<p>I do like the opening <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/statlerwaldorf?src=hash" rel="nofollow">#statlerwaldorf</a> moment (even if it were blitzed from the transcript!).</p> <p>The pursuit of anchor rich links is a vexed one. You only really need a <em>few</em> from very <em>select</em> external pages though let's be realistic, most don't obey meaningful anchor text, and instead continually inadvertently race for <em>click here</em>.</p> <p>Personally I've found that supplying boilerplate text already prehyperlinked (absolute not relative) within gmail practically guarantees a copy/paste into the recipient's CMS often preserving the HTML but use it with caution and avoid recycling the same text.</p> <p>I do wonder if Moz have ever considered deploying <a href="http://www.quora.com/How-did-Quora-implement-the-text-selector-feature-for-Embedded-Quotes" rel="nofollow">embedded quote</a> functions into the site much like Quora does?</p>

<p>I manually add the OG tags per social target site in the header because the Yoast plugin doesn't offer the granularity of optimum dimensions that each social site demand, So in particular the aspect ratio of a twitter image versus a facebook post are different. If I used one OG image dimension compromise for my post/site URL it might not gain the extra in stream space on the social networks, where as manually I can determine that. More effort, agreed, but more reward - as with so much that is SEO.</p>

<p> initially, from memory, the ugc authorship never worked as you nofollowed the profile links to Google Plus, right? That since rectified but of course the bar for display of authorship has since gone up by google and it also depends on the user adding moz to their contributor to section on their g+ profile. </p> <p> I mention this as its becoming clear that more big publishers as nofollowing their signature containers as a result of the external linking fears of late - paradoxically it seems google is shooting themselves in the foot as a result, now having to rely on more sophisticated methods of attributing authorship as a result. </p>

<p> ...the implications are that more discrete email and hyper retargeting opportunities of your database to gmail suffix holders means you can entice people to your G+ page and extend your G+ brand power/search reach by doing <i>carrot </i>type marketing to them and less <i>stick</i>. (you see that, I didn't mention the <b>i</b> marketing word just there which is really scary to polemicists). </p>

<p> Charles - cheap translations can <b>cost</b> you a lot of credibility, I've seen woeful examples out there even for "crowd sourced" versions for big sites. Many localised projects are serially under costed because of the process of translation yet these days the costs have come down with so many great tools and technologies. For example, if you use the reasonably priced WPML plugin for a Wordpress compatible site you can via the backend, manage the translation XML import/export and even it's price of translation with suppliers. That way you avoid the folly of email and word docs swapping. </p>

<p> Here you go Gianluca, Pete, Tadeusz et al, an embeddable, interactive, tablet and fat finger friendly version of <a href="https://www.thinglink.com/scene/444884388539269122" rel="nofollow">Mega-SERP</a>. </p> <p> ps. I can set it to editable by anyone (!) if you want. </p>

<p> Alas, this is the messy sequel to peak Open. </p> <p> Moving on...sites with site search focused design and less traditional navigation now seem like a more interesting idea. </p> <p> I'm thinking design like <a href="https://www.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">gov.uk</a> which feature the internal search box heavily - you can then mine that data in analytics for user intent. To date I've found the site search % has been low and not as rising as I would hope for, but that's largely a result of it being a less prominent CTA in an old design. With modern design now there's definitely an appeal with this approach. </p> <p> If you have a site search and want an Analytics segment to install to your GA dashboard to monitor that %, here's a <a href="https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=v3QNwcM0QdGKYs_yYb-ukQ" rel="nofollow">link</a>. </p>

<p> It would appear that Mr Cutts on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243451" rel="nofollow">agrees</a> with that assertion Russ. </p>

<p> append &amp;pws=0 to the query parameter </p>

<p>I agree wholeheartedly and advocate this model entirely, however do note that suppliers can be reticent to such performance models tied to the purple stack when those business KPI's are subject to variation by factors outside of their control. Meaning, that fluctuations in business conversions, (for example staff churn affects sales conversions) can put a spanner in the works and mask increases in other parts of the funnel. So you really can't bottom line obsess with the data, you have to look at multiple data points to assess marketing success. (Oh, I might add, that social ROI is in effect the same mindset, you can measure it, instead of obsess over vanity metrics alone)</p>

