August 2004 Archives

This one is easy, but maybe you'll get it wrong. You don't need to know anything about SEO for this.

Guess a number between 1 & 10.

The first 3 people to email me the right answer at barry.schwartz@gmail.com, gets an invite.

Of course, you need to trust me. But I have the number written down on paper in front of me.

Good Luck!

Updated: Only one try per person (please don't use multiple email addresses, I run these contest all the time) and I will announce the winner as soon as I get 3 correct answers. But you need to be the first three, if I get four correct answers, the 4th does not win.

***CONTEST IS OVER***
The answer was 5. If I have time, I'll post a summary of the attempts.

In the past we discussed the possibility of Google starting an IM service, maybe named gIM, maybe not. It seems like there is more speculation going on at InternetNews a JupiterMedia help news site. Gary posted this over at Search Engine Watch Forums, an other JupiterMedia held site.

I had to share this with you. I was over at Verizon DSL to check out any new services and products that might help my business and found this button:

So I put up some tracking code using Urchin's campaign tracking module goal conversion. I'll report back how many people clicked on this above. No artificial clicking, (thinking to self, like that is possible).

If you are fortunate enough these days, you have more clients than you can handle. For some the task of starting a new business in SEO/SEM starts with getting new clients and getting those clients to pass on a good word of your good graces. A good and ongoing thread over at SEOchat asks members how they go about getting new clients and keep the stream of clients going. I know from personal experience that I have never done much advertising at all for my services. Most clients come in via word of mouth, recommedations from other clients, or from the occasional fun dabbling of working with PPC. Some of the members detail the top ways they go about getting new business that might be of interest to some. Here are some of the preferred ways SEO's or any business can find new clients.

1. High rankings in the search engines!
2. Word of Mouth
3. Connecting in the forums
4. Article Writing
5. Referrals from Web Designers or other online businesses
6. Establish a newsletter
7. Purchased advertising on other related sites
8. Sales Calls (Telemarketing)
9. Print Advertising
10. Using PPC to attract potential clients
11. Affiliate Marketing
12. Giving away free software or information
13. Public Speaking
14. Give away free SEO services to other business, charities, non-profits
15. Direct Marketing to target businesses
16. Writing excellent winning copy
17. Just being one cool and savvy businessman

As you can see there are more ways to gain new business than probably most people have time for. Its seem that by far one of the best ways to gain new clients is to treat your present clients VERY WELL. Its makes sense, that if the clients you worked so hard to get, love your work, then they will start talking. Results speak for themselves.

Check the the thread How to Get New Business over at SEOchat.

Forget the debate about cloaking, I am a bit tired of that anyway. How does one detect some of the cloaking going on around the Web. Follow these instructions:

(1) Download the Firefox Browser
(2) Install it
(3) Download the User Agent Switcher for Firefox/Mozilla while using firefox
(4) Restart the browser
(5) Under Tools --> User Agent Switcher --> Options --> Options (that will open a dialog box)
(6) Click Add Under User Agents section
(7) In the description add "Googlebot" and in the user agent add "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
(8) Repeat this process for all the spiders you want to test. Updated comprehensive list of user agents.
(9) Under Tools --> User Agent Switcher --> select the user agent
(10) Then navigate to the pages that you want to test for cloaking.

Hope this helps some people be Googlebot. :)

WebmasterWorld does it again, provides answers by reputable sources to questions that plague search engine marketers. So we have about three "local" products by Yahoo!, Yahoo! Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local and Overture Local Match. What does what, who offers what and how does it help me?

OvertureRep's second post at WMW provides a clear answer:

Yahoo! Yellow Pages consists of a comprehensive database of listings licensed from InfoUSA plus a section of paid listings in the Sponsored Businesses section. The Sponsored Businesses section consists of paid listings from our reseller partners, self-service, and Overture. The Overture products are geographically targeted Local Match and Precision Match listings.

Yahoo! Local also includes a comprehensive database of listings licensed from InfoUSA, several other data sources, and web content. Yahoo! Local also has a sponsored business section which solely consists of geographically targeted Overture Local Match and Precision Match listings.

