Interviews Archives

We had a tremendous amount of coverage during the Search Engine Strategies conference, and every time we were in the Press Room, we saw another WebProNews video being filmed. Members at Cre8asite Forums and DigitalPoint forums discovered this particularly interesting interview between Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz interviewing Vanessa Fox of Google's Webmaster Central.

The interview covered many different topics which are summarized below.

Is Google Base worth it? Vanessa says yes for sites with structured data, such as real estate listings or recipes. It is a separate searching system and you can refine your results. Google Base is a great product for results that can be refined.

Getting on Google News: If you're accepted to the program, you can submit a news sitemap through Google's Webmaster Tools.

Google Sitemaps Initiative Offering Sitemaps in 18 New Languages: This has always been available, but now the content is available in 18 languages so people can learn more about it without having to learn English.

Sitemaps Support through robots.txt: The syntax of this is:

Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/sitemapfile.xml

Vanessa says that it is still recommended that you initially submit your sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools so that webmasters can determine whether their sitemap file has any errors.

What does Vanessa think about other search engine "Webmaster Central" portals? It's great. Yahoo SiteExplorer just went out of beta, and it works well. All engines should have such tools.

Can we get support for the following in Google Webmaster Central?

• Delete URL: We've had a URL removal tool for about 6 years. It's certainly a possibility to port to Webmaster Central.


• Live PR Score: I'm not sure about that one.


• Will Google ever compete with Alexa? Not likely due to privacy concerns.


• Link sorting: Vanessa says that she will pass the request on.


• Seeing supplemental results and why they are supplemental: Vanessa can see the expansion into determining where pages have problems but not getting too specific.


• Will we see penalties for people who buy links in Google Webmaster Central? We'll start paying more attention to paid links. (Days after this interview, Matt Cutts addressed the issue of paid links.)


• Information on who is linking to 404 pages: It's possible, but the best way to deal with this is with a redirect, because you may not be able to get that broken link fixed.

Is it possible that submitting a sitemap can get an orphaned page -- that has no pages linked to it -- indexed in Google? Possibly, but it probably won't rank well. It might rank for non-competitive terms.

What about results that are not wanted by a user? Will sitemaps affect that? The most important thing is about user experience. Is this page what they wanted, or is it a hop to get to pages that they want?

What happens if I want to move to another site through a 301 redirect? If I verify both of the sites in Webmaster Central, is there a way to keep the rankings? It is possible if we are able to verify ownership for both sites. Other things you can do now is that you take the pages from the old site and put them on the new site as-is and redirect one-to-one. A lot of people who do this move restructure the content, so it gets harder to pinpoint the issue. While it is a natural time to redo your site, just do everything a step at a time.

With regards to parasite hosting and I host my content on an .edu site, do you think that there may be too much trust that Google is putting in this domains, and do you think that that might slide in the future? We're always looking at our algorithms. We always look at improving user experience and spamming the search engines is not the best user experience. We have a team that works on this, and we have an authenticated spam reporting tool in Webmaster Central. Hopefully, you will see these results improve.

You can watch the video here:

Discussion continues at Cre8aSite Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

I'm sure they wanted Jakob Nielson, but 15 minutes before Danny's Keynote talk at the Chicago SES Conference, Cre8asiteforums' founder, Kim Krause Berg, was planted in a chair by WebProNews for an interview about usability. She made sure to mention important keywords like "search engines", and she pointed out the value of adding descriptive link labels for engines and people.

Discussion of her debut performance at Cre8asiteforums' usability forum, where usability and SEO/M have always played nice together.

If you are a PPC nut, then you know the name Andrew Goodman. Well, Lee Odden has interviewed him and the interview is live at Search Engine Guide, if your a PPCer, its worth a read.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is a great interview at Search Engine Journal of Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads. Patrick talks about his background in search, the company's current and future plans and some new products he is working on. Some very interesting items.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Cre8asiteforums saw a great idea when Barry first launched the SearchEngineRoundtable blog. And, it wasn't just because he would be visiting forums to report on interesting topics. It was the mix of Search Engine marketing and engine news, forums discussions, and reporters who would hunt for a forums' pulse that we thought was original.

Over the weekend, Cre8asiteforums relaunched in its new board software. In addition to getting used to Invision, its members are treated to articles, interviews and an SEO tools section. While not abandoning the "forums" job, the hope is to fortify the SEO/SEM, Usability and Web Development industries with supportive materials, more opportunties for promoting credible works and finding new ways of keeping the creative juices flowing.

Asking one's girlfriend to marry him via a search engine is certainly creative. And, did you know he has a twin brother?

Say hello to the host of this blog in An Interview with Barry Schwartz

Brett Tabke, owner of WebmasterWorld, has given me the privilege to ask him a bunch of questions on the recent news that WebmasterWorld Bans Search Engine Bots from Crawling. So here it is....

Barry: Brett...Thank you for taking the time during this hectic period at WebmasterWorld to answer several questions about the recent changes you have made, to disallow spiders from accessing your site.

