Category — seo

I am thinking maybe we need to create a “neighborhood watch” of sorts for the online space. Every day I learn of something shady, hypocritical, or downright monopolistic that they do. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to site and write down every time I hear of them doing something “evil.” For example, just today I saw two posts from some of my favorite bloggers that showed what Google has been up to.

First up is Aaron Wall on Hypocritical Nature of AdSense

Next up was Slightly Shady on Google Creating Its Own Internet

Seoker.com on Google Toolbar Steals 401 Messages

Here are my two cents on both issues:

UPDATE: The fine Folks of Google Horror Stories  sent me a note letting me know that they are designed to serve as a Google Watch Dog. Feel free to post your horror story there.

[Read more →]

Well the jury is out. Craig Hordlow Mostly SEO blog had conducted a controlled experiment to see whether Google followed links inside your Gmail. You can check out his blog for the details of the experiment.

Unfortunately, it looks like Google does not index pages through Gmail. I guess I have nothing to bitch about here. If anyone has noticed something to the contrary from gmail please let me know.

I like to keep up with what SEO companies are springing up. It seems anyone with a little bit of SEO knowledge can start his own company and gain clients. I was a little excited when I found a company called Weblistic. They claim to be experts in local search. I decided to check out their demo video to get an idea of what they can do. All I have to say is their video is hilarious.

They made SEM seem too confusing for anyone to handle. Goe targetting, ad Copy, 100s of keywords, oh my :0 ! My favorite part is when they show the amount of search engines out there. If you look carefully Google appears twice, and why is Verizon Wireless there… do they have a search engine I do not know about. Then they show a pie chart saying google’s search share is about 1/3. Last time I checked Google had more than 50% market share.

If you are a small business do not let these people scare you away from trying to start your own marketing campaign. Am I going to sit here and tell you its easy, no. Buy I will say the beauty of online advertising is that anyone can do it, and the learning curve is not that high. Sure if you want to get into super advanced techniques like multivariate testing then maybe you should hire a pro. I am sure that if you are getting to that point then you have a multi-million dollar business and you wont need to hire these guys.

Buyer beware!

Ok so I discovered something. I do not know if this is something that people already knew, or something obvious I never learned about. Maybe this only works on the this one case with one of the clients I work with. Due to NDA I cannot disclose the web site. Basically I found a weird URL in the SERPS. It was a URL that we had 301 redirected to a better url (hyphens and kw rich). Upon closer inspection I realized that the url had two backslashes at the end of it.

I thought this was weird so I tried this technique with other pages on this domain. By simply adding to backslashes to the URL that was supposed to be 301 redirected I got to see the page without going to the new URL. I even used the Server Header tool and my findings were confirmed with a 200OK.

Just so you know I tried this with another client we used 301 redirects with that had super dynamic URLs before hiring me. Unfortunately, the double backslah technique did not work with Dynamic URLs.

Let me know if anyone else has seen something similar?

Once again, I received another spam letter to one of my websites: Enjoy!

Hi,

I just landed on your blog and found it to be very informative and interesting. I congratulate you for creating such a wonderful blog. Most of our moderators are a regular visitor of your blog. I would be highly obliged if you would spare some precious moment of yours and allow us to contact you for giving an interview or to review your blog in a finance community site having 100K+ members.

Know more from http://www.debtconsolidationcare.com/

http://www.debtconsolidationcare.com/interviews/ (interview)

http://www.debtconsolidationcare.com/ranking-chart/blogs/ (blog review)

Please let me know your choice and mail me at julimith@gmail.com

Regards

Julie

With a few tweeks this letter may have fooled me. Here is all they would have to do. Have a scraper look at the title of my blog and replace “your blog” with “blog name”

The last sentence is a total run on and doesn’t even make sense. If you are going to spam you should still try a little, I cannot imagine anyone taking this kind of BS serious.