Overture Local Match is a product for advertisers that have a physical storefront or service a specific geographic region. Advertisers provide a description and details about their business and do not need a website to participate. The advertiser chooses the relevant keywords and defines the geographic region to target their listing.

Here are a couple of links you can go to for more info:

Yahoo! Local: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/local/index.html
Overture Local Match: http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/lm.jhtml

Here we go again, but the importance becomes less and less every month. :)

You can easily check the backlink fluctuations over at http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php. Just make sure to use the link:www.domain.com syntax and horizontal window view.

Forum coverage:

• DigitalPoint
  
• Search Engine Watch
  
• SEO Chat
  
• WebmasterWorld
  
• HighRankings
  
• Cre8asite
  
• V7
  
• IHelpYou
  
• WebProWorld
  
• SEO Guy
  

Google seems to have released a new button found at the bottom of the SERPs page. The new button is to the right of the normal "search" button but says "search harder". I have not seen this myself, it might be one of those things Google is rolling out to some people. A thread at WebmasterWorld has several people who have seen this.

Basically, if you do a search on a very general keyword, such as cars. It asks you if you want to "search harder", if you click that search harder button, it takes you to a different SERPs page for cars found here. When you click on the link, see the URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=cars&btnmeta%3Dtha%3D1%26seen%3D7d8882011a9da6f0%2CpaQUq1
BgsA8J%2CRVuszxD0ZLYJ%2CKWbRZb06QI8J%2CRsWGZdkk_oUJ%2CEItB
6rHmy6YJ%2C4DBTRhlVuqUJ%2C8pAZTckoaBMJ%2CDk2ynlAPOA0J%2C8uB
J_n5AyTYJ%2CXY7ep7ykeoAJ%2C=Search+Harder

Very interesting...As more information comes my way, I will post it.

Here is an other chance to win Gmail invites.

- Correctly answer the question below by emailing the address below
- First Three Correct Answers Win
- Email barry.schwartz@gmail.com the correct answers

Question is:
What date in Month, Day, Year format was "Black Monday"? Hint, it applied to the AltaVista search engine.

*** CONTEST OVER ***

Answer is Monday, October 25, 1999, see http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/14042.htm.

Thank you Marcia for helping with the question.

I just wanted to point you folks over to two threads that Alan Webb (a colleague and respected SEO based in Germany) started on the topic of major search results changes in terms of rankings. I'll quote the post and then link to them below.

Many webmasters in the thread above are reporting significant drops in traffic, up to 80% in some cases within the last 24 hours. In contrast others are reporting significant rises in the SERPs which indicates a big change (which imo is not sandbox related).

Rather than having a "I've dropped/risen too" thread, perhaps it is a good idea to attempt to work out what has been happening. I personally have seen big changes on numerous travel booking related sites. One of the theories appears to be too high keyword density. This may have some merit, as on some sites ranking drops are not across the board on all themes/phrases. So it could be that templates focusing on one term have a much higher density than others. I'll certainly be looking into this. I'm also wondering if this is somehow theme related as as I've mentioned it defintely has affected the travel theme. or perhaps it is based on just highly competitive terms as a whole.

It would also be interesting to see if there is a concensus from those sites that have lost traffic on..

1. Are they affiliate sites with many links to the affilate host.
2. Do they have satelite domains which they cross link/one way link with sites particularly on the same ip c-block.
3. Are the drop in serps keyword specific or site wide.
4. Are some inbound links on mass from single domains. For example, a great number links from a footer link on a major site.
5. Have changes been made to keyword density recently.
6. Is there a distinction in ranking between major and minor terms.
7. Has there been any PR changes or backward link changes.

Google isnt likely to give us the direct answer, but maybe they wont need to if we work together in cracking this change.

If your site has been affected from wednesdays update, it would be helpful for all, if you could perhaps answer the 7 points above relating to your own site.

Discussion over at WebmasterWorld and at SEO Chat.

One of the reasons behind SiteMatch is to ensure your deep pages are indexed by Yahoo. But if your pages are search engine friendly and the navigation is not prohibitive to the natural spiders, then SiteMatch is not needed for that purpose.

