Toronto SEO Firm - SEO & SEM Specialist

I read a good informative post by Doug Caverly at WebProNews.com, it talks about some changes Google has recently made to their section on “What’s an SEO?  It seems Google has taken down their warnings about SEO’s a few notches.

The old version mentioned “a few unethical SEOs” in the fourth line and then jumped into a list of warning signs.  The revised help page introduces a negative in line three, but uses the gentler term “irresponsible.”  From there, it names a lot of possible benefits.

“Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure . . . Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript . . . Content development . . . Managing online business . . . development campaigns . . . Keyword research . . . SEO training.”

Relatively neutral, background check-type questions follow, and then the same warnings eventually appear.  It seems Google now has fewer qualms about nudging people towards SEOs, though, or has at least decided that its old description came off as too harsh.

Barry Schwartz deserves credit for unearthing the less-than-sweet version.  And perhaps as another way of saying “sorry,” Google’s asking people to contribute their own SEO-related recommendations.  Google has upset so many folks with it’s seemingly non discriminate penalties that it want to make nice with a portion of their professional user base?

There have been rumors of such techniques floating around for ages and there are even some black-hat SEO’s that specialize in this type of “link bombing”.  The gist of the deal is that you create organically or through purchase ‘bad’ links to your competitor’s websites in hopes of causing their search engine rank position to plummet.

There are a couple of interesting posts floating around about this practice because someone from Google has chimed in on this controversial topic.  It is funny how a subject matter can take on a complete different view depending on how you look at it.  There are a couple of headlines out there that in my opinion are quite deceiving: “Google Defends Bad Link Theory & Repeats That Competitors Can’t Hurt You” and “Google Debunks Link Sabotage Theories” - In both cases I think the reality is the complete opposite of the titles.  Here are the two quotes that made me realize this, “Most of these guidelines involve the content on the site itself, something which generally can’t be changed through links pointing to the site.”  To me this means that some of the guidelines refer to incoming links and those can and will affect  your site in a negative way.  The next quote is even more ominous, “In theory, I can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing website issues I have not once run into a situation like that. Also, I know that if a situation like that were to come to our attention, it would be resolved very quickly.”  This last one tells me that it is possible and because of stiff competition I believe it is even likely.  Sure, if it comes to their attention that it is being done it can be resolved but it might never come to their attention, right?

Bottom line is that it is very unfair that something beyond your control should affect your website’s ranking.  Especially when it is so easy for a competitor to use these techniques to harm your site.  I am also guessing that the occurrence of this type of black-hat technique is much more prevalent than anyone knows.  After all, a few positions in Google ranking for popular keywords can means 10’s of thousands of dollars to some businesses.

Yahoo has been busy as a beaver (as we Canadians would say) with a slew of new announcements yesterday.

The most interesting one is the launch of Yahoo! Circular, an online retail marketing program modeled after newspaper circulars/inserts.  This activity blitz comes just as Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting was set for August 1 where Corporate raider Carl Icahn and a slate of new board members are expected to attempt their coup at the meeting, targeting CEO Jerry Yang’s job and trying to force a Microsoft acquisition agreement.

As part of this aggressive plan, Yahoo has brought Walmart.com on board in a multi-year deal allowing Yahoo to provide display and video advertising for the retail giant. Wal-Mart also announced this week its foray into the classified advertising space. According to the Yahoo deal, Wal-Mart will use Yahoo’s AMP! Advertising management platform to reach Yahoo audiences, and Yahoo will be the exclusive reseller of Wal-Mart’s display inventory.

I wonder if all this excitement and activity will die down once the Yahoo! changes ownership?

For those of you following my progress you would know that I have been doing SEO for about 3 years but only for in-house clients and my own websites.  I recently decided to take on a few new projects, hence the development of this site.  www.torontoSEOfirm.com first went live on May 9, 2008, just over a week ago and already I am ranking on the first page of Google results for one of my targeted terms (see image below) - We even have a site-link for our newest post! - This term does not have a lot of competition so it is not exactly a monumental accomplishment but it does give a good indication of how ‘doing things right’ can have a very positive effect, even with a new site.

Not to say Ask.com is anything like a pimple but we are talking relative size here.  The question is, can a search engine that is 1/17th the size of the industry leader run a profitable business model?  The answer is, YES! 

