When it comes to SEO, an article written by a self-professed newbie probably isn’t the first thing you want to see.  That said, Julia Angwin writes for the Wall Street Journal, so she was able to catch the ear of some important people and put together an interesting piece.

Not long ago, Angwin decided that the first result for her name didn’t do a good job of representing her career.  So she apparently contacted both Google and Danny Sullivan to ask about getting it removed.  Sullivan said (and a Google employee confirmed), “They don’t really intervene unless there is some good legal reason to do that.”

Then Angwin spoke to Rhea Drysdale, who suggested cross-linking things like her Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.  Also, even if you can’t pump out widely published and read articles every week like Angwin, “Ms. Drysdale recommends submitting articles to Web sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol on topics on that show off your expertise.”

Title tags and metadata came up at a later date, and by the time Angwin published her write-up, she’d seen a great deal of improvement in the search results for her name.  She also learned that she’ll have to keep at the process to make sure content created by other people doesn’t endanger everything.

Her article’s a good read and definitely worth a look.

Share: del.icio.us Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon Technorati

The company that now has Carol Bartz for a CEO has issued a new blog post to explain a misunderstanding we discussed three weeks ago.  Much of the same ground gets covered, but there are some handy dandy new stats to emphasize that Yahoo isn’t wrecking search campaigns left and right.

A brief recap: Yahoo’s terms and conditions allow it the option to adjust campaigns without first telling the folks in charge.  Notifications go out afterward, at which point said folks are free to change things back.  Only lots of people got upset about the power Yahoo had given itself.

So a post on the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog explains, “Since June 2008, we have optimized approximately 2% of all active accounts and created approximately 20,000 new ads.”  And “[t]he acceptance rate of changes we have made is roughly 80%, which we believe indicates the changes have been helpful.”

Anyone who’s still worried can even contact Yahoo via the “Support Request” option and permanently opt out if they want.

It seems that doing the opposite would almost be smarter, though.  Perhaps try to sympathize about the torch-and-pitchfork reaction of some bloggers, and presto, you could have a search professional optimizing your account for free.

Share: del.icio.us Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon Technorati

Here’s a slight admission as we get started: the information in this week’s article won’t be something you use every day, and if all goes well, you won’t actually ever have to use it.  Just in case you manage to lose some site data, though, here are some tips on how to recover almost everything.

Google’s cache is key here, and so is the advice of John Mu, who works for the search giant.  Mu recently walked someone through the recovery process in a post on the Google Webmaster Help Forum.

So if something important hiccups, Mu suggests, “ASAP Take your website down, do not let the server respond to any requests.  This is important because otherwise the cached pages will be overwritten by whatever content you have online now.”

Then use the Warrick tool.  Mu continues, “It’s pretty much the best way to get your content from Google and from the other sites that cache your pages.  They’ll send you an email with the content when it’s ready (1-2 days depending on the site).”

Finally, “Once you have the Warrick files, you can put your server back up & work on patching things together.”

This may not be terribly fast, but it sounds somewhat easy, and is sure to be better than starting from scratch if catastrophe strikes.

Share: del.icio.us Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon Technorati

Search for “dave taylor” on Wikipedia, and you’ll be presented with a list of 17 different men.  But search for the same name on Google, and askdavetaylor.com pops right up.  So you’d be right to conclude that the owner of this site knows what he’s doing, and - though you probably didn’t guess this - he recently had a little chat concerning AdSense that seems worth repeating.

Taylor was actually interviewed by Arlene Lee of the Inside AdSense team.  His answers were posted on the blog, and you can learn a little bit about what he does and how he came to use AdSense.  We’ll skip straight to the “how I succeeded” section.

Taylor said, “Once I began working with AdSense in earnest, I began to wonder how ad placement, size, color, and design would affect earnings, and how to balance my desire to offer a splendid user experience with the need to simultaneously maximize revenue.  Enter A/B testing.  I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks.”

He then listed some specifics, continuing, “The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn’t a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.”

Other tips include creating great content, and while keeping your ads visible, not distracting readers.  Simple stuff, maybe, but what’s good enough to get one guy ahead of almost 20 others in Google’s search results will hopefully help you get ahead of a handful of competitors.

Share: del.icio.us Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon Technorati

Okay, people, nobody panic.  In all honesty, this isn’t a new development, and if you haven’t been affected by now, you’re probably in the clear.  Still, some info has been making the rounds that seems worth a mention, and said info is that Yahoo has given itself the power to play with search advertisers’ campaigns.

Yes, if you get into the fine print, you’ll discover that Yahoo’s terms and conditions document states, “In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s).  Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s).”

Scary-sounding, eh?  It must be a rare business owner who’s comfortable giving this much control to a huge corporation within which just about anybody might decide to do something.

We should return to the timeline, though.  Even though a bunch of people believe the provision is new, Barry Schwartz actually first noticed it in June of 2008.  And since there haven’t been hundreds of reports of inappropriate fiddling (or even a single high-profile one), Yahoo and all of its employees seem to be keeping their thoughts about campaign adjustments to themselves.

Don’t get too freaked out if word of the situation reaches your ears, then.  And maybe, just maybe, keep an eye on any Yahoo campaigns to play it safe.

Share: del.icio.us Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon Technorati