A thread at HighRankings named Out Of Sitematch & Bump In Y! Ranksings discusses one person's story with SiteMatch. This individual did not renew his SiteMatch subscription and soon after saw his rankings improve. From my understanding of the post, it seems like the site's homepage was not included in the SiteMatch results. So he wasn't ranking for his most important keywords (important is subjective here). I am not so clear as to why, neither is he, his vendors or YahooMike. It seems like he did not submit his homepage URL, and thus the page was not included.

I was under the impression that the natural crawl would pick up other pages (if search engine friendly) even if they were not submitted to SiteMatch. Speculation? I rather not, but you see where I am going with this.

Time to throw out your external backup drives, you can now use Gmail to store your files remotely. Jeremy Zawodny was the first I've seen to mention the concept of Web E-Mail: The New Hard Disk. As he mentions in a recent entry named Internet Hard Disk with GmailFS, its becoming a reality. How cool.

Richard Jones provides the following information on the GmailFS - Gmail Filesystem:

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

Two days before the official 2nd year anniversary of Cre8asite, I wrote a short entry to mention the special occasion. The official press release is due to go out tomorrow, but I could not help but to post a link to it today. The press release can be found at PRWeb.com and it is named Cre8asiteForums Breaks Out the Champagne for its Two-Year Anniversary. Congrats again!

I've been waiting for a thread to pop up on this topic in the past few weeks, and finally one sprung up that caught my attention over at HighRankings. The thread is about a small SEO firm who needs to provides his client with an answer to "Why Should Customer Renew?"

Pretty much all of the on-page search engine optimization (seo) efforts are done or should be done right up front. So let's say you have a client with a five page site. You optimize each page for the client and then sit back. If your not providing any link building services, then in reality your work is done. Of course, you might want to see if the keywords are a good fit for the site. You might need to make some tweaks here and there. But after, lets say, three months, what else is there? Reports. :)

Many of the SEO professionals in the thread agree, that they should only charge for actual work performed. To tell a client that they would drop in the rankings if they don't renew a contract is wrong. Again, this only applies to the on-page seo efforts. I do understand that keeping links up to a site, will require additional money and time.

I prefer to take this one step further. As many of you know, I am big-time into building dynamically driven Web sites. That means, empowering the customer to manage the site themselves. By building a search engine friendly site that can be easily maintained by the customer, he/she can add/edit/delete pages as they see fit. Can all clients write well for search engines? Maybe not, but I want them to try. If I can properly educate the client on the basics of SEO copy-writing, then we have a winner. So there is no reason to even pay a monthly fee or hourly fee to have an SEO review your copy.

Let's say Google makes a major change to its ranking algorithm, they now put a ton of weight on the meta keywords tag (not true). Then, a programmer can make a single change to a template file in a matter of minutes. The site will automatically pull data from a data-source in the database and build keywords for the meta-keywords field. There you go, you can charge for 6 minutes of work. :)

I personally believe that most on-page seo firms should not charge a monthly fee. They should base prices on work performed and not to base prices on reading forums or go to conferences. Man hours = billable.

The more I conduct usability evaluations for clients and my business Partners' clients, the more I realize how little people understand what usability is, how it applies to them, and why they need it.

A lot of people live on this planet. Web sites are trying to meet the needs of these people. SEO’s and marketers sometimes have limited knowledge about who will use a web site and what words people might type into a search enigne to find a web site. There is simply not enough thought and research conducted for the long haul. (And sadly, some SEO companies never bother to ask enough questions.)

Is the person who typed in “disability health insurance” over 65 years old, fumbling over the local library’s old computer with a dial-up modem (libraries in some cities are badly in need of funds.) Is this something someone from China or Australia would be looking for? Who searches more for this type of information, men, women or insurance brokers? If it’s men, at least 8 percent of them are colorblind. Many can’t see the color red used for that little “Required Field” asterisk. If there’s somebody else waiting behind the guy in the library, he doesn’t have time to read a lot of content when he first arrives at a homepage. He needs to quickly learn the navigation scheme and be directed within seconds to where his information is about signing up or customer service.

I now think that sending off all my old SEO clients back into the world with a wave was more like sending them off to Kindergarten. There was so much more we needed to know to give them a fighting chance in the world.

