SEO Question: I was recently threatened by a competitor about them pointing bad links at my site. Can I be penalized based on who links to my site?

Continue reading "Can I Get Penalized for Who Links at My Site?"

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SEO Question: I believe link popularity is the #1 criteria to rank in most search algorithms. Is it possible to gain links too quickly?

Continue reading "Can You Build Links too Quickly?"

Google's Peter Norvig recently wrote an article called Reporters and Parrots, which, oddly enough compares reporters to parrots. I think it was partially based off of his recent frustrations expressed in his piece on global warming...which Seth thinks should be renamed to something more like "Atmosphere cancer" or "Pollution death".

Peter's parrot comparison is a bit hard on reporters, but if you know common reporting flaws you may be able to use them as a marketing angle. For example, if you can see a big deal bubbling up early make sure you plaster your lesser known angle or different angle early and often so you can later hear your voice echoed throughout the mainstream media.

After you feed them a few crackers you may be able to feed them other things as well, but you won't have a chance to feed them if you pick the same angle that is already well spoken for with better known experts. Of course reporters can misquote and you really want to be careful with how far you are willing to go to be quoted. Being seen saying the wrong thing to thousands of people might not be the best marketing vehicle unless you are creative and / or have thick skin.

Once you have an in from one story and reporters start trusting you then it becomes easier to get cited over and over again.

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Dan Thies has a great free video covering link strategy. It is from week two of his last link training class.

People look for concrete yes or no answers to link questions, but link strategy shifts as your market position shifts. Anyone new to linking and looking to have a long view on how the dynamics shift and how to weigh their risks and techniques would do well to watch that free video.

If you like that video and want more Dan's next 8 week link building Teleclass starts March 22nd and costs $795. Money well spent if you can afford it and are new to linking. This message is totally unsponsored. Although Dan gave me a coupon code I did not use it because I wanted readers to know this was not a sponsored recommendation.

SEO Question: Much of my website is in Google's Supplemental index? What is their supplemental index? How does it work?

Continue reading "What are Google Supplemental Results?"

SEO Question: I have noticed many more content heavy websites in Google's search results over the last year or two. Why does it seem it is getting harder for commercial sites to rank?

Continue reading "Why Do Search Engines Favor Informational Sites Over Commercial Sites?"

SEO question: How do I do SEO for a small commercial website? Adding more pages will make it look more unprofessional, and so not something I really want to do?

Continue reading "How do I do Search Engine Optimization for a Small Site?"

Danny points at a SEW thread noting that starting next month Yahoo! will no longer allow competing businesses to bid on trademark phrases:

"On March 1, 2006, Yahoo! Search Marketing will modify its editorial guidelines regarding the use of keywords containing trademarks. Previously, we allowed competitive advertising by allowing advertisers to bid on third-party trademarks if those advertisers offered detailed comparative information about the trademark owner's products or services in comparison to the competitive products and services that were offered or promoted on the advertiser's site.

In order to more easily deliver quality user experiences when users search on terms that are trademarks, Yahoo! Search Marketing has determined that we will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks."

Trademark terms are some of the most valuable words in the search space. While this move may not be surprising given Yahoo!'s past activities, will this move cause other engines to change their policies? How will this policy effect comparison sites which offer many brands on the landing page? Is Yahoo! trying to commoditize the search marketplace to help them make more money away from search?

They still support typosquatting and cracking sites away from search, but may that be coming to an end too? The recent Perfect 10 vs Google lawsuit points to newtwork quality becoming a more important issue.

There has been buzz about conversational marketing recently, including exposure on Poynter and Performancing.

I think conversational advertising works primarily for the following groups:

• those who can give away their entire product free because they realize that the viral buzz around it will cause many more follow on customers...this works especially well if the product is informational related or downloadable software that has negligible per unit cost
  
• network based companies that can offer a free trial (perhaps even lifetime free trial) of a high value product which increases in value through subscriber growth. Think VoIP companies, etc.

When CashKeywords sponsored Threadwatch it was a hit, largely because they offered the option of getting their entire product free of charge. Typically though marketers are greedier and/or short sighted, you get people who:

• want someone to review the low end version of their product; or
  
• people who want free marketing without respecting the time and effort needed to create a site that draws a large niche audience.

While idealistically conversational marketing should work great there are many fundamental errors with it.

1. People are skeptical of advertising.
   
2. By default the group of people asked to comment on an ad are going to be more inclined to offer negative feedback.
   
3. The people who buy and like your product and comment on it would likely give you more useful feedback directly.
   
4. Threads often run on tangents. If it is a paid ad the odds of the tangent being a negative one are much higher.
   
5. Most legitimate companies have made a few mistakes and/or have a few skeletons in their closet. If they have not made any mistakes then they probably are not interesting enough to be comment worthy.