Barry: The big change was that you, on November 18th, changed your robots.txt file to disallow all bots from accessing your Web site. In a thread you started in the Foo forum at WebmasterWorld named lets try this for a month or three... you elegantly linked to your robots.txt file to show people. And subtitled the thread, "last recourse against rogue bots." Why was this the last course of action? I have spoken with dozen of site owners who run sites as large as yours. Most tell me that you can fight off these rogue bots one by one, but you need to factor in the costs of these bots into your hosting prices. How would you respond to that?

Brett: It is difficult to talk about issues that brush shoulders with security related matters. Once you talk about something and your actions to counter that problem in public, you give rise to an invertible counter measure. That said, we have been saying for many years that it was our number one problem on the site. I made a plea in the forums five years ago for a robots Inclusion standard (instead of an exclusion standard).

One thing that sets WebmasterWorld apart from all other similar sites, is the ease with which we can be crawled. There are no CGI parameters on url strings and all off-the-shelf bots can index the site. I can write a 15 line perl program in 5 minutes that will download the entire site - even with cookie support. That same thing can not be said about sites that are not freely crawlable (like other forums and auction sites with cgi based or non standard urls).

The change was for us to require cookie support via member login. That action mandates either allowing the approved big search engine crawlers to feast on a login page instead of page viewing several million pages before they realized the site was 100% different than before. The easiest solution to that is to set a robots.txt ban on all crawlers.

I knew it would be a controversial action. In such cases, it is always better to bring up the subject yourself or least people get the wrong impression that it was by no action of your own. I just threw up the post as a marker so that people knew we'd taken the action ourselves and I would come back later with more information after things settled down a bit. We had started down this road about mid-july when we began blocking many of the major crawlers.

> Why was this the last course of action?

We've tried every thing to stop the bots. Once we got up to several thousand ip's in the system ban list, it was having a serious effect on system performance. We also were occasionally into a situation where we would ban an IP and then that ip would get recycled to another member that had nothing to do with a download attack. It is hard to block an IP such as an AOL ip, because you block several million users using that IP via the AOL proxy cache.

> I have spoken with dozen of site owners who run sites as large as yours.

Size is not the only issue. The ease with which WebmasterWorld can be crawled is first up. I've been studying offline browsers for about a week. All of the site rippers or offline browsers available from Tucows, are able to download WebmasterWorld in it's entirety. Only 6 were able to successfully download part of a Vbulletin site. One would also choke on weird urls (like caps in filenames, or extremely long filenames).

> Most tell me that you can fight off these rogue bots one by one,

Ya, we were spending about an hour or two a day on this problem. I was to the point of hiring one person full time to address it.

Barry: Part of this process, you made a change that now requires cookie support, something that most bots can not support. As a side affect, all members had to relogin to WebmasterWorld. First question, do you have any stats on how many times the "forgot my password" function was used over the past 5 days? :) And my second question is; wouldn't it have been more affective to spend money on a full time server guy to fight off these bots then to lose the search engine traffic completely?

Brett: The majority of people are using browsers such as Opera or IE that auto remember passwords. We also have switched our cookies about once every 60 days for this very reason. That keeps people from leaving cookies laying around in an internet cafe, or on their work machine.

> affective to spend money on a full time server guy to fight off these bots then to lose the search engine traffic completely?

Even hiring a full time guy at this point wouldn't fix the problem. All the tools we have used are only a bandaid solution at trying to cure cancer. We have tried: page view throttling, bandwidth throttling, agent name parsing, cookie requirements from selected ISP's (over 500 including all of Europe/China), IP banning, link poisoning, various auto banning, and various forms of cloaking and site obfuscation to make the site uncrawlable to non-se bots.

The biggest issue, is the massive amount of overhead system and time it takes to manage all that. The totality of it all is staggering. From raw parsing of log files, to code, to server setup, to managing it all takes an inordinate amount of time. It is very easy to make mistakes in all that. (like the time we banned New Zealand visitors because we banned the big ISP's proxy server there) Our site is here for the members - not the rogue bots.

Barry: On that note; almost all the big names in the industry were shocked that you would take this action. They pretty much laughed that you thought you wouldn't be delisted within 30 days, let alone 60 days. Danny Sullivan said;

Brett figures he's got 60 days until pages drop from places like Google to get an alternative search solution in place. That seems optimistic to me. WebmasterWorld is a prominent site and should get getting revisited on a sub-daily basis. If search engines are hitting that robots.txt ban repeatedly, they ought to be dropping those pages in short order, or they aren't very good search engines. I mean, can you imagine the irony of Google and Yahoo getting pilloried on WebmasterWorld for taking so long to drop pages after they were told to do so after the ban was put into place.

Search experts like DaveN, Oilman, SEGuru and others all felt the same way. Why did you really feel it would not happen so fast?

Brett: It has been over 180 days since we blocked GigaBlast, 120 days since we blocked Jeeves, over 90 days since we blocked MSN, and almost 60 days since we blocked Slurp. As of last Tuesday we were still listed in all but Teoma. MSN was fairly quick, but still listed the urls without a snippet.

