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I’m a big fan of the Google Webmaster Central Program and using sitemaps. I agree that you should build your website so that it is crawlable and not rely on sitemaps to compensate for poor site architecture, but hands down there is no better tool when you are migrating or cleaning up after a site migration than webmaster central. However there’s a dark side to webmaster central that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up.

Using Google Sitemaps for Competitive Intelligence »

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Sometimes things need to be tested and checked, answers need to be sought, friends need the assist, even if it is for Monkey Balls In Louisville Kentucky

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Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

Nicest Bloke in SEO

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I actually like Compete I think it’s quite a bit more accurate than Alexa or other competing services, however when I see comments like this on their blog it makes me question some of their conclusions:

Every search query we see in our data is a query performed by an actual person.

via compete blog

Compete Still a Bit Wet Behind the Ears »

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It’s amazing in this day and age that companies really don’t know how harness the power of the internet for good. It’s so much easier to try and solve problems and create evangelists instead of threatening legal action. However MyMac Melbourne did the opposite they took a bad situation and made it worse threatening to sue him. Also be sure to check out the MyMac Melbourne you Tube Video.

oh and if you are someone’s legal team any and all communications you make with me about this will be published in their entirety on this blog

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Controversial and confrontational marketing are time tested methods for bringing traffic, attention and links to your company, product or website, however there’s more to it than just picking a fight.

Understanding Confrontational and Controversial Marketing »

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So one of the reasons I’ve been light on the blogging is I’ve got a lot of projects going on. One of which involved rebranding a domain from a crappy hyphenated domain to a brandable/purchasable one. So I had my XML sitemap ready to go. I had my htaccess ready to go with redirects in place. I let the dogs loose about a week and half ago and things are not going entirely according to plan.

Webmaster Central has Problems with 301’s to a New Domain »

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Think it’s just whiney SEO’s who have issues with accuracy on the wiki? Not so my friend, for example Morgan Webb of Webb Alert has a problem with people who keep editing her wiki profile and perpetuating the inaccuracy that she was born in Canada.

Again a resource who’s standard is citability not truth should not be trusted, by you or anyone else. Google however exacerbates and perpetuates the problem by giving them such high trust and rankings in a flawed algo.

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The Tour de France is scheduled to begin tomorrow, so I was doing some research for another site and was really amazed at the favoritism Google shows Wikipedia. So I decided to break it down and show bad it really is. Below is a list of all the stops on this years Tour de France, I’ve gone through and removed the accent characters because most people are never going to bother typing them in. Lastly to the right of each term you find the # where wikipedia is listed.

2007 Tour de France Winner - Wikipedia »

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Go ahead type in any single letter of the alphabet into a google search box. Think it highlights an algorithmic bias that wikipedia is listed top 10 for every one. Sure no one really searches for the “a” but when you play on the fringe you learn things about how an algo works. Still not convinced try the numbers 0-10 … still think I’m not onto something … try it with [aa] and go to [zz] the only one wikipedia doesn’t rank for are [ee] and [tt]. Want more proof try [00] or [11] or [22] or just make up some 3 digit number like [897] or [396] … sure the wiki should absolutely be ranking for all those terms … right

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So you’re sitting around wishing you could have some of that iPhone traffic, but your never going to get your pages to rank in time. Well friend how about you make this a learning experience. Go to the Google trends page for June 29th. Take a look at all iPhone related searches people are doing. Wait for the next big electronics product launch do a little search and replace and employ a little predictive SEO … lather, rinse, repeat, multiply … any questions?

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So I was doing an image search and came across something interesting. Looking for [Jet Blue] showed some interesting results. What caught my eye was the pictures of the failed landing gear incident. Not what I would consider an ideal image SERP. What does your an image SERP for your company, your product or your name yield? Remember what starts on facebook, doesn’t always stay on facebook, just ask Rummer Willis.

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Lets Have fun with Anchor text Part III

click here constigratitude

constigratitude click here

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Let’s have some fun and experiment with Anchor text part I

snergelitude Click Here

click here Snergilitude

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The recently updated page from Mahalo is pretty interesting

Things That Make you Go Hmm - Mahalo and Elective Genitoplasty »

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Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to actually see one of these billboards

or perhaps you’ve seen one of the following mentioned somewhere on the web

THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY

To the advertising company who’s running the campaign I have to say please get a clue!

THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES »

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ef yer wunderin whet dees es ebout cleek heer

Ichthyosaur Didgeridoo Asterism Velutinous »

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I’ve made no secret of my Disney fan status, in fact I have several news feeds set up to catch Disney items. Catching up in the feed reader this morning I came across the following: Top 10 luxury attractions at Disney World

Top 10 luxury attractions at Disney World How to have a five-star vacation at Disney parks and resorts

Needless to say this tickled my “link bait sensor” however upon further inspection, I realized the perpetuator of this “heinous attention garnering crime” is none other than Forbes magazine, republishing on MSNBC.com . I’ve said it many times in the past link bait isn’t anything new, the print world has been doing it for decades. It’s only new to the previously advertising averse turned web publishers.

ps: If I did it though my list would have went to 11

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Aequeosalinocalcalinosetaceoaluminosocupreovitriolic Aequeosalinocalcalinosetaceoaluminosocupreovitriolic »

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As an SEO one of the things we often have to overcome is optimizing for the singular and plural form of the word, such as [blue widget] and [blue widgets]. Now some folks go the route of building one page for each keyword. While this can work you often end up with two very similar reading pages. Sometimes people will pick the “more important” one and use it in the title and sprinkle the other one in the page. IMHO this is much better approach as it generally reads better.