I’m not alone in my fascination for what happens after the click from search engines. Recently someone joined Cre8asiteForums, who began to post around the place, including the usability section. His name is Derek Chew (aka “Mugshot”). He’s launched a web site called OrganicRankings.com.

What’s special about Derek is his devotion to the relationship of SEO and usability. A visit to his site shows he’s rounding up some popular writers from related industries. One area of interest to some of you may be his SEO Experiments section. I've learned he's considering more ideas that will be beneficial to folks in the SEO/SEM fields too.

In the coming months I’ll be writing more articles about what usability really is (it’s not just about design and its not a one-size-fits all approach). I’ll also try to explain why it’s important in our work. The key to usability is that it’s always evolving because it’s about people and how we use the technology and products we create. Someday, search engine robots will embrace FLASH and people will wonder how we ever lived without it.

RSS is revolutionizing the industry, Jeremy Zawodny discusses the difference between Feed Search vs. Web Search. In this entry, Jeremy discusses the challenges the Web search engines have with (1) Structured vs. Unstructured Data, (2) Frequent Updates & (3) Real-Time Pings. He ends his entry with the words "The model of "search and find" or "browse and read" will turn into "search, find, and subscribe"."

I find myself slowly switching to this model myself. I use RSS and Web Search very differently. Subscribing to a search phrase is a lot different conceptually then searching for something on the Web. A Web search normally is done, not to find information on topics that are "news related" or of daily interest to yourself. I use Web search to research topics in the past, find product information, locate company information and find specific information on a need to basis.

My RSS feeds (by the way, I use Yahoo as my RSS aggregator) is a place I go a few times throughout the day, to learn about what is new in my topics of interest. I subscribe to Jeremy's blog, I also subscribe to VersionTrack - but the "real kicker" is that I subscribe to the search phrase "search engine". Anything found that matches "search engine" in the RSS networks are found. Expanding this feature of structured data, with frequent updates will be critical.

My thoughts are that Web and Feed Search are different. They are used for different reasons and both are good on their own.

This is probably one of the best examples of a properly executed thread. A new member asks a question about a tag name the meta rating. The member finds this tag on a page with a pagerank of 8, and asks the question if there is some type of correlation. Then two moderators quickly respond explaining that the search engines do not use this tag for any real purposes, especially ranking purposes. I think its best for me to quote Bill Slawski, from the thread named Meta Rating Tag.

Since the days when that might have been a way to indicate to some software that a site was safe for children or not, there has developed a whole standard way of creating ratings. The W3C pages describe it, though it's actually thrid parties that issue the ratings.

Some of them issue their own labels and decide which ones are appropriate for your site. Some of them allow you to make that determination. One of the best ways to get one of these labels is through one of the links on this page:

http://www.w3.org/PICS/raters.htm

This is one of the ones linked there that I've seen labels used from a number of times:

http://www.icra.org/

Search engines do some filtering, but I don't believe that meta tags determine how that is done.

They can help you create a rating label specifically for you site

Bill adds more later to the thread, so check it out.

Toogle, a funny application that uses Google's Image Search, queries Google's image search for the first result matching your keyword phrase. Then it reads the image and translates it into text, the same text you used to enter the query box. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out at Toogle Image Search.

Here is an example of a search on rustybrick logo gif.

Looking to go to a conference or an event where a bunch of search engine people gather? Well here is your chance. Check out the thread at the SEW Forums named List all the groups that hold SEO conferances. Here is a list, in no particular order, that is found in the thread:

• http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/
  
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/
  
• http://www.seoroadshow.com/
  
• http://www.ad-tech.com/
  
• http://www.i-adworld.com/
  
• http://www.internetmarketingconference.com/
  
• http://www.highrankings.com/seminar
  
• http://www.the-dma.org/
  
• http://webmastersinthesun.com/
  
• http://www.emarketingassociation.com/
  

Since I just received some new gmail invites, I thought it would be a good idea to start up the gmail invite contests again. If you want the chance to win a gmail invite please follow the instructions below:

- Correctly name the search engine marketers shown below
- You must name them in the fashion of: A = First Name Last Name, B = First Name Last Name and C = First Name Last Name.
- First Three Correct Answers Win
- Email barry.schwartz@gmail.com the correct answers

*** CONTEST IS OVER ***

Answers are: A = Danny Sullivan, B = Mike Grehan, C = Jill Whalen

Doug from Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting just tipped me off on something not well known to the Overture customer, at least I have not hear of it until today. A term known as "Godzooky" at Overture!

