Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they revealed.

Some of my favourite selections, and their translations:

Eric: “Microsoft’s Bing launched in June 2009 and has grown so rapidly that some commentators have speculated that it could overtake Google as early as 2012.”

Translation: Some commentators said idiotic things, and I hope you’ll take believe my tongue in cheek reference to said foolishness seriously. In other news, the sky is falling, the sky is falling!

Eric: “For current events, news-seekers can visit the websites of major publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.”

Translation: “We’re shaking in our boots due to the stiff competition for non-commercial pageviews by bankrupt companies sailing a sinking business model.”

Eric: “From an advertising perspective, Google’s search advertising tools compete for ad dollars every day against other forms of advertising including, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, direct mail and banner ads.”

Translation: “You have no clue about direct response advertising on a small-scale or for niche markets and I’d like you to be gullible enough to believe someone selling SEO services is going to advertise on the TV or the radio or the newspaper.’

Eric: “Advertisers know that they have other options and they can and do turn off their Google ad campaign whenever they want.”

Translation: “If advertisers don’t like us arbitrarily increasing click costs to meet our predictions for Wall Street, they can spend their money on TV, or get the massive volume available [at the rapidly growing] Bing. *snicker*”

Eric: “Our business principles that have guided us from the beginning include

- “Transparency. We give advertisers detailed information about the ad auction, including their ad quality score.”

Translation: “We tell advertisers explicitly when we’re going to charge them more money ‘cuz we feel like it.” (See Google charging Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com $2 CPC for the term SEO Book. )

- “Loyalty, not Lock-In. As much as we would like users to stay with Google, if consumers don’t like the answers that Google Search provides, they can switch.”

Translation: “You can switch to Google Product Search, Youtube, Google Mortgage Comparisons, Google Travel Search… All with one click [from our search results].

You should also be loyal to Google search to buy ads not just on generic queries but on brand keywords.”

As Aaron Wall writes, “The whole point of building a brand is increased affinity with users & not needing to pay for incremental distribution driven by brand demand. To spend money to build brand only to have to keep rebuying the existing brand equity is quite a futile exercise. ”

- “Be Open Not Closed. [Insert rest of quote]

Translation: “We openly explained to our Android partners that they could comply or get lost. We are using compatibility as a club.”

- “Label Ads Clearly.”

Translation: “We’ll label them clearly as Sponsored Links… in the upper right hand corner so you have a good user experience and don’t think to ignore the ads. That’s because in the upper right, you’re unlikely to pay attention, given the Western reading pattern to start in the upper left and move diagonally down to the right.”

…

Do you have a positive view on Google? Am I wrong on these things… feel free to pipe in and comment, even and especially if you disagree or have something more to add!

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This is a guest post by Phil Golobish, Senior SEO Consultant at Slingshot SEO. When he’s not writing posts for Gab, Phil helps Slingshot achieve digital relevance for deserving brands. You can follow Phil at @saintphilip or +Philip Golobish.

In 2006, AOL accidently released a ton of Google click through rate data. Clever marketers then used this data to estimate traffic a site could receive in any ranking position, and to forecast SEO ROI.

Since then, Google has made countless algorithm changes, incorporated personalization options, and blended results with images, videos, news, etc.

Given these changes, are the AOL CTR numbers still relevant? More specifically, what impact has blended search results had on CTR? The study Slingshot performed after the jump!

To answer the questions above, Slingshot SEO’s Research and Development department decided to do its own Google click through rate study using 2010 – 2011 non-branded keyword analytics and ranking data from its portfolio of clients. Enquiro and Optify have done similar studies and their much-appreciated results are overlaid in the graph below.

The graph above is incredibly useful for making current CTR estimates for ranking positions. However, analysis of Slingshot’s client data suggests that in some cases CTRs on traditional organic listings can vary wildly specifically when a non-branded query triggers a blended SERP that contains images, videos, news, etc. See the graph below for details. Note: Only the Optify study was included to simplify the comparison.

Aside from position one, the most significant change in CTR in a blended SERP is between positions two (2) and three (3). This difference between the two proposes an interesting SEO strategy question:

Should SEOs target keyword phrases that trigger blended results over like-volume keywords that do not, in order to win more traffic?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer and sample data is still being collected. We should have more conclusive data come August. However, savvy SEOs should be mindful of the different spreads of CTRs and should consider blended results during keyword selection for every search engine optimization campaign.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Uber Social Media? Unisex Mandivore? Unlikely Someone Minds?