Google will hang onto a site up to 90 days after you put up a robots.txt ban. Even if the site is completely unreachable, we have seen sites still listed as url only sites up to six months later. It is only via the Google url removal utility where that process will be faster. It is a feature I had not used on Google in many years, and completely overlooked it.

Barry: Also in that summary thread, listed above, you expressed your frustration with the engines for "changing a perfectly good and accepted internet standard." Can you expand on that, and what steps you think they should take to get the robots.txt syntax the way it should be for 2005?

Brett: Without webmaster input, changing the robots.txt standard only encourages others to also play with the standard. Of the offline browser bots I looked at from Tucows, the majority of them can be set to ignore robots.txt. Why, because the standard has not been appreciated, endorsed, or adhered to by the engines as will as well as by the offline browser or site ripper programmers. The engines have fostered an era of robots.txt disrespect.

The engines changing the standard to suit their own needs, is exactly the same as Netscape and Microsoft playing around with the HTML standards during the browser wars. Only by adhering and endorsing standards can we together keep the net from becoming more chaotic than it is now. The enormity of what a webmaster has to already know is already too much for one person. The last thing the internet needs is every big search engine coming out with it's version of robots.txt standard. We need them to support the standard or form an open commission of theirs and our peers to come up with a new one (Which I have been endorsing for 5 years).

That said, as the author of the first robots.txt validator in 1998, I do take the standard very seriously. Hardly a day goes by when I don't get a email from someone asking why their robots.txt with an "Allow" line was marked as bad by the robots.txt validator.

Barry: Due to the fact you are an SEO expert, people came up with wild theories as to why you really did this. Some people said you were banned for cloaking. Some people said that you had a crazy PR stunt in mind. One PR stunt was that the search engines were coming out with a uniform site submission tool and you wanted to be the first to use it. Others said that you wanted to show the search engines that you do not need them. I am sure you heard of many other theories. Which do you find the most funny? Which do you find the most outrageous? And how would you respond to some of them?

Brett: I often forget the scale of how huge WebmasterWorld has become and how many people look to us on issues like this leadership. I have given up trying to disabuse people of notions to contrary why we do things. Not every hat is tin foil and not every helicopter black.

> Some people said you were banned for cloaking.

In order to address many of the rogue site ripper issues, we do openly cloak on the agent level some things. We have to be able to determine what is a good se bot and what isn't. If we randomly go throwing around poison links that lead to autobans without knowing what bot was what bot - we would be banning the se bots left and right. We also use it to keep random ad served content off the page where the only difference is the filename of the image file. That would encourage massive amounts of respidering.

We do everything we can to try to out fox the rogue bots. SE bots were always served the same content as members, and we never IP cloak so it is clear to just about everyone what we are doing. You could always check by a simple agent name switch to slurp. Sometimes we will trip and make a mistake ourselves as there are a few thousand lines of code dedicated to the issues we are talking about.

The number of things needed to address rogue bots is absurd. It was when I was trying to trim down the htaccess ban list to a few thousand IP's after getting hit for 12m page views in a week, that I threw my hands in the air and turned on required login and blocked all the bots. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision, but it was a spur of the moment reaction. If I had it to do over again, the only thing different I would do, is have the new site search engine debugged and ready to go.

> Some people said that you had a crazy PR stunt in mind.

I knew there would be an interest in to to WebmasterWorld members. Some of the other speculation by other noted webmasters was flat out wrong, self interested competitors, and showed a complete lack of understanding of the tech issues involved. One major blogger suggested that we could address all this with a couple of bans in the httaccess list. I laughed when I listened to it, because we had close to 4000 IP's in there and were on the very of banning entire C blocks and all of the AOL proxy servers. Clearly, the tech issues were well beyond his knowledge.

> Others said that you wanted to show the search engines that you do not need them.

Yes, a hundred thousand targeted referrals a day are just plain wrong. Lets cut to the chase; I adore search engine traffic, but my first duty as a webmaster is to the visitors and members of our site. Anything that interferers with that to the degree that rogue spiders, downloaders, offline browser, monitoring services, site rippers, or whatever you call it - I have to take action.

> I am sure you heard of many other theories. Which do you find the most outrageous?

That I was starting a bot busting service that I had talked about 4 years ago in the forums.

> And how would you respond to some of them?

I would not respond to it. My first and only duty is to the members and visitors of WebmasterWorld. Anything I can do to enhance their experience at the site is our goal. That viewpoint is what built WebmasterWorld and what will sustain it. Take care of your members first, and everything else will take care of itself. The more transparent we can make the tech, the better it works for everyone.

Barry: Do you expect support from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves to get back into their indexes quickly? Have they offered you any support or advice?

Brett:
> Do you expect to get back into their indexes quickly?

No different in that regard than any other website.

> Have they offered you any support or advice?

