pipes.yahoo.com

  • 16/05/2012 Interview met copywriter Johan Verest

    Toen ik in 2006 zijn bekroonde direct mails, verkoopbrieven en andere creatieve uitspattingen bestudeerde, was hij voor mij een soort onbereikbare superster. Iemand die van mijn copywritersvonkje een steekvlam maakte. En nu, 6 levensjaren later, trakteert deze Brusselaar me op een etentje in Belga Queen en is hij onder indruk van m'n werkwijze... Drie woorden: What the f***!!

  • 24/04/2012 Google bestraft Over-Optimalisatie: 6 SEO-Tips om dit te vermijden!

    Google heeft weer een energiepilletje geslikt; in 2012 wordt de jacht op over-geoptimaliseerde websites - zeker die met relatief magere content - opgevoerd. De potentiële kans om als dergelijke webmaster een penalty te krijgen van Google vanwege 'doorslaan in je SEO' lijkt dus toe te nemen. Google gaat dit de komende maanden actief oppakken: hier alvast een informerende video + 6 praktische tips om jouw zoekmachine-optimalisatie (SEO) uit de gevarenzone te houden!


  • 13/04/2012 Waar plaats je een button op je website?

    Vorige maand schreven we al over het belang van een goede vormgeving van je call-to-action buttons. Maar wist je dat de locatie van je call-to-action button op je website net zo belangrijk is als de grootte en de kleur?

  • 07/03/2012 Google Analytics update: 7 aanpassingen voor een betere usability

    Opnieuw hebben de developers van Google Analytics een aantal belangrijke wijzigingen doorgevoerd. Deze wijzigingen betreffen een update in lay-out en het toevoegen van diverse nieuwe features. Na eerder al de vele wijzigingen en verbeteringen in 2011, zijn het nu meer subtiele aanpassingen dan echt aangepaste functionaliteiten, maar juist wel die aanpassingen die het pakket gebruiksvriendelijker maken. In dit artikel een korte samenvatting van deze ‘nieuwtjes’.

  • 15/02/2012 Gratis SEO Scan! – It giet tóch oan: ‘Traffic Builders Elfstedentocht’

    Wat Wiebe Wiebeling ook zegt: de Elfstedentocht komt er absoluut dit jaar! Een SEO Site Scan-Elfstedentocht welteverstaan. Traffic Builders ‘bezoekt en adviseert’ gratis 11 ambitieuze websites (door heel NL) die hun online marketingdoelstellingen willen overtreffen. Wilt u dat? Stuur ons vóór 25 februari een twitter-bericht  (inhoud: zie onder), en win gratis deskundig SEO-advies (+ fles Berenburg) van het beste zoekmachinemarketingbureau van Nederland (2010).