<p>hey Alex, some really neat usage of Drive there! I increasingly use Drive with this extension that allows right <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-google-drive/gmbmikajjgmnabiglmofipeabaddhgne" rel="nofollow">click saving of links/images to Drive</a> and also work the RSS events feed of Dropbox into a private twitter bot account that keeps me notified of project amends.<br />Do you therefore invoice or client present task time directly from this big doc?</p>

<p>you are damn right Tom. Do it with a pithy private video as well in G+ and the response rate is unprecedented.</p>

<p>wow, i did a ctrl+F and only x3 mentions of <b>mobile </b>on this page so far so I will double that and say <i>mobile</i> search and site access will rocket this year unabated relative to 2010-2012. I'll hazard a guess that non keyboard text search query behaviour will also way increase (if anyone can measure that accurately) eg voice/gesture/tv. <i>Mobile </i>site access will hugely rise in Q1/2 and <i>responsive </i>will become a near norm for redesigns. I agree on #8 and look forward to it but disagree on #4 with Android taking ++share.<br />Oh and Google Groups will wither and be mothballed and they'll be a dev. stampede for Glass by the summer which will become the new Wave.</p>

<p>if copy/paste by email sharing, aka <i>dark social</i>, as Addthis stats have time and again shown, is co-citation analysis of gmail content as a viable search signal, in the Goo works ?</p>

<p>the semantic link?</p>

<blockquote><i>publishing five to ten posts per week led to a 633% increase in leads</i></blockquote> <blockquote><i><br /></i></blockquote> <p>whoah - I don't think that is realistic in many organisations and prefer to reduce the frequency for the quality<i> and </i>the quality posts that are sufficiently pre-seeded, researched and outreached. At the suggested rate of output it hardly allows time for adequate planning.</p>

<p>Hi Gianluca, a fine piece indeed that is also close to my heart.<br />It's definitely a challenge to balance inbound marketing for an international site and it's often an underestimated cost of being fully international.</p> <p>The issue of scale really comes to the fore when you also factor the possibility of multiple language or local social support for the brand/company. eg have one (twitter) brand account per territory in each language or a central one. One Google Plus company page with Circles per territory or separate for each territory? Planning and ambition has to be very clear for international SEO. I do wonder how these interesting survey results have evolved over time.</p> <p><br />ps . Please <i>don't snap my face</i> when I remark that you have, possibly unconsciously, used the Spanish word for folder: "<i>carpeta</i>" as in subfolder, throughout the post as <i>sub-carpets, </i>as in the upholstery meaning:)</p>

<p>how much on page additive content has it enjoyed in that time?</p>

<p>I've anecdotally noticed EMD's on the wane as the inbox is testimony to a growing second hand discreet market for unsuspecting decision makers to be charmed by EMD resellers with a poison link legacy. There's a lot of barnacles on shiny domain objects floating about.</p>

<p>I believe last thursday' email by GWT ranks among the <b>worst </b>emails Google has <b>ever</b> sent.<br /></p> <p>If the premise of the email targeting by GWT team was to notify webmasters that their websites are linked by distrusted links then the content of that email <b>failed</b> to make that explicit.</p>

<p>So i took a closer look at the last example you cited Andrea with the multi author setup specifically  <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fseoblog.giorgiotave.it%2Fbrowser-size-analytics%2F2357" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fseoblog.giorgiotave.it%2Fbrowser-size-analytics%2F2357</a> and I've seen similar where a suboptimal page level blog setup then <i>suffers from </i>gravatar markup blog comments which confuse the rich snippets testing tool because of the syntax that wraps the code. In addition I think your page example has a lack of an author <i>byline </i>in the body of the page. I'm unsure if the page language has any effect here. However add the author bio and links within the body of the page with text links not just graphic icons and I bet your page would succeed at authorship.</p>

<p>Hi Andrea - great delving here, thanks for your post although I agree with others here that a punchy post title would help attract the deserved attention this post merits!</p> <p>I've also been debugging authorship implementations and agree it's fraught with difficulty especially as recently I think Google have adjusted aggressively how they assign attribution in edge cases.</p> <p>I've also noticed non compliant avatars that continue to appear in the SERPs and I theorise that many of these, for example authors of tech blogs, gained authorship status during the manually approved period in 2011 and have since altered their avatars to non compliant versions. It is as if once conferred the authorship status there is room to inadvertently abuse the rules afterwards because the avatar check does not appear to be constant. Do you follow me?</p>

