There are probably tens of thousands of Internet marketing blogs. They often focus on different marketing aspects yet still you can easily get overwhelmed by the sheer number of them in every niche.
In order to prevent information overload I selected 30 marketing blogs I am convinced everybody serious about online marketing success for his blog, […]
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Posted by amoore

This is my first YOUmoz post and unlike many first timers, you don’t need to be nice to me.  As Tom and his favorite song would say, Treat Me Mean, I Need The Reputation.

I thought that Jane did a great job on bringing up some interesting points about Google in her post Google’s Advice - Godsend or Gimmick?

It’s certainly true that Google divulges quite a bit of information and advice to the public, but taking a quote from Jane

…always remember that (Google) is going to misspeak and they’re going to publish posts and comments that are in their own interest. They are also aware of their power, and so we should pay close attention to the meaning behind the messages we hear and find the middle ground between faithful servant and irate conspiracy theorist.

So why would a person ever go into operating a business?  To MAKE money, of course, and Google isn’t exactly a non-profit organization.

This brings me to the Google Content Network and Advertising.  This is old news but something worth exploring. We know in 2007 Google released what is known as "Placement Reports" for the Content Network. This is a detailed report of all the websites on the content network that your ad has appeared with the usual click rate, click throughs and conversion data of the search network. Before this introduction of the "placement report" you were told by Google that your ads will appear on certain websites with relevant content based on algorithms and what you are trying to advertise for.  Basically, before the introduction of this report you would have no clue what websites your ad was running on.

If you advertise in the Google Content Network and have never run a placement report, please do so immediately as this is what I have found.

Having just taken over our entire Google Adwords Campaign 3 weeks ago, I will tell y’all that we bid on words that are related to the Vietnam War and Vietnam veterans as we are a military website.  Obviously military veterans in this country speak English and use English speaking sites so we targeted only English speaking sites and websites located in the United States.

After running a placement report I found that we had advertisements running on Vietnamese websites (some with English words, some totally in Vietnamese).  4 of these websites were producing impressions in the hundreds of thousands with high click rates.  4 sites that were in Vietnamese cost our company in one year alone over $3,000 with 1 sale! I think we can agree that that is an awful CPA and ROI, as we don’t sell anything over $60 on our website.  I further analyzed the report and found an additional 200 sites that either were foreign or produced poor CPA’s.  So I placed these 200 websites on our "site exclusion" list to be excluded from running our advertisements. "Site exclusion" is located under tools in Adwords.  By doing this I saved our company a pretty pretty penny for the next year, resulting in massive amounts of praise by my boss (I should’ve said I’ll split the savings with you!).

So getting back to the point of Godsend or Gimmick, what the hell gives??!! We clearly stated to only appear on English speaking sites located in the United States, and based on my placement report we appeared on websites that catered to Vietnamese people, Ethiopians, Chinese and Korean news plus a various number of other foreign countries.  I sent Adwords an email asking for an explanation.  Here’s what I got from the Adwords team:

"I ran some placement performance reports and can confirm that your ads are appearing on domains outside of the standard .com and .net. When we place ads on the content network as well as the search network, we do so based upon the user’s IP address. In your case, a user may have an IP associated with the United States, however, is visiting sites outside of the US."

Yeah, that’s great, you run an IP address scan to make sure the IP is hosted in the US, but come on, Google, everyone knows that you can get an IP address in the US no problem!  I know you’re capable of scanning a website to see if the content is in English rather than VIETNAMESE!  

This tells me that Google is looking out for their best interests which is, of course, generating money through Adwords. HOWEVER…

Where did I learn how to run the placement performance report and how to exclude websites? In a free Google package that included an apron, cooking recipes and a small booklet titled "Recipes For Success, Advanced Tips From AdWords Experts."

Google: Godsend or Gimmick??

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by Jeremy Chatfield

For the last few years, I’ve been doing some SEO on Apache sites. Suddenly, this year, I’ve had a clutch of IIS sites to handle and I’m seeing some puzzling and worrying things which appear to be caused by the way that Microsoft defaults to "caseless" file systems. Worrying things as in "damaging to search engine results." I can’t find any guidance from Microsoft’s knowledge base or Live Search, nor from Yahoo! and Google Webmaster guidelines. Have I missed something?

What is Case Folding?

 If I have a file called "default.asp", I can call it "DEFAULT.ASP" and "dEfAuLt.AsP" and still open it. Upper and lower case letters are treated as one. 

This is required in handling domain names. The original domain name service specifications ensure that "MERJIS.COM" and "Merjis.com" and "merjis.com" all map to the same machine on the Internet. So there’s no problems with inbound links, or in-site links, that refer to the web site with different cases in the domain name part of a URL.

However, the original World Wide Web Consortium spec is clearly based on Unix and Linux usage in the scientific community. Unix and Linux have case-respecting file systems. That is "default.aspx" and "Default.aspx" are two different files.

