How to get picked up by Google Image Search

So its time for me to ask a question, how does Google and Yahoo handle decisions in terms of listing images and which site to trust. It seems to me that the originating site should get the credit for the images, but this is not true in all cases. I would love to hear feedback of experiences on how to get images in the index. Simply turning that little switch in Google Webmaster Tools seems to do little or nothing to really help.

Should the images be hosted on the same domain? Does that make any difference?

Should the images be a specific type? Seems to me that this should not be the case.

Should the images be free of any java script?

Should they have a enlarge feature?

Obviously and ALT tag can help and a decent file name, but this does not seem to make a difference in certain situations.

Would love to hear opinions on this.

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.

Pages of Links

Sorry everyone, I have been really busy and have not had much time to write about anything lately. But I thought it was about time to see another SEO post from me that is not on Search Engine Watch.

As you may or may not know a recent algo change has affected the value of pages that contain a list of links to other pages. This could be a site map or a list of relevant pages to a topic. A tip that you may want to consider is adding unique and interesting content to these pages as well as relevant links from the outside world.

However the best tip I can provide after the basics are done, make sure you link to these pages from your standard navigation. Without these links these pages could be considered irrelevant and may not move up.

Changes to Google algo since March 1st

It looks like Google has changed how they view pages with more anchor text than regular text now. To prevent lists of links ranking that may not be very good quality.

I have finally seen enough cases where I think this is a significant part of an update that went on back in March 1st.

Simple suggestion would be add descriptions to what’s at the other end.

Posts on WMW about the Google Search Quality Team Responses

I was taken back a bit by some of the “Angry” posts about the type of help given by the Google Search Quality Team. As an ex-Inktomi guy, supporting users I know that it’s a tough line between providing information and giving away something that can be taken out of context and used in court. Thus not everything they get can be responded to in the same manner. Personally I appreciate any data I can get back it absolutely helps me with my diagnostics even if it’s a minuet detail. Just a late night thought.

Changes in my career and such

So last month has been a crazy one, I have made quite a few changes in my career. I have decided to start consulting and joined forces with Joseph Morin to work with mid to enterprise size clients and share what both of us have learned over the years. The new business is doing well and I am still working with the folks over at Shopping.com.

I plan on attending more conferences this year than more normal 2-3, so come by and say hi when you seem me. I am staying put in San Francisco, I love it here too much to move.

So if you need help with your in-house team I now consult.

SES NYC Party List is UP

Joe Morin has done another smack up job of finding out where all the best parties are. Check out this post.

I hope to see you all there.

April Fools

Wow, there are some pretty strange pranks going on for April Fools. Especially which almost looks real. But the amount of hackers combined seems a little more than normal. Thus I would agree with the fake attack.

Sorry I haven't been able to write in a while, but expect some news from me this week!http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Google Webmaster Tools Query Stats

I am not sure how long this feature has been around, but I was just scrolling through my list of sites and wanted to see the recent query stats on a few of my sites. I noticed that there is an option to see query stats by search location. This is great, now for foreign sites I can actually see exactly what’s going on within that country.

This seems especially helpful if you are having a hard time getting rankings up in a specific country. In my case trying to rank sub domains from a .com site hosted in the US.

Fear of Personalized Search and SEO

There seems to be a general fear of how personalized search is going to affect how SEO works. What strikes me the most is the common unwillingness of SEO’s today to advance their abilities to cope with change. I am very intrigued by the sheer volume of posts that appear daily about every little bump in Google. As an SEO community we need to move beyond this type of thinking and adapt to the future of how search will work.

One thing is for sure, Google is not going to risk the user experience of Google Web Search. It is also blatantly clear that Personalized Search will only be offered to signed in users. How else can they appropriately track search behavior to encompass a proper result? Keep in mind that cookies are slowly going away, many users are turning off accepting cookies for privacy.

I see the field of SEO becoming a strong part of user experience enhancement. If we can help to make sure sites are highly accessible and are attractive to users we will perform well in the SERP’s. It is sad that there are still folks out there creating garbage sites just to drive revenue and not fill a particular need. We are going to see a huge shakeup of these results sooner rather than later. Which will open the doors for sites who deserve to be exposed moving up and taking the place.

VC’s Investing in Startups

A very interesting scenario has come to mind that is not and old one. If you have a great idea and are able to get VC funding, one of the major requirements is a proper business plan.