Yes, they have been great off-the-record. It isn't something they can talk about in public either. I am saddened by that fact, but I do understand the big sites simply can ill afford to talk about security or tech issues that can have a negative effect on their own system in public. I was asked in Vegas why we had banned so many engines - clearly, they had taken notice - but no one had a answer except to ask why G was still allowed on the site.

Barry: What are your plans for the next 7 days? And then the next month or two in terms of these rogue spiders and non rogue spiders?

Brett: There has to be 5 pounds of turkey in the fridge and I think the last half of the pumpkin pie will be done by the end of the day ;-)

Other than that, I have a site search engine to finish debugging and then we have an open house at our new offices, Christmas travek, PubCon Australia, new employees training, and a spring PubCon in Boston to plan and flush out. Interesting times indeed!

> And then the next month or two in terms of these rogue spiders and non rogue spiders?

We have made alot of changes to the core bot detection architecture this last week. The members have been so helpful and giving with new ideas and new ways we can address the problem. There is no one magic bullet that is going to fix the problem, but a more polished approach using all the techniques is what we are working on. People have gone so far as to write custom code for us to use free of charge.

The one thing I would like to leave people with, is to download a few of the site ripper programs and run them against their own site. Test how easily their site can or can not be crawled. There will be site owners that will be shocked to see their site is either completely crawlable without regard for robots.txt, or uncrawlable because of various site architecture problems. There is something there to be learned by every site owner.

Barry: Well thank you for spending the time answering my questions. I wish you all the best and I hope everything works out in the long run.

Brett: Thank you.

"If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor in a valuable space, you’ll need a lot of link power."

So states Rand Fishkin, of Seomoz.org, from an interview just out by E-Consultancy called SEO Ranking Factors - the Rand Fishkin interview.

Triggered by Rand's now-famous Search Engine Ranking Factors, which
E-Consultancy featured on their site, Rand answers SEO and search engine questions that a lot of web site owners have. Rand offers his opinions based on his own experience in search engine marketing and his ties to the industry that permit him access to its many experts.

The interview touches on links, page rank, Web 2.0, Mike Grehan's theory that "the rich get richer" as far as link power, and the value of search engine marketing. Of his list of favorite bloggers, he makes all the PC (politically correct) answers, which means he didn't include me, despite my having covered him here two days in a row. Next time, dinner's on me and we pick a much fancier pizza joint, Rand, okay? heh.

The interview reads well and is informative. I'd say more but the other guest authors here somehow seem to be posting when I'm also logged in and they always beat me to the finish line.

Came across a nice interview that Rand from SEOchat did today with Dr. Garcia (orion), a moderator on SEW forums and one of the SEO/SEM industry most well known experts on search engine technology and IR (Information Retrevial). He has been someone who came into this industry to help educate us heathens on the particulars of the search technology we only had a partial understanding of. Through his brilliant posts and amazing insights more and more experts have begun to understand our field even better than before. I had the great oppourtunity to meet him while in New York and I was delighted to see Rand did a great interview with him about many of the topics he discussed before.

Rand covers some good topics everything from “on-page” optimization via linearization, co-occurrence theory, he goes on to ask about underappreciated issues of SEO/SEM, major trends in the way search engines rank pages, shifts towards greater or lesser use of things like PageRank or link popularity, practices of buying and selling links, and much more.

If you are looking for your daily dose of salt or just care to brush up on some important topics currently in the search technology.

Read Rands Interview with Dr. Garcia

Several months ago must have been the last time Ammon Johns, the 'Technical Director' of Propellernet Search Engine Marketing and an Admin at the Cre8asite Forums, and I have chatted over the phone. Ammon and I touched based Thursday night to just catch up and, of course, talk search engine marketing. One of the best parts of writing at the Search Engine Roundtable is having these opportunities, to talk with the leading SEM experts in the world.

Ammon was gracious enough to give me a call, all the way from his home town, Hove, in East Sussex, on the South coast of the UK. We must have talked for over an hour but of course it felt much less. I asked Ammon after our call was over, if it would be alright if I shared some of our conversation with the public, he kindly accepted. I write this entry three days after our conversation, so I hope I do honor to the detail of our discussion.

Continue reading "Shooting the Breeze with Ammon Johns - Worldwide Leading SEM Expert"

I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Mayer, Aaron Ferstman and Nancy Evars from Yahoo! Search after the last session of the day. Let me take you through the conversation in chronological order, as best as I remember it.

After the "Search Engine Friendly Design and Coding (Especially Flash)", which Tim spoke at, I met up with Aaron at the speakers platform. Aaron was waiting for Tim to finish answering individual attendee questions. Aaron and I discussed the normal stuff you discuss with people when you first meet them. We discussed the fact that people in California like to buy big 4 wheel drive SUVs and how people in New York like to buy small fast cars. I myself just leased the Lexus SC430 (sporty convertible), and as you know, it does not drive well in the snow - you also probably know that New York tends to get its share of snow. We just found it funny that people in Cali like cars that are more suited to New Yorkers and New Yorkers like cars that are more suited for Californians.