Apparently, my USM was broken and I didn’t even know. Sounds dirty, right? You take that USM, grease it up and put it in the FRJ!

No, I’m afraid USM is nothing that hot and bothered. It just stands for Universal Subscription Mechanism and has to do with my RSS feed. The URL was typoed so the link was broken.

If you go to add my RSS feed to the reader:

And then you click on USM, you get the following window:

Where the link, as you can see is broken.

Kudos to Will Manders of Scuba Diving blog Scoobtube for pointing it out. I’m working on the fix.

p.s. On the note of some blogs I like reading and am glad I’ve subscribed to (because otherwise I’d forget about them, since so many things pull for my attention!) are Chris Brogan for entries like More than Offers, John Battelle who did more than write a popular book on search, but comments intelligently on the ad market, and Julien Smith with entertaining items and titles like how to debug thought code.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Do you want to make 15% – 25% commission, recurring month to month?

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

While googling around to help my sister Dahlia because her Gateway PC broke down (again … I think she got that 1/1,000,000 that makes it through QC when it’s a lemon), I saw the following search result. It’s entirely made up of forums, which is the first time I’ve ever seen such a thing (at least, when not searching for forums or info about them).  Screenshot after the jump.

A few thoughts come to mind.

1) This is a response to longtail queries. Forums have traditionally been a great place to learn subjects in depth, online. The first social media I really got into were forums around 2002-2003, when I was really into hiphop and Counter-Strike. Both had some amazing forums around where you could soak up information to your heart’s content.

2) I think this is part of the May Day update. It’s interesting to see how effective the update probably is in some cases, as I explained in point 1.

It’s also interesting how ineffective it can be.

- I still have no idea what the hell a RAID access failure is, except that it’s something to do with the motherboard, graphics card, or hard drive. And that’s virtually the whole computer, so not narrowing things down much.

- I’m also not sure really how to fix it. I got some idea it’s to do with the drivers, so I had my sister get the latest ones, but the other points were about reconnecting SATA cables etc.

- All these forums are by techies – for techies.

It’s like expecting my mom to come here and understand this post.

I don’t blame the forums mind you – they claim to be for an advanced audience and that’s fine.

- Any search engine that directs a non-techie to them, however, has some important questions to ask.

“How technical is a particular page?”

“Does this query need a more technical or more generalist response?”

3) I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Nvidia’s #1 ranking is [mostly] because they have the most posts/authors and thus the richest discussion. By extension, that would often make it the most authoritative thread.

Two arguments suggest that other ranking factors may be predominant, here.

a. From reading other forums, I think this is something that specifically has to do with Nvidia hardware, so it may be some kind of brand association. I could be totally wrong on that – please correct me in the comments if I am wrong.

b. The PC Help Forum has more posts and authors than HP’s forum – yet it ranks lower.

(The counter argument to “b” is that HP.com has both a load of link juice and brand factors pulling for it, which overcomes the lower post/author count.)

3.2) Recency also does  not seem to be the driving factor in rankings here, though Google does seem to find it important enough to display.

My guess is because this is not a query that deserves freshness, though some people may have a slight preference for it.

Consider the low – and constant – search query numbers – a newsy item would have seen a spike in searches.

This also supports my earlier suggestion that this is to do with solving the constantly refreshing long tail …

Raid access failure doesn’t even chart on Google Trends…

What do you guys make of this search result?

Have you seen it before? If so, how long?

What explanations for it do you have, and do you think it ties into May Day?

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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And I’m lucky to have been nominated in two categories!

1. My post, “The 4.5 Personas of My SEO Site,” is nominated in the SEO category! If I get into the Finalists round, I’d love for you to vote for me to win!

The post has also made it as a reference for Full Sail’s Internet Marketing Master’s Degree.