<p>Outstanding collection of titans of SEO knowledge here Thanks Gianluca. </p> <p><br /></p> <p>btw I think SEOMoz could do with a <i>Pocket/Readibility/Send To Kindle</i> function!</p>

<p>wonderful post Philip to see how those seemingly simple and often heard conclusions are evidenced by your laboured research.</p>

<p>Disqus powered blogs allow image attaching to a comment. It's an epic facility that few people use to supplement a text comment.</p> <p>A few years ago, Seesmic started out as a video comment platform but it never truly got adopted. Google Plus is slowing changing things. If you *really* want to bond with a blog author, record them an audio comment (audioboo) or a video comment (Google Plus offers private or public options) and you'll be ahead.</p> <p>Lastly, if you do not want to linkdrop, you can judiciously deep link your name URL to a blog post you have written about the subject you are commenting on and curious users will likely find it or you can hint at it.</p>

<p>Hi Heriberto, I've not explored that meme more than this post but I'd say you could 'pivot' that meme and apply it to SEO and Internet marketing what with the undercurrent of grumblings about Penguin making less effective the yesteryear techniques. </p>

<p>Mike, with reference to your ham sandwich SoV part and  "<em>you may surpass them with less links that are higher quality</em>" how do you suggest to emphasise this point because the nuance of the power of a quality link maybe lost on a misguided pursuit of volume of links by some. In some verticals, post Penguin, the ability to leap rank with quality links is phenomenal.</p>

<p>just brilliant and not a monochrome animal in sight!</p>

<p><em>"...I think that removing low quality crap from the Internet is all of our jobs"</em></p> <p>I so <strong>agree </strong>with this I've sprained my thumb <strong>up</strong>.</p> <p>Imagine just for a moment on Twitter, that no one <em>reported spam </em>when hit with a spammy follower, sure Twitter might eventually eliminate it algorithmically, however when the community cooperates with manual reporting of it, that not only helps accelerate elimination of that spam, over time it allows improvement to auto detection adn elimination of it. Everyone wins. &nbsp;<em>Ask not what your serp can do for you - ask what you can do for your serp.</em></p>

<p>The public visibility of the email value in the G+ profile is not <strong>determinant </strong>for Authorship verification. In Google Plus, on your Edit profile page, it's only after you click into the Work box when editing it, that the <em>visibility</em> option appears just above the blue <strong>Save</strong> button. So you can alter it to 'Your Circles' for example or however granular you wish. I think Google perhaps are not explicit enough each time they make Authorship announcements.</p>

<p>Google have created a <strong>simpler</strong> method to obtain Authorship.</p> <p>They have not really made much noise about it yet and there is a lot of confused configurations out there.</p> <p>Use <a href="http://plus.google.com/authorship" rel="nofollow">http://plus.google.com/authorship</a></p> <p>Tom - thanks for this brilliant tool!</p>

<p>Top WBF! and even more top banana because it did <strong>not </strong>mention the SEO word once in the transcript or even on the whiteboard so <em>non</em> SEO people won't be scared off if this is embedded elsewhere!</p>

<p>good shout Phil, it <strong>is</strong> one of those lesser used aids in WP.</p>

<p>Hey Gianluca, top post fella. &iexcl;gracias!</p> <p>my $0.02 additions</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.news.me/" rel="nofollow">news.me</a> which fits your labelling of 2.&nbsp;<em>Distillation</em> - it came out of the New York times lab and features a <em>Reaction Timeline</em></li> <li><a href="http://www.twilater.com" rel="nofollow">twilater.com</a>&nbsp;- aggregates what your Twitter friends have favourited</li> </ul> <p>Bonus:: There is also <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=about_today&amp;trk=today_%3Fmenu_right" rel="nofollow">LinkedIn Today</a> service, but I'll confess I haven't really used it, although I know I should!</p> <p>ciao</p>

<p>Jeff, here's a resource for you&nbsp;<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421" rel="nofollow">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421</a></p>

Hi Phil, as you know I've also noticed some adverse "ranksplosion" from fickle assigned Sitelinks with a possible bias towards blog Author pages with G+ links on them. Unlike you I have not meddled enough to draw conclusions but I am working on it. (It might require adding author links to main parts of website (not just blog) although that is not the route I wanted to take.)