A serious question that should be at the top of your mind is how are you going to drive traffic to your newly derived startup? Putting up a billboard in Iowa and expecting to see traffic is almost suicidal. So why would you omit the line item regarding traffic generation?

Yes, SEM is a great way to drive traffic to new sites. We know that, its something that has become a standard in the industry. In some cases it may not be possible to have a profitable business with SEM alone.

So just a thought, while budgeting you may want to consider a line item for SEO. Especially since SEO can drive so much GM it should not be a small amount of money either. Take a few minutes and call a few consultants and agencies for appraisal. You may be surprised how much more is involved than you first thought. It’s one of the reasons we are in business.

When is SEO just too expensive?

Now this may sound funny, but I think it’s interesting to look at the cost of production of some of the largest most powerful websites out there. As an SEO I tend to judge huge sites radically based upon their ability to optimize code. We may think well let’s work some magic here and do a URL re-write or let’s optimize the way the templates are generated. But the most common thing that I tend to neglect is the overall cost!

Did you know that a simple code change, not a complicated URL re-write on a very powerful site could cost as much as $300k? So now that the company has paid for their consultant to come in and tell them what to do, they still have to fork out this much in resources. It’s quite a humbling thought.

This includes, engineering time. If the engineering teams are setup on certain groups or resources there is a certain cost associated with each hour of his or her time. That cost is then multiplied by the number of QA engineers associated with the testing of the code and then the user front end testing required to make sure that the user base is not going to freak out. This is before it’s even pushed to production and taking into account the simple cost of copying the code from staging, to production and then testing to make sure everything is live and happy.

I think back to some of my past articles, like its 2007 and most ecommerce sites are not SEO optimized. Yes the big companies have a large risk, we think its small but the cost is quite substantial. There still is no excuse for the smaller sites that can make these tweaks and it may cost them several thousand dollars in engineering time.

Ok this is a result of my brain going in crazy directions today with too much caffeine.

A few suggestions for sites that carry classifieds type content

A question that I just responded to on webmasterworld.com, brought back some general questions that I have spent a lot of time theorizing around this year. How do you handle content that is expiring quickly?

First just getting the content indexed in a reasonable amount of time is very difficult, if your ad lasts anywhere less than 5 days this may be impossible. Especially if you delete the ad! I would recommend not deleting the ad and rather spending more time figuring out how to get a user to an ad that is similar and relevant. How you ask? Use a search engine that will be the cleanest way to index and catalog your available options.

Providing users with an alternative method to finding additional content is always helpful. But it’s critical that the options you are providing them are relevant! The simplest method would be to use a search appliance and ask it to provide the top 5 matches for other products or classifieds on the site that could be a good match and to display them. Thus when the search engine gets around to indexing this content it will have the ability to find related products to index and give the user a place to go.

Nothing is more annoying that searching for something and landing on a useless page. Google knows this and does whatever it can not to display such results.

From an indexing point of view a rapidly changing list of pages can be a nightmare as well. For example if you have a category for used tv’s on your classifieds site that has a next prompt at the bottom of it. The search engine assumes that the user will have to click “x” amount of times deep to get to the product at that given time. Make sure you display all pages in a numbered fashion above and below the list to make it easy to find. Then every result is only one click away from the primary category page.

These types of sites are also great candidates from coming up with a Google Sitemaps solution. You can sure that Google will pick up these pages at an expedited rate IF they are refreshed constantly. You cant generate a sitemap once a month and expect this to work.

Google’s -950 Penalty

Tedster from Webmasterworld.com has posted a very interesting theory about the -950 penalty and a direct correlation with a seemingly coincidental patent that was recently released. I agree with his logic about this particular patent having a unique effect of the rankings.

However, if you read through this patent it seems to me that it was designed to detect and penalize content generated from basically a content generation system. The sole purpose of these content generators is to mix-up content and make it seem themed and relevant for search engines.

The most interesting example of this is the following “An example of the cluster bit vectors are as follows, using the above phrases: TABLE-US-00001 Monica purse Cluster Bill Clinton President Lewinsky designer ID Bill Clinton 1 1 1 0 14 President 1 1 0 0 12 Monica 1 0 1 1 11 Lewinsky purse 0 0 1 1 3 designer”

The first thing I noticed reading this line is that the data looks like it may belong together, but the order written obviously would be generated and not logical English. Google could take this sample and run it against other known examples of content that are themed. If this particular sample is so far beyond the normal threshold it could easily trigger such a filter. The most interesting part of spam is usually it is targeted to mostly competitive subjects, thus the sample size is very large and easy to target.

