ddemchuk

clearly you've never actually ran an advanced SEO campaign. I can rank a shitty, spun article higher than most people's great articles with those "fiddly tactics" without ever touching the article itself.

I meant top affiliate offers, generally stuff like popular weight loss products (acai and green tea were two big ones 1+ years ago), electronic cigarettes, forex, etc.

go to a site like http://www.offervault.com/ and you can see the details on a lot of the popular offers out there.

Don't fall into the affiliate rabbit hole if you have your mind on other projects though, 99.9% of guys in the affiliate world are broke young bullshitters

they're worth it when you're doing contract web design work and your margins allow you to scale horizontally and still profit with them.

Also, once you've mastered the slicing process, it gets really boring, so outsourcing it is a nice relief

For most non-unique-brand keywords that have decent traffic volume, it's challenging to rank a domain without resorting to advanced SEO techniques. If you study most of the top affiliate offer SERPs, you'll often see .info, .net, and .org domains rankings. Most other domain extensions simply don't have webmasters at the helm skilled enough to rank for worthwhile keywords.

Never do spec work. Never.

Show him your portfolio and examples of solutions you have solved that are similar. Unless a contract is signed, don't do anything more than a nice proposal.

I use sescout.com for all of my SEO sites, it's great

Talk about instant content farm...SEOs around the world are rejoicing at the prospect of a million songs worth of unique data

the ecig niche, unless you're going completely longtail, is very blackhat. if you're just learning seo, its not a good niche to find results with unless you pick up on advanced tactics quickly.

also, a single page affiliate site will be very hard to rank for anything. add content and make it into a real site.

just because a link is nofollow does not mean it will not help your rankings guys. It does not mean "ignore this link please Google" it means "I don't vouch for this link Google". A nofollow link will still count towards your total link profile.

I use Google to search for things my friends don't have answers for. I use Facebook to ask my friends about things they have answers for. I don't want my interests influencing my friend's searches, nor do I care about their input on 95% of the things I'm searching for (coding, SEO, tech news, hardware, etc)

"their network" is the apple phones that access the apple store. No other devices can access the Apple store but Apple devices. Therefore, "their network"

Why should they not be allowed to generate revenue from someone who is using all of their technology and network distribution work to make their own money?

Apple provides a content distribution platform connected to a network of millions of devices, of course they're going to take a cut of revenue generated on their network

true, good point. I upgraded to the beta when it came out a while back on my 13" air and I'm perfectly fine with the sizing. The new update made things even smaller/better. I run my Skype on a different Spaces section though so screen real estate isn't an issue for me.

doesn't skype have like 10 million users online at any given time? 160 upset people is like dropping salt into the ocean.

what about your statement is supported by their actual actions in the recent years? who are their actual customers, searchers or adwords bidders? They simply need to provide a decent enough search experience to keep users coming back so they can keep adwords bidders participating. It's their entire business model.

wait, what? Am I wrong in saying that google is not in the business of making money? They're making a damn killing off of search traffic.

Duckduckgo is not. They're getting press for being defiant.

google's not going to do anything because they're in the business of making money off of search and duckduckgo is not

I don't think google is the best benchmark for page speed. Try espn or cnn.com

My two favorite takeaways from this blog post are:

1) You can increase your site's rankings by installing the Bing Toolbar amongst a group of people and have said group search google for your target keyword and click through on your result.

2) Google is able and willing to manually screw around with search results in a seemingly easy manner.

As to the issue of Bing slurping up google's data for their own purposes: Scraping the web is a double edged sword. They aren't doing anything illegal. If anything, this whole ordeal has made both Search Engines look like a bunch of teenagers fighting over a who stole who's boyfriend.

I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in recent times though.

Google uses click data in their ranking algorithm. It's a fact. Pick a low volume, low competition niche, have 30+ of your friends search for the keyword and page through the results until you find a result (same for everyone), have everyone click through and not bounce. You will improve that site's rankings.

Chrome tracks clicks and traffic. Google Toolbar tracks clicks and traffic. The difference in the situation is that the majority of people use IE to search on Google, not the Google toolbar/Chrome to search on Bing. Bing has more data to work from than Google does in regards to this exact type of click tracking.

I wouldn't say it was obvious, mainly because this was something Google did specifically to cause this. I would imagine you could replicate the same results with other major search engines simply by doing the same thing with the same amount of volume as the Google dudes did.

Additionally, if things were reversed and Google was posed these questions, I would imagine would be lacking just as many answers as what Bing is supplying.

well, they're presented with either 1) killing their organic search traffic by blocking Google or 2) allowing the crawlers but not being able to stop their data from being aggregated and included in local results.

Yelp's API specifically says their data cannot be aggregated with other sources. When presented with that, Google simply said they weren't using the API, they were scraping.

Apparently scraping is a free pass to do whatever the hell you want if you're Google.

The world's largest scraper is complaining about being scraped...when Yelp and all the rest of the local businesses directories realized they were being scraped and the data was being used to google's advantage, it doesn't appear that Google gave two shits. Tables have turned, and it's like someone stole the handball from the recess yard.

Who the hell is in charge of the PR for these two companies to allow them to late night bitch at each other over Twitter??? These companies rake in billions per quarter and are acting like they're gonna be on TMZ tonight.

Considering they're a search engine, whose job is to crawl the internet and determine the main keywords of any random page on the internet, I would imagine they have text parsing abilities that make it possible to infer the topic of any arbitrary page.

I hire writers to do things similar to what you described all the time, though I don't have them push the boundaries as much as you described. My suggestion? For every article you get an order for, write an article for your own sites. Build up a site network. You know what needs to be done. Go do it yourself and cut the dependence off.

Also, please charge at least $0.02 a word. A dollar per 450 word article is bullshit. You're a good writer. 2-3 cents a word is completely reasonable in your industry.

it just seems to me that there is a gaggle of very obvious failing points that can easily become the focus of your guys' attempts to clean up the serps. Buy Viagra is probably the oldest known keyword to be subjected to blackhat seo techniques in the history of Google, yet it's still littered with hacked edu's and spam sites. If 300k broad match searches a month is something you guys feel isn't worth focusing on, then I guess this is a moot point. But at that kind of volume, I think a little bit more attention is warranted.

The simplest response is that link spam works, has worked for years, and coming into 2011, it appears to be as strong as ever in terms of ranking sites for competitive niches.

I'm sorry, but WHAT?!?!

1) They are not a startup. They're over 4 years old. They have officially passed the starting phase

2) They have not monetized since graduating into the big boy businesses phase. Riding the coattails of VC's for years with no clear plan to reach profitability is not business

3) They are instable as hell. They crash nearly everyday, with millions of dollars in the bank, hundreds of engineers working for them, and 4 years of development under their belt, and they have a frickin meme because of how instable they are

4) They've stopped innovating. Nothing new has come from twitter in the last 2+ years other than their API. 140 character messages, we get it.

Blatant buzz word fanboyism is still running amok apparently.