Overture has a broad match technology named Godzooky. Doug has sent an email to Overture asking for more information about "irrelvant clicks" coming from the Overture PPC campaigns he was running. In a response back from Overture, they mentioned something named "Godzooky". And I will quote from his response from Overture's International Client Services department; "We have a tool called Godzooky that is used when there is no match in Match Driver?. Godzooky uses the first 60% of the listings in the Index (search terms, titles and descriptions) and attempts to find an algorithm."

Overture has deactivated "Godzooky" for Doug. By the way, a search at Google or Yahoo on "godzooky overture" brings up nothing. But Godzooky brings up this friendly Godzilla at http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/godzooky.htm.

Doug has also posted this over at WebmasterWorld.

As reported over at WebmasterWorld, Gmail invites have been halted by Google. Meaning, Google has not been giving out Gmail invites for about a month or two. That drought has been fixed with a nice shower of invites found in many gmail account users inbox. Invites are back and I am sure they are selling on eBay now. :)

I thought I would wait until two days before the two year anniversary of Cre8asite Forums to wish them a happy Two Year Anniversary! I have often used Cre8asite as a place to base most of my entries at the search engine roundtable. The members, the moderators and all the readers have done such a fine job over at Cre8asite. Kim Krause is the admin over at Cre8asite, she is not only a very professional and smart person, she is also a very caring and extremely giving individual. The forum is run by the most talented and giving people out there. I am personally proud to be a member at Cre8asite.

To join the celebration visit the Cre8asiteForums Celebrates its Two Year Anniversary thread or click on the Cre8asite Two Year Anniversary Logo below.

For those that know me, I am a firm believer that going the dynamic route, when it comes to site development and maintenance, is the best and most efficient method. Many web designers and seos don't share my passion. However, this is a dynamic web site issues forum, so I thought I share a challenge I came across.

My company has built dozens of e-commerce sites, all very dynamic. We empower the customer by allowing them to manage the whole site. So if they want to add a category, they can do it. If they want to add product, pictures, new sections, brands, and so on - they can do it without calling us. Actually, I recently and finally finished an article I named Search Engine Friendly E-Commerce Catalogs which discusses many of the basics. Here I would like to touch on one area of the dynamic e-commerce site, the URL.

Our e-commerce sites use mod_rewrite to make search engine friendly and keyword rich URLs (not that I feel keywords in the URL make a big/any difference in rankings, but I feel they can be helpful with usability and click-through rates). So what we do is dynamically build the URL based on the name of the product. Let me give you a real life example; look at: http://www.smarttuxedo.com/Tuxedos-1/Sutton100-Wool-Single-Breasted-Tuxedo-1-Button-Shawl-Lapel-Available-1-Button-Notch-and-Peak-Lapels-45.html.

That URL is way long! Right? Well look at the product name in the h1 tag or the title of the page. My client gave that product a 17 word title! Now that is not good for usability, not good for seo and not good to look at. So I told my client to go into the products and shorten them to about 5 words. he said ok.

The problem is, when you would change the product name, the old URL (the one the search engines indexed) would work and the new URL would work. So the search engines would re-crawl and find the new URL, but also see that the old URL worked. My client would have two pages with exactly the same content on them. Not the best idea.

Solution: We built a dynamic 301 redirect which automatically redirected one from an old URL to the new URL. How does it work? Simple... If the URL does not match the title of the page, redirect (301 style) to a URL that matches the title of the page. For example try; http://www.smarttuxedo.com/OLD-CATEGORY-URL-1/OLD-PRODUCT-URL-45.html

I have posted this at Search Engine Watch, sorry for pointing out the threads I have started, but I really think it will be helpful for others.

