Google’s update on links

I am pretty thrilled to see the current update on link abuse that Google has put out, I have seen so much abuse of links that is simply powered by the purse that you have in hand. Some sites spending 100’s of thousands of dollars a month to drive links to their sites. Many of these sites that ranked did not deserve to be ranked, and where a horrible useless site is put up.

We know how popularity is a significant factor in determining if a site should appear within the index. My hope is that this may allow sites with perfectly good content that have not been picked up have a chance to be picked up. With the increase in value of search engines over the years, it can be difficult to build natural popularity without the assistance of search engines.

It would be extremely helpful to allow sites the chance to be reviewed as they where years back when the amount of new sites where small and easy to view one by one. Some sites that may not be targeted for revenue should have the chance to come up without building a giant waste fund for paid search to get their chance to compete.

E-commerce is still not getting SEO

It surprises me to no end that many large e-commerce sites are still not using SEO as a strategy for their businesses. This is truly a waste of money in the long run, especially for some of the larger sites in the industry.

Google is trying once again to inject products into results to help with this process. Unfortunately without a major taxonomy structure that they lack, the results will remain of lower quality until they can do something about it. The worst part about it is that E-commerce sites are not crawler friendly and thus these products are not properly displayed.

A few large branded discount electronic sites have made attempts to make their sites crawler friendly and have failed quite badly. The information about how to make these changes can be found all over the web.

Not to bash them, but my favorite discount online store is e-COST and have prices and deals very difficult to find. It is such a shame that they are not ranked. I assume they do not spend a lot on advertising simply based on the cost of spend for ROI. But word of mouth marketing can only go so far.

Sydney and the Australian Market

I have spent this week in the beautiful city of Sydney Australia, which earlier this week I gave a seminar with Search Engine Room on using search to drive your e-commerce strategy. An impressive turnout from some of Australia’s leading companies. Hats off to Martin Kelly owner of Search Engine Room for such leadership. He has built quite a strong brand here in Australia and many top companies know his work.

At the end of the day I gave a quick site review session in which I looked at half a dozen sites targeting the Australian market. This market is not far behind the US in terms of development and innovation. However many of the same mistakes that we have seen over the years are plaguing new business.

Based upon my browsing sites that are locally targeted and hosted in the US, it is more important than ever for site owners to consider hosting locally. The overall experience is far to slow and not a great use of high-speed connections.

New Zeland a market not to be ignored

Last week I spoke at in Auckland, a great turn out for a small market. I was very impressed with the startups in the market and how they have beat out many of the large brands that you commonly would http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifsee enter and rule a market. One such company that has built an amazing brand is Trade Me and is growing in market share like mad.

This conference also attracted turn out from all three of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. They see an opportunity in the market and with the year over year growth I think its time to look at the Kiwi marketplace.