After the car talk, we discussed what it takes to speak at these conferences, especially as a representative from the search engines. I commented that Tim does an excellent job. We agreed that these speakers need to be politicians. Soon after, Tim was ready for a cigarette so he pushed his way (being dramatic - he did not push anyone) out the conference room out onto the street where he can get a breath of fresh air (or cigarette). There Tim, Aaron and Nancy sat to talk about various topics.

We discussed the Yahoo! Search Blog, which Nancy works on and the conversations ultimately lead to Jeremy Zawodny, who will be arriving tomorrow, and his blog. Jeremy is known to say things in his personal blog which ruffel the feathers of some of the more corporate types over at Yahoo!, but overall it seems to me that most of the people over at Yahoo! are fairly relaxed. After meeting Tim, I get that impression.

The blog conversation moves on to, of course, to comment spam. Yahoo! Search Blog, as you know, allows for commenting - as opposed to Google's blog. Jeremy has a lot of experience with blogging and he uses MT Blacklist to fight comment spam on his blog as well as the Yahoo! Search Blog. Tim made a comment that he was at some bar with the WMW crew and one mentioned that they tried to comment spam Jeremy's blog. Of course Jeremy blocked the comment spammer from doing so in the future. But another WMW folk said that if he was spamming blogs, he would make sure not to spam a Yahoo! employee's blog.

We then discussed ThreadWatch.org, NickW's blog, Tim loves reading it. Tim finds ThreadWatch to be more of a forum then a blog, I see his point - but I disagree. We discussed giving ThreadWatch.org a link on the left hand navigation of the Yahoo Search Blog site. I think it might happen in the near future. From ThreadWatch we moved onto forums. We discussed some of the exciting threads, such as the one about how people post spammers in order to show Yahoo! and Google who the spammers are. Tim kind of hinted that he wouldn't do anything manually when he finds such a thread. Of course he could not comment on Google's behalf.

I then asked Tim about all the PM's he gets or Sticky Mails (as they are referred to at WMW). He says he gets some of the funniest things. One story he told me was about this Sticky he got from someone who basically copied content off another site and complained that his site was not listed. After Tim responded to the member who sent him the sticky mail, the member responded that he was a cab driver and he should give him a break. Of course, Tim knew that this person was not a cab driver - so he found the whole situation funny.

That conversation lead to how Yahoo! handles the re-inclusion of pages that were delisted. He said that you can email an address and Yahoo! should review it within 2 weeks or so. He gave me specific examples of such cases, but no need to mention them here. At first, he explained, Yahoo! was bombarded with requests for re-inclusion (this occurred after Yahoo! merged all the other engines into one). But now, a re-inclusion request should be reviewed quickly.

Then the Yahoo folks split up and I walked with Tim back to the Hilton. During the walk, we talked more about giving NickW that link on the Yahoo Search Blog and some football talk. Tim is a Steelers fan, I myself am a Jet fan (yes I know). We talked a bit about how we used to run rotisseries before it was all automated on the Web. He used to fax back and forth sheets between people. I actually had my brother write small programs to help keep track of the stuff.

As we approached the Hilton, we talked about how Yahoo's Blog links to Google's blog and how MSN's blog links to both Yahoo's Blog and MSN's Blog. But you do not see Google linking to either Yahoo or MSN. :) Which lead us to talk about those Google bombs, and the recent "more evil than Satan", when queried at MSN Search Beta brought up Google. Of course the engines play games with each other, and he shared some funny stories with me on that. At that point we exchanged cards and parted ways.

It was nice meeting the folks at Yahoo. Nancy was nice to talk to, real smart and fun. Aaron is an all around nice guy, seems very hard working and honest. Tim has way too much fun over at Yahoo!, seems way to laid back and, to be serious, is an excellent communicator.

To be honest, I feel I am one of the luckiest people in this industry, to have the opportunity to interview Mike Grehan. Everyone has several people that make an impact in one's life. Mr. Grehan did that for me with search engine marketing. His deep understanding of the workings of the search engines and his eloquent method of illustrating the information to us all is super natural. And without further ado, my interview with Mike Grehan, the author of "Search Engine Marketing Book: The essential best practice guide".

Barry: Hi Mike! I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions.

Mike: The fact the you're paying me a huge sum of money for it helps Barry.

Continue reading "Interview With Mike Grehan: Author of Search Engine Marketing Book"

Yesterday, I had interviewed Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads Inc., a link popularity and traffic generating ad firm. Patrick has a detailed background in SEO and is now currently focusing on the link building component. This interview makes for some interesting reading. Make sure to click on the entry to read the full interview.

Roundtable: Hi Patrick, Thank you for taking the time with me for this interview. I thought it would be nice to chat with a link building SEO at this time because of all the talk going on about PageRank, or lack there of, and the SandBox effect. Of course, I would like to get into your service found at www.text-link-ads.com during this interview, but let's first get into link building. Sound good?
Patrick Gavin: Yes Barry, thanks for the opportunity.

