Welcome Search Newz visitors! It seems that Search Newz’s syndicated version of my article, “If You Listened When Google Announced Submarine Crawling,” which follows up the one you’re seeing now, forgot to link to an important Matt Cutts video. So there’s the link to help you out. Anyways, on with the show – here’s what submarine crawling is all about, as interpreted from Matt Cutts’ explanations.

Matt Cutts’ post and this Webmaster Central post recently explained that “high quality” sites are being given special treatment – submarine crawling.

We all know that links from high quality sites are more valuable than those from average or mediocre sites. Now, Matt and Google have given us a new measurement for finding high quality sites – submarine crawling – and thus high quality link prospects.

Russian Submarine courtesy of Orpheus Grey.

So WHAT is Submarine Crawling? (more…)

If you live in Montreal, you’ve probably seen Silver Star print ads. But you’d be a lot less likely to see them in search results on any major search engine because their search marketing effort is nonexistent (well OK, maybe MSN might return them). Not only is their SEO (What is SEO?) non-existent, it’s a near-100% duplicate of Mercedes-Benz Canada’s site!

If you’re Google and some random Canadian searches for “Buy Mercedes Benz car,” would you rather return the more authoritative Mercedes-Benz website or a total copy on a subdomain?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you might think. (more…)

Things have been absolutely incredible here lately, as I’ve achieved a variety of milestones.

1. Matt Cutts complimented me and SEOROI.com by recognizing that I was one of the first two people (with Mike VanDeMar of the Smackdown blog) to notice Google indexing site searches. (more…)

And it isn’t Google Analytics, as I mistakenly thought. So I need to apologize to Google (and to you, my readers) for the error/false accusation and getting people worried for nothing.
Even more humbling, both Matt Cutts and the official Google Webmaster Central blog have called yours truly’s site “high quality.” So let’s see … (more…)

I’m in a crap situation, and I need to learn to say no. First, because saying yes is eating into my own time and second because I’m embarassed to admit that I voted for friends’ submissions that were average and not really deserving of votes. (more…)

I recently topped 200 subscribers to my RSS feed! Thanks to all of you who subscribed . Update: Make that 300 !

Now, I need to qualify that statement. Over 200 people have clicked on a subscribe link, in the past weeks, be it in a post or in my sidebar. But I’m concerned about the confidence I can place in my data, which idea came to me from reading Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics An Hour A Day.

My problem is that because I feel Google has enough power and enough data, I’m using ClickAudit click counter/meter to measure how many people click individual subscription links. Tracking is at the post, widget and sidebar level.

The problem is that, since I’m not on Feedburner, I don’t have access/usage stats. And at the same time, as I’ve recently experienced a surge in traffic (10,000 visitors last month), it’s very difficult/tedious to just look at my logs and see how much of that is referred from feedreaders. Even if I went that route, I’d be unlikely to find all my subscribers visiting on any given day.

All of which has left me wondering what you guys were expecting when they clicked my subscribe links! Were you expecting the feed itself? A page with more information about subscribing, like these 20 reasons why you should subscribe, possibly with an email form as well? A Feedburner page?

So I’m inviting all of you who’ve recently clicked subscribe (as well as those of you clicked a while ago) to give me some feedback and vote on this poll:

1) When you clicked subscribe, you were expecting to go to the feed.

- Yes, I expected the link’s destination to go to your feed.

- No, I didn’t expect the link’s destination was your feed.

2) For those who were expecting something else, what did you think the link would take you to?

- A Feedburner page.

- A page about the newsletter/subscription.

- Something else. (If this is your answer, please tell me what that something else is.)

3) Still for those who answered “No,” what did you do once you realized that the link had opened up the feed? Why?

- Subscribed anyways.

- Didn’t subscribe.

Thanks for helping me figure this out! And please, if you hadn’t subscribed prior to reading this, don’t answer the poll. But do subscribe to my RSS feed .

p.s. I apologize to my readers for the cutting off in feedreaders due to using the ‘more’ tag for excerpts on the main blog page and the SEO ROI homepage (where you’ll now only find the best/most important posts I write). I’m trying to figure out a way around that, while still showing excerpts. Please bear with me while I try and figure out how to get you all full feeds.