April 30, 2008 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: April 30, 2008"

If you were interviewing an SEO firm to see if they're for real, what questions would you ask them? A High Rankings Forum thread touches upon some of the must-know questions, and they're outlined below:

1. How long they have been doing SEO?
2. Can you give me three clients that you have had first-page results for?
3. What are some campaigns you have succeeded with?
4. Can you illustrate any significant traffic boosts or conversion boosts?
5. What is your general SEO process?
6. What is your criteria for choosing keyword phrases?
7. How is success measured?
8. What should you expect from us as a client?

And the list goes on and on. What would you add to this for desired results?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Strategies spoke with Daron Babin and discussed the current state of the conference circuit with regards to individuals believing that they have been banned from either SMX or SES events.

Danny Sullivan kindly transcribed the event on Sphinn (which I'm very grateful for!) Here are some key points:

According to a series of events, Rand Fishkin believes that he was banned from SES events. To respond to that allegation, Kevin says:

. There are folks we’ve asked not to come to the event primarily because they were on the competing side of the business from the commercial side of the business and defaming SES. So naturally what kind of a business manager would I be if we didn’t meet with our senior management and ask these people not to come. You don’t go to a Coca Cola convention and the Pepsi people don’t show up at the Coca Cola convention and defame Coca Cola. It’s just not done. It’s childish and foolish and I’m disappointed that Rand is perpetuating a rumor. That’s just not accurate.

Kevin also adds that he believes that there was some sort of exclusion due to his focus on paid search versus organic search:

I was an ad guy doing search, so the red-headed stepchild in the ad community, and I come into the search community and I’m not welcome because I not a search insider.

In his response, Danny says that there was never such a thing and that Kevin has always spoken on panels in conferences that Danny himself arranged.

Finally, one of the last key points is that Kevin believes that the attendees were looking for "fresh" content at the events. Danny responds that the content issue was addressed, but the primary selling point in his experience was the better food (which SMX boasts over SES).

What about banned attendees? Danny says:

At SMX, we banned the staff of one particular show from attending finally in February, in reciprocation for a ban placed on our staff stretching back to December 2006, for a myriad of reasons that would change. If that ban is ever lifted, I'll happily lift ours.

However, Danny is quick to mention that he's always looking for good talent to speak at these events and there should be no perception of exclusion at all.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on what type of advertiser would you automatically add to your AdSense competitive filter list. I.e. which type ads do you not want showing up on your site?

Here are some of the responses:

• Adult Related Sites
• Ringtone Sites
• Win Free Stuff Sites
• Irrelevant Sites
• MFAs
• Deceptive Sites
• Parked Domains
• Work From Home
• Etc.

I would create a poll here, but the answers can be so open ended. Which type of ads would you block immediately?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Now that Google admitted to crawling JavaScript and forms SEOs and Webmasters need to be aware of how to manage even more duplicate content issues.

In the past, a good strategy was to build out filter pages (filter by color, size, price, etc.) using JavaScript pull down menus. Google would typically stay away from such forms and you would not necessarily have to worry about Google seeing the same content filtered or sorted by color, price, size and so on.

But now with Google crawling JavaScript and forms, Webmasters need to take an extra step towards preventing Google from crawling and indexing such content. Why? Duplicate content.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on this topic and offers tips on what to do, to help you with this problem. Some of the advice includes:

• Include the duplicate content in an external Js, assign it to variables, and do innerHTML to some divs.
• Use XmlHTTPRequest (GET) to retrieve the data in XML format and then put it into the page.
• Use an Ajax POST and retrieve the XML content with this.
• Use robots.txt to block specific files and/or page naming conventions.

There are many ways to tackle the issue, but using JavaScript alone is no longer the best answer.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google is making a major promotional push for iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), with the new artist themes section. If you go to the Google home page, you will notice a special logo that looks like the logo on the right of this post, and a line that reads:

What happens when great art mixes with your homepage? iGoogle Artist Themes

Clicking on the logo or the link will take you to that special iGoogle Artist Themes page, for you to select from about 70 iGoogle personalized themes made specifically by artists. Here are a few sample themes:

This promotion is not just based in the US, Gabs notes Google is pushing it in the UK as well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.