<p>MichaelC - i am curious on that also, is the demotion of the rank most likely a result of the offending site being actioned against manually OR because the offending contributing garbage sites are devalued <em>thus </em>causing the drop of the site that is linked to them? Thus are Google more interested in the network than the individual?</p>

<p>thanks Eppie, I'm off to rinse some snake oil URLs through Link Detective...</p>

<p>I hear your point weeworld although it's aggregate data, not personalised info, and thus I don't regard it as any more invasive as any other standard tracking practice. In some jurisdictions this sort of activity is becoming more tightly regulated e.g. EU Cookie directive - although there are still a few months left until it comes into law.</p>

I went for "Fresh" and "Processed" although I confess I toyed momentarily with the metaphors of "Preserved" or "Mature" for Processed as in "Young" and "Mature".

<p>I am interested in how the dreaded EU cookie law will affect retargeting for the advertiser from may 2012 onwards when the law comes into effect. How do vendors advise how to proceed here for site owners who wary of popup saturation advising users how to opt out?</p>

<p>So if according to Google, per this new webspam link report "displaying fabricated Reviews would be considered spam" - what is your definition of "fabricated" - Is "fabricated" a unverifiable quotation/testimonail from satisfied customer that is marked up with schema HTML?</p> <p>I'd advocate that unless it links to a 3rd party hosted review, that itself has some sort of user account verification, then the snippetised review is probably spam. &nbsp;We've all submitted spam reports and never known the consequences if they are acted on or not (as the penalty may just be a discounting of linkjuice or none at all-not always detecable) but with a false snippet it should be pretty evident if the offending site has been penalised or not by Google webspam.</p> <p>What are people's thoughts on this? Are you going to help Google police the web?</p>

Today, - thankfully- Google has announced a specific rich snippet spam report form : http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=rich_snippets_spam i wonder how much silent listening Googlers do around here ;)

Great examples! I totally agree with you Giuseppe that Rich Snippets are open to abuse and now more than ever as Google recently liberalised the ease of including them within your markup. The Rich Snippets video tutorials hinted at their right to reserve their display in the Serps but there does not seem to be any policing of the legitimacy of them at the moment. Ironically PPC Rich Snippets offer more confidence in part because they aggregate from places Google can whitelist and you can check via Google Seller Reviews, but natural results are too easily open to abuse at the moment. I fear the SEO industry may shoot its collective self in the foot in this area before more sophistication evolves to combat abuse. SEO Star Wars has only just begun. p.s. If you like Dr Seuss and this topic I also blogged about Rich Snippets: http://post.ly/4Nuc5

<p>thanks Ethan. way cool how to.</p> <p>I do like how Ontolo splits out a stack of URL's, been looking to do that for ages!&nbsp;I use a Chrome Extension to do the <em>opposite </em>and place all open tabs into a single bit.ly URL. (it's called Tab Bundles) Maybe that could be of use with your Gdocs next iteration for column D somehow?</p> <p>Bitly bundles are nice as you can set them to private/public, invite collaborators and there's a Disqus discussion function within the bundle.</p>

<p>I think Google refer to localization of search results as a <em>contextual</em> signal rather than <em>personalisation</em> - hey it's semantics - the bottom line is universal SERPs are increasingly less important, no? As in 90 million users less important than BG+ (Before Google Plus).</p> <p>ps. Rob Ousbey did a nice post explcitly about how to set the omnibar for search shortcuts that includes non personalised searches&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ousbey.com/blog/chrome-shortcuts-opensiteexplorer" rel="nofollow">http://www.ousbey.com/blog/chrome-shortcuts-opensiteexplorer</a>&nbsp;It's a boon for your productivity if you're a ranker.</p>

I would award you double thumbs up if I could for that double embed tip, it's simply brilliant.

<p>hi gianluca, i tried "search+" on twitter but it does not create a hashtag, so #spyw or #gspyw does as it would be cool to track chatter,no?</p>

<p>momentous shift as you say Rand. This is a really welcome WBF.</p> <p>I agree there is no rhyme or reason as to availabilty of SPYW. i'm sure dust is still settling.</p> <p>Two things I'm looking at right now is how many people +1 content that is not their own. At least if this is the "new linking" then there is a general holding back from what I see even within the SEO community.</p> <p>Also, the connections we have within Google that determine our SPYW Serps are avaiable to any logged int person to examine at the little spoken about&nbsp;<a href="http://www.google.com/s2/search/social?hl=en#socialconnections" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/s2/search/social?hl=en#socialconnections</a>&nbsp;I'm finding the scale of those secondary connections a true eyeopener.</p>