andrescholten.net

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netters.nl

karelgeenen.nl

  • 16/05/2012 Mooie lettertypes door sIFR of Cufon? Dat kan slimmer met Google Web Fonts!
    Veel websites maken gebruik van sIFR (uitleg Wikipedia) of Cufon (uitleg) om mooie lettertypes weer te geven. Deze technieken werken met Flash en Javascript. Hoewel de lettertypes er inderdaad een stuk mooier van worden brengt het ook een aantal nadelen met zich mee. In dit artikel bekijken we een mooi alternatief! Nadelen sIFR , Cufon [...]
  • 09/05/2012 Welke statistieken worden gemeten?
    Als website eigenaar heb je (in potentie) toegang tot een schat aan statistieken. En met al die cijfers over klanten, bezoekersverkeer, leads, landingpagina’s, omzetten en conversie kun je sleutelen aan een nóg betere website of webwinkel. Weten is meten. Maar wat wordt er zoal gemeten? Baynote (pdf) vroeg zo’n honderdvijftig winkeliers onder andere om hun [...]
  • 09/05/2012 Meerdere websites samenvoegen: volgens Google moet het zo!
    Er kunnen verschillende redenen zijn waarom je meerdere websites zou willen samenvoegen. Bijvoorbeeld bij een overname, of wanneer je het aantal websites binnen je netwerk wil terugbrengen. Hoe dan ook, het brengt altijd een hoop stres en onzekerheid met zich mee. De grootste angst is die voor verlies van bezoekers van Google. Want wat doet [...]
  • 07/05/2012 1000ste artikel op Karelgeenen.nl. Lezers bedankt!
    Vandaag "is het zo ver". Het artikel wat je nu leest is de volgende mijlpaal in het nu bijna 6-jarig bestaan van Karelgeenen.nl. Dit is namelijk het 1000ste artikel! Statistieken 1000 berichten 432.010 woorden 15.274 reacties 1.438.811 bezoekers 3.076.582 pagina's bekeken Dank jullie wel! Uiteraard waren de bovenstaande statistieken nooit gerealiseerd zonder onze lezers, jij [...]
  • 01/05/2012 Hoe Nieuwe Klanten Vinden Met LinkedIn (7/7)
    Eén van de grootste misverstanden m.b.t. LinkedIn is dat mensen en bedrijven het enkel als een (passief) uithangbord gebruiken via hun persoonlijke en bedrijfsprofielen. Dit zorgt vaak voor ontgoocheling m.b.t. de resultaten. In het boek "Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken" (gratis te downloaden via www.hoe-linkedin-nu-echt-gebruiken.com) wordt in de LinkedIn Strategie Matrix voor bedrijven beschreven dat [...]

yoast.com

  • 14/05/2012 Penguin, Panda, it’s not that black and white..

    We're getting quite a few site review requests and SEO consultancy requests recently for people that have been hit by a sudden drop in traffic. Because there has been quite some news about Google's Penguin and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. In our perspective, whether you're blaming Penguin, Panda or another [...]

    Penguin, Panda, it’s not that black and white.. is a post by on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

  • 24/04/2012 Having a blast at BlueGlass LA

    I'm currently sitting in the conference room for BlueGlass LA, listening to Marty Weintraub and finishing my presentation I'll be giving this afternoon. Which leads me to the point of this post as I'm going to try and prove a point, therefore the following video is not really meant for you to watch but for [...]

    Having a blast at BlueGlass LA is a post by on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

  • 21/04/2012 Why I dislike Bo.lt

    When I released my updated WordPress SEO article a few weeks back, my buddy Avinash was kind enough to tweet it. He tweeted it, at first, with a bo.lt link. Bo.lt is a sharing service that allows you to basically make a copy of a page and add some notes or even some changes to [...]

    Why I dislike Bo.lt is a post by on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

  • 16/04/2012 WordPress Stats Infographic

    My Google Analytics plugin recently hit 3 million downloads and my WordPress SEO plugin hit its first million downloads. I thought those stats were cool and I decided to have an infographic made with more WordPress stats and dive in a little bit more and gather some stats that I thought would be interesting. If you [...]

    WordPress Stats Infographic is a post by on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

  • 04/04/2012 The ethics of SEO

    The type of SEO I help my clients do and promote to you using this blog is often labeled white hat SEO because it stays within Google's and other search engines guidelines. Other SEO's don't care about Google's guidelines as much and do what's called "black hat SEO". Far too often though, black hat SEO [...]

    The ethics of SEO is a post by on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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marketingland.com

  • nieuw: 20/05/2012 Microsoft Launches Socl Social Network: A Look Inside
    Congrats, Mark Zuckerberg. You went public on Friday, got married on Saturday and now as a special present from part-owner and best partner Microsoft have a new social network to contend with: Microsoft’s So.cl. But don’t worry too much. I just spotted the news of So.cl going live on...

    Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


    nieuw:
  • 19/05/2012 Poll Results: 25 Percent Of Our Readers Got Facebook’s Closing Price Right
    The Facebook IPO is over. The company went public today with its stock price opening at $38 per share, and when the dust had settled on a record-setting day of trading, Facebook closed at $38.27 per share, just a few cents above where it began. As Greg Sterling wrote today, that’s not where a...

    Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 Facebook IPO Fails To Deliver Anticipated “Pop”
    I had assumed, as did many others, that Facebook shares would open at $38 and head north from there. In fact I thought demand would be so brisk that the shares might hit $100. Was I wrong. I believed there was considerable pent-up demand for what was the biggest tech IPO ever. But that demand [...]

    Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 Marketing Day: May 18, 2012
    Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Marketing Biz: All The Non-Facebook IPO News Fit To Print Warning: This column contains no Facebook IPO news. But there sure was a lot going...

    Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 Marketing Biz: All The Non-Facebook IPO News Fit To Print
    Warning: This column contains no Facebook IPO news. But there sure was a lot going on outside of that particular media circus, from new product launches by Twitter, Majestic SEO and Hubspot to new rounds of funding for Pinterest, Quora and Bit.ly. The best of Twitter in your inbox This new email...

    Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.


searchengineland.com

  • 18/05/2012 SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 18, 2012
    Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Search In Pics: LinkedIn Bike, Chrome Watch & Facebook @ Google In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web,...

    Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 Search In Pics: LinkedIn Bike, Chrome Watch & Facebook @ Google
    In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. LinkedIn Bike Parked At Google: Source: Google+ Google Chrome Watch:...

    Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 Dylan Hoffman’s Pirate Times Doodle 4 Google Wins Pirate Booty
    Google announced the winner of the Doodle 4 Google competition and today that winner’s logo is on Google home pages around the world. The Winner is Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisconsin for his Doodle named “Pirate Times.” The Doodle won him a $30,000 college scholarship, a...

    Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 adCenter Updates Microsoft Advertiser Intelligence With Templates & Mobile Data
    Microsoft adCenter recently launched an improved version of Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI). MAI is a keyword research tool that helps Advertisers find related keywords and their historical and projected traffic and performance data from the available adCenter traffic. As an Excel add-in,...

    Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.


  • 18/05/2012 Google Improves AdSense Reporting And Bolsters Smart Pricing With New Research
    Google has introduced several new reporting improvements for AdSense publishers, and it has released new research that shows publishers make more money with “smart pricing” — even though their revenue-per-click is discounted as compared with search ads — than they would...

    Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.


seroundtable.com

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seobook.com

  • 09/05/2012 GWT notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.seobook.com/

    I am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line & the following message:

    Hello dear managers of http://www.seobook.com/! My name is Olivia, and the issue I’m gonna to discuss is for sure not new, but really actual and complicated, otherwise your website and therefore business wouldn’t have lost their favourable positions. Yes, I want to talk about Google Panda and Penguin. These virtual beasts become more and more freakish. Don't you think it's time to pacify them? Google intends to clean its search results from poor content websites, low quality links and hype. Are you sure your website has nothing common with this stuff?
    Our team has been constantly studying Google search algorithms. We have already faced the latest freaks of Google Panda 3.4 and will be happy to win back your top positions.
    We will heal your website from:

    • poor on page optimization;
    • same content submission;
    • low quality links to your website;
    • absence of website moderation;
    • black hat SEO applied earlier.

    We will make Google be proud of you with:

    • high quality SEO strategy;
    • backlinks from relevant resources;
    • quality SMO;
    • links diversity;
    • unique content for every submission directory;
    • constatnt situation analysis and reporting.

    Contact us and you will get a reliable website healer, strategy planner and safe guard of your top positions.

    Looking forward to your answer!

    And Gmail is letting this stuff slide through the spam filters. Along with garbage like this:

    Our Web Site [the url] is definitely related to yours and by placing a link from your site to a Web page of ours, you may not only bring further value to your visitors but you may improve your search engine rankings potential as well. By NOT being what Google and other search engines refer to as a "dead-end" site or a site that does not link to other industry related and content sites, your rankings have a good chance of increasing for important keyword searches. We can explain this in further detail following a response from you.