As noted at SEO Chat Forums, software was developed by a group of hackers to hit gmail accounts. I am not sure of the validity of this, see the short mentioning at http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/hac080904.cfm.

I have had the honor of exchanging several emails with Mike Grehan about some of the theories spreading around the forums and found in many articles at SEO sites. One such theory we discussed was the concept of "themed sites" and how you need a site within a specific theme to stay within that theme in order to rank above your competitors (keeping every other variable as equal). So people were taking the extreme action of buying a new domain name for each theme. Then only having information about that theme on that new domain.

Now Mike is about to release his 3rd edition of his search engine book and he has been researching some of these concepts in great detail. With his permission, I will try to convey what his thoughts are on this topic, but not take away the deepness of the "why" found in his book.

Mike asked Daniel Dulitz from Google this question on 'theming' (is that a new word?). ""Utility" and "depth" really should be measured by a
site's users." What I understand this to mean, based on the examples given by Daniel, is that a site will not hurt in rankings if it contains pages off topic to the real essence of the site.

Example; I have a site on the Smurfs (why did I pick the smurfs, I have no idea) but on that site, I have a page or two on how I block spam with spamassassin, will that hurt my site for ranking well with Smurfs? Not at all, according to Daniel.

Now, will a site with detailed information on spamassassin rank better then the page found at the Smurfs site? Of course, at least that is the goal of the search engines.

So when people discuss themed sites and how they are the only way to rank well, it is believed that some are misunderstanding the concept of what a "theme" is. The search engines think of it as the "utility" and the "depth" of the site (in pages and content).

Disclaimer: I hope I did justice to what Mike has graciously communicated to me. Also, I do not have a page on smurfs, nor do I have a page on spamassasin.

I posted this over at Search Engine Watch as well.

DigitalPoint does it again, a new, cool, and useful feature was just added to his forum. Basically, if you run a blog (currently only supports MovableType and Blogger) you can automatically add your latest blog entry to your title. I have attached a screen image of my latest post at DigitalPoint Forum, you will see my latest blog posting as a link between my name and my forum status (or is that the title?).

So if you are a member at DigitalPoint's Forum go to your User Control Panel and then click on "Edit Options". At the bottom at your XML feed URL to the "Blog XML Feed URL" box. Then click update. Its that easy. Nice work Shawn!

Forum coverage, of course, at DigitalPoint.

Google News, as Chris Sherman points out in his post, adds an international filter option. In the image capture below, you will see the drop down menu. Neat little ad on by Google.

Here is some good news for those that use the hosted version of Blogger. You can now add, BlogSense, better known as AdSense to your blog entries. Here is more information on how to add blogsense to your blogger blog.

Forum coverage at Search Engine Watch.

I am a Mac user and today I downloaded this new tool named Inquisitor. Basically, it is this little program that is out of the way. You can begin typing in the little search box and as you type it the search is refined. You can search Google, News, Images, Shopping, Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Seems like a neat tool so far. Let's see if its something I continue to use. Check out the images below. Top right image, is when I types "search engin" and the bottom right image is when I completed typing the last letter "search engine".

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

John Battelle's Searchblog, very popular search related news and opinion blog, asked the question in his entry named This Is Odd; why was Feedster and Blinx taken out of Google's results?

Soon after, GoogleGuy shows up with a comment, see the 6th comment down. Not bad. :) The bottom line is "Given that the issues appears to be on Feedster's side in this case, if they'll start serving Google a normal page again instead of a 404, I would expect their root page to be back right as rain in a few days."

Disclaimer (before even writing this entry): These are my personal views, I understand some client's don't have the budget, and I am sorry if I offend anyone.

I have just went through two long meetings the past two days (yes on Sunday, as well). These meetings were about how to properly build search engine friendly e-commerce sites. A lot of what my company does is build Web sites that empower the customer to build SE Friendly pages (much like how this blog works, but a tad more sophisticated :)).

To my amazement, one of these companies used a fairly well known SEO Firm that, in my opinion, built the site wrong. When building an e-commerce site from scratch, why would you not ensure that the pages are search engine friendly. Each and every one. By search engine friendly I mean, that each individual page is optimized for a unique keyword. So each category landing page, is optimized for that category. Each product or brand page, is optimized for the product or brand.

