SEOMoz is doing a survey of search marketing professionals, if you work at all with search engine marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising or any related field I’m sure it would help a great deal with their survey results. Also, you could win an iPhone (or $400 if you have one). Be patient though, their site is running kind of slow with all of the traffic they are getting.

Popularity: 7%

Everyone has heard over and over again how important it is for your site to have more links coming to it from other (related) sites. It is true, the search market is a popularity contest and the more links that you have coming in to your site the better you can do in search results. If you want to rank for “web design in Oklahoma” or “search engine optimization in Oklahoma” you have to have incoming anchor text with those phrases. Something as simple as “Oklahoma web designer” or “SEO in Oklahoma” are all good terms to have linking in to your site. However, that is only half of the battle. Search engine optimization is all about relevance. (more…)

Popularity: 11%

Google has disabled all of the Adwords ads that reference text link ads for selling PageRank on their search results. This I’m sure is related to their recent stance against selling text link ads to pass PageRank.

A simple search for “text links” or “text link ads” on Google will turn up results but it will not however show any Adwords ads on the page. I wasn’t able to find any search terms related to the subject come up with Adwords ads on the search results.

I’m curious what the advertisers ended getting for their troubles. If their campaigns were just ended or if they received some kind of compensation. Right now that is all the information I have about this, if I hear anything new I will update this post.

Popularity: 5%

It looks like Google is playing with an experimental new search system that works a lot like Reddit (or Digg) in that you can vote up or down various search results depending on their relevance to you. It seems like this idea is only going to happen per a user so it isn’t going to be something that can be manipulated as much as it sounds that it could. Although if they do eventually implement something like this I could see part of their algorithm pulling rankings from a system like this to decide on what is worth reading and what is not. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

Google has officially announced that selling links is a linking scheme and outlines what is considered bad for your site and what is considered acceptable when it comes to advertising on your blog. They added “Selling of links” to their help files on link schemes. This means that if you are advertising link spots on your site in order to pass PR on to those that would pay Google will remove your ability to pass PageRank. They have done this recently with the big PageRank scare of ‘07. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

We all know that the Alexa ranking isn’t very important, but it still serves its purpose in advertising in sites like TLA that rate you higher based on your Alexa ranking. TLA isn’t the only one that uses Alexa ranking as a factor in your site’s importance but it is one of the major services that does. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

Sitemaps have been around for a very long time but it is only recently that the large search engines have begun to support sitemap submission to help towards the crawling of your site more frequently. It can also help to let search robots know where pages that may be hidden can be found. Typically, you want to make sure these pages are accessible throughout the site through organic linking; hopefully you haven’t failed your site in that aspect. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

It appears that overnight Google has changed how PageRank ranks sites, several very high profile web sites have been affected by this change and lost 2-3 rankings. The speculation is it is directly caused by web sites having paid links either to bad neighborhoods or just having them at all. It seems like Google is going head-strong into a shift towards ranking web sites poorly depending on where they link and if it is paid or not. I have compiled a list from various sources about the high-profile sites that have lost significant ranking.

This move is furthering the shift that a lot of people have been seeing away from not only PageRank, but possible away from Google for everything. Some sites have lost so much ranking they don’t even show up for their names, such as John Chow. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

It appears as though your robots.txt file that tells search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl is being indexed by Google. This means all those pages/files that you don’t want crawled are available to the general public by just doing a Google search for the robots.txt file. Oddly enough they are even getting PageRanks. (more…)

Popularity: 4%

As we have all heard, titles are a very important part of anything. Especially when it comes to designing web sites, the title says it all. The title element is how your site is understood by your visitor and also by search robots. In the past people would stuff their titles with as many keywords as they could think of to ensure that search engines would pick up the keywords and they would rank higher. That really isn’t the point and so search robots ever since have given less importance to titles. (more…)

Popularity: 3%