We know Google has the ability to globally pattern match snippets of content and deem them duplicative, thus a filter of this nature could be pretty easy to build on top of such technology. It’s rather ingenious!

Effects that behavioral skipping has on SEO

Behavioral skipping has become a pain in my side this past year and thought I would spend a few minutes sharing my pain. The logic is, if you have site that produces a page based upon a search you know what I am dealing with.

To provide a frame of reference every single page that you view is actually search result, even though the data seems pretty simple and theoretically easy to produce. But to scale according to a large database, you cannot create 10’s of millions of pages and make sure that they are all doing what you want manually. No one can afford to maintain that type of process. So instead you try and learn the behaviors of users by what they are looking for and try and assume what they want either based upon a click or a search. In this case it’s really the same thing, but the URL’s are different.

It’s amazing to see how wide spread this type of problem is across the net. You can simply go to any major retail site and type in a popular model number of a product. It can be very easy to get 100 results back for a specific ipod, especially when the retailer has tons of sub retailers that ship on their behalf.

It became obviously clear why these sites also do not perform at all in MSN, there was a post about how you can remove your competitors from the MSN index by getting duplicate pages indexed using ?value after each page. With large retail sites you do not have to work hard at this. It becomes very easy to do without anyone else’s help.

My thoughts on Jason Calacanis’ post

First I would like to clearly say that I respect Jason Calacanis as a business leader and what he has accomplished in his career. No, don’t worry I am not going to start a bashing session about this. But I think it’s important to read between what Jason and Danny wrote about this subject.

I think Jason’s general synopsis that 90% of SEO’s are snake oil salesmen may be a little rough. Yes there are quite a few shady individuals out there. But more importantly we should clarify that large mistakes come from firms who have way too many employees and high turn over. The sales staff’ focus is to sell the customer and with sales in general a certain amount of BS is involved. As someone who really knows this process inside and out, this is not where the failure happens, the failure happens within the high turn over tech staff that is doing most of the work. When you provide the keys to your site to some kid who is fresh out of school and has optimize maybe 2 sites in total, the risk moves up.

In general my opinion is that a good SEO is one who has been optimizing sites for a period of time, hopefully a long period of time. This individual has made mistakes and has clearly learned from his or her mistakes. We can only grow in this industry by error itself. I have personally optimized 100’s upon 100’s of sites, some small and some large. But actually being in the trenches for the past 7 years has given me a leg up. Many of the top guys in the SEO industry have built names from themselves in a short period of time, and they do a great job. Thus the need of a lot of experience is not necessary, but it prepares you for sudden changes in search algorithms that can really shake up your life.

Danny was very right in his logic and reasoning around the majority of the industry. Almost everyone has good intentions and very few that are bad are still in business. A lot of us remember the trafficpower.com days, far and few between.

Now for my controversial view, when you take away the rest of the small sites out there and look at the big bad boys. The landscape of knowledgeable people changes dramatically. To optimize a large high trafficked website requires a dramatically different thinking process. Yes all the same practices apply, but how do you get the search engine to like all 100 million pages? This is where I feel there are a lot of snake oil firms selling. Most large SEO firms CANNOT handle ultra sized websites.

Most commonly the first things a person will experience working with a large company is all of the red tape and road blocks. It takes a lot of one on one time with the engineering staff and the capability of drawing ideas out of their staff. If you cannot get them on your side, you are sunk and the project will fail!

Of the consultants that I know in the industry, the only ones that I would throw at a large company are Joseph Morin, Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal. I have seen their reactions and how they present themselves in such a manner that can be conducive of a productive meeting. I am sure there are many others out there that I do not know, and forgive me for not mentioning you. People, who know me, also know I will never recommend anyone that I wouldn’t use myself.

Yes, I tend to write in a very scattered way, so I will say in short. I think Jason’s comments where a bit too generalized and Danny made it clear. But there is a difference between a standard SEO and a fortune 500 SEO.

Website accessibility for SEO

I think its time to bring up website accessibility and SEO again. One of the things that I constantly rant about is that pages load too slowly and are too big, causing rankings to move down. There are several factors that I have been looking at lately that seem to add additional credibility to this logic. The main thing I keep looking at is latency.

One of which is locations of Google crawlers coming into my global sites. A simple analysis that I have done over several sites that I manage concludes that if you have a TLD or an IP address from a country Google will cross the pond from the local country to crawl the foreign sites.

