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…)

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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!

Google Analytics is broken (like PageRank is broken), and leaking my data into the index. All the site searches here on SEO ROI are resulting in site-SERPs pages getting into G’s index. How is this happening?

Final Update: This has been disproven as being the source of the site-search-results appearing in Google’s search results. I had good reason to believe that Google Analytics was the source of this (you can see below for my original thoughts on the matter), but there’s now a clarification. My apologies to Google and to my readers for the mistake.

A while back I saw a video about using Google Analytics to (more…)

Ever see that classic gag of a couple of people standing around staring upwards at nothing and pointing in the same direction? A crowd grows around them, and gets gradually bigger. The point is just to see how many people they can attract into their crowd of starers (more…)

• If knowledge is power;
• If information is knowledge;
• And if Google is organizing - and, more importantly, distributing - the world’s information;

Then isn’t Google the single most powerful organization in the world?

(more…)

Actually, I didn’t. And that’s why this post matters. (more…)

I’ve gotten two emails from a certain “RankRanker@gmail.com” (aka “webmaster@RankRanker.com”) trying to sell me their “Free SEO System and Link Exchange With Extra Earning”. While spam email pitches for terribly named, grammar-rule-flaunting, “get rich quick” systems (NEW: Now With An SEO Twist!) (more…)

The following are four cases involving reputation management. The paragraphs are long because (i) they were written that way and it felt natural (ii) I’m too lazy to edit (iii) most importantly, we’re all suffering from shorter attention spans. I promise you good content if you read on. Some definite lessons to be learned about proactive reputation management for those of you who are attentive to detail. (more…)

A girl I was close with in high school wanted to get her nipples pierced. I’d heard some horror stories about nipple piercings and decided that I’d do some research on the topic to try and dissuade her, assuming she’d learn from others’ mistakes. (more…)

Think you’re going to linkbait people with whitepapers? Maybe get their email or have them register for your webinar? MyVenturePad is bringing the stakes of the game one step higher: They’re giving away Meatball Sundaes! What is a Meatball Sundae? (more…)