2. My article on 101 advanced tips to buy text links also got nominated in the Link Building category.

Here’s hoping the judges will consider my writing good enough to go through and win!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

You all know how strong of a critic I am towards Google, but I thought this user research and testing was pretty unique, cutting edge, and can potentially lead to some great benefits for Sub-Saharan Africans (like finding health info, as mentioned…). http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/designing-useful-mobile-services-for.html

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Until about December 22nd. In the meantime, 2803.fr brings us news on one of the first information products for the iPhone: A consumer reports guide that uses the iPhone camera to scan barcodes and report back its product rating accordingly. (Post is in French, fyi.)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

And that means tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for a variety of companies participating in the program, for aggregate savings to SEOs in the millions of dollars!

For those who are unaware, Yahoo bought out Altavista a long time ago. With that purchase came Altavista’s paid inclusion technology.

With paid inclusion, you paid Yahoo to include a list of URLs submitted in a special format (XML if memory serves?). If you were small, you paid a flat fee, or if you were big, you paid on a cost-per-click basis for every visitor sent to your site via their search engine. It was argued that this could benefit sites that had poor architecture, the same way submitting a sitemap could be beneficial.

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader. You can also check out my search engines category for more posts like this. It’s mostly about Google, but I also have written items like this one, “5 Things MSN Must Do To Gain Search Share.“

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

You NEED to attend SMX Advanced. It’s that simple. The single best investment you can make in your search education and professional life this year will be happening in Seattle, June 2-3, 2009. Here are 5 sweet reasons to attend.

1) Marty Weintraub of Aimclear search marketing is on at least 2 panels. At SMX West, he schooled myself and the rest of the audience with such creative techniques that I couldn’t help but be entertained. I was laughing out loud and grinning like my mom does when dad makes dinner !

2) The networking promises to be off the hook! There’s a reception the night before the show, parties during the show and after, the attendees feature roomfuls and roomfuls of potential leads for my fellow consultants, and roomfuls of potential vendors/link sources/social media vote sources/knowledge sources for the inhouse guys. For example, last year I got a free tip about reputation management issues for a client I was handling SEO for.

Check out a sample of who went last year. 1800 Flowers, AT&T, Amazon, Godaddy, BusinessWeek, CareerBuilder, CNet, eBay, Duke University (I hear they pay their SEOs in basketball tickets ), eBay, Fox Interactive, GoDaddy, HP, IBM, Intuit, JP Morgan Chase, Monster.com, MTV, Nordstrom, Overstock, Progressive Insurance, Time Inc…

It’s a Who’s Who of leading online companies and online divisions of organizations. Plus it was attended by every SMB with their head screwed on right!

I also met a shitload of awesome people, including Brent Payne, Brett Borders (a Denver copywriter), Tom Critchlow, Eric Enge and Stephan Spencer. Eric and Stephan schooled me on closing SEO deals at SEOmoz’s party, but I unfortunately lost the notes/couldn’t read my handwriting when I got home…

Where else can you rub shoulders with geniuses like Todd Friesen, Jonah Stein, Jim Hedger, Sarah Bird and Gillian Muessig?

3) You can crash SEOmoz’s office for a little bit, and spy on their secret sauce. Spoiler warning… It’s barbecue. More seriously though, people at the show will share stuff like this collab Give It Up video at SEOmoz.

4) Third Door Media go out of their way to accomodate and help every last one of their attendees and speakers. They provide kosher meals. They organize networking lunches. They create a mini-network for you to contact SEMs you admire so you can make plans to meet.

At my very first show, I forgot my laptop and went off to the airport, clueless. At security, I realized what happened and my newly-minted SEOmoz friends (it was our first time meeting in person) put me in touch with people there to start the hunt. Luckily, it was found by Third Door’s folks and the incomparable Claire Schoen insisted that Third Door cover the shipping and handling to send it back across the continent to my frozen Canadian butt! Can you spell C-L-A-S-S A-C-T?

Guy Kawasaki has adopted “Be a mensch” as one of his favourite bits of business advice. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Sean Moriarty, Claire Schoen, Michelle Robbins and gang score a 10 on the mensch-o-meter.

5) These lovely mensches have agreed to put me on a panel again! YAAY! I’ll be speaking on “Keyword Research Artistry,” one of the show’s first panels on day 1. I’m also hopeful that I’ll be given a spot on the Ranking Factors panel, but with leaders like Rand Fishkin and Marty Weintraub already on the bill, it’s clear competition for that panel’s speaking spots will be fierce.