The result is that "http://merjis.com/contact" and "http://merjis.com/Contact" are two distinct and different URLs. On a Linux system, you could have two different files to deliver the contents. But on an IIS system, although you can make the request for two different files, you are delivered the contents of a single file.

Robot Exclusion Protocol

If you don’t want part of your web site crawled–for example, a private, members only area–you can tell web robots to steer clear. You drop a "robots.txt" file with a couple of lines like:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /private

This will tell search engine spiders like GoogleBot that you do not want Google to crawl these pages.

The problem, of course, is that like the original W3C specification for a URL, the Robot Exclusion Protocol appears to respect the case of a file name. So if you have accidentally referred to the private members area as "/Private" or "/PRIVATE", then the robots are allowed to crawl that URL. And IIS will fold the case and let the robots look at content that shouldn’t be allowed.

Search Rank and Results

As SEOs know, rank depends on inbound links and the link copy. So if spiders see a few references to an uppercased version of an IIS file and to a lowercased version of the same file, then there can be two different page ranks for the same page. This would tend to decrease the PageRank for both files - it’d have more PageRank if all the links went to a single URL, not two or more.

Obviously, this only becomes a problem when the search engines have both case variations of the file. So the risk becomes real if there is any evidence that the search engines return search results for two or more case variations.

So is This a Real Fear?

I am looking at web server log files for August and September 2008. I can see Yahoo! and Google spiders crawling the same file, under two different case variations. Clearly the spiders aren’t smart to these web servers being IIS and using case folding. If the spiders were smart, they wouldn’t crawl the same file under two case variations. The spiders are also clearly crawling case-respecting variations - that is, if the reserved area for members is called "/Members", then Google crawls "/Members", even if "/members" would also take it to the same place.

This means that so long as all references to private areas have a consistent case usage, then you can rely on using the robot exclusion protocol to deflect the robots unless someone not under your control, such as a third party site, refers to "/MEMBERS" or another case variation - which the robots are allowed to look at.

Search Engine Results 

Even worse, the log files show several instances, for different files, where search engine results have led to different pages. For example, imagine that I have a page called "uppercase", triggered by the search query "upper case." I have instances where the search engine query is the same ("upper case") but some search results lead to "/uppercase" and some lead to "/UPPERCASE".

That suggests that the search engines, as well as the spiders, do not understand than IIS folds case. The consequence appears to be that using IIS risks reducing your page rank, for reasons outside your control.

Defenses

You can defend entire private areas of the site. There is a "robots" meta tag that allows you mark each page as being indexed or not. So by marking the private area with "NOINDEX", you can keep those pages out of the search results. They may be crawled, but they shouldn’t be indexed. That will work whatever the case of the filename that was used.

However, I can’t see any simple defense, using IIS, to protect against the multiplicity of search results and the apparent weakening of rank that might follow. There are some tools similar to the Apache mod_rewrite that will rewrite URLs for IIS - allowing you to enforce a mapping to all lower case, for example.

Duplicate Penalties?

So, if the same content is served in multiple case variations and spiders don’t seem to recognise case folding, and search engines appear to multiply-index case variations… are these pages treated as duplicates? 

I don’t know. 

Is Page Rank affected?

I don’t know. Yet. I’m setting up some experimental sites to see if I can manipulate rank by tweaking capitalisation of links. 

Do any SEOmoz readers have any experience of this problem? Am I overreacting to seeing crawling and ranking of multiple variations of the file name? 

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Google settled a suit in the UK around the issue of whether or not religious groups can buy the keyword “abortion.” Long story short: They now can (via NYT). Expect a lot more of this kind of thing going forward. Google has the responsibility of being an arbiter of…



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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Meet Paul Griffiths, the Search Blogger of the Day. Today I’d like to highlight a post entitled Realistic Salary Expectations? Average Salaries in SEO. Paul talks about salary surveys and how the relate to real world SEO job hunting. Because the SEOVacancies blog is SEO-job focused (which is a really cool niche blog idea, btw), I trust Paul’s opinions.
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Brian Clark highlights various levels of reading, and how many bloggers fail to go beyond scratching the surface.

Improved data visualization technologies are making it easier to transfer knowledge.

I few posts back I mentioned that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk would be good for some SEO processes. It looks like people are already using it to spam social media. As sock puppets rise up many of the broad/general social media sites will get polluted by increasing amounts of spam.

