Matt Cutts and this Webmaster Central post recently explained that “high quality” sites were being given special treatment - submarine crawling. Since we all know that links from high quality sites are more valuable than those from average/mediocre sites, Matt and Google have in effect given us a new measurement for the value of a link - submarine crawling.

Russian Submarine courtesy of Orpheus Grey.

What’s submarine crawling? (more…)

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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 …

• Matt Cutts intervenes early at Sphinn and in my comments here to clarify that Google Analytics wasn’t at the source of these new items in Google’s index;
• In followup explanations by email, he shares where those site SERPs were coming from;
• Matt & Google provide a public explanation of what’s really going on, thus joining the conversation rather than ignoring it and hiding away
• Matt and Google compliment me/ SEO ROI (!) for having a high quality site worthy of this fancy treatment.

How’s that for reputation management? (Incidentally, on a prior occasion it took Matt about a month to get back to me on something, so it looks like they’re improving .)

A little while back I wrote about how I thought Google was indexing site SERPs for those sites that had Google Analytics tracking site searches. In effect, I mistakenly accused Google of leaking Analytics data into its index. I had enabled site search tracking and my friend Brian had too, and we were both seeing these site search results pages turning up in Google’s SERPs. Thus we were worried about the integrity of our data.

As it turns out, Google’s experimenting with a new form of discovering deep content on “high quality” sites. Whereas content hidden behind forms and javascript was once inaccessible, Google is now testing out new ways of discovering and crawling it, including performing limited numbers of site searches [and indexing the results].

Read the full explanations at Matt Cutt’s blog and the more technically detailed explanation at the official Google Webmaster Central blog.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, don’t you think it’s time you subscribed?! Consider that prior to the loud-titled “Google Analytics Is Leaking…” post, I had actually written about the topic over a month earlier! If you pay close attention to my blog, you’ll learn/discover nuggets of information waaay ahead of everyone else!

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.

Shana retaught me to say no, so many thanks to her! And my friend Sean Maguire (of 360 Sell) recently served me a raw dish of ‘your page sucks‘ and in fairness - I agree to a large extent! (Just not about the aspects that matter to Google, which is what that post is about.) Kudos to Sean for being a straight talker!

Besides that, while we’re on the topic, I want to make the point to some SEO friends of mine who frequently message me on MSN about digging their stuff. I’ve done it before and will probably do it again, but you’re going to have to up the ante. I’m ashamed to say that some of those pieces I voted for took you all of 10 minutes to write and 5 more to edit. Give me a break!

On the same note, to those people who constantly send me stuff on SU and hardly return the attention, kindly take me off your lists. It’s reeeeally annoying and I’ve begun thumbing down those posts of yours that feature Adsense above the fold and content below. Is that your goal?

p.s. If you were wondering why I didn’t post much this week, check out this interview with Tyler.

Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data. Outside of linkbait, whose value can be measured by analogy to the link-buying market, there are no standard metrics for tracking the result of social media activity. This ties into my question on the proper measure and value of attention equity: How do you measure it and what is it worth to you? Here’s my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. (more…)