If you like my regular blog content, well then rest assured that this will be more of the same. In fact, some techniques I’ve been using but haven’t yet blogged will be shared at the show – and only there. After that, I’ll be saving the content for an extended document I’m writing. Maybe a whitepaper, maybe a short book… But it will definitely only be at:

6) P.s. Their early bird special is only good until May 1st. If you delay, you’ll pay more. Get started claiming your spot at SMX Advanced now!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

For school, work and taxes. Therefore, posting will be light or nonexistent for the next two weeks. When I return, I’ve got some massively juicy content for you, including interviews I did at SMX West with Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Internet Marketing and Gillian Fishkin of SEOmoz.

Those are two of the top shops in the game today, by brand awareness and client base, and our interviews focused on the business of SEO – how do you build a company, build a brand and become successful in this industry.

On a related note, I got accepted to speak at SMX Advanced on Keyword Research ! Last year I spoke there on Buying Sites for SEO.

There’s also some juicy research in the works on moderator behaviour in social media and historical trends.

So you probably want to add my rss feed to your reader so you don’t miss any of that good stuff!

In the meantime, have a look at my most popular posts, or dig through my category archives to satisfy your thirst for advanced SEO knowledge…

* Affiliate Marketing
* Algorithms
* Web Analytics
* Blackhat SEO
* Blogroll (linking out to others)
* Case Studies
* Content
* Credibility
* Domains
* Facebook
* Friday Photos
* Fun
* Greyhat SEO
* Ideas
* Interviews
* Keyword Research
* Latest News
* Law
* Link Building
* Linkbait
* Local SEO
* Pay Per Click
* People
* Reputation Management Posts
* Search Engines – Writing about any given engine, specifically.
* SEO FAQ
* SEO ROI Quality
* Social Media
* Specialty Services
* Videos
* Whitehat

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This post is about search… but first, a little anecdote. I was playing poker with some buddies this weekend, and it reminded me of a thought I have often had about my friend Jon’s bluffs: he’s very succesful at finding that threshold “pain level” above which our other friend Will and I are hesitant to call the bluff. That is, he knows what the minimum raise is that he needs to make to intimidate us out of the pot. Typically it’s about 3-4 times the big blind.

On a related note, I’ve also been fortunate to go to schools with reasonable size classes most of my life. Even now in university, I’ve got some seminars that are tiny – there’s 18 of us in “Legal Education” with prof. Rod MacDonald (who is awesome, if any other law students are reading this … definitely worth taking). That’s allowed me to observe interaction in small environments pretty closely.

Throughout these years, there’s always been a girl or two who stood out as being more attractive than the others, at least in classes where the size was 20 – 30 students. The same can be said of some one or two people really standing out for their intellect. I don’t mean just being smart. I mean “remarkably smart.”

In university, the dynamic has changed to a certain extent. In my larger classes of 60 – 80 people, there’s often 4-5 outstandingly intelligent people.

Now, put all the hot people in a room? What do you get? The Coors-Maxim party my friend went to. Girls that would stand out in a normal crowd looked average in his pictures, because you could only compare them to one another.

Now, put all those smart kids in a room? What do you have? Law school classes (present company excluded from the ‘smart kids’ designation)… where commentary and questions that’d be notable otherwise are average.

However, in law school this effect is more pronounced since you study in isolation from people in other programs. This is especially true in my third year of law school, as I’ve gotten used to this environment of overachievers where having a brain isn’t suspect. The Coors-Maxim girls could still be compared with fresh memories of other, less attractive girls, since there’s no closed beauty environment.

So from this, I draw a few different conclusions:

First of all, being remarkable on the web is incredibly more difficult than it is to be remarkable offline.

The reason is that online, the field to compare with is that much bigger. You’re competing directly with other folks offering the same products or services – to which there’s often little barrier to entry – plus you’re competing with everyone else for attention in the media etc.
Offline, you only have to compete with whoever else is available locally. Who do you have to beat? The local butcher and the 3-4 supermarkets within a 10 minute drive?

Second, you’re better off finding a field where the competition really sucks, since the effort it’ll take for you to stand out enormously is much less. Luckily for us, there are plenty of business rating sites like Yelp and BOTW Local that can help you find those places where the competition sucks. Not to mention places where people rate their bosses, their jobs … the web ironically makes discovering pockets of dissatisfaction incredibly easy.