<p>sure, it's here in my view of gmail apps:</p> <p><a href="http://minus.com/m1U6Vhh3j#2o" rel="nofollow">http://minus.com/m1U6Vhh3j#2o</a></p>

<p>svelte tips John, especially Boomerag, thanks!</p> <p>Rapportive is a <em>can't live without</em>&nbsp;category of add-on for sure.</p> <p>If you want Google instant like search speed retrieval <em>within </em>Gmail try&nbsp;<a href="http://cloudmagic.com/" rel="nofollow">cloudmagic.com</a>&nbsp;which gets better after its indexed your machine.</p> <p>The Gmail undo send allows you to specify upto 30 secs infact. Saved my hasty ass a few times.</p> <p>The other Labs one I enable for productivity/better composition of email is "inserting images" in email so you can drag/drop images inline.</p> <p>Finally, I can't but gush again over using IFTTT with your Gmail account to initiate all sorts of magic, it's especially good for services that don't offer RSS of some features, for example when a tweets get favorited - you can set twitter to email you or you have to be mindful to detect it the <em>activity</em> stream (maybe 3rd party apps do, mine doesn't) - however with IFTTT you can trigger all manner of wonders once that twitter notification email arrives and you have it filtered and labelled in your Gmail.</p>

<p>You forgot the <strong>regulator</strong>.</p> <p>If your sector is regulated and you can evidence abuse that is violation of license conditions for example, they can come down like a tonne of financial and bureacratic bricks on competitors playing dirty.</p> <p>And if they've earnt spurious backlinks via .gov and .edu then evidence of or even publication by a regulator of investigation of abuse, can also destroy a linkprofile when those linking partners realise they have a poisoned association.</p> <p>Of course, have your self some replacement worthy content ready to offer those places and you could be winning very soon.</p>

<p>ok, I won't overdwell to the chagrin of others, but i'll comment on:</p> <p><strong>Prediction #5: Overly Aggressive Search Ads Will Result in Mainstream Backlash Against Google</strong></p> <p>Yes, and by association that will worsen the perception of SEO practitioners unfortunately. Search trust is at the core of the whole industry. I contend that this backlash will be <em><strong>further </strong></em>exacerbated by site owner abusers of the <em>snippet spam </em>issue that the face-snapping Gianluca highlights here and which I postulated about elsewhere. Simply go and Google&nbsp;<em>Dr Seuss SEO Star Wars</em></p> <p>Fingers crossed Google will combat this rapidly in 2012 or I'll predict a riot.</p>

<p>tremendo Gianluca - you hit the inbound nail on the spot. Infact that term - inbounder - I bet will be more widely used in 2012.</p> <p>Your ending comment: ...<em>Because it can be gamed still, but &ndash; hopefully &ndash; needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice.</em></p> <p>is where I fear that the not-viable part may unravel. I'm already seeing Schema abuse in the Serps for unverifiable snippet information that can lead to increased CTR. It's true that successful SEO will be ever more nuanced but I don't expect that the interest graph utopia that combats spam will be so smooth.</p> <p><em></em></p>

<p>I totally know what you mean. This is a great topic and one that deserves some special inbound marketing segmentation treats for power Gmailers and the like. I'm socially mapping my email database, you?</p>

<p>I recently attended a SEO conference with GianLuca in Spain and can attest that the local talent level is indeed high and he defintely has his finger on the wider SEO pulse. (It was a joy infact that both our presentations ended on practically the same slide independantly!)</p> <p>One of the talks was about how to prove SEO value in fee discussions with clients in Spain and how spanish SEOs could earn more pay and respect. Spain has relative to the EU low renumeration levels, although demand remains high and supply low for SEO talent in Spain. I also think the way forward for Spanish SEOs and indeed any non english language ones is to learn English and not feel inhibited to your local geographic market. Let us not forget that first W in www.</p>

<p>Ripples is the just so that convergence of SEO &amp; Social......don't you wish we could just pause the internet for a moment, my head hurts with the <a href="https://plus.google.com/112544075040456048636/posts/TSiT8TQzpQ7" rel="nofollow">possiblities</a>.</p>