To add further credit to this I have examined other sites in the same industry who actually host their sites within country. These sites out rank 10 to 1 any sites that are hosted back in the US. Now I know what you are thinking, what does this have anything to do with accessibility? EVERYTHING! Imagine a dialup user trying to pull down your fat slow pages over the pond, what a terrible experience! It’s imperative that these basic things come into play with your strategy.

Here is a small list of things that I look at that seem to make a huge difference.

1). Page Load Speed, if it’s over 500MS on average its way too SLOW! Look at your Google Webmaster Tools under the Crawl Rate to see what Google see’s.

2). Page size, how big is your page? Does it really need to be that big? Do you really need 100 images on it? Are they properly tagged? Do you really need all that graphical crap?

3). Text vs Graphics, how much text is a part of your page? No not the same boilerplate that appears on every page. The unique core part of your document.

4). Section 508 elements? Do you have them? ALT tags, are a great start, this is easy stuff to add and can really help you out. Check out Target.com, they got sued for not having them.

Google back link tool, easy tool for diagnosing URL issues

As any SEO would do, as soon as a new toy is available I drop everything and start playing with it. The first thing I noticed is that this is a great way for large site owners to find URL problems. Wow what an amazing insight to huge issues! I was able to find spaces in URL’s strange tracking id’s that I had no idea still existed and trailing characters. What a great tool for my large site arsenal!

This tool is available within your Google Webmaster Tools, simply click the Link tab after you select your verified site.

SEO learning's from expanding internationally

After this last year I have walked away with a lot of information about how Google reacts to expanding your brand into new countries.

My first hassle was acquiring local domains within each country:

Requirements within the UK, a Royal Postal Address, even a PO Box will do. Not a tough one.

Requirements in Germany are quite the same, a local address within Germany to acquire the domain.

France was a huge hassle, not only a local address was required but as soon as you attempted to acquire an SSL certificate the process became slow and aggravating. You can only maintain your registration for up to 1 year in France, thus if you forget to renew you could be in trouble.

The most surprising for such a low hassle culture was Australia, you need to provide a mountain of documentation and prove that you are a resident of Australia to obtain a local domain.

During this acquisition process of domains we decided to launch under sub-domains from a US hosted .com. As you may know already if you have a .com and it's hosted in the US, it can be a huge hassle to get listed locally in country. With some nifty routing and clever negotiations I was able to get IP's from other countries completely re-assigned to me locally. When you broadcast a foreign IP, it's still mapped as being from the local country thus you can be identified as being from in country. This was a very successful approach rather than the extreme alternative which was to open an expensive data center.

During this process I was also told that RIPE addresses are EU addresses and not specific per country. This is not true, and will cause your other foreign sites to be thrown in the wrong country.

While launching these new properties I also discovered that if you are in Germany and an English based site within Germany links to you, it still helps. As long as the content on the site is themed and relevant, it seems that Google simply examines theme of the links pointing into the English site, which many where German and had extremely related content.

I walked away with the basic premise that if you host and have a local TLD in country your life will be so much easier. The search engines have a long way to go to provide a simple way to handle multi country businesses.

Observations on Trends on In-House SEO's

I have observed over the past year there seems to be a very strange split that is occurring within the in-house SEO group. Personally working in-house for a large company with a wide variety of SEO's, I noticed that continual research and development is a dying art. Innovation is coming form old information and logic and little time is spent reading the boards/blogs and staying up to date.

Personally I spend half my day researching and staying up to date on any advancement as it could be catastrophic if you let it go. Additionally I noticed that the return to the forums only occurs when something goes wrong, the in-house folks who spend time reading and staying up to date are commonly not asking questions when changes are occurring since they are a step ahead.

It’s 2007 and many of the top e-commerce sites are still not optimized for search engines

I just went shopping for a set of Shure headset’s for my ipod, excessive gym use fried them. After visiting a quite a few sites and observing their flow and process in which to find products I was pretty impressed how easy it was to find the product. At the same time the URL structure of most of these sites are not indicative of proper crawling structure. These companies are leaving so much money on the table I cant even understand it.

Shopping engines will prevail as long as these companies stay in the dark ages. Amazon seems to still be the most innovative e-commerce site out there, they are a great example of what to do as well as what not to do in some cases.

Just my rant for the day.

BTW, I wound up buying my headset on eBay, much better price!

