Archive for the 'SEO Industry' Category
There is a set of interesting quizes being published over at SEObook.com – the one below is very telling. I personally think it is OK if a company pushes its own products but Google and other search engines built their popularity on the basis of offering free and fair search results. Many average Joes’s (and Jane’s) don’t understand what is paid and what is organic, they just assume they are getting the best results on the first page….
There have been many reports that Google Plus is not doing as well as they say. Here is a post by the new CEO of Reddit.com
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.
I put together a fake news story last week and it seems someone posted it to Reddit.com and then the fun began! I got a phone call from my host at around 8pm and he said my website might be under a DoS attack because it was receiving 100+ http requests per second!! Needless to say my poor shared hosting account crashed and my host was working hard to keep it live!
Here are the results so far
The website usually gets 200-300 visits a day. The 86k requests I could not serve kinda sucks but I was not really expecting this to go as viral as it did. I will update this after the 24 hour mark.
30 hour update!
Referers.
I watched about an hour of the live feed from the Senate antitrust hearing on Google and caught about 15 minutes o f Mr. Schmit’s testimony and what I heard wasn’t very good. I felt he did not answer the questions posed very clearly and instead used each answer opportunity as a mini PR piece.
It seems the gossip around the blogesphere is mixed, many think Schmit did a good job at deflection the accusations and many more think Google is going to be facing an official inquiry by the FTC shortly. My personal belief is that Google will come up with a proposal to self-regulate because they definitely don’t want the government dictating what they can do.
Forbes had a good article that was mostly against Google and some of the statements were very powerful, like this one:
The grand disconnect at the Google hearing was that Google was oblivious to the concern that they represented their business as non-threatening with no competitive conflict of interest in order to gain content owners trust and business, the bait, and then they violated that trust by flipping their business model mid-game and switching to be the most serious competitive threat these companies could face – all while publicly denying that they are now competitors at all.
Full article here http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2011/09/22/googles-bait-switch-deception-exposed-at-hearing/
This whole bait and switch conspiracy might be a tad far-reaching but there are lots of factual examples to back it up. I think Google would be smart to make a move to bury this whole thing before it reaches the general population because soon the pitch-forks will come out.
Just finished reading the submission by Jeremy Stoppelman and all I can say is ouch!! He makes a really strong case (with lots of factual evidence) which points to Google participating in very unsavory behavior. I don’t know if Google can talk their way out of this one. I will be watching this news closely, there is no doubt Google is a modern day success story and they have done some really amazing things (I love gmail) but I think their shareholders are so used to sky-high returns that it is pushing them out of the search game.
Read the full submission by Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp here.
Back in 2009 I took a look at some web directories that got their page rank and indexing sniped by Google.
Around a year and a half ago Google unleashed its’ wrath on general web directories. With bolts of lightning (not quite but just as painful to the directory owners) it struck down the page rank of some of the best know directories for buying links. Let’s see how they have faired 18 months later.
http://www.ewebpages.org/ still sitting at page rank 0
http://cdhnow.com/ stuck on page rank 0
http://www.dirspace.com/ zero it is
http://www.linkforever.net/ zero page rank bar love
and it goes on and on….it seems that almost all of these directories have remained in Google’s ‘bad’ list and in addition to having their page rank stipped they also don’t rank for their domain names.
I thought it might be fun to take a look at where they are now?
http://www.ewebpages.org is sitting with a healthy PR4 and is looking like it gets regular traffic
http://cdhnow.com/ is also back up to a PR4 and it looks somewhat active
http://www.dirspace.com/ also has a PR4 but is looking mildly neglected
http://www.linkforever.net/ chimes in with a PR2 and seems to get the odd submission
A quick peek at my first directory (I don’t own it anymore) www.2ListNow.com and it is still holding on with PR3 but the details pages seem broken.
All in all it looks like web directories have made it through the storm and I still think they have some limited value in building backlinks.
So as fast as Google can think up new ideas it seems the darker parts of the web are ready to profit from them!
There is already many websites out there selling this service. Here are the promises made by one of them.
- All +1′s come from people with a google account that has been verified by phone (Phone Verified Accounts)
- All +1′s come from real people. No bots are being used!
- All +1′s are being given by manually going to your website and clicking the +1 button It’s untraceble because the +1′s are being given from different IP’s
- All +1′s are given dripped over a couple of days so it looks natural
It really is simple if you want to understand why guaranteed results SEO is always a scam.
If someone really had the super SEO skills or the inside scoop on the secret algorithms of search engines and they could guarantee ranking, then why would they do it for $50, $500, $5,000 or even $50,000? The top spot for a competitive keyword (top 500 revenue generating) can be worth six figures easy, so why not do it for themselves and retire? Why do it for you on the cheap?
Besides this obvious reasoning you might wonder why anyone would be so desperate for business that they would take a chance of working for free? Most often they are either using paid search to place you on the first page and ripping you off, or they are ranking you for non-competitive keywords and ripping you off.
OK, as you can see it has not been perfected but www.trueknowledge.com is very cool anyways. Take a spin and let me know your comments.