<p>I notcied that the botw directory uses this technique. Compound search that term and you'll get a bulleted response eg.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&amp;q=botw+ammunition" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&amp;q=botw+ammunition</a></p>

<p>Hey Nivaria, I tweet in both languages also (but I'm not yet on Google+ becasue of Apps Users are not enabled) however I abstained from a separate twitter account per language. I did this because I already manage 9 accounts but principally because my followers (of both languages) of my single account are able to filter out the tweets in the language they don't read without too much problem. I probably tweet 70-80% in english and the language changes at different times of day also. I'm not sure what I'll do in Circles, maybe more language differentiation, except most spanish advanced marketers want/or know sufficient english anyway and the productivity loss of duplicating your social efforts in multiple languages is not worth it in my mind.</p>

<p>even before I scrolled to the comments I could tell Gianluca the SEO poltergiest was in the room!</p>

<p>fascinating one John. I personally feel a substitution usage of the Facebook Like and Share to a Google +1 will improve my experience of both brands. Why? Because i don't actually feel I actually benefit from Liking/Sharing a brand in FB when I use it to infrequentley check up on Friends/family activity. I don't have the expectation of using Facebook to see what brands are upto, its just not my mood and can be really out of place in the FB stream. Whereas if I +1 a brand it will impact on my search experience which is desirable. (I'm actively considering unliking all brands I have Liked and would +1 them instead)&nbsp;</p> <p>So going back to your findings it may be that a swathe of early +1 adopters would less keen users of Facebook - some people have postulated it's currently a FB haters group? - however I would hedge a bet that if you repeated the study in 6 months you are likely to find a similar trend.</p>

<p>I noticed that an incorrect/invalid URL entered into the tools creates a graph even if the URL does <strong>not</strong> exist. Be careful what you type!</p>

<p>Russ, these tools are brilliant at visualising the spamtasticness of my competitors or indeed the client SEO legacy. I'm tempted to anonymise the graphs into a twitpic hashtag league table of spikeness deviations because my sector would beat you all by a mile :) If there were a total deviation score averaged across the 3 reports...</p>

<p>I totally sympathise with the point about direction of gaze.</p> <p>The issue is almost all stock imagery supplies models looking down lens in the mistaken belief that magazine imagery has the same purpose as web imagery.&nbsp;Another reason why you own photoshoot can be worth it, you can take a tonne of photos with the gaze set for all possible page combinations.</p> <p>I tested it and got a 27% uplift&nbsp;<a href="http://whichtestwon.com/archives/4673" rel="nofollow">http://whichtestwon.com/archives/4673</a></p> <p>The other issue to bear in mind is negative space (usually not enough of it - a result of camel committee design process) and suprsingly effective colour contrast, try Attention Wizard to pretest your mockups before committing to HTML.</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p> <p>it took me 2 months of negotiation after fulfilling the editorial and technical criteria to gain inclusion and that was with over 18 months of daily articles backing up the application. Pay attention to siteload speed of your news section, you&#39;ll note a certain threshold of those pages that are included. By keeping a spreadsheet sitemap of the articles and their outbound link destinations per article I eventually convinced the Google News team to accept it. Be prepared to contest with evidence their standard rejections but don&#39;t resubmit relentelessly without fixing the problems identified. One of the biggest reasons for rejection is ill advised self linking and lack of multi authored content without biographies of writers. it&#39;s cliche but be original , generous and useful to readers of your content/your market and you will improve chances of inclusion.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>great post, (you deserve an upgrade to the main site!) - my query though is about the recent tightening of the Facebook rules for promotions.</p> <p>I thought that the recent announcements made it a violation of Facebook terms to run a contest that required a <strong>Like</strong>, see this:</p> <p><strong><em>You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion&rsquo;s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.</em></strong></p> <p>The above is from n&ordm;3 in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php</a></p> <p>My understanding of that is therefore a custom made landing Facebook tab page (effectively an app you make yourself) that requires a Like is banned under these new rules.</p> <p>Perhaps I misunderstand and I know Facebook change so frequently.</p> <p><strong>Can anyone clarify?</strong></p>

<p> <p>very svelte tutorial. top.</p> <p>As you say there are a tonne of tools out there. Rowfeeder is a great one to work with excel, oh the list goes on...</p> <p>Burning question though Tom is 'did you mum see that easter egg?'</p> </p>