My latest column on SEL was about how you have to give your SEO as much information as possible if you want them to solve your problems in an efficient manner, equating a broken website to a sick patient.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Why launch Chrome (Google’s new “browser”) when Firefox, Google’s favored son, is doing so well? Because Google needs its own. Using a comic book to introduce it is fun, and certainly, there’s always room for new approaches to platform and interface, and Chrome looks to have a lot of…



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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

In order to get a leg up on the competition, successful Search Engine Marketers need to be armed with the latest tools of the trade. Join us as we explore a range of popular search engine advertising tools along with some important features you should be aware of. Whether you are looking for a free basic tool that will help you get started or a more advanced paid offering, our panel of experts will provide you with the insight and experience to zero in on the right solution.
Moderator:
Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ
Speakers:
Yoav Izhar-Prato, Co-founder & CEO, Kenshoo LTD
Neeraj Kochhar, VP/Director of Search, SMG Search
Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
David S. Kidder, Co-Founder & CEO, Clickable

First up is Yoav from Kenshoo.

Keeping all the ingredients in place and correlation between them is the key factor. Must implement “quality management”.

What is quality management? Understanding page content, behavior, and how conversions take place.

Under consumer behavior - takes 4-5 clicks on average for conversion to take place. Most of the systems in place today attribute the conversion to the last keyword used. You need to look at the whole path to the conversion. You need to be able to assign weights to first click, last click - weights needs to be allocated properly.

Another aspect is super structuring. Doesn’t matter how many engines using, need one campaign management center. Use your structure across all campaigns.

Bid optimization - algorithmic and rule based. Believes in a combination of both.

Major aspect is path to conversion. Lots of keywords can contribute to the conversion. Again, assigning weights to them is critical.

Next up is Neeraj from SMG.

What is a holistic approach? Search in the context of broader cross channel communications. Looking at TV, and other channels collectively is key.

Talent - need search professionals with marketing mindsets that understand consumer behavior, ROAS, engagement and technology.

Innovation - we think of search as web based. Expanding beyond that to mobile. Agnostic to a particular device. Understand the motivation for mobile search. Understand the motivation for Google to present text results or image results.

Technology - generation efficiencies.

Methodology and approach - life cycle of a search campaign.

First piece is to understand consumers. Google Trends is a good tool for this. What other queries are consumers using? What are consumers thinking about your business? Mine search query data. Look at seasonality.

Connect - how to take the insights and build messaging, how do you target people? What mode are people in?

Measurement - key component - otherwise throwing dollars away.

Beauty of search is speed. Can do all this fairly quickly. All this happens in real time and in a dynamic way. Don’t need to invest millions. Can invest small.

Holistic approach - two key components - paid and natural. With SEO there are no guarantees, but need to get all the work done. With paid search you can bid on keywords you can’t rank for naturally. Want to maximize coverage on page 1. Drop off rate from Page 1 to 2 is 85%-88%. Page 1 is the true opportunity. Need to be there. Need to craft the right balance between SEO and paid.

Starts with KW list. Look at volume. Map keywords with content. Where do you need to supplement or get support from paid? Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, and other tools are great.

Must understand if search is always a meaningful platform. Can it help you if you are in the deodorant business?

Must look at entire cycle - the funnel. How are people moving on from keyword to keyword through the funnel and what do they do to prior to converting?

Finally, competitive analysis. What are you up against? What is the likelihood you will succeed?
What’s your strategy relative to the competition? Always keep a holistic approach in mind.

Need a way to centrally manage all your keywords. How do you generate scale? May be running campaigns on 3 - 10 engines. Need to consolidate. Need to look at all the variables.

Measuring beyond the click. Are consumers completing the actions you want them to complete? Are they driving sales?

If doing something on TV, or radio, it’s important to have search support.

That’s all.

Last up is Thomas Bindl. Topic - “Tools that make SEM life easier”.

Gives live demos of the following keyword tools:

Google Sets (great for generating keywords)
Digital Point keyword suggestion tool (Gives free access to WordTracker)
SEO Book keyword tool
Google Trends
Refine Labs keyword tool (pulls data from Google and shows competition and volume)
Spyfu
Keycompete

Contributed by Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

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SEO Tips from MarketingProfs… How do you actually get your Web site ranked high in search engines? The answer is quite simple, but getting there can be a bit more difficult.

39 Vote(s)

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Recently the SEO industry is buzzing around a relatively new term, advanced SEO.
Advanced SEO is not yet clearly defined but many people already seem to agree what it is. My personal impression as to this inherent definition is: Advanced SEO appears to consist of complex web development and analytics tasks. Now I wonder:

Is […]
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This morning a number of user have been discussing on Plurk and Twitter over Darren’s ProBlogger Banned from Stumble upon.

43 Vote(s)

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Reputation Management is much like a beauty regime.

49 Vote(s)

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Well, you might still get indexed, but spamming sphinn no longer gets you a dofollow link if you don’t go hot. Will this affect the quality of submissions? Only time will tell. What do you guys think?

46 Vote(s)

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Digg, Reddit and all the other so-called "social media" sites can be a great way to get your message out to millions of people, but with so many voices out there screaming for attention it’s hard to be heard sometimes-even if that 400,000-word poem

53 Vote(s)

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.