    Create FUD & some huckster will sell into your messaging with inbound spamming.

    If you ever wonder where the "reputation problem" of the SEO industry comes from, wonder no more.

    One company in particular does a great job of riding these trends on through to their logical conclusion, then riding them a bit longer. And that company is Google.

    On a positive note, it great to see Demand Media had solid growth & a stellar quarter. They will plow that capital into registering about 100 new domain extensions. Nothing to worry about there. It's not like they were known to redirect expired customer domain names for their link juice.

    Good job Googlers!

  • 08/05/2012 Ha! Bullets Can't Hurt ME

    Negative SEO vs Sabotage

    Just about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized. A person can say "not me" but how do they operate optimally in both the short term and long term if they never operate near limits or thresholds? But now that Google has begun actively penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles & tightening these thresholds, competitors have been giving one another shoves. Some of the most widely highlighted examples of crappy SEO were not attempts at SEO, but intentional competitive sabotage.

    Why Many SEO Thought Leaders Remain Ignorant About SEO

    Recently there have been numerous claims that negative SEO doesn't work made by people who should know better.

    Many of them don't know any better though, due to a combination of being naive, trusting public relations messaging as being the truth, and a general lack of recent experience on smaller sites.

    If someone only...

    • does consulting for large corporate clients
    • works in house at a big company
    • publishes a site about SEO and doesn't build & market sites in competitive areas

    ... it is easy to bleat on about how negative SEO isn't generally possible except for weak sites. Sites that (allegedly) deserve to be hit & must (obviously) lack quality to be so weak.

    The Risk of Labeling "Spam"

    As highlighted above, some of the most frequently & widely cited spam examples were not examples of spam, but examples of competitive sabotage. Thus anyone who recommends highlighting "spam" can potentially hose businesses that did nothing wrong.

    Why Many SEO Consultants Pretend Success & Cheer Brand

    Most sites focused on search typically write a syndication of Google fluff public relations and/or are doing cloaked sales pieces claiming that the death of spammers is great because they and their clients keep becoming more successful. Its all fake it until you make it / fake it until you too are driven out of the ecosystem & pretend things are always getting better even when signs point the other direction. This is done for a variety of reasons:

    • not wanting to lose access to Google
    • signaling you have experience working with big brands
    • wanting to signal that you are a safe play in the marketplace

    Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

    Marketers Sell Whatever Google Promotes

    It is far easier to get paid to do nothing than it is to get paid to fight against the waves of the ocean.

    So long as Google keeps feeding macro-parasites trying to kill off smaller & independent players you can expect a lot of consultants to push themselves as being a good fit for the big brands that Google is explicitly designing their algorithms around promoting. However this trend won't last forever. Many of those bigger sites are becoming ad networks & at some point Google will see that competitive threat for what it is. They will then decide "the user" would like a bit more diversity in the results & to see more smaller sites rank.

    Most Businesses Must be Small

    Much like wealth, business distributions follow power laws & most businesses are small in scale. Sure "build brand" is a nice cure all, but building a strong brand requires scale. Not all businesses have the margins required to build brands. And businesses take time to grow.

    Quality vs Scale

    Scale & quality are not the same thing. Some businesses are intentionally kept small because their owners feel scale requires compromising on quality. Remember the Olive Garden review that went viral, or what the biggest banks did to the global economy a few years ago?

    Most Big Companies Start Off Small

    Since going public in 1987, Fastenal has been the fastest growing public company. The company was started by a guy who was sorting bolts and nuts in his basement. Now that they are worth $13 billion they are virtually untouchable, but if 30 years ago online was a big sales channel & someone negative SEOed him his business could have been toast.

    Big businesses come from small businesses, as does most innovation. However, if the underlying market is absurdly unstable that retards investment in growth and innovation in companies like Fastenal:

    The Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the "grand opening" weekend, and the first month's sales totaled $157.