However I learned something today from none other than Matt Cutts. Yesterday I posted on Threadwatch about link building techniques. Matt came along and noticed he was #2 for linkbait and linkbaiting. Now if you look at the title and URL of Matt’s post here’s what you see:

SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-linkbait-and-linkbaiting/


If you look at Matt’s post today you’ll see this Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Notice what I did with keywords. I carefully chose keywords for the title and the url (note that I used “change” in the url and “changing” in the title).

where he references a post with the following data:
Changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/change-default-printer-linux-firefox/


Don’t know about you but I don’t need to be hit over the head anymore … Thanks Matt

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Do you Know what the Chicken Noodle Soup Video is? Well you should …

Chicken Noodle Soup Video »

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In the olden days of SEO it was all about targeting the “right keywords”. You wanted to rank for [blue widgets] you put blue widgets in the right spots, your title tags, your meta tags, you looked for a density of x%, you put your keywords in bold and italics and things were golden. While things have gotten tougher it’s still possible to succeed with this approach. However the folks who are looking forward aren’t just targeting the right keywords, instead they are setting their sights on traffic …

Targeting Keywords versus Targeting Traffic »

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Sometimes it’s not important that you be the best in your game. Sometimes if you’re above average but are distinctive and set yourself apart you can work the magic and get lot’s of ink. Case and point Indy Race Car Driver Danika Patrick. Danika came onto the Indy Race Car scene a few years ago as a driver for Rahal Letterman team (Pro retired driver Bobby Rahal and David Letterman, yes that David Letterman). In her rookie Indy year she qualified at the Indy 500 with the fastes time however lost the pole position (first position for the start) due to a technicality. She did lead for few laps but ended up finishing fourth the highest position for female driver for the Indy 500. While Danica’s racing career has advanced it’s clearly been left in the dust by her publicity campaign.

Danika Patrick »

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There’s been quite a bit of noise in the SEM space about some of the recent changes made by the Google Adwords Quality Score. I thought it might be interesting to take a more in depth look at some of my site statistics.

Profits Murdered By Google Adwords »

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Since my experiment in reputation management is actually getting much more interesting than I planned I thought I should go back and do a proper writeup.

Reputation Management - Case Study, Part I »

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Can you outrank Shoemoney?

The Official Outrank Shoemoney Contest: click here
Sign-up for all ShoeMoney contests: click here
ShoeMoney on Digitial Point: click here
Shoemoney on Typekey: click here
Shoemoney on MSN Spaces: click here
Shoemoney on Pimp my Blog: click here
Shoemoney Media Group: click here
Shoemoney doing Google Video: click here
Shoemoney on Digg: click here
Shoemoney on Threadwatch: click here
Shoemoney on V7N: click here
Shoemoney posers on Flickr: click here
Shoemoney on Feedburner: click here
Shoemoney the ringtone king on Google base: click here
Shoemoney on SEORoundtable: click here
Shoemoney Interview: click here
Shoemoney puttin’ the moves on Paris Hilton: click here
Shoemoney Commenting on Matt Cutts Blog: click here
Shoemoney getting named dropped but no link love in Wikipedia: click here
Shoemoney in BOTW.org: click here
Shoemoney intereview announcement for SEORockstars: click here
Shoemoney on Oilman.ca (what the heck is that about): click here
Shoemoney Podcast: click here
Shoemoney on Google News: click here
Shoemoney gets mentioned in WPN: click here
Shoemoney in Technorati: click here
John Scott on the Shoemoney Drama: click here

With any luck the scrapers will pick this one up and I’ll get some linkage back for the term Shoemoney

At the very least this should create some interesting linkage patterns on touchgraph.

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In part II we looked at legitimate Marketing Examples on MySpace however it’s hard to take a complete look at all that MySpace is without acknowledging that it does have a dark and seedy district. There are some adult areas with lots of nudity however as of this writing none of the pages linked to here will have full nudity on them. There will however be links to some casino gambling, risque content, and suggestive photographs. In fact many of the links on this page will have the nofollow tag and should be considered Not Safe For Work.

Dark Alley’s of MySpace »

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I will admit when I first stumbled into MySpace I really didn’t think it was much more than a bunch of horrendously ugly pages with really cheezy music. However if you are willing to dig a little deeper you can find some legitimate companies and organizations who are using MySpace. If you’re ready let’s dive in …

Marketing Examples on MySpace »