I wasn't planning to do a recap this week, but there's too much good material and important stuff to let it slide. Apologies for the brief format:
- Mike Blumenthal has a fascinating, at times antagonistic and completely enthralling publication of an IM conversation with former Marine and current CEO of YourTechPros, Gabriel Howard about some very effective spamming that took place on Google Maps (for the record, we are NOT the Seattle SEO company he anonymously mentions).
- Yay! Dashes = underscores = term separation in URLs at all three major search engines.
- There are no more labels of supplemental results (that does NOT mean there are no more "supplemental" results - read Danny's piece carefully). Good discussion on this from Mike Grehan & the Bruce Clay crowd and a great comment from Michael Martinez at SEL:
Google needs to be fair about this. Just because a page doesn't have many inbound links is no reason to prevent it from having an equal opportunity to score well for relevance.
- This business blogging toolset is pretty darn comprehensive and something I'll probably be referencing for blogging stuff in the future. Nice work, Bootstrapper (even if it is on a business credit card site) - love the linkbait strategy :)
- Check out Amazon's product search results getting spammed... Is vertical black hat the new black?
- Robin Liss makes the 30 under 30 list at Inc magazine - congrats, Robin. Hopefully you're not too cool to hang out with us at SES San Jose this year :) If you look at the full list, you'll see a remarkable number of Internet-based businesses who are successful thanks, in part at least, to good web & search marketing. No surprise, but very cool stuff.
- Nifty SEO Game - you fight different spammers and Matt Cutts rewards you if you beat them. Kinda like Mike Tyson's Punch Out but with better graphics (
)
As always, please add your important news items in the comments below.
I am fascinated by how successful YourTechPros's spamming of Google Maps was. Gabriel Howard says it drove more traffic than the web. Hope to hear more about this and about how Google will handle it. Will P.O. Boxes be allowed?
There's a fundamental problem with Google's handling of supplemental results. Most websites' PageRanks gravitate upwards toward the home page and top level navigational pages with no content, leaving the leaf nodes (product pages, blog posts, etc) high and dry, unless every one of your site is a blog with RSS and attract links like bees with honey (ya, lousy metaphor - it's 1:34 am - shoot me).
Also because page staleness is a factor, when blog posts get old, they go supplemental. That's why you might see a blog's archive posts that used to be in the main index slowly turn supplemental.
Now, which would I rather land on, a blog post that's relevant to my search query or a blog category page with 40 posts to wade through to find what I want using CTRL-F?
With Google's set up today, a huge percentage of a site's "real" content are buried in the supplemental while "about", "contact me", "terms of service", and "privacy policy" pages sit in the main index ranking for nothing.
That doesn't work for me.
Finally! But I think dashes have an advantage when someone is trying to spread the word about and URL verbally. Try saying "somedomain.com/very_interesting_article", then "somedomain.com/very-interesting-acticle" - I bet the latter is easier. Or is it just me?
I'm with you - dashes still separate slightly better from a human usability perspective.
I understand what Amazon was trying to do with those Search Suggestions because I was just optimizing a site that sold a single book and was looking for ways to optimize the Amazon page as well.
Usually the title of a book can't tell you what it's about: particularly fiction and memoir books, but it did seem too easy. It does take a few DAYS for a search suggestion to be considered and approved (as mine were), and you receive an e-mail when they are, which seems to imply that someone is reviewing these. I know I wouldn't want that job.
The search suggestions were renamed Tags a day ago, not to be confused with the ability to tag an item with a certain category for the sake of finding other items from the same category by clicking on them on a product's page. Frankly calling them both tags is slightly confusing.
So if they have humans monitoring these, they are a great way for books with cryptic titles to be better found by those looking for them. If this is completely vulnerable to spam, I hope they find a way to salvage what began as a decent idea.
thanks Rand. I too was fascinated by the interview w/ the techpros guy...and Mike's entire series of blog entries on spamming Google Maps.
I love the SEO game...
Get the Black Hat and have Matt C. give you rewards. :)
Maybe G and MC can bump our PR for every bad guy we catch...
A little show of good will from Google that they are doing their job getting rid of the Spam MFA and proxies would mitigate the many empty Spam reports...
I do hope it is not like 5 years to propogate when you file a Spam report.
So the real Google game sucks, might as well play the imaginary SEO game and have fun...
I found it ironic that the easiest way to win the SEO game was by spamming Q ;)
Adam is Spamming Q really Spamming or a creative way to express yourself.
If you are Spamming then you are wasting time because no one will be interested in the garbage but if you really saying something but in an unconventional way, that to one's eye it may look as Spam but to another's eye it may be sage...
You deside.
The SEO game kicks ass. But you better keep those arms up if you want to survive all those bad spammy guys!
Supplemental--I have pages on a site that are intended to be supplemental pages because that's exactly what they are—supplemental support material.
Any well-rounded site, book, or paragraph has material that supports the main, more developed areas, so I don’t see supplemental results as a problem. If I were Google, I'd be suspicious if all the pages on a site were A+ link worthy. That’s not the 'natural' pattern of things that involve language.
If the pages are supplementary or not supplementary they still get hits on long tail keywords..
YEah we all have supplementary, I have a whole bunch of extra pounds around my stomach that I need to lose because I been working hard to clean up my Website's supplementary..
:)
Although I too dislike the supplemental index, can anyone suggestion another way for a spider-based search engine to split up its content?
As far as I can tell, A search engine can't just store every single webpage on the Internet as the same "class", as then we'd basically get the equivelent of Altavista 1998 results :)
Dashes = underscores is a mixed blessing. I find it much more difficult to read text_separated_with_underscores.
I have never found a blog program that creates URL's with underscores, and I hope this trend does not change.
Dash or underscore issue has been a needless long debate between tech and seo in my previous company.
They can celebrate peace finally.
Re: TechPros... wow.. I hope John Doe SEO company was not Internet Advancement .. :\
It was a busy week. Lots of good stuff in those links.
I heard about a few things too...
All these and more can be viewed on my blog (click profile).
Thanks for sharing your link roundup Rand, look forward to seeing what else others post.
Ha ha. I just beat up a LinkFarmer. I like the SEO games that have been popping up.