    One of the biggest failures of modern societies is the self-serving myth of too big to fail.

    If SEOs believe that size of a business is the primary legitimate proxy for quality, they should either hire thousands of employees or go get a job at Wal-Mart.

  • 30/04/2012 Google AdWords Ads Add Album Cover & Song Preview

    Before I get any drops of jupiter hate on the following...I was typing in training.seobook.com & somehow accidentally hit enter after typing train & when the URL completion didn't work I got the following SERP.

    If you click the feature video link it does a YouTube video overlay. The other links lead into the relevant iTunes webpage.

    Such media extensions have been in place for movies for quite a while now, but this is the first time I have seen them on music-related search results. In time one could expect similar ad expansions to hit other media areas like books, games, and maybe even other vertical search features. Google could possibly roll it out globally on brand searches as well at some point, allowing companies to offer intro videos (or even reviews of new product lines) directly in the search results.

  • 27/04/2012 The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages

    Huge Update

    Google recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the "commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money" category.

    Based on the number of complaints online about it (there is even a petition!) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update.

    Spam vs OOP

    Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer.

    A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.

    Why the quick turn around on the naming?

    If you smoke a bunch of webmasters & then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and look for the edge cases that make you look bad & promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for make money online.

    As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D

    Another site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that users can't tell them apart & force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn't get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits.

    Google also put out a form to collect feedback about the update. They only ever do that if they know they went too far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:

    So Worried About Manipulation That They Manipulate Themselves

    When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia & in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards & in the first page of search results was:

    • a big ecommerce site where the review on that product stated that the retail described the quantity as being 10x what you actually get (the same site had other better pages)
    • a user-driven aggregator site with a thin affiliate post made years ago & attributed to a site that no longer exists
    • a Facebook note that was auto-generated from a feed
    • an old blogspot splog
    • a broader tag page for a social site
    • a Yahoo! Shopping page that was completely empty


    That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google's cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name.

    The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.

    Part of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms).

    SEO-based Business Models

    Now more than ever SEO requires threading the needle: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but not so aggressive that you get clipped for it (and hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics & analytics back into efforts) & a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens & throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won't on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff.

    And your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings & then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn't consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?

    The Unknowable Future

    As search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. Many trends can be predicted, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well.

    This year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda & now Penguin) & the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a candle wick adjuster was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:

    Blekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run for only a few million a year. As computers get cheaper & Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does & Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file & how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake.

    At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:

    I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. “More than 90 percent.”

    There will be many more casualties in that war.

  • 19/04/2012 GoogleBowling, Negative SEO & Outing

    Excessive Complexity & Unintended Consequences

    Sergey Brin recently said:

    You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.

    He was talking about Facebook, but those words are far more applicable to Google.

    A Social Experiment

    In the movie Dark Knight the Joker ran a social experiment where he offered 2 boats full of people the opportunity to save their own lives by blowing up the other boat. The boat full of "criminals" threw the button overboard & the other boat also decided not to push the button.

    Of course taking someone's life is more extreme than taking their livelihood, but if you do the latter it might create stress and/or other issues which in effect lead to the former. Some people who see their income disappear might have a heart attack, others might have marriages that soon falls apart, leading into a spiral of depression and substance abuse & eventually suicide. Others still might have employees that get laid off & end up heading down some of the same scary paths - through no fault of their own.

    Negative SEO Goes Mainstream

    Anyone who outs or link bombs smaller businesses (small enough that Google punishing them destroys their livelihood rather than just giving them a bad quarter) is a _______. Anyone who advocates outing or link bombing such businesses is an even larger _______.

    Why?

    With all of Google's warning messages about abnormal links they have built the negative SEO industry in a big way. In some instances those who are not good enough to compete try to harm competitors. I received emails & support tickets like the following one for years and years...

