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  • Wed, 09 May 2012 01:28:01 +0000: GWT notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.seobook.com/ - SEO Book.com

    I am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line & the following message:

    Hello dear managers of http://www.seobook.com/! My name is Olivia, and the issue I’m gonna to discuss is for sure not new, but really actual and complicated, otherwise your website and therefore business wouldn’t have lost their favourable positions. Yes, I want to talk about Google Panda and Penguin. These virtual beasts become more and more freakish. Don't you think it's time to pacify them? Google intends to clean its search results from poor content websites, low quality links and hype. Are you sure your website has nothing common with this stuff?
    Our team has been constantly studying Google search algorithms. We have already faced the latest freaks of Google Panda 3.4 and will be happy to win back your top positions.
    We will heal your website from:

    • poor on page optimization;
    • same content submission;
    • low quality links to your website;
    • absence of website moderation;
    • black hat SEO applied earlier.

    We will make Google be proud of you with:

    • high quality SEO strategy;
    • backlinks from relevant resources;
    • quality SMO;
    • links diversity;
    • unique content for every submission directory;
    • constatnt situation analysis and reporting.

    Contact us and you will get a reliable website healer, strategy planner and safe guard of your top positions.

    Looking forward to your answer!

    And Gmail is letting this stuff slide through the spam filters. Along with garbage like this:

    Our Web Site [the url] is definitely related to yours and by placing a link from your site to a Web page of ours, you may not only bring further value to your visitors but you may improve your search engine rankings potential as well. By NOT being what Google and other search engines refer to as a "dead-end" site or a site that does not link to other industry related and content sites, your rankings have a good chance of increasing for important keyword searches. We can explain this in further detail following a response from you.

    Create FUD & some huckster will sell into your messaging with inbound spamming.

    If you ever wonder where the "reputation problem" of the SEO industry comes from, wonder no more.

    One company in particular does a great job of riding these trends on through to their logical conclusion, then riding them a bit longer. And that company is Google.

    On a positive note, it great to see Demand Media had solid growth & a stellar quarter. They will plow that capital into registering about 100 new domain extensions. Nothing to worry about there. It's not like they were known to redirect expired customer domain names for their link juice.

    Good job Googlers!

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  • Tue, 08 May 2012 15:23:49 +0000: Ha! Bullets Can't Hurt ME - SEO Book.com

    Negative SEO vs Sabotage

    Just about any independent SEO worth their weight who publishes a number of websites has at least once hit a snag & been filtered or penalized. A person can say "not me" but how do they operate optimally in both the short term and long term if they never operate near limits or thresholds? But now that Google has begun actively penalizing sites for unnatural link profiles & tightening these thresholds, competitors have been giving one another shoves. Some of the most widely highlighted examples of crappy SEO were not attempts at SEO, but intentional competitive sabotage.

    Why Many SEO Thought Leaders Remain Ignorant About SEO

    Recently there have been numerous claims that negative SEO doesn't work made by people who should know better.

    Many of them don't know any better though, due to a combination of being naive, trusting public relations messaging as being the truth, and a general lack of recent experience on smaller sites.

    If someone only...

    • does consulting for large corporate clients
    • works in house at a big company
    • publishes a site about SEO and doesn't build & market sites in competitive areas

    ... it is easy to bleat on about how negative SEO isn't generally possible except for weak sites. Sites that (allegedly) deserve to be hit & must (obviously) lack quality to be so weak.

    The Risk of Labeling "Spam"

    As highlighted above, some of the most frequently & widely cited spam examples were not examples of spam, but examples of competitive sabotage. Thus anyone who recommends highlighting "spam" can potentially hose businesses that did nothing wrong.

    Why Many SEO Consultants Pretend Success & Cheer Brand

    Most sites focused on search typically write a syndication of Google fluff public relations and/or are doing cloaked sales pieces claiming that the death of spammers is great because they and their clients keep becoming more successful. Its all fake it until you make it / fake it until you too are driven out of the ecosystem & pretend things are always getting better even when signs point the other direction. This is done for a variety of reasons:

    • not wanting to lose access to Google
    • signaling you have experience working with big brands
    • wanting to signal that you are a safe play in the marketplace

    Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

    Marketers Sell Whatever Google Promotes

    It is far easier to get paid to do nothing than it is to get paid to fight against the waves of the ocean.