A few keywords you might use to help your searches: “rate my ___” “___ reviews” “___ sucks” and other synonyms.

Third, you don’t need to beat that many folks to stand out. Life and business aren’t zero sum games. This sounds like it contradicts point one, about competing online being much harder. While that is partly true, I exaggerated to make my earlier point – you aren’t competing with everyone. Anyone could compete with you … but most people won’t.

People’s attention is limited, markets are inefficient, RFPs don’t go out to the most-deserving firms … you don’t need to beat Google for the mainstream media’s attention every day of the week. (Only every Monday – Friday and any day there’s a Google “product” release… I hate the word product for online services… It sounds really pretentious. Is that just me?) You just need to beat out the other people emailing a journalist with a story pitch on that particular day.

Just those 15 other girls in your 30 person class. And sometimes, the girl just dressing nicely puts her ahead of the other folks around you.

Fourth, if you’re going to enter an existing market, rather than play “feature catchup,” play “feature/benefit changeup.” Instead of creating a robot that crawls the web to answer searchers’ questions, create one that crawls for vulnerabilities in terrorists’ websites. Instead of a social networking site that lets you poke cute members of the opposite sex, create one that helps people find teammates for their sports leagues.

Fifth, in isolated environments such as niche industries, what people become accustomed can provide a barrier to entry to outsiders, especially if it’s an environment or culture people get used to. For instance, I thought recently about what it would mean if I switched to studying business. Probably the culture would be less academic… and having already suffered from being around anti-intellectual neanderthals, I’d rather be here in law school.

Am I right? Wrong? Being pretentious myself trying to explain what remarkability is to an audience that is incredibly intelligent and experienced? Let me know in the comments! As usual, I’ll edit with dofollow links for quality comments.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve had this site for about a year now and feel it’s time for a redesign. I think that there are improvements to be made in terms of usability and conversion rates, but most importantly, I’d love to hear what you think needs to be fixed/improved. How can I make my site better?

Some goals I have for the coming year:

Develop my audience and reach. I’d like to have 20,000 + subscribers a year from now. I don’t know how realistic that is, considering that I don’t blog about web design or beginner topics that seem to generate subscription volume for most sites, but it’s something I hope to achieve anyways.

Finally launch Original Monetization. My developer’s gone AWOL with my money and code, and is not answering emails, which is quite frustrating. This site would likely be used to cross-promote it.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Stephen Shankland blogs for CNet on Digital Media, and he’s a reporter who learns fast and understands search marketing pretty well, especially for someone who’s not immersed in it 24/7 like many of us search geeks. Yesterday, he wrote a post highlighting some of the recent controversies about Google’s guideliness, featuring quotations from yours truly and Matt Inman, amongst others.

Check it out: Want top search results? Tread Carefully.

For me, this is a nice feather in the cap and certainly something to highlight on my credibility and recognition page.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

If you do, let me know in the comments or by email and you’ll be given access to test things out as well as a free copy of both plugins when they’re publicly released. One of them helps make minisites in wordpress for PPC landers, and the other lets you figure out when jerks steal your content and which of your members said jerks are, so you can kick em out.

On a related note, I’m preparing several feature-quality posts, as well as guest posting and contributing to other posts, and they take time. So please be patient – I assure you it’ll be worth it. And if you haven’t seen them yet, check out my best posts and ideas.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the posts I’m working on to get you salivating:

Internal Link Building – PageView & Time On Site Booster
Sitepoint SEO Forum: A Study on Moderator Behaviour And Its Effects On Membership
PPC Panel Uber-Coverage (Multiple Conference, multiple panel notes)
Growing Online Business Trend: Commoditization of Data
Sue The Bastards! How Porn Sites Could Be The Next Frontier In Class Action Lawsuits

So… get my rss feed. You’re going to come back anyways when they all make the frontpage of Sphinn (maybe not the ppc panel, depends how comprehensive it is and thus worthy of being promoted or not).

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Per Sitemeter’s blog:

“The most disconcerting initiative is the one being proposed by the FTC, which seeks to restrict ‘tracking activity.’ This means internet consumers can decline to allow you (and us) to track visit activity on your website.