    ...but the rate of demand increase for such "services" has been sharp this year. Every additional warning message from Google creates additional incremental demand.

    And this is where outing a competitor makes one a total and complete _______ of a human being.

    A Recent (& Very Public) Example of Negative SEO

    Dan Thies mentioned that it was "about time" that Google started hitting some of the splog link networks.

    Anyone who knows the tiniest bit about the social sciences could predict what came next.

    In response to his Tweet, someone signed his site up for some splog links & Scrapebox action. Now he is getting warnings about his unnatural link profile. Dan didn't intentionally violate Google's guidelines, but he became a convenient target:

    15th March - Dan Thies posts smug tweets to Matt Cutts and pisses off the entire internet.
    18th March - seofaststart.com - blog posts started - anchor text "seo" "seo service" and "seo book"
    22th March - seofaststart.com - 1 million scrapebox blast started - 100% anchor text "Dan Thies"
    26th March - Dan Thies posts in Twitter that he has received an unnatural links message.

    Since then Dan has installed a new template & his rankings tanked. Is it the template or the spam links? Probably the spam links, given how many other sites have got hit for using too much focused anchor text.

    • Will the site stay tanked? If so, now Google's approach to anchor text & link spikes allows independent websites to get torched in a few weeks for a few Dollars.
    • Or will the site come back stronger than ever with the help of the spam links? If it does, then how long is it before people start accidentally spam blasting their own websites & posting a public case study about burning a competitor on a forum, then citing that forum thread in their reconsideration request?
    • If the site quickly comes back, will that be due to a manual intervention by a search engineer, or from an algorithm more advanced than some people are giving it credit for being?

    When asking such questions one quickly arrives at another set of questions. Is it the web that is broken? Or is it Google's editorial approach that is broken? If the observer breaks the system they observe, then the observer is the problem.

    The Bigger Issue

    The bigger issue isn't the short term trends for SEO related keywords or Dan's site (he will be fine & rankings are not that important for sites about SEO), but the big issue is that if this can happen to a decade old website then this can happen to literally anybody.

    Piss off a ...

    • competitor
    • SEO
    • web designer
    • web developer
    • business partner
    • blogger
    • blog reader
    • former customer
    • freetard
    • ex-friend
    • bitter family member
    • insert any classification or category you like
    • etc.

    ... and risk getting torched.

    When you out someone for shady links, you can't be certain they were responsible for it. They could have had a falling out with a consultant or business partner or another competitor who wanted to hose them. Or their SEO or webmaster could have been non-transparent with them.

    Then you out them & they might be toast.

    White Hat, Black Hat & ________ Hat SEO

    Any of the ________ who promote competitor smoking or competitor outing as somehow being "ethical" or "white hat" never bother to explain what happens to YOU when someone else does that to you.

    Sketchy marketers can make just about anything look good at first glance. No matter how shiny the package in concept, it is hard to appreciate the pain until you are the one undergoing it.

    Building things up is typically far more profitable than tearing things down & if SEOs go after each other then the only winner is Google. Literally every other participant in the ecosystem has higher risk, higher costs & is taxed by the additional uncertainty. Sure some of the conscripts might get a bit of revenues and some of the "white hat" hacks might gain incremental short term exposure, but as the marrow is scraped out of the bone, they too will fall hard.

    Google is betting that the SEO industry is full of ________. If our trade is to worth being in, I hope Google is wrong! If not, you will soon see most of the quality professionals in our trade go underground, while only the hacks who misinform people & are an unofficial extension of Google's public relations team remain publicly visible.

    That might be Google's goal.

    Will they be successful at it?

    That depends entirely on how intelligent members of the SEO industry are.