Roundtable: Thanks. To start off, let me ask you about how you go about creating new sites and at what point does the link building process begin for you? Do you have any process, in which you stick with, during the link building campaign? Can you give the readers at the Search Engine Roundtable and idea on how they should manage the link building aspect of SEO during the overall SEO and site development plan?
Patrick Gavin: It is best to start the link building as soon as possible. Our strategy for all sites, new and old is two fold:

Continue reading "Interview with Patrick Gavin from Text Link Ads Inc."

Today I had the privilege to ask Kim Krause, the owner of Cre8asite Forums and founder of Cre8pc, a few questions. Kim runs a popular and well-respected forum at Creasiteforums.com. The forum is often referenced in this site and Kim stops by on occasion to share some of her thoughts on SEO and usability. Kim's current focus in the search engine-marketing world is bridging the gap between the seo world and the usability world. She is a known advocate to improve search visibility in order to convert that searcher to a buyer (or a desired action). So if we may, let's get to the interview.

[Roundtable:] Kim, I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions about your forum, your services and your professional goals. Since this site is about forum coverage, can you give us some insight into why you started cre8asiteforums?

[Kim Krause:] Thank you, Barry, for considering me as an interviewee, and for your coverage of happenings at Cre8asiteForums. All of us at the forums appreciate your efforts and kind support.

Cre8asiteForums was once known as the Cre8pc Web Site Promotion club, which I launched in 1998 using the free club access provided by Yahoo!. Back then, I was working in web design and freelancing from home in search engine optimization. My target market was home and small business owners. I have a strong passion for them because many have little or no budget, but deserved a chance to get into search engines without being ripped off. Whatever I learned from my work, or from testing methods for the companies I worked for, I shared in that club.

When Yahoo! bought E-Groups (or whatever they were called) and changed their format from Clubs to Groups, we club owners lost certain control. For example, the unwanted advertisements that now interfered with posts. I also co-moderated a Home and Small Business Club, owned by Carol Daly of Creative Enterprises as well. Her group is flourishing and I'm still a contributor there because the needs of small businesses interest me.

In addition to the Yahoo! Group involvement, I frequented other SEO or marketing forums, and got to know people and the forum owners. From my Cre8pc Club, I met Bill Slawski (aka bragadocchio), now an Administrator for Cre8asite Forums. Mick Hansen (aka Mick), now a Moderator for Cre8asite, was also a member. At the time he joined, he was still living in Denmark and was about 15 years old. Adrian Lee (aka Adrian), also a Moderator at Cre8asite, was a long-time member of the Cre8pc club too. Those guys, plus a woman who was a member and later became a Cre8asite Moderator (no longer with Cre8asite), essentially kept things going when I needed a break and were keen to expand the forums when it was finally rolled into a Php based forum in August 2002. By this time Jill Whalen was contributing the Club. It was no longer Kim's little SEO club, but was ready for prime time. Club member Phil Craven (who now has his own forum), had the skills necessary to pull it off, and suggested taking the Club to true a forums format. We said we'd give it a try. Our beginnings were quite humble and there was no plan in place.

[Roundtable:] Looking down the list of forum moderators and administrators, I see that you have successfully enlisted a talented and well-known set of professionals in the SEM/SEO field. How did you get such great volunteers to help out in the forums? Did you have to reach out and ask them or did they come on their own?

Continue reading "Interview with Kim Krause, Usability and SEO Legend & Expert of Cre8PC.com"

If your in the SEO world, you are bound to know the name "Digital Point". Digital Point, the company, has built several tools that have helped revolutionize the SEO World. All of these tools are free and available at Digital Point's SEO Tools page. The founder of Digital Point is Shawn Hogan, an honest, good and giving person. I am pretty sure his first SEO tool was his Keyword Tracker tool that is used by almost every SEO I know. Shawn has also set up a forum based on supporting these tools.

Shawn was kind enough to allow me to ask him a few questions about his tools, his forum and himself. We hope to be interviewing more well known forum leaders, tool builders and SEO specialists in the near future. Continue reading to see the interview...

Continue reading "Interview with Shawn Hogan of Digital Point"

As the SEO field grows, more and more people are fascinated by link building strategies. I sometimes dream of complex linking strategies (just kidding). Link building and how search engines look at the links pointing to a page is an exciting and mystical topic of discussion.

For this reason, I have decided to start an interviewing process, where I select fairly well known link specialists to interview. Jim Boykin, of We Build Pages, is the first link building specialist I have asked for an Interview. So, let's get right into it.

[Roundtable]: Jim, I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions about link building strategies. Shall we proceed?

[Jim Boykin]: Go ahead Barry, I'm Feeling Lucky!

[Roundtable]: Ha ha... So Jim, let us first tell the public about yourself. How did you get into this business? Tell us a little bit about your history and what led you to where you are today.

[Jim Boykin]: I was always a computer geek. I was the first kid in elementary school to touch our school's first computer (thinking around 1978). In college I worked as a consultant in the computer lab. I left college in 1993, and traveled around the country (USA) for five years - never seeing a computer from 1993 until early 1999.