Forbes is reporting that Jim Safka, head of Ask.com announced his company will acquire Lexico, the owner of sites including Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.  The deal has an estimated acquisition value of over $100 million dollars.

Back in March Ask laid off just under 10% of it’s workforce and decided to focus on women above 30 and web searchers looking for answers to questions about health, fitness and entertainment because it appears this niche made up a majority of their user base.  With only a shrinking 4% share of searches Ask seems to be holding on by a thread.  There has even been speculation that they would soon be dropping its own search algorithm in favor of licensing Google’s search technology.

Safka denies this claim and say that the new Lexico acquisition is to take advantage of current Ask.com users that tend use full-sentence questions three times as often as users of other search engines.  So for now it looks like Ask.com will keep up the fight and just try not to go head on with Google but instead to attempt some innovative side-steps in hope of capturing a bit more market share and perhaps some more loyal customers.

Google Friend Connect was showcased at a Campfire One gathering of 3rd-party software developers at the company’s “Googleplex” campus in Mountain View, California a couple of days ago.  The plan comes just days after top social networking websites MySpace and Facebook broke down barriers of their online communities to let members share profile information at other websites.

Friend Connect lets website owner’s add social-networking features such as registration, member galleries, message boards, and fun or useful third-party applications called “widgets” by simply adding snippets of free computer code.
 People visiting websites using Friend Connect will be able to interact with contacts they know from online communities such as Facebook, Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo or hi5.

To demonstrate, an iLike application was incorporated into an official website of musician Ingrid Michaelson so that visitors don’t have to leave to connect with friends at their social networking profiles. All website operators using Friend Connect see are user nicknames and images, if any, posted along with them.

Concerns about protecting people’s profile data prompted Google to decide to work individually with website operators interested in Friend Connect, according to Glazer. Website owners are invited to put their names in a “white list” queue online at www/google.com/friendconnect.

Google wants to be at the heart of the Internet trend of people building online identities that play, share, and conduct business in virtual environments, according to one Silicon Valley analyst.  Google plans to phase in more websites and social networks in the months to come, with the Open Social software platform as a basis for interoperability.  This is good news for the forward development of social networks but it also will make webmasters more dependent on Google as it searches for more revenue opportunities.

I have been a critic of Google’s posturing and seemingly indiscriminate awarding of penalties for a long-time. 

There has been a ton of speculation around the industry of -20, -50, -60, -100 penalties (for those laypersons this is a SERP penalty that subtracts ranks you should be awarded, so if you normally should rank number 9 for a specific keyword or phrase, with a -60 penalty you would rank number 69 instead).  Someone found a site listed in number 61 position with sitelinks, usually sitelinks show only for the first result in a Google search.  Rumor has it that these penalties are being applied because of the suspected purchase of paid links.

I have said it before and I will say it again, until I see proof that Google can read a webmaster’s mind I don’t think these type of penalties are fair, or a good businesses practise for that matter.  If Google is going to punish websites so serverely because they ‘think’ the owners have bought links then it is going to be really easy to sink the competition.  Simply go on a little spending spree buying up site-wide links on some crappy unrelated pharma sites and watch your competition sink in the SERPs.

I better get busy and check my Paypal account so see how many competitors I can afford to get penalized.

Our original website, www.OnlineBusinessStartups.com concentrated on web design, advertising and promotion solutions.  We began providing SEO services to our in-house clients over three years ago, since then our company has matured to the point where we are now able to accomodate additional SEO service clients.   Over the next few months we will be able to take on a limited number of new SEO clients.  Please contact us for a free quote to see if our service is right for you.

The usual smoke-and-mirrors we are used to from Google were put away for a brief period this week during an interview Udi Manber, VP of Google Search had with Popular Mechanics.  Manber mentioned that Google had tweaked its’ algorithm 450 times last year.  This explains some of the really weird disappearances and resurrections of many websites and directories.

He also made an revealing statement about on-page SEO, saying: “I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages,” - It makes you wonder where the line is drawn between proper white-hat SEO and gaming the search results. 

Something else that was said that effects directories and other penalized websites is a statement that: “Google doesn’t adjust search results by hand.  “If we find, for a particular query, that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it,” “We have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution.” That sounds like BS to me and it is quite obvious that there has been many ‘hand-adjusted’ visible tool bar ranking for directories and blogs.  I suppose Matt Cutts will be busy fielding much of the follow up to the answers from this interview.