Toronto SEO Firm
Search Engine Optimization Marketing Services

I have written before about the millions of pages of spun content that has infected the web and is indexed and ranked by Google.  Just yesterday I received a well written email detailing how this company will help me advertise on quality content blogs.  I asked for a sample and this is the quality!

A favorite of pretend SEO companies is to spin articles using software and then publishing them as unique.  Here is a shinning example (http://www.masquerademasksformen.com/2012/01/16/texas-automobile-recyclers-offer-opportunity-to-save-big-on-auto-repairs/)

With countless companies in the usa taking visits in cash flow, there may be one that will be in fact booming and supporting individuals save money concurrently. The auto these recycling marketplace isn’t getting smaller, its expanding and there are many main reasons driving this increase in business. A vey important just one requires salvaging the average consumer a considerable amount of money car repairs.

Just brutal and why any company would want their website or brand associated with an article like this is beyond me.

Sometimes your website or various web pages within your site don’t rank well or rankings go down without any obvious reason.  Sometimes you need to dig deep and be creative.  There was a post over at Google support forums that received an interesting answer.

John Mu, checked out a posters site and made an observation about the length of the alternative text (alt tags) used in the images source code. John said that the images are using “a full copy of the – sometimes long – title as the alt-text for all of the product images on the page.” He recommended the webmaster stay away from throwing so much content in the alt tags of the images.

it could be confusing to see the exact same text over and over again. Search engines generally aren’t impressed by seeing the same text that many times, so I’d simplify that a bit by perhaps using the full text for the main product image, but not reusing it for all of the smaller detail-images.

Great little piece of information to file away!

One of the main digs against Google is that it has been very slow in reacting to content farms that ad little to zero to the search results. Sure Google has chased down some little guys over the past few years but they have continually shied away from bombing the really big content farms. But Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s CEO has confirmed the ban. He told searchengineland.com, Blekko has decided to ban the “top 20 spam sites from blekko’s index entirely, based on our users click /spam on results.” This includes ehow.com, one of Demand Media’s top revenue generating web sites.

Skrenta explained this came up after listening to Danny on This Week In Google. Rich hacked together a reverse slashtag named -/contentfarms that allowed searches to remove these sites from their searchers. Today, Blekko decided to drop the sites completely from their index, making the slashtag irrelevant.

The top 20 sites Blekko removed from their index include ehow.com, experts-exchange.com, naymz.com, activehotels.com, robtex.com, encyclopedia.com, fixya.com, chacha.com, 123people.com, download3k.com, petitionspot.com, thefreedictionary.com, networkedblogs.com, buzzillions.com, shopwiki.com, wowxos.com, answerbag.com, allexperts.com, freewebs.com, and copygator.com.

Gutsy move by Blekko and it will be interesting to see if Google follows suit with some major moves. But let’s remember that Google makes a tons of cash from many of these sites because they show Adsense.

I received a private message at a forum I have been a member of for many years and it was from a relatively senior member that was promoting some discounted listings reviews in his network of web directories.  The directories themselves look pretty nice, good templates and category structure but I took a quick look through the backlink profile of one of them and I was quite shocked!

I found backlinks from porn, coming soon sites and even from a page that was simply 10k+ links jammed full of porn, gambling and rx – I was going to post a screenshot of the page but it crashed my browser twice so I figured I better not push my luck.

Most good SEO’s always check backlink profiles before building links but there are many ‘cut-rate’ services out there that won’t spend the extra time doing this type of due diligence.  So be very careful or your website might just become part of a ‘bad neighborhood’.

It seems SEO’s are fairing well these-days, even in a bad economic environment – salaries for SEM/SEO related positions were up in 2008 and that just shows that decision makers are continuing to see the relative value we bring to the table.

2009 yearly salaries for an individual contributor with 1-3 years relevant experience range from $40,000 to $80,000; senior manager salaries range $70,000 to $120,000; and vice presidents with responsibilities for large SEM campaigns or a team of specialists earn from $160,000 to $250,000.

While the salary range for those with 1- years experience is quite wide I think that the majority of those getting the low range, $40k – $50k are in the 1-2 year experience range.  Once you have 3 years plus under your belt I don’t think you would even consider a position for under $60k.

It seems the spending on SEM will continue into the distant future and that is sweet music to anyone that is involved in this industry!

So Google finally stepped up to the plate with a post over at GoogleWebmasterCenteral on blog comment spam but the real question is did they give us good, useful information or just open up a Pandoras box of ways to ‘kill’ your competitors in the search rankings?

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.

Now many folks are drawing the obvious conclusion, should I just go buy a blog spam commenting package from overseas for $10 and hope the dozens of spam comments will sink my competitors rankings?  Google answers back that if your competitors link profile is otherwise healthy then this type of offensive won’t make a difference but what happens if your competition is relatively new and has a really small link profile with just a few dozen links?  Will I then be able to sink them for all the semi-competitive keywords they are beating me out on because of their high quality content?

I just wish Google would do away with their shroud of secrecy and start being more transparent because this sounds like they just opened the door with a sneaky, under-handed method of playing dirty.

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