    So long as Google keeps feeding macro-parasites trying to kill off smaller & independent players you can expect a lot of consultants to push themselves as being a good fit for the big brands that Google is explicitly designing their algorithms around promoting. However this trend won't last forever. Many of those bigger sites are becoming ad networks & at some point Google will see that competitive threat for what it is. They will then decide "the user" would like a bit more diversity in the results & to see more smaller sites rank.

    Most Businesses Must be Small

    Much like wealth, business distributions follow power laws & most businesses are small in scale. Sure "build brand" is a nice cure all, but building a strong brand requires scale. Not all businesses have the margins required to build brands. And businesses take time to grow.

    Quality vs Scale

    Scale & quality are not the same thing. Some businesses are intentionally kept small because their owners feel scale requires compromising on quality. Remember the Olive Garden review that went viral, or what the biggest banks did to the global economy a few years ago?

    Most Big Companies Start Off Small

    Since going public in 1987, Fastenal has been the fastest growing public company. The company was started by a guy who was sorting bolts and nuts in his basement. Now that they are worth $13 billion they are virtually untouchable, but if 30 years ago online was a big sales channel & someone negative SEOed him his business could have been toast.

    Big businesses come from small businesses, as does most innovation. However, if the underlying market is absurdly unstable that retards investment in growth and innovation in companies like Fastenal:

    The Fastenal story began in November 1967 when company founder Bob Kierlin opened the very first Fastenal store in his hometown of Winona, MN. The front counter was a salvaged door, about a dozen people attended the "grand opening" weekend, and the first month's sales totaled $157.

    One of the biggest failures of modern societies is the self-serving myth of too big to fail.

    If SEOs believe that size of a business is the primary legitimate proxy for quality, they should either hire thousands of employees or go get a job at Wal-Mart.

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  • Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:49:27 +0000: Google AdWords Ads Add Album Cover & Song Preview - SEO Book.com

    Before I get any drops of jupiter hate on the following...I was typing in training.seobook.com & somehow accidentally hit enter after typing train & when the URL completion didn't work I got the following SERP.

    If you click the feature video link it does a YouTube video overlay. The other links lead into the relevant iTunes webpage.

    Such media extensions have been in place for movies for quite a while now, but this is the first time I have seen them on music-related search results. In time one could expect similar ad expansions to hit other media areas like books, games, and maybe even other vertical search features. Google could possibly roll it out globally on brand searches as well at some point, allowing companies to offer intro videos (or even reviews of new product lines) directly in the search results.

  • Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:21:06 +0000: The Google Penguin Update: Over-Optimization, Webspam, & High Quality Empty Content Pages - SEO Book.com

    Huge Update

    Google recently launched their webspam Penguin update. While they claim it only impacted about 3.1% of search queries, the 3.1% it impacted were largely in the "commercial transactional keywords worth a lot of money" category.

    Based on the number of complaints online about it (there is even a petition!) this is likely every bit as large as Panda or the Florida update. A friend also mentioned that shortly after the update WickedFire & TrafficPlanet both had sluggish servers, yet another indication of the impact of the update.

    Spam vs OOP

    Originally leading up to the update, the update was sold as being about over-optimization. However when it was launched it was given no pet name, but rather given the name of the webspam update. Thus anyone who complained about the update was by definition a spammer.

    A day after declaring that the name didn't have any name Google changed positions and called the update the Penguin update.

    Why the quick turn around on the naming?

    If you smoke a bunch of webmasters & then label them all as spammers, of course they are going to express outrage and look for the edge cases that make you look bad & promote those. One of the first ones out of the gate on that front was a literally blank blogspot blog that was ranking #1 for make money online.

    As I joked with Eli, if it is blank then they couldn't have done anything wrong, right? :D

    Another site that got nailed by the update was Viagra.com. It has since been fixed, but it is pretty hard for Google to state that the sites that got hit are spam, blend the search ads into the results so much that users can't tell them apart & force Pfizer to buy their own brand to rank. If that condition didn't get fixed quickly I am pretty certain it would lead to lawsuits.

