Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

Many SEO’s and Google themselves have been preaching the relative un-importance of visual page rank for ages….now it appears Google is finally ready to put its words into action – they have removed Google page rank from being reported in Google Webmaster Tools and here is the official explanation:

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools. I think this is a good thing, since I agree it is obsessed over too much, plus what Google showed in Webmaster Tools was not very useful to webmasters.

Good first step, now let’s see what other changes this leads to.

The LA Times is reporting that the judge in the MySpace Mom’s suicide killing case has overturned his decision about the ‘criminality’ of breaking the Terms of Service of a website. And that is really good news for all those SEO’s out there that have ever purchased a link.

I know a few SEO’s that were considering leaving the country because a few of their paid directory submissions were in the ‘gray’ area. Now they can remain in the USA and Canada and live out their lives not fearing the long jail term that should be associated with breaking the ToS of companies like Google.

Spinning articles has become a favorite pass-time of overseas link sellers and I find it very annoying, here is a little excerpt from a blog post titled: The best with. Real estate of loan of financing of UNO to find comment conditions

By against the, strong one of agreement of like and well the loan of is encore in the medium of the real estate, Moreover in more the loan specialize in expert in software in the financing of financial of organizations real estate. Particularly projects of financing of customers of provision of at organizations the same ones put of these enticing.

I have written some shallow articles and blog posts in my time, but this is ridiculous!

For those of you new to the SEO world you can rest assured that if the sky has not fallen yet – it soon will, any second, maybe…this same drum has been beating for the past 5 years and every few months a new SEO Prophet has some newfangled reason for it to be the truth, THIS TIME!

Here is a posting from a forum on Feb. 2006

A few weeks ago one of my Google Knols was chosen as a Top Pick Knol Award, Top 10 SEO Tips.

In 2008 it is interesting to see that paid search efforts outspent organic optimization 10-1, my thoughts are that this will drastically change over the course of the next 5 years because many competitive industries are hitting extremely high costs on a pay-per-click basis and even though SEO can be harder to measure and can take a longer time to show results.  Those results are so impressive that they can mean the difference between ‘making-or-breaking’ a business.

I was recently involved in doing SEO for a company that had a cost per acquisition of $47 through traditional style advertising and that cost went down to $3.85 for those aquired though search engine optimization.

I find the biggest problem with SEO continuing to grow at the pace it deserves is twofold, first there is a lot of resistance from traditional marketing folks because SEO is a much different animal.  With SEO you are spending considerable resources on something your company ultimately has no control over, the search engines.  And to make matters even more complicated the search engines keep their algorithms and methods of ranking a secret.  Secondly, most business owners and traditional type marketing managers don’t really understand SEO and that makes it very difficult for them to justify the expense and risks involved in switching over their traffic acquisition methods to organic vs. paid.

But there is hope and I do see a pattern starting with the largest and most progressive companies as they give SEO a try.  It has even reached  a point where many of these companies are bringing SEO in-house where they can learn, track and enjoy these advantages up close and personal.

-We had a quick page rank update a couple of days ago and it pretty much surprised everyone. Even though page rank does not seem to mean a heck of a lot these days every update still seems to get the webmaster and SEO community up and jump’in! Personally I am wondering if my weird news site will ever see some green juice again but the PR0 does not seem to be hindering the steady flow of traffic – this week it was extra busy averaging around 1,100 visits a day.

-Finally the ‘SEO’s are criminals’ buzz is calming down. After Matt came out and said that SEO’s will be held to higher standards and Google is tracking them there was a long and painful cry of foul across the entire industry. Myself I don’t really think it is such a big deal and the SEO playing-field has never been level anyways.

-As far as the ‘page rank sculpting’ episode I will simply say I feel sorry for the SEO firms that sold this to their biggest clients and now have to figure out a way to get their foot out of their mouths.

What will next months buzz bring….no idea, maybe a new conspiracy theory about Google and Yahoo! planning to buyout MSN to stop BING from conquering the world?

Came across an interesting little site today that brings up a Google and Bing search side-by-side for easy analysis.  I used my obvious number one raking term, “toronto SEO firm” and the results from the two engines are quite similar.  But I have to say that I really like the fact that Bing brought up my ‘About Us’ page in the first page of results.

Here is another company that tells you they will work magic and get you to the top of Google results in minutes, I guess they are telling the truth…sort of.

Their claim is that you don’t pay on a pay-per-click basis just a small monthly fee.  So what they do is basically buy an adword on a ppv or ppc basis and probably add 200% to the cost and charge you for it.  Not an out-and-out lie but still kinda deceiving.

Craigslist seems to be a potpourri of bad SEO’s – take a gander at this advertisement:

Affordable SEO – 1 WEEK TO THE TOP (Toronto and area)