» seo

My friend Lyndon was talking about SMO (Social Media Optimisation) and directories the other day and pissed a couple of people off. He was damn right too.

Most directories are useless rubbish

Bog standard web directories are not worth a cold cup of ****. A directory that sells on the basis of PR is asking for its link-pop-pass on ability to be stripped away.
See, for me, the whole get links from lots of directories on different IP’s thing is so frickin 2003 its not even funny any more! Most can be knocked up in two seconds flat and then populated with a dmoz script or Y! scrape. Most if not 99.9% of them offer very little value at all othe than the ability for joe bloggs to be able to drill down and find or add a site in an area they want to. Usually they are plastered with adsense adverts in the head of the document, designed to attract the users eye and take them away from the people who have paid to list. Funny.

I’m looking for people who would be prepared to participate in a ranking experiment, with the specific aim of determining whether blog power can unshackle domains that have sat with ranking restraints over a prolonged period of time.

The minus 31 penalty is the phenomenum whereby a site doesn’t rank for its site name, url and cannot rank for any keywords before page 4 or position 31 in the Google SERPs. Sites affected by this cannot rank for their target keywords however obscure. Unless it has no competition whatsoever, sites affected by this just cannot rank, not even for a complete unique title string.

Lyndon wrote a good post today talking about bait and switch or as he called it “switchbait“. I’m glad he did, cos I was in one of those ’shit, what shall I blab about today’ moods.
The method is as old as the hills. Build a domain, get the visitors, move them on to somewhere else. At least thats a quick and dirty interpretation.

First off a word of caution: This method could get you into trouble so watch yourself. A competitor could scream cheater! Fact is, its not cheating its not cloaking either, its using the referer string in combination with the query string to deliver content.

Many long tail searches often land on pages that don’t really cut the mustard for the query. This is lose lose. You lose in terms of outputting a page that isn’t really relevant to what the user was looking for and the user loses by having to hit the back button.

A few folks at  TW happen to think that some guy named Jason Calacanis is a bit of a Troll  Asshat idiot   Retard…I can’t comment as to whether he is or not as I really dont know the guy well enough to make such an assessment.

Apparently he thinks that 90% of SEO’s are evil/slime and that 10% are not. I do wonder how he arrived at that figure, no seriously I do. Who are these magical 10% where are they even?

Matt tells us all about the new Google backlinks feature in the webmaster console.

I had a little look at this and must confess, think its pretty cool in an ‘ooh this is interesting kind of way’.

The numbers aside, what I really liked was how it enables you to drill down to individual pages and see the number of external links pointing to each URI.

Brad wrote an interesting piece today which got me thinking about the topic of linking out, authority scores, pagerank leakage and all those old chestnuts.

Lots of papers out there on PageRank and theories and counter theories on how linking out can effect your PR adversely/positively and all that, so I’m not going to rehash any of those arguments.

I have to confess, there was a time when I was kinda obsessed with the whole SEO PR leakage thing too, worring about ‘bleeding’ precious PR and all that jazz, however I do think the ‘game’ has moved on a little, in terms of the SE algo’s have matured to a more considered examination of what is and what is not a good or a bad page worth ranking. Why do I think this? Well just go and look at a few well ranking sites and see how they link out. One immediate one that springs to mind is Wikipedia, although their recent decision to stick a nofollow tag on their outbounds may come back and bite them ( I hope) .

I read a very good blog post this morning from the old linkmeister himself NickW.

He talks about linkbaiting generally, what makes for good vs what makes for bad and touches on its newly born cousin ‘widgetbait’, a term I heard for the 1st time yesterday in a private discussion with Lyndon . More on widgets further on.

Anyways, getting back to Nick. For those of you who don’t know him or have never had the pleasure/displeasure to encounter his often acerbic wit, he’s the guy responsible for setting up Threadwatch , Performancing and the recently launched click influence and is generally credited with coining the phrase Linkbait. He’s a good egg, who tells it like it is.
Besides damn hard work a big aspect behind Nick’s success with these ventures has been his ability to stimulate debate amongst the community by writing interesting content that actually has something to say.

He gets people talking about stuff. Simple huh? Very rarely will you read a longish blog from Nick that doesn’t have something to add to the mix. He wins, we win. He gains links and kudos, we learn a little and maybe grab an idea or get incentivised to modify or adapt or use whatever it is he might be talking about. Does he hit it everytime? No, of course not, he’s human like the rest of us, but he’s certainly worth some closer scrutiny…

I’m watching Ugly Betty, but only half heartedly, just can’t get into it, so i start flicking through the wordpress tag link in the control panel of this install. I came across this site entitled “Do You Want to Double your PR for the Next Update“.
Anyhow,I almost felt moved to comment and say, well no actually mate, that’s a lot of old tosh, but upon reflection thought nah, what’s the point he’ll either get miffed at my audacious brass neck daring to question his ‘expertise’ and the like, and either delete what I say, or just try and argue black is blue.

Reading this blog here from oilman got me thinking about SEO and how people value their worth in terms of what they charge for their services and how some of what he is saying about others and their denigrating what we do can impact upon us negatively.

Putting to one side all those idiots who say they will submit your site to the search engines for a one off fee of $100 solicited by way of some awful looking spam email or adsense ad somewhere. Those tosspots really don’t help the situation as they help paint a perception that there really is nothing to what people like me do, when the obverse is so blindingly obviously true!