    Google also put out a form to collect feedback about the update. They only ever do that if they know they went too far and need to refine it. Or, put another way, if this was the Penguin update then this is GoogleBot:

    So Worried About Manipulation That They Manipulate Themselves

    When I was a kid I used to collect baseball cards. As the price of pictures from sites like iStockphoto have gone up I recently bought a few cards on eBay (in part for nostalgia & in part to have pictures for some of our blog posts). Yesterday I searched for baseball card holders for mini-cards & in the first page of search results was:

    • a big ecommerce site where the review on that product stated that the retail described the quantity as being 10x what you actually get (the same site had other better pages)
    • a user-driven aggregator site with a thin affiliate post made years ago & attributed to a site that no longer exists
    • a Facebook note that was auto-generated from a feed
    • an old blogspot splog
    • a broader tag page for a social site
    • a Yahoo! Shopping page that was completely empty


    That blank Yahoo! Shopping page is also what showed up in Google's cache too. So I am not claiming that they were spamming Google in any way, rather that Google just has bad algorithms when they rank literally blank pages simply because they are on an authoritative domain name.

    The SERPs lacked expert blogs, forum discussions, & niche retailers. In short, too much emphasis on domain authority yet again.

    Part of the idea of the web was that it could connect supply and demand directly, but an excessive focus on domain authority leads users to have to go through another set of arbitragers. Efforts to squeeze out micro-parasites has led to the creation of macro-parasites (and micro-parasites that ride on the macro-parasite platforms).

    SEO-based Business Models

    Now more than ever SEO requires threading the needle: being sufficiently aggressive to see results, but not so aggressive that you get clipped for it (and hopefully building enough protection that makes it harder for others to clip you). That requires a tighter integration of the end to end process (tying efforts into analytics & analytics back into efforts) & a willing to view SEO through a broader marketing lens & throwing up a number of hail marry passes that likely won't on their own back out but will give you a lower risk profile when combined with your other stuff.

    And your business model is probably far more important than your SEO skill level is. Imagine running a consulting company for a lot of small business customers for a few hundred Dollars a month each, based on stable rankings & then dealing with a tumultuous update that hits a number of them at the same time. And then they see an older (abandoned even) competing site of lower quality with fewer links ranking and they think you are selling them a bag of smoke. These sorts of updates harm the ability to do SEO consulting for anyone who isn't consulting the big brands. Yes many people made it through this update unscathed, but how many of these sorts of updates can one manage to slide through before eventually getting clipped?

    The Unknowable Future

    As search evolves, invariably anyone who is doing well in the ecosystem will at some point face setbacks. Those may happen due to an algorithm update or an interface change where Google inserts itself in your market. If you never get hit, it means you were only operating at a fraction of your potential. If you consistently get hit, you might be aiming too low. Many trends can be predicted, but the future is unknowable, so set up a safety cushion when things are going well.

    This year Google has moved faster than any year in their history (massive link warnings, massive link penalties, tighter integration of Panda & now Penguin) & the rate of change is only accelerating. Go back about 125 years and a candle wick adjuster was cutting edge technology marketed as brand spanking new:

    Blekko has a decently competitive search service which they manage to run for only a few million a year. As computers get cheaper & Google collects more data think of all the different data points they will be able to layer into their relevancy algorithms. In some markets Chrome has more marketshare than Internet Explorer does & Android is another deep data source. And they can know what user data to trust most by tracking things like if they have a credit card or phone verified on file & how often they use various services like Gmail or YouTube. Google+ is just icing on the cake.

    At the same time, they need to improve. As the search algorithms get better, so do the business models that exploit them:

    I asked Kristian Hammond what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. “More than 90 percent.”

    There will be many more casualties in that war.

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  • Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:46:54 +0000: GoogleBowling, Negative SEO & Outing - SEO Book.com

    Excessive Complexity & Unintended Consequences

    Sergey Brin recently said:

    You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.

    He was talking about Facebook, but those words are far more applicable to Google.

    A Social Experiment

    In the movie Dark Knight the Joker ran a social experiment where he offered 2 boats full of people the opportunity to save their own lives by blowing up the other boat. The boat full of "criminals" threw the button overboard & the other boat also decided not to push the button.

    Of course taking someone's life is more extreme than taking their livelihood, but if you do the latter it might create stress and/or other issues which in effect lead to the former. Some people who see their income disappear might have a heart attack, others might have marriages that soon falls apart, leading into a spiral of depression and substance abuse & eventually suicide. Others still might have employees that get laid off & end up heading down some of the same scary paths - through no fault of their own.

