Paid links - no argument, just dealing with it

Matt Cutts is asking for spam reports on link selling, and doesn’t receive a warm welcome from SEO’s regarding Google’s newest economic policy.
Let’s look at what Matt’s actually saying:
1. Google thinks paid links really impact Google
2. Google is testing at least two new algos to spot and devalue paid links
3. Matt wants reports on live [...]

ReviewMe: Benefits, hazards, and overall use

ReviewMe is one of a number of services that pays bloggers to review websites. Simple.
The aim is to try and generate some kind of buzz for sites leveraging the blogosphere, and there has certainly been no shortage of nervous comments about the potential for commercial corruption of the blogosphere.
Anyway, when Aaron announced discounts on the [...]

Fight complacency: make your websites even better

It’s easy to feel comfortable when a website is successful, but this is an illusion created by a sense of complacency.
Every time you raise a site’s profile and rankings, you are pushing others down. SEO is a zero sum game - winners do so at the expense of losers.
Many SEO’s will look at their client [...]

Opportunities in a multi-tiered internet

With the growth of social media has come a massive fragmentation of the internet into individual tiers which in themselves are microcosms of a larger whole.
These microcosms aren’t necessarily small - YouTube, Digg, Flickr - are all structures built into the internet which are mini-internets unto themselves.
Similar rules apply, similar opportunities apply.
I already knew this [...]

Google Adsense changes format

It made news when Google changed the ads format for AdWords from a blue background to yellow (how long before Yahoo! copy this? :) ).
However, I’ve not seen any mention the fact that Adsense has also been changed - instead of the default little box with text stating Ads by Gooooogle, we now get an [...]

Quality content indicators for human users

I’ve posted before about possible quality indicators for Google, so now we’re going to look at a couple of quality indicators for human users.
Michael Gray posts a nice set of indicators for providing value content for human users:
1. Create a Glossary
2. Use Video and Podcasts
3. Do Interviews
4. Provide Conference Coverage
5. Cover News and Emerging Trends
In [...]

vbulletin SEO

When it comes to SEO for vbulletin, there are a few simple approaches you can take that most vb admins simply do not understand:
1. Duplicate content
I’ve already listed some of the serious duplicate content problems that vbulletin has, and how to address them.
However, despite being given a SEO perspective, some vb admins think they are [...]

Aged domains vs branding new ones

One of the big mistakes I’ve made recently is to take some older domains and try to launch new content on them for news portals.
Even though the domains are like 3+ years old, they haven’t had much of a search history on Google. The result is that they are effectively being treated the same as [...]

Using SEO to fight scams

I had someone turn up at Platinax, warm themselves up to members - and then invite others to be “mentored” by him - by paying $1k to join what appears by all accounts to be a pyramid scheme.
The scheme is entirely based on reselling rights to resell rights for a bunch of junk ebooks and/or [...]

Would be nice if you could select UK sources in Google News UK

On Google.co.uk search, you can opt for “Web” or “UK” only results.
Wouldn’t be nice if you could do the same on Google.co.uk’s News section?
That way, if I’m searching the news by keyword - ie, “Ford” - I would be more likely to find something about Ford cars and the UK car industry relating to “Ford” [...]

How to make a Call To Action work better

The number of links a user has to click between visiting a site and fulfilling an action can have a serious impact on conversions.
I don’t have any live stats on this, though I expect the PPC stats trackers are keenly aware of this.
The difference is that it’s all too easily overlooked in SEO.
For example, when [...]

Adding value for monetising websites

Today I got to thinking a lot more seriously about revenue generation options for monetising websites.
Although I’ve pretty much doubled my Adsense earnings over the past month, it’s still not a huge amount.
And today it really hit me how meagre the revenues are relative to other earning options.
The main reason I have websites is to [...]

Think about Link Equity and Content Value

Link Equity
SEO’s used to talk a lot about preserving PageRank - I used to think of PageRank as like water, and building a good site archtecture was about funneling this into the right sections of the site in the right manner.
PageRank as a useful SEO term is pretty much redundant, but Aaron Wall now speaks [...]

Secret hideout found on property website

So while having lunch I decided to idle time surfing a few property websites.
Found myself looking at Irish property for comparative research, when I happened to note an interesting location on one of the pages:

Someone should inform the Garda about this? ;)
More seriously, though, there are some nasty little formatting errors on the page [...]

Losing out by not using PPC?

The backbone of my business is SEO, but I’ve come to realise that I am completely missing out by not having embraced PPC.
For example, I started my first real affiliate program recently. I can sit and wait for leads via SEO. Or I can push traffic in via PPC and generate instant revenues, and tweak [...]

Someone’s using my brands - time to look into Trademarks

I just tried to sign up with Google Talk in order to chat with Aaron Wall via IM.
A username is required, so my first attempt was for iBrian. Sorry, not available.
Okay, no big deal. It was popular enough to see the .com registered.
So I tried platinax. Sorry, not available. Huh? Platinax is my own unique [...]

Tip: Google indexing faster via Google Blog Search pings?

Marketing Pilgrim reports - and says it has confirmed - webmaster chatter suggesting that pinging Google’s blog search service will get your blog indexed faster.
This sounds remarkably similar to last year when it was demonstrated that adding your blog feed to “my yahoo” also expedited indexing.
So if you’re using Wordpress and/or vbseo, there’s a new [...]

Looking to the future of SEO - great article recommendations

There have been a number of complete gems posted around this week which all look to the future of SEO.
I saw Danny Sullivan do a presentation on the future of Google at SES London in 2005 and it was frightening - but as Matt Cutts points out in one of the following articles, SEO’s are [...]

How long before SEO hacking goes mainstream?

I had to look twice when writing the following story at Platinax News: New Storm Worm inserts links in user messages.
The short of the story is that this is a worm that - after infecting a user’s PC - embeds links in messages the user posts to blogs, forums, and other online communities.
I had to [...]

Now is the time to have a business plan for your websites

The First Age of The Internet is fast coming to a close, and with that comes the removal of early opportunities and low-hanging fruit.
That means if you have a serious plan for a website, you need to push on getting it out now, and fast.
If you have a website without a business plan, you need [...]