Early in 1999 I purchased a computer, and my world has never been the same again!!! My first thought was, "What's this language?, I gotta do this!" I learned basic HTML in a few days. About a week later I purchased webuildpages.com and within a few days I had my first website live. Two weeks later, I received a call from a company in Atlanta Georgia (I'm from Northern New York), asking if I could build them a web site. I asked how they had found me, and the response was they searched in AltaVista for "Build Web Pages" where I had ranked high (by accident because of my company name). That is what started me thinking about optimization, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since!

When I started my business I attended every local networking meeting, and praised the values of having a website and internet marketing, and I picked up some local clients along the way. During 2001 and 2002 I worked for a few local design firms as their "Internet Marketing Specialist".

I wanted to work for a company that made internet marketing priority 1, so, I decided to go "solo", and back to my own business of We Build Pages. I specifically targeted the phrase "Internet Marketing", and 3 months later, with a little luck, I had achieved a #4 ranking in Google, and was lucky enough to stay in the top 10 for a year and a half.

When we hit #4 my life again changed forever. We Build Pages had grown from 1 to around 10 employees within a year, and my job role had transformed into being "Sales Manager", "Team Leader", "Lead Researcher", "Business Planner", "Idea Guy", "Trainer" along with a handful of other roles.

[Roundtable]: Jim, as you know, there are dozens of link exchange and brokerage Web sites out there. What are your feelings about link exchanges and these type of Web sites? Would you ever participate in one of these programs? What would you tell a novice link builder to watch out for when participating in these programs?

[Jim Boykin]: In the past we've been heavily involved in trading links, and have managed link exchange programs on over 150 PR7+ sites. Our programs and pages have gone through a few changes. There is a value to link exchange, but it may not be much today. I also believe in finding one way links. It's one thing to get 200 link trades, and another thing to get 50 one way links to your sites from 50 sites. I believe one way links are much more valuable than link trades.

A few years ago link trading was the "in" thing. The ole "You link to me, I link to you, and we both benefit" was a game that got overplayed, and Google seemed to react to it. I know many pages where links out seemed not to count on pages named "links.html" or had the word "links" in the title tag of a page, or if a page had the word "links" in a text link linking to a page. It wasn't and isn't always the case that those links wouldn't count.....but I'm guessing that Google sees what percent of your links are reciprocal, and if it is above a certain percentage, then a filter might go into effect.

Link Brokers...

Well, there's certainly a market for high value advertising on other sites. Some brokers hold auctions that are a bit of a gamble, because often the exact URL's are kept secret and only given to the paid winning bidder. Another danger is if you win an auction, you may find your link sandwiched between links for Viagra and online gambling, and it seems like things like this may throw red flags when found on sites that are completely non-related, and often have their PR blocked from passing. If your link is found on a site like this, then you could find the eyes of engines reviewing Your site as well. Link Brokers can be good...but there can be risks with buying what you don't know what link you're buying. PR is not everything.

If you have a good relationship with a broker, you can often hear of new opportunities or totally relevant opportunities and know the URL before paying. If you use your broker right, they can be a good friend to those with a competitive market.

Much of the brokered links are "site wide" links, and these may cause attention....again, like link trades, I think it's a Ratio that may throw filters. A site with only 10 links, but from 10 different sites, will often do better than the site with 1000 links but only from 5 sites. Buying a bunch of site-wide links isn't always the answer.

In my opinion the guy with 10 "really relevant" links to a site can beat the guy with 100 non relevant links, and I see this often in search results today.

Many SEO's, including myself, are very cautious in their linking actions. Once you've been hit, or seen others hit, you tend to treat your sites with more care, and that often means "going underground", even if your intentions are "white hat". I think that just recently the SEO world is starting to admit that link advertising is real, and being aggressive on links is not in itself "black hat".

Still, everyone sees sites that have been penalized, either by gray bars or by not passing PageRank. Many of the best SEO's are very quiet about how they get links for the fear of being considered "overly aggressive" by Google.

We've changed our linking techniques a few times over the years, and are constantly experimenting with different tools, and expanding our repertoire of techniques. We have seen the ups and downs of linking campaigns. We've been know to be aggressive about our linking campaigns, but today we're trying to get it down to a "science". I've seen the hand of Google come down on sites before, so a lot of what we do today is geared towards making linking appear to be as natural as possible. In today's changing SEO world, the engines are getting smarter at analyzing links, and are sure to continue to improve their analysis of back links.

[Roundtable]: There has been a lot of discussion lately about how links from related Web pages are more valuable than links from Web pages off topic to your page. Do you find this to be true from strictly a link building standpoint?

[Jim Boykin]: I do believe that links from related places help more than links from non-related places. That's not to say that links from non-related places hurt you, or don't help, just that sites that link to you that Google finds relevant to your site, may count for more.

In the papers that were filed with the Securities and Exchange for Google's Public offering, on one page, there is an interesting line: "Many other aspects of a page's content are factored into the equation, as is the content of pages that link to the page in question." I believe Google is moving more towards that goal every day.