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seoblackhat.com

bluehatseo.com

  • 09/06/2011 Guest Post: How To Start Your First Media Buy
    This post was written by a good friend of mine and one of the best media buyers I know Max Teitelbaum. He owns WhatRunsWhere and has previously offered to write a guest post on the subject for you guys, but with all the buzz and relevancy of his new WhatRunsWhere tool I requested he write [...]
  • 12/07/2010 Open Questions: When To Never Do Article Submissions
    Got a question in my E-Commerce SEO Checklist post from Rania, who didn’t leave me a link for credit. “4. Steal your competitors articles and product reviews and do article distribution.” You recommend STEALING articles from competitors as an advanced SEO tactic?! Seriously?! How about recommending that users create their own unique content in order to increase their [...]
  • 09/07/2010 SEO Checklist for E-Commerce Sites
    Answering a question on Wickedfire here. If you own an Ecommerce site and don’t know where to begin on the SEO go through this check list. In total, it’ll cost less than $500. 1. Signup with all related forums. Put your site in the footer links and go through answering product related questions on a weekly basis. 2. [...]
  • 22/06/2010 How To Take Down A Competitors Website: Legally
    They stole your articles didn’t they? You didn’t even know until they outranked you. They jacked your $50 lander without a single thought to how you’d feel? Insensitive pricks They violated your salescopy with synonyms. Probably didn’t even use a rubber. They rank #8 and you rank #9 on EVERY KEYWORD! bastards! Listen, why don’t you just relax. Have a seat over there [...]
  • 11/11/2009 Addon Domain Spamming With Wordpress and Any Other CMS
    I got this question from Primal in regards to my post on Building Mininets Eli, I like the post and your entire site. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. One thing confuses me about this particular tactic. Where are you getting the content from? You mentioned Audioscrobbler and Youtube API but I am not focusing on a music [...]

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wolf-howl.com

blog.traffic4u.nl

  • 15/05/2012 Whitepaper Automated Trading nu beschikbaar
    Het geautomatiseerd verhandelen van Display Advertising ruimte neemt een grote vlucht in Nederland. Om de kennis van de mogelijkheden voor zowel adverteerders al publiceerders over dit onderwerp te vergroten is Traffic4u actief lid van de IAB taskforce Automated Trading. Tijdens de succesvolle IAB Automated Trading Summit van afgelopen 9 mei werd de, door de leden [...]
  • 29/03/2012 Verbeter je conversie met gedragsverandering en neuroscience
    Begin maart werd in San Fransisco de Conversion Conference West gehouden. Traffic4u woonde de conferentie bij. Het waren twee dagen vol met tips en tricks om de conversie van je website te verhogen. Een overzicht van de hoogtepunten en een aantal inzichten op het gebied van gedragsverandering en neuroscience die je kunnen helpen je bezoeker [...]
  • 28/03/2012 SES New York: Online adverteerders, vergeten we niet iets?
    Vorige week bezochten Traffic4u collega's Dennis Griemink en Irene Valens de SES Conference in New York. Meerdere sprekers hebben stilgestaan bij de inhoud van advertenties. Volgens hen wordt hieraan nog te weinig aandacht besteed. Bij het optimaliseren van campagnes blijft het vaak bij het aanpassen van biedingen en het toevoegen en uitsluiten van zoekwoorden. Maar deze [...]
  • 05/03/2012 Display Advertising nieuwe stijl – Automated Trading Summit
    De laatste jaren is de markt voor display advertising aan veel verandering onderhevig. Werden enkele jaren geleden bannerimpressies vooral in bulk van persoon tot persoon verhandeld, is het nu zo dat een steeds groter gedeelte per impressie en geautomatiseerd wordt verkocht. Dit automatisch verhandelen (Automated Trading) is een snel ontwikkelende markt op zichzelf aan het [...]
  • 01/03/2012 Verschil tussen kliks en visits
    Waarom komt het aantal kliks uit mijn banner-campagne niet overeen met het aantal gemeten visits in mijn Google Analytics interface? Dit is een vraag die we regelmatig krijgen en vandaar ook dat we hier graag een kort artikel aan willen wijden. Definities: Klik: klik van een internetter op een banner. Op het moment dat er [...]