Monetizing an SEO blog

Well I now know for sure that Google’s Adsense and Blogkits both suck for monetizing an SEO blog. What works on your blog?

Observation, while trying to think like Google

I have been reading new blogs today to see what people are talking about and I ran across this SEO site, who claims to have been in business since the mid 90’s. I though wow, why I have I never heard of this firm before? After a simple whois search I noticed that the domain was originally registered in 2001 and there isn’t a reference to another company name before that.

I just thought this would be an interesting observation, especially since there is so much talk about age of domains and rankings.

How do you decide whether you need to submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools?

From my experiments over the past year I have found a few interesting conclusions of the effectiveness of the Google Sitemap’s tool. Basically, there is only one reason I would use the Sitemaps feature, if your site has a lot of new content added every day that can possibly be 20-50 clicks deep on your site. These pages are very difficult for Google to pick up quickly, and with a site that is this deep it most likely has millions of pages.

Use this simple logic to determine if your pages belong in the sitemap, if you cannot click to the page from some sort of easy navigation, don’t bother submitting it. Orphaned content will not get ranked, unless it’s linked to by an outside source. If a user can’t click to it most likely they will not find it anyways, unless you run a search based site. Search based sites offer a huge nightmare to crawlers, at this point in time crawlers do not know how to search your site. Thus I would recommend using the keywords that you have in your search logs to create pages. Offer an easy way to get users to these predefined searches and ensure that the URL’s to these search results are clean and are not full of parameters.

From my tests I have submitted sitemaps with millions of pages that have been around for at least a few months, after my tests I could not measure an impact to these pages. Since they where so well indexed before.

What have your experiences been with Google Sitemaps?

5 Simple Tips for writing Press Releases for SEO

I commonly find huge mistakes when sending press releases out the wire, actually there are still companies that are spending over $1,000 per release and not one release is going through the online network. It’s a true shame, since a lot of these releases wind up sitting in a fax machine and will just get chucked when the custodian stops by. Here are a few tips that I would look at to gain credit for your releases.

1). Make sure you are using an online wire service that will let you send out your releases electronically.

2). Are you writing about products and or services that appear on your website? If not re-consider tying in the content of your release to a service you have online.

3). Use word to create your release and add hyperlinks from very specific words that match content on your site. Do not just link to the homepage, I bet your homepage has nothing to do with what you are talking about.

4). If you cannot use your mouse to click to the pages that you are trying to link to, then don’t link at all. If Google sees these pages as orphaned and not linked to by your normal navigation they will not help you

5). Post your releases on your site in an archive fashion, make sure that you keep all of your old releases on your site. This content that you just paid a lot of money to write will pay off down the line!

You may not see the payoff from the first release, but over time and consistency you will eventually see the benefit. Press Release submission tools will get your data out to thousands of great 3rd parties, and if they accept the links from the document you will be in great SEO shape!

How will personalized search affect SEO?

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to tweak links, apply for a link bait scheme and alter the way our sites appear to Google. But one of the new search features slowly coming down the pipe is personalization of search. Now a whole new set of factors play in the SEO space, thankfully a lot of our efforts in terms of Social Marketing are going to take effect. But the question remains, if you are a user of personalized search and look for something basic like a printer. You may no longer get the vast results that help in your selection process. For example if you are a fan of HP and Epson products and visit their site all the time, your searches will be augmented with Epson and HP, where normally they may not be relevant. This is a very interesting challenge for Google, however even a greater challenge for someone trying to break into a very competitive industry.

Search has usually leveled the playing field between the titans and the small mom and pop sites out there. Can it be that we are one step further along in stopping the Entrepreneur from growing? Now it will be so very important to have a strong brand!

Just a random thought for the day!

Understanding the mind of a foreign SEO

In 2006 I spent a portion of my divvied up time supporting sites that live in the United Kingdom, German, French and Australian markets. My main observation over time was how the behaviors and beliefs of SEO’s vary so significantly country by country.

These are a few of my thoughts country by country.

United Kingdom: The Brits are very likable and easy to work with. If you start off with a “Properly” built presentation you have a very high chance of scoring the deal. As soon as they trust you, this may only take a few weeks. You are in great shape and your projects will move very quickly. On the other hand some of them are SO trusting; they tend to shoot themselves in the foot based on a hand shake. There are too many shady SEO’s in the industry to be that trusting. Especially since there are only a few local UK based SEO’s with a clue.