<p>It was superb: full of aha, chin stroking, jaw dropping and head nodding moments throughout. Astute advice and incisve insights all day from an affable bunch of people, all very approachable and generous in their sharing of professional experiences.</p> <p>Evidently the linkbuilding subject focus of the event allowed a comprehensive exploration by diverse set of pro SEOs, more so than in a general SEO event which might only cover the topic by one or two speakers over one session.</p> <p>Where I think this sort of event could <em>really</em> excel is to invite other non SEO speakers of note to be interviewed or participate. For example, Rand, your talk discussed the advent of social search and how significant these filters are becoming for SEO. It would have been ace to see you on stage quizzing the likes of Dan Zarrella or Brian Solis (who happened to be in London that day!) thus also appealing to a parallel excitable universe and in doing so would also widen the event appeal beyond devoted agency/clientside SEO types.</p> <p>Stateside readers should <strong>not </strong>miss the New Orleans event, if in doubt you can still hear the attendees effuse about #linklove via this unofficial list: <a href="http://bit.ly/linklovers" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/linklovers</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

lets be clear, the reason rankings reports are so close to many a client heart is because it's the most tried & trodden (yet flawed) method that their self audits are based on. Bash the trophy keyword into Google and note the rank, irrespective of how inaccurate that query and leap to conclusion maybe compared to the true situation. (personification, location, etc) and how distant that really is compared to the money shot.

<p>wow - who said people <strong>don't</strong> scroll? - great one Oli.</p>

<p>thanks Christoph, it's interesting, however I note that venue place listing pages that heavily use geopositional tags such as FourSquare, continue to rank well. A big takeaway from this is to be active in using these services for basic linkbuilding.</p>

<p>Multinational SEO it's an underestimated vexed challenge - I can attest.</p> <p>The definitive way to go is option A but you don't always need a cannonball to murder a mosquito, it really depends on your market and resources.</p> <p>Make use of the meta&nbsp;lang tag if your CMS permits it if you follow option C on a per sub folder basis. I've mulled about efficacy of the GEO tag also but have no evidence to support its effectiveness. Dedicated local IP I find works really well, although overseas hosted sites can also rank well if the link profile proportion includes powerful local and language matched links. One of the greatest challenge I find often comes in equalising the qualitative inbound links per language if you operate on a option C basis.</p>

<p>Thanks Tom for the roundup and incisive thoughts - these live events often happen at the most unfriendly euro timezone hours ;)</p> <p>For me the whole shift in emphasis towards the <em>author authority </em>element seems one of the more interesting that I hope will outlast the spat and dust between the search giants over <em>cheatgate </em>and may have resonance beyond SEOland.</p> <p>Efforts like humanstxt.org bring attention to it - although I'm not sure it could evolve to an actual protocol - and it seems like the<em> author authority</em> is an area other services are actively considering. Look not just at PeerIndex and Klout for social scoring, they have just further consolidated their API into a new version of Seesmic. I'm sure&nbsp;Twitter will do some variant themselves of authority this year and further mainstreamise the entire influence economy. Even nascent Quora has rapidly evolved to openly debate the merits of some sort of <em>People Rank</em>.</p> <p>As to how much weight the <em>author authority</em> is assigned by search in the future is largely down to Google and Facebook, which is why the former's success of their anticipated social effort is so keenly anticipated and why the latter's direction is so pivotal.</p>

<p>The sentiment in this post&nbsp;is spot on&nbsp;and is reflects a prominent theme of the event in London.</p> <p>All too often SEO is loophole chaseconomics and technical navel gazing - fine on some levels - yet the real gold is now more than ever in the sustainable relationships and gratituitous karma that can bestow you links that money can't buy.</p>

<p> <p>As an attendee I can attest it was an excellent SEOslam. Both Will and Rand displayed method in the madness and&nbsp;vice versa, however if there were one theme that united both presentations it was the <a href="http://blog.paulgailey.com/the-elephant-a-cow-and-a-room-full-of-seo" rel="nofollow">cow dressed as an elephant</a>&nbsp;and Seth Godin's <em>remarkableness </em>that infused the thinking.</p> </p>

<p>Does the criteria of attendance to Mountain View for WOAC certification still apply?</p><p>This makes it prohibitive for many. Surely other head Google offices can undertake this role? </p>

i agree and i tend to view trading style websites as all too often amplify ing noise rather than adding genuine value to the user. &quot;Nice sell&quot; for SEO but I do wonder if it&acute;s a temporary measure and a misguided diversification of resource against loving the mother domain.

no#10 especially wrankles me. In the case where legacy agency SEO tactics included mass placement on such pages and those pages later gathered crap links the client suffers in blissful ignorance. Multiply this by thousands and just the job of monitoring those legacy links let alone removing them becomes a huge task that distracts from the genuine good link development effort.

