticals that are still lacking major players (or high-quality players). Here’s just a few that I think would be great to add to the search repertoire:
Sports Search - Browse by year, team, sport, championship, stats, college, professional, etc. There’s a built-in ad model and it’s an idea ripe with possibilities for expansion, sponsorship and cross-promotions.
Legal Search - My understanding from recent law school grads is that none of the major portals are currently up to the task. Obviously, some of that is d…
It’s been a long time coming but a picture is beginning to emerge of how the Big Four search engines really differ from each other in terms of ranking algorithms. Yahoo! remains the most secretive of the engines. Google’s increasingly complex algorithm is the best documented, though least well-understood.
When Yahoo! brought out its own search engine (April 2003), it supposedly combined the best features of Altavista, AllTheWeb, and Inktomi’s technologies. Inktomi was the first major search engine to place significance on linkage. Inktomi relied on true, unweighted link popularity. Altavista’s chief strength, in my opinion, lay in its ability to…
It seems a lot of people have been able to sign up with Google sitemaps and verify their information. Good for them.
I, on the other hand, have been unable to verify my site. I’ve uploaded files per Google’s instructions and inserted a meta tag per Google’s instructions and Google turns a blind eye to everything. It’s a simple cut-and-paste job, Googlers. You should be able to find the first tag after “head”, right?
I wondered to myself, “If it’s this brainless about my site, how good is the information it provides about other sites?”
So I added a few other sites to my list, such as seomoz.org, cnn.com, and google.com.&nb…
Rather than make criticisms myself, I’ll just quote what others have written in the past and let you make up your own mind.
From O’Reilly’s blog post on the cease and desist letter sent to IT@Cork:
“Web 2.0″ was coined when we were brainstorming the concept for the first conference in 2003. As noted in the letter to IT@Cork (sent from CMP’s attorney, but with our knowledge and agreement), “CMP has a pending application for registration of Web 2.0 as a …
For no reason at all, I thought I’d post some of my favorite search phrases that have brought traffic to SEOmoz this year. After all, if it’s interesting to me… it’s probably boring the pants off you, which is why I posted it on a Friday afternoon, when you should be spending time with loved ones and the June sun.
Hot Young Things26 referrals this yearThis must be because of the age group of the staff we’ve assembled and the fact that it’s often warm near the windows.
Animals in Pants Commercial28 referrals this yearDue to legal issues, I won’t be commenting on this one, but I can say that w…
I’ve been thinking it’s time for an “old-school” SEOmoz blog post. These are some of the rarer, but occassionally highly effective techniques for rooting out links in a challenging campaign.
#1 - Mentioned without a LinkThis one is surprisingly effective. Your goal is to identify sites/pages that already mention your brand/product/service/website but have failed to provide the direct HTML link. Just shoot them a pleasant, personal email and request the link - success rates can be very high. To find these willing linkers, you can use Yahoo!’s advanced search parameters, i.e. …
A spammer from Romania has found a loophole in Google and is getting billions of subdomains into Google in just 3 weeks - and ranks them!
Here is a site query of one of the domains.
The stupid thing is that he also ranks: example 1, example 2.
“TheHoff” is writing how this was done on his blog […]
Someone posted at Cre8asiteforums about a new Firefox Extension called “Stumble Upon” and already it’s a hit with forum members. Since the guys were all ga ga over it, I decided to give it a shot, using my female abilities…
Danny digs deep into the censorship taking place at Google Answers. Basically, as I wrote yesterday at SEW, Google Pulls Question About Google From Google Answers. The question was, “What percentage of Google searches are contextual?” Google pulled it, the…
Some people don’t like to read, so what we have are streaming audio and streaming video. The Inside AdSense Blog is one of the first official search blogs to use video to answer questions at the blog. They announced they…
A couple weeks ago, I reported at SEW blog on a Garett Rogers discovery, where he found that Google added a line to the robots.txt file for “/call”. So we made some speculation on that. He then updated us on…
WebmasterWorld moderator eWhisper posted a thread at WebmasterWorld documenting some of the smaller changes made to Google AdWords recently. He discusses how recently Ad Scheduling, AdWords Editor and Local AdWords got all the attention. He lists several other features and…
Danny reports that Google and Adobe formed a deal that will “Adobe will distribute the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer as part of Adobe Macromedia Shockwave Player downloads.” Danny also notes that Yahoo! partnered with Adobe to provide a special…
The Inside Google Sitemaps blog announced new features for Google’s Sitemaps free service. The additions include; Full list of crawl errors (not just 10 anymore) Now, you can view data for individual properties and countries as well. For instance, you…
I can’t believe I didn’t spot this until Philipp Lenssen blogged it, Google is testing CPA (cost per action) AdSense ads. What that means is that instead of getting paid for clicks or impressions, you can get paid a…
I have been watching a WebmasterWorld thread named Loads of Supplemental and the titles are all corrupt. It is true, there are many examples of pages in Google’s supplemental index that have inaccurate titles. It appears that Google is listing…
A WebmasterWorld thread asks are the good advertisers jumping ship? Are Google AdWords advertisers either turning off the content network option and only advertising on the search network, slowed their advertising down due to the content network performance and/or completely…
Ok Alexa data is not the most accurate traffic measuring tool in the world but it is very good at showing traffic trends. One of my favorite sites to play around with and compare trends against other ad systems is…
What I am about to show you is nothing new, it happens all the time, but today is starting out to be a slow day, so I thought I post on it. I DigitalPoint member conducted a search on the…
There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld, where the Google AdSenseAdvisor posts how geo-targeting works with Google’s contextual ad program, Google AdSense. Geotargeting is based on the IP address of your users. So, say one page of your site is…
A Cre8asite Forum thread asks SEO training- is it worthwhile? There are many ways to train oneself to become an SEO, they include; Seminars Conferences School Books Forums Friends Trial & Error A great way to begin is to pick…