4smartphone.net Sucks
I came into the office today to get caught up on some work. When I logged into Outlook, I discovered that the hosted Exchange service we use for our email has been down since Friday afternoon.
I went to their website to try and get some information on the problem and found this:
New Time Slot for SEO Rockstars
Due to the start of my daughter’s high school softball season, I’m no longer able to commit to being available on Tuesday afternoons to do the Rockstar show. So, we’ve decided to move the show to Fridays at 3:00 pm EST.
Eric Ward (aka Link Moses) will have the honor of being our first guest in our new time slot. It should be a lot of fun. Eric’s been in the game longer than anyone I know. If you have any specific questions you’d like us to ask Eric, feel free to email them to me.
SEO Days in London
Earlier this week, Dave and Jen announced that the three of us were launching a new SEO training program called SEODays. And this morning, Dave announced the dates of our first two-day event. Since those announcements, I few people have emailed asking why I hadn’t posted anything about it.
The Last Word on Dave Pasternack
OK, the little contest is over. At 12:00 pm Eastern time, Aaron’s data center showed a page from the James Beard Foundation in the #1 spot. Apparently, most other data centers showed my page in the #1 spot, but the data center I connected to here in SoCal showed the same as Aaron’s.
In the last couple of hours, it looks like my page moved to the top at all data centers, but it wasn’t #1 on Aaron’s at the right time, so I’m fine with his decision. (Aaron has made a $1,000.00 donation to the James Beard Foundation)
So what have we learned? (Other than the obvious that SEO contests are stupid)
I’m Joining the MyBlogLog Boycott
MBL/Yahoo,
you are a bunch of fucktards for banning Shoemoney.
It was fun playing with all your ridiculous exploits for about a day. But I’m bored of surfing the web as other people, and quite frankly, I’m tired of pills and porn icons showing up on client’s sites. In the end, the service as a whole has no real value. (Unless you consider slowing down the load time of your site a valuable thing). So it’s time for it to go.
The Real Dave Pasternack
I’ve said many times in the past that I think SEO contests are stupid. But the Dave Pasternack contest is beyond stupid. It’s destructive, disrespectful, and completely unprofessional.
If the only person named Dave Pasternack happened to be one of the talking frogs from Did-it, I wouldn’t really have a problem with it. But he’s not. There’s another Dave Pasternack.
The real Dave Pasternack is an award-winning chef who owns an Italian seafood restaurant in New York’s Hell’s kitchen called Esca. (Italian for the word bait). He is also an author whose recipes have been featured on dozens of high-profile culinary websites and TV shows including Martha Stewart, Epicurious, Esquire, and New York Magazine.
He is a Master Chef on the rise.
Social Media Spammer “Video Gary” Responds
Gary actually posted this as a comment in my original post, but I thought it deserved a post of its own:
It was certainly not my intention to try to make a mockery of search engine optimization with my videos.
If that’s how that video comes across, then I apologize.
Here’s where I’m coming from, though. It seems like a lot of people don’t understand what it takes to get traffic or good search engine rankings. To illustrate my point, I was on vacation in Colorado with some friends recently, and the topic of websites came up somehow. When I explained what I did, my friend mentioned how he had some websites a few years ago but got rid of them because he never got much traffic. He didn’t understand that you need LINKS to rank well in the search engines.
I think that for a lot of new people, they’ll spend hours trying to get their meta tags just right or get their keyword density to an optimal level because some free article they read, some outdated forum post, or some friend just as clueless as they are told them to. When instead they should be focusing on two things – quality content AND quality links. Now I know my video says nothing about the importance of quality content, so I can’t really fault you or anyone else for not knowing my stance on the subject. I should have mentioned, probably even emphasized that without quality content you’re site won’t achieve its full potential.
But quality content still needs links. It’s pretty easy to explain to a client that their content needs to be good. They tend to understand and can usually handle that part on their own with little to no help from the SEO guy. The quality links part, however, tends to bewilder most. Part of the reason is that high quality links are hard to get directly. You usually can’t just email the authority in your niche and say, “Hey, I’ve got this cool new site, link to me.”
When I go about getting links, I look at them as the middleman to me getting what I want. I figure that if I put interesting articles in article directories, write press releases, and post sites on social bookmarking sites, I’ll start to get some of those high quality links I wanted in the first place provided my site and the content on it are high quality as well.
Not a bad response. Although he left out any mention of using multiple digg accounts to help accelerate the process….
Paris Hilton Thinks I’m Hot
I logged into MyBlogLog today and was stunned to find that Paris Hilton had joined my community. What was even more exciting was the fact that she left me a comment that said she thought I was “one hot monkey.”
Now to some, that might sound like an insult, but to me it’s a clear sign that she actually reads this blog and/or listens to SEO Rockstars. And if she does read here, or listen to the podcast, she’s probably started to figure out she really needs some professional help.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that she’s embracing the whole Social Media thing, but it doesn’t look like her MyBlogLog presence is really helping her much with more traditional SEO type things like Ranking for her name. And we all know that not ranking for your own name is a bad thing when you are about to deal with a huge reputation management issue.
What Paris really needs is a good SEO consultant. So I’m going to take advantage of the fact you think I’m hot to make you an offer you can’t refuse:
Paris,
I’ll work for you for 6 months free of charge. I’ll make sure none of the bad stuff makes page one, and I’ll also help http://www.parishilton.com take its rightful place at the top of the page. All I want in return is the chance to spend one weekend with
An Update on Jason Vs. the SEO World
Jason Calacanis asked on his blog who he should have on his podcast to represent SEO. Apparently I won the popular vote. Shortly after, Jason sent me an email asking me if I would be willing to come on.
Social Media Marketers Need to Accept Some Responsibility
Attention all Web 2.0 Zealots:
Spamming Digg isn’t an SEO activity. It’s an SMO/SMM activity.
So why is it that all the hip “Social Media Marketing Consultants” struggle with that concept? Is it because deflecting the wrath of all the top Digglets towards the SEO community allows them to slip under the radar with their own client work?