I can understand where an SEO firm will take an existing site and make tweaks to it in order to optimize some of the pages. That makes sense to me. But to build a site from ground up and then only apply the the principles of SEO and dynamic content to a few hand selected pages, that in my opinion is wrong.

I will of course not mention the company here. It leads me to believe that many other SEO firms are practicing SEO in this manner. I feel its wrong to pitch a search engine friendly e-commerce site that in reality has to be maintained through manual intervention by an SEO.

Automation! Build a system that allows your customer to build pages. They really don't need to know much about SEO. All they need to know is about their product, and if they know their product, they can write very good copy for their product pages.

Empower the customer through simple to use web tools, educate the customer about search engines, and let the customer be in control!

Well, it has been around two plus months since the last PageRank update (or at least is feels that way). People are getting really antsy, patiently awaiting the next PageRank update. Over at SEO Chat there is a thread named Will there be a PR update... EVER?, which has a poll. The poll already as 43 responses, so post your opinion.

The question: Will there be a PR update... EVER?
The answers: (1) No! PR is gone... Forever! (2) Yes! there will be a PR update before mid Sep. and (3) Yes! there will be a PR update after mid Sep.

How not to conduct link exchanges? Do not send out hundreds of unsolicited emails with the same link exchange message. A thread named Ticked Off By Cryptic Link Requests over a HighRankings discusses this. I personally delete these emails as soon as I see them, most of them don't even get into my inbox (thanks to spamassassin).

As noted several times on this site, most recently here, SEMPO has been under the gun by many high profile members and industry representatives. In response to the long and (IMO) exhausting threads at the various forums, it was suggested that a forum open a pre-moderated thread to discuss the issues with SEMPO. How does this help? Well, it gives SEMPO the ability to quickly review the main concerns without all the chatter in the regular forums.

Jill from HighRankings has opened not just a thread but a forum dedicated to, as Jill puts it, "SEMPO Questions and (hopefully) Answers". The forum has a long description which states, and I quote:

This is a moderated forum with the purpose of communicating with SEMPO board members. Increased communication with SEMPO members is on SEMPO's agenda, and we at HighRankings support that mission. This forum is moderated, meaning that all posts will have to "pass the muster" before being posted to the public. We hope that SEMPO board members will appreciate our efforts to make communication to the members just a little bit faster and easier, and we hope that one or more SEMPO representatives will take some time to answer the questions being put forth to them.

The first post in this forum is named Questions About Sempo Aug. 18th Newsletter, where Jill asks a list of questions, she hopes will be answered. Time will tell.

I have been emailed by a dedicated reader of this blog, Umit Yoruk, that he is seeing Google results with related searches at the top. I personally do not see them for any of the keyword searches I have done, but if you have - feel free to add a comment. Here are some screen shots from Umit's computer, he promised that he doesn't have any adware or spyware on his machine. :)

The past month or so has been filled with controversy not from outside of the SEM industry, but rather within. SEMPO has been the talk of the forums. You can see from my first entry on the SEMPO scandal, and from responses in the forums, my sempo meeting coverage and mike's follow up that things were hot.

On the top of that list was member communication. Wednesday night, SEMPO sent out their first actionable member communication memo. It outlined the actions they have taken and will be taking to overhaul the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. However, some SEMPO members are not yet satisfied. Jill Whalen posts at the Search Engine Watch Forums saying "was kinda like the boring meeting, only shorter." I personally feel that this was a huge step, but enough about my personal feelings. Over at HighRankings, Greg Jarboe, the PR volunteer for SEMPO, posts a response to Jill's comments.

For some reason, people are under the impression that link buying is a SEO practice that one should not participate. I am not sure why some people think this way but they do. It might be because of all the chatter on reciprocal link exchanges, or building dozens of pages to build link popularity, or maybe all the news about how some SEO firms interlink all their clients and even worse, hide links from their client's sites to their own. So I can see why people might shy away from the link buying side of SEO.

A thread at HighRankings named How About Purchasing Text Links?, has a po