    Negative SEO Goes Mainstream

    Anyone who outs or link bombs smaller businesses (small enough that Google punishing them destroys their livelihood rather than just giving them a bad quarter) is a _______. Anyone who advocates outing or link bombing such businesses is an even larger _______.

    Why?

    With all of Google's warning messages about abnormal links they have built the negative SEO industry in a big way. In some instances those who are not good enough to compete try to harm competitors. I received emails & support tickets like the following one for years and years...

    ...but the rate of demand increase for such "services" has been sharp this year. Every additional warning message from Google creates additional incremental demand.

    And this is where outing a competitor makes one a total and complete _______ of a human being.

    A Recent (& Very Public) Example of Negative SEO

    Dan Thies mentioned that it was "about time" that Google started hitting some of the splog link networks.

    Anyone who knows the tiniest bit about the social sciences could predict what came next.

    In response to his Tweet, someone signed his site up for some splog links & Scrapebox action. Now he is getting warnings about his unnatural link profile. Dan didn't intentionally violate Google's guidelines, but he became a convenient target:

    15th March - Dan Thies posts smug tweets to Matt Cutts and pisses off the entire internet.
    18th March - seofaststart.com - blog posts started - anchor text "seo" "seo service" and "seo book"
    22th March - seofaststart.com - 1 million scrapebox blast started - 100% anchor text "Dan Thies"
    26th March - Dan Thies posts in Twitter that he has received an unnatural links message.

    Since then Dan has installed a new template & his rankings tanked. Is it the template or the spam links? Probably the spam links, given how many other sites have got hit for using too much focused anchor text.

    • Will the site stay tanked? If so, now Google's approach to anchor text & link spikes allows independent websites to get torched in a few weeks for a few Dollars.
    • Or will the site come back stronger than ever with the help of the spam links? If it does, then how long is it before people start accidentally spam blasting their own websites & posting a public case study about burning a competitor on a forum, then citing that forum thread in their reconsideration request?
    • If the site quickly comes back, will that be due to a manual intervention by a search engineer, or from an algorithm more advanced than some people are giving it credit for being?

    When asking such questions one quickly arrives at another set of questions. Is it the web that is broken? Or is it Google's editorial approach that is broken? If the observer breaks the system they observe, then the observer is the problem.

    The Bigger Issue

    The bigger issue isn't the short term trends for SEO related keywords or Dan's site (he will be fine & rankings are not that important for sites about SEO), but the big issue is that if this can happen to a decade old website then this can happen to literally anybody.

    Piss off a ...

    • competitor
    • SEO
    • web designer
    • web developer
    • business partner
    • blogger
    • blog reader
    • former customer
    • freetard
    • ex-friend
    • bitter family member
    • insert any classification or category you like
    • etc.

    ... and risk getting torched.

    When you out someone for shady links, you can't be certain they were responsible for it. They could have had a falling out with a consultant or business partner or another competitor who wanted to hose them. Or their SEO or webmaster could have been non-transparent with them.

    Then you out them & they might be toast.

    White Hat, Black Hat & ________ Hat SEO

    Any of the ________ who promote competitor smoking or competitor outing as somehow being "ethical" or "white hat" never bother to explain what happens to YOU when someone else does that to you.

    Sketchy marketers can make just about anything look good at first glance. No matter how shiny the package in concept, it is hard to appreciate the pain until you are the one undergoing it.

    Building things up is typically far more profitable than tearing things down & if SEOs go after each other then the only winner is Google. Literally every other participant in the ecosystem has higher risk, higher costs & is taxed by the additional uncertainty. Sure some of the conscripts might get a bit of revenues and some of the "white hat" hacks might gain incremental short term exposure, but as the marrow is scraped out of the bone, they too will fall hard.

    Google is betting that the SEO industry is full of ________. If our trade is to worth being in, I hope Google is wrong! If not, you will soon see most of the quality professionals in our trade go underground, while only the hacks who misinform people & are an unofficial extension of Google's public relations team remain publicly visible.

    That might be Google's goal.

    Will they be successful at it?

    That depends entirely on how intelligent members of the SEO industry are.

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