The problem that makes conversational marketing sound appealing is that many of the best content providers do not make near enough off their content due to limited ad sales resources and content topic selection of hypersaturated low value topics.

As an ad buyer, when I am buying ad space in hyper-saturated markets I respect the fact that there is going to be under-priced ad inventory. Marketers market on spyware because it has a positive ROI. Marketers market on stolen or garbage content funded by Google AdWords because it is profitable.

When doing the pay per influence model you don't buy the influence of those with reach. If they are selling that they lose their credibility...and eventually their reach. All you are merely doing is overpaying for ad space near their content.

Look at the Superbowl. Those ads are likely overpriced largely because they give advertisers such large exposure. Now some of them may have viral follow up elements that add value in other ways, but most ads do not do that.

I sell conversational ads on Threadwatch and get like 1 enquery a month. Not much considering that is one of the 10 or so most powerful sites in this industry.

I have also cut back most of my ad spend for this site outside of AdWords because most of it offers a net negative ROI...whereas I might make a slight profit with AdWords.

Do I get some love from conversational marketing? You bet your ass I do. In the last couple days I stumbled across this SEO Book mention and another great thread at Digital Point. That is conversational marketing. You commenting on this thread is likely going to be good conversational marketing. Sites that make you feel you know the owner will continue to grow in reach.

You can't make happy customers want to give positive feedback on someone else's site by advertising there. They have to already want to do it. And you can't pay for it or some people will question it for being fake.

I am interested in a topic, but am not sure if I should create a niche site within that topic or create a site about that topic?

Continue reading "Is It Worth Creating a Site Broader than My Niche?"

I'm researching poison or forbidden words and I've only found a few vague or older posts from 2000 in a few SEO forums. Supposedly if a site uses poison words in the title etc. it is pushed way down in the SERPs. Any idea if this is fact or fiction? I'd love a complete list of poison words, although right now I'm specifically trying to find out if sale, best, about, contact us, website, or free shipping are poison because I have a retail product site with those words in the home page title, description, and body text.

Continue reading "What Are Poison Words? Do They Matter?"

I still want this blog to primarily be about SEO, but I am going to start posting a bunch more about other web aspects and other marketing ideas I have, because as the algorithms advance those who have great holistic or viral ideas will be the ones who win. Those who chase the algorithms will need to have smarts and resources beyond what the average person has. Almost anyone can be creative and if you tune in to culture the marketing ideas tend to throw themselves at you.

Recently on a hunting expedition Dick Cheney shot a 78 year old man.

I am not a flash designer, but if I were I would love to create a flash game called Hunting With Dick.

If someone does it and does it well they should easily get a PageRank 7, a higher PageRank than this site has. Some source material:

• The Daily Show
  
• Al Franken
  
• David Letterman

I really would love to see this game. Anyone think I should hold a prize giving contest?

Won't It Piss Some People Off?
Of course it would, but recently a ringtone company created a fake sexual ringing tone site called Pheretones. It spread like wildfire.

"You run the risk in any campaign like this that you might offend somebody," he said. "But even if you offend somebody, it seems to spread the gospel of the campaign."

Conversation is the key to traffic.

Ultimately most people working on the web are going to get squeezed as marketing inefficiencies get taken care of.

Why not create many doorways to your personality so people with similar interests can find you? Why not work for clients that you can be passionate about? Imagine if every new client was your favorite person to work with.

When I interviewed NFFC he stated:

I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.

Or to put it another way, the best sites say - this is what we do, this is how we do it, if you don't like it go somewhere else.

As I read and learn more I come to appreciate just how dumb I am. And I mean that in a good way. The biggest reason I like blogs is coming across articles with simple lines like:

Hypocrisy abounds: Everyone supports the free speech they agree with.

In relationship to the US media's self censorship policies.

The problem with media censorship is that most forms of consumer driven media are largely based on mainstream media.

Telling half of the story is not honest. Having half of the story doesn't help anything other than corruption. But maybe that is what we want.

The nanny media, even more prudish since 9/11, covers our millions of eyes to protect us from our own icky deeds. In Afghanistan in 2001, while covering a war that had officially killed 12 civilians, I watched a colleague from a major television network collate footage of a B-52 bombing indiscriminately obliterating a civilian neighborhood. "If people saw what bombing looks like here on the ground," he observed as body parts and burning houses and screaming children filled the screen, "they would demand an end to it. Which is why this will never air on American television."

If you go to Alexa and Blogpulse to see how the article is spreading. You can help it spread by mentioning it on your site.

The hollowness of the whole US pro free speech stuff shows well when you notice that almost nobody is searching for it, and a dime a click is enough to be one of the top ads on the issue. It is an issue the media would rather not talk about, at least not honestly.