This also means advertisers would not be able to track ad effectiveness, (e.g. whether someone clicks on an ad or not). This would favor ONLY THE LARGEST website publishers who can attract a few brand sponsorship type advertisements as small sites would not have effective data to communicate their value. The bottom line,[sic] [is that] this proposal would essentially break the internet advertising machine for everyone except ad spammers.”

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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=AsF7s1pRZXQjk6M7mHIy99bal8kF?p=http%3A%2F%2Fseoroi.com%2Fspecialty-services%2Fnew-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-internal-link-building%2F

Try and find http://www.pokeraffiliateprograms.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-discussion/17456-new-plugin-wordpress-internal-link-building.html

(Updated with new link as Yahoo changed its results and included other links I’d gained.)

Hint: It’s not there. My Internal Link Building plugin got a wide collection of juicy links (would appreciate more sphinns so it can go to the biggest hits area, folks, please), most of which are not reflected in YSE. Look at this nice thing Markus did for me, and I don’t even know him!

http://www.netvibes.com/markus941/activities

That’s perhaps more of a crawling issue, though. The first post is indexed at Yahoo, however, which bears the question: why doesn’t YSE show the link?

Long story short, those are two of many links – quality links that have driven traffic – which are not being returned by YSE. At least some of them are indexed. What is going on with everybody’s standard link research tool?

Is YSE going the way of Overture? Accuracy of the functionality slowly dying off until MSN or Google replace it altogether?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

You heard it here first folks: Google has recently updated its keyword tool to share precise volume numbers. Whereas the tool only returned relative numbers before, it now shows the precise amount of monthly search that occurred last month, as well as an average amount of monthly searches.

(Removed the keyword the tool was showing cuz that’s private.)

Here’s another one:

This comes right as the Overture tool from Yahoo has finally been put to rest, after showing data from January 07 for over a year. A smart move by Google that will not only gain it attention from SEOs, but surely the domaining world as well.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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?

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22sessionID%3D%22

Found while looking for folks using Blue Martini, which seems to output some nasty long URLs featuring BM user IDs and “J sessionIDs”: http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22bmuid%3D%22

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Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Some of you might have noticed that I recently picked up Ice.com and Diamond.com as clients. Well, for any of you interested in working with me and with the other great people here, I have good news: Ice.com’s recruiting SEO experts, SEM specialists, analytics smartiepants, and web developers / coders / programmers (particularly if you’ve done ecommerce work before)! If you’re looking for a job in search marketing and/or analytics, write to Shmuel at ice, or send me your cv/cover letter and I’ll forward them.

Update: In response to some questions – the work requires people to be in Montreal, Canada. There may be monetary assistance for you to move (emphasis on may because I don’t know), but the bottom line is that Ice.com wants people working in their physical offices. As to the job being full/part-time, I’ll ask and update. I’d lean towards saying it’s full time work though.

In addition, the company (I can’t say we since I’m a consultant to Ice.com, not an employee), is recruiting students for data-entry work to begin July 1st. You don’t need much prior qualification besides the ability to take

Some reasons you’ll like working in search marketing at Ice.com:

- Competitive salaries with what you’d find at an agency or doing your own consulting

- Original challenges. For example, as part of an update to a new software package, I had to figure out the right mathematical formula to calculate the number of pages we’d end up with. Earlier I was working on auditing the site’s SEO and I’m hoping to work on some initiatives of my own soon.

- Learn from working with cream of the crop vendors and software. I’ve had the opportunity to look at SEM campaigns set up by Range Online Media and Did It, and the analytics jobs get to play with Rolls Royce toys in Omniture analytics and Visual Sciences analytics. You will become a better search marketer/analyst working here.

- Work with multidisciplinary teams and touch on stuff outside of your job in seo/sem. For instance, I was working with our affiliate management team in regards to affiliates bidding on branded terms and using Ice.com as their display URL.

- Friendly and accessible management. The CEO works smack in the middle of everyone else, and both he and the other top management are no more than 20 seconds away from anyone’s desk. If you have an idea to implement or a concern, it’s easy to bring it up with them, not to mention that they’re very open to suggestions and quick learners.

- Dental and health insurance.

- Jewish holidays off (the owners are Jewish) even if you’re not Jewish.

- Free bagels.

Contact shmuel at ice or write me, gab at this domain.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.