<p>Heres another one, with analytics and multiple short urls for the same link:</p><p>http://cli.gs/</p>

&quot;use it effectively&quot;: precisley - the mobile web is about context, ultra relevance to where/who you are, irrespective if it is a dot mobi url or a m dot subdomain. definetly not about cramming the pc site into a tiny screen or hope some resizing zoomy whatsit browser on the handset will make it acceptable.

<p>Great read this thread.</p><p>I manage a bilingual .com site, hosted in the my main market country, defaulting to my main market language and note dramatic SERP differences when a google search is conducted when &amp;hl= parameter comes into play.</p><p>No matter how much i have set the webmaster central geo settings, the html declaration, and html lang setting, even the locality meta tag, i still underrank, and drop 8 places, for natural language query for my site when i select the &quot;paginas de espa&ntilde;a&quot; (and those ranking above me display .com and not .es ending)</p><p>I suspect Dannys comment about the language of your most influential IBLinks is a factor. Ideally the ibl to your site should point to the url with the language parameter set in it i guess, but what happens when you cannot control in the ibl parameter and it comes from a english anchor link into a spanish homepage for example - big spanner or unimportant? </p><p>My question to others grappling with multingual matters is:</p><p>How critical can mixed languages in your homepage title tag be? eg. a french company name with an english slogan in the title tag for your homepag. Is that a spanner in the works for search engines or a surmountable distraction in determining language?</p>

<p>Interesting post.</p><p>Good useage of graphs can always get points across in a cogent way.</p><p>Indeed, I wanted to redistribute the article it to company colleagues who I would consider non-internet literate even from the big picture perspective, yes those outside of the bubble of the web, let alone &quot;search&quot;. Two finger keyboard pushers who &quot;gotta have a 26 inch monitor+gold mouse&quot;&nbsp; - In this case the company owner, yes the one who pays the bills, and who i have to convince to set the marketing budget. The guy infact who indeed does not talk english, sound business man oh yes, but kinda scratching his head about the internet, &quot;...its all spam,porn and music piracy no ?- when are going to explain this internet thing to me properly you get so hot under the collar about?&quot;</p><p>Like, where do you start?</p><p>The whole www things is a a great promise for breaking down language barriers uh and conveying information? Here&acute;s a great primer that wont get the luddite confused, me thinks. Alas no. </p><p>I pushed the URL through google translate to machine reformat the whole text into Spanish (not Cervantes quality but acceptable), comments included and prepared to fire off a the URL, (hey even write it down on a postick and shove it on his monitor) - however the real practical limitation is that machine translation cannot process images to convey information - as you say or illustrate in your post, if you are going to triumph online, use text over other formats, or should we say machine readable information (did i say semantic?) and therefore it got me thinking.....</p><p>Why not use the brilliant google charts api or similar to convey such information? So its a bit more janky (as wordpress say) to use, yes you will have fiddle with parameters and bend urls etc, but dont you end up with information that is more open and ultimately more distributable, even findable?? Isn&acute;t online graphing the way to go?</p><p>...meanwhile mr Company Boss still waiting for that &quot;explanation&quot;.</p>

<p>This is most odd.</p><p>Of the 10,000 words contained on this page/thread so far, only in 2 instances does the word &quot;mobile&quot; appear according to a bit of ctrl+f action.</p><p>If the googlebot were to evaluate its importance/relevance to this argument, it would be a near irrelevance then, Right?</p><p>And yet where is google putting most of its efforts and investment into?</p><p>So when we say web search I assume that includes mobile search.</p><p>zdnet.co.uk is running an interesting story about threats to google in the mobile space right now, however I think their reserves and proven strategic and executional skill will see them continue to thrive.</p><p>Could you consider mobile search vertical search as such? Yahoo has done lots of carrier deals, hence a big motive microsoft is interested in them. Mobile is a minefield but given most humans wedlock to the devices and their ubiquity its understandable google want to emulate their success on the pc screen to the mobile device.</p><p>(+6 mentions)</p>