France: If you cannot work with the French in person, do not try at all. The French culture has a lot to do with local ties and personal formalities. The only way I get projects completed is by visiting them in person; otherwise it can be quite painful. I have found that since this is such a new field most like to listen and understand, making the process quite seamless. On the other hand if you meet an SEO with a little experience they know more than you and that’s final! You can argue with credible evidence and it’s still not enough to sway their beliefs.

Germany: The Germans are the most interesting! They are the most intelligent and thoughtful people I have ever worked with. Nothing is ever done without careful analysis of data and backups for the data. But with the 4 meetings I have had with local SEO’s only one of them made any sense with the techniques they where using. I can specifically remember having a meeting with an SEO who completely believed that if they where to link to one of my completely relevant and totally themed sites, that they would get banned. To this day, 6 months later this guy still believes it. Another SEO, who thinks he is a white hat only uses black hat techniques and would not work with me until I incorporated them in my sites. Cloaking, Doorway Pages, the works.

Australia: A great group of folks to work with, very insightful and everyone is so new to the industry that they are willing to learn. Australia has a lot to grow in terms of competitive SEO, it’s fairly easy to get ranked out there currently. On the other hand some of the folks I have met are extremely gullible and are likely to be burned by incompetence. I do hope that they research everyone that they choose to work with.

These are just my personal observations; hopefully you can come to your own conclusions.

My thoughts on the Google infrastructure update

I was happy to see that Matt Cutts posted an article about Google's infrastructure updates. Most importantly the one talking about Supplemental Results, an area that most SEO’s believe is a sign of a penalty. Like many search engines one giant database with a ton of content in it is just not logical and too expensive. Thus having a second or third database with additional content, makes a lot of sense. You can slice it up any way you want to look at it, but now that they are going to surface these results more often we may have much less to worry about.

The following question still remains in my mind, if you are competing in a highly competitive space. Would it make sense for Google to blend in supplemental results within this type of search? My general thought is no, you would only see the benefit if the results are tail or less competitive. But we won't really know until it happens.

Where to start first, SEO or SEM?

For a new business it can be a tough choice, should I bite the bullet and invest in SEO for my new site? Or should I try the safe route and spend the money on an SEM campaign? Where margins could suffer being lost in the mist of endless competition?

If you truly are starting a new business and do not have a lot to gamble, the SEM option may be your better choice. You can start to feed your profits by simply turning volume saving money for the SEO investment. I know how this sounds; the SEO guy is suggesting SEM! But if you are in a highly competitive field its going to take a lot of money to move the new site.

A few reasons why it can be such a tough process:

1). Google looks at the age of the domain, a new domain could spell trouble. You would need to build credibility towards the new domain. Rand Fishkin wrote a great article today about this exact subject.

2). Do you have enough real unique content to stand apart? Maybe not, you may just be taking the same data bits from the other sites that are out there. Not a great user experience and Google can see this.

3). You may have invested in the wrong technology, many new online sites get sold this amazing web design with a huge back log of technical problems. It could cost hundreds of hours repairing it. That’s why it’s so important to check the rankings of the other clients. If they don’t rank, something is wrong!

On the other hand if you can get the press coverage and have a unique offering you might just be able to take the risk. To asses the situation go to the search engines, check out the competition. See how long they have been in the business and most importantly figure out how many are competing with you. It’s important to realize that competition is not just the sales guys. It’s also the other sites out there, the ones that you may consider pointless, specs, news etc.

Analyzing potential SEO problems on large sites

When you are dealing with really large sites that get millions of visits, it can be a daunting task to see potential problems. The advent of Google’s Webmaster Tools has helped with identification of problems. However it’s not perfect, especially when you have millions of pages. Thus going back to basics can be the best way to check your logic.

If you are linux savvy, I would recommend grep’ing through you log files and start with the simple things. Here are a few examples of what you can look for.

more access_log | grep Googlebot | grep 302 > somenewfile this is a great way to see if you have any potential redirects that may be causing problems. 302’s are still notorious for causing issues.

You can also look for simple errors, like a 404

more access_log | grep Googlebot | grep 404 > somenewfile

I recently went through several sites and found an abundance of errors just by diligently looking at a small sample of logs. All you need is about 100meg’s or so, for a decent sample size.

Is Google’s Webmaster Tools – Page Rank distribution tool broken?

I have just looked at 25 different sites, some new some old. Almost all of them have high Page Rank in the toolbar and drive a tremendous amount of traf