[Roundtable]: Not too long ago, I wrote a small entry on Pyramid Linking Strategies, and how linking from page A to page B and then from page B and page A is not recommended on a large scale. Would you be able to expand on that theory from an application stand point? In other words, has your experience shown to prove this theory right and what is the limit of direct link swaps that you feel comfortable with?

[Jim Boykin]: I found that an interesting read. I don't agree with everything that person seems to be doing, but I can understand some of the reasoning behind it. There are creative ways to go about link exchanging. This seems to be one creative method.

Creating directories for each client's site also seems like a lot of work. Perhaps he should look more at making sure his clients' sites link out to related sites in related "neighborhoods", as opposed to creating other sites that do that.

[Roundtable]: An other popular topic in the link building realm of SEO is something nicknamed "hoarding one's PageRank". In layman's terms, there is the belief that not linking out from one's page can't hurt your rankings. What are your thoughts on this theory?

[Jim Boykin]: I think that linking out to other sites is one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO. I really believe that "dead end" sites don't perform nearly as well as sites that link out to other related sites. Linking out to non-related sites might put you in the wrong neighborhoods, but, I believe, that linking to authority sites, or related sites can help your rankings. I'm sure that places like Google not only take into account "who links to you", but also "who you link to". In the "olden days" there was a trick to ranking high in Inktomi by linking out to the authority sites in your industry...that even counted more than who linked to you...I think this still plays a small factor in ranking, but most seem to ignore this aspect. I say: "Link out, and link out related "hoarding one's PageRank" is just not wise in my opinion.

[Roundtable]: In your opinion, which sites are the best for one to get links from? What I mean by best is; what are the easiest links to obtain, the most important links to obtain and the most basic links to obtain?

[Jim Boykin]: I believe that getting links from related sites are the best links to get. I won't say sites with the higher PR are better. I'd take a link from a relevant PR6 page over a huge PR8 link that has nothing in common with my site.

[Roundtable]: Since this site is mostly about forum coverage, let me ask you about your feelings on the different forums out there? I would expect that you spend some time reading the forums, which ones do you like the best and why? Also, why don't you post often at these forums?

[Jim Boykin]: I'm probably guilty of spending too much time in the forums when I should be doing other things. I probably stop in a forum every few hours, and probably read forums for about 2 hours total each day.

I started in Jim's World, at the ole www.searchengineforums.com site. Jim Wilson was the true pioneer of SEO Forums. Many of the best in the industry owe their start to this man. I owe a great part of my early learning to this forum.

At some point I moved over to Webmasterworld, and I would hang out in the GoogleForum (3) all the time. Back when Google Dances meant huge ranking shifts, there'd be threads that were so many pages, and getting updated so often that it would be humanly impossible to read every single post. I've since shifted over to hanging out almost exclusively in the "Supporters Forum" to get away from the "noise" of "me too" posts. Brett's Webmasterworld Conferences are a favorite of mine as well. I've never been to better "meeting of the minds" than at these conferences.

I've also been reading SEO Chat on a daily basis since its inception. I was the second member of SEO Chat, (Darin Ward being the first). For several months I was trying to get Darin to work at We Build Pages (And bring his Google Dance Tool and SEO Chat to We Build Pages), but the traveling itch got to him, and next thing I knew he was offering me a deal to buy the Dance Tool and SEO Chat from him. At the time, I was saving up to adopt a baby, so I couldn't afford his nice offer, and the following week he sold it to DevShed.

Also, at least once a week I pop into other forums to see what's being discussed there. Some of my other favorites are John Scott's forum (now at V7N.com). There's not much noise, just good posts by some very knowledgeable people. Some of the top minds in the field are "hiding out" there. Every now and then I also check out Jill Whalen's forum, and I keep my eye on Seo-Guy's Forum as well. Darrin Ward just started another forum at www.seotown.com where I think there is great potential as well.

I think the big forum to keep our eyes on is the new Search Engine Watch Forum. Already I've picked up some great internet marketing news, found here first. No ones got connections and insight like Danny Sullivan. I think I saw that you were a Mod there as well Barry, Congrats!

Ah, and why don't I post often???? .....I guess I'm not good at forum communication. I tend to have IM chats each day with many forum moderators, and seem to be much better one on one, rather than being part of a larger conversation. I also try to say under the radar, and to be honest, often don't have much to add. I'm a better listener than a talker sometimes. I did post the other day to announce that the PR and backlinks were updating :)

[Roundtable]: Jim, I would like to thank you for being so gracious in answering my questions. Before you go, can you spend a minute just describing your current business offerings and what makes you feel that link building is the most important area in SEO (if not the most important, then one of the most important)?

[Jim Boykin]: Well, I'm pretty sure that most people realize that link building is the most important aspect of any optimization campaign. I don't even consider that debatable. At We Build Pages, we usually start with a complete analysis of keywords and competition. We then perform on-page optimization, and follow that up with an aggressive link building campaign. After the first month, 95% of the work we perform for clients is involved in getting links, links, and more links.

Jim Boykin
CEO, We Build Pages
www.webuildpages.com