You often hear best practices saying that Google won’t index your pages if they force Googlebot to take a sessionId. Is that really true?

How does Googlebot treat session IDs?

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I’m really excited to release my first plugin for Wordpress, named Internal Link Building. What it does is give you an admin panel to assign keywords to given destination URLs. The point being that your website will link within itself a la Wikipedia - every (more…)

Just chatting with a friend at a enterprise level analytics job. Google’s new AdPlanner tool reports that all of their monthly traffic is equivalent to their monthly Google search referrals… “Google @ world all your traffic are belong to us” sent 1 minute ago from twhirl.

“What does Google want” is a common question that many pretentious SEOs claim to know the answer to. I’m about to join their number. Google has moved beyond measuring SERP quality based on relevance and are now aiming to provide the best user experience possible.

Other titles I was considering for this post were:

Why Matt Cutts’ “Make Content For Users” Was Very Insightful

How Googlers Measure SERP Quality - Relevance Is No Longer King

Sorry Rand, But The Googlers Were Very Expressive, IMHO.

They are aiming not just for relevance, but overall positive user experience.

That’s what’s behind labelling of cracked sites in SERPs. That’s the reason for Universal search. That’s why AdWords integrates with GA, and GA with Feedburner. That’s why Quality Score counts loading times.
That’s probably what’s behind Knols (remember, Wiki + AdSense is good user experience ;).) For the inspiration to this post, lookie : what google wants/researching the territory.

Aaron Wall claimed, in Strategic Content Based Link Building, that you could gain $10,000 worth of links with two days of work. That’s a lot of hyperbole, which goes back to how I didn’t make 3K in a week. My 3K post and my criticism in the comments on Aaron’s post is at the heart of this post’s idea: (more…)

So I got the following pitch in an email, in summary:

We will create personas and add value to communities around your topic and get links to you from members of those communities. Each link costs $xyzabcd.

When link buying turns into genuine, valuable editorial content that people would be happy to find in a SERP, which content only indirectly affects the links you built… is link buying still problematic?

Update: See more on what google wants, from the horses’ mouth.

David Mihm - web designer and local seo extraordinaire - recently asked me to participate in his local SEO ranking factors survey. And it got me thinking as to how a search engineer might consider the usefulness in ranking sites of any particular factor. Let’s see what the thought process in this part of a search engineer’s workday is like. (more…)

When you and a busload of friends have had several long hours of championship partying in the club where you gave 110%, and you’re still so pumped for overtime that you go over the top for the win - you’re a Hall of Fame member of the Pro Partying Association. (more…)

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency - most people place it around 7 times - for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have!

“Do we credit the first click or the last click for this conversion?”

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Here’s just a partial rundown of the awesome folks I had the privilege of meeting and talking to at SMX Advanced! Once again, I also want to thank the wonderful people at Third Door Media for providing kosher lunches, for giving me the opportunity to speak at Search Marketing Expo and for being class acts generally. Big shout outs to Michelle Robbins and Claire Schoen especially. (more…)