Cnet Bastards
This is actually beyond stupid news. Pathetically shameful would be a better description.
Cnet writer Elinor Mills recently wrote an article about how traditional newspapers are struggling with the difference between writing headlines for a print publication and writing headlines for web content.
Where Did Keyword Discovery Go?
They’ve been down all day for me. Am I the only one who can’t connect, or are they really out of service?
Using Google’s Brand to Spam & Jam
During yesterday’s Rockstar show, we spent some time talking about the latest domains on the web being used for some good old fashion parasite SEO. A brand new domain on our monitoring list was http://www.quizilla.com
Why Most Bloggers Are Complete Idiots
A story showed up this morning on Threadwatch titled “US Government Wants US Bloggers to Register.” The source of the Threadwatch post was GrassrootsFreedom.com.
Here are the statements made in the original post:
Neteller Pulls the Plug on U.S. Gambling
I think everyone new this day was coming, but I have to say, it came a lot quicker than I thought it would. Yesterday, the two founding shareholders of Neteller were arrested on money laundering charges. Today, Neteller announced that it was suspending all processing services for the U.S.
Even if the big players are successful at establishing new payment processors, the Feds will just start adding the new companies to a blacklist that gets distributed to U.S. banking institutions. When that happens, your bank will not allow you to transfer funds to any company on the list.
That will put the industry back to requiring players to send checks or money orders to fund their accounts. I’m sure diehard players will be willing to do that, but the average new player that gets sent to a gambling site via an affiliate won’t.
If you are someone still earning a living as a poker/gambling affiliate, I’d suggest you spend the rest of week looking for a new gig, or get busy boning up on Euro/Asian SEO.
Craigslist Spam
I came across three different posts today talking about spam on Craigslist. What I found most interesting about all the stories is the fact that no one seemed to get the SEO connection.
The increase in affiliate related spam everyone’s seeing is due in large part to Google’s infatuation with the Craigslist domain. Google routinely puts Craigslist pages on the first page for search terms that return between 1-2 million results. And if you throw a little link love at a Craigslist post, you can get it to pop for phrases even more competitive.
If you still don’t think its being done for SEO value, ask yourself why someone would waste their time posting affiliate products on the small market CL sites like Albany, Asheville, or Allentown? Those sites don’t come close to having enough human traffic to make it worth the effort. But what they do have is a post life of 45 days, instead of the 7 day limit found in the major markets. That means the post has a smaller chance of getting flagged, and it can last long enough to get indexed and listed in Google. Since Google doesn’t discriminate based on the size of the city, it becomes the best place to post.
Stupid Things We Say – Part 2
Last St. Patrick’s Day, I had a couple of cocktails and wrote a post called “Stupid Things We Say.” That post contained some examples of really stupid press releases that were distributed through PR Web by companies in the SEO space. At the time I wrote it, I was just trying to kill some time with a little light-hearted humor. Although the irritation these press releases caused was real, they didn’t really have a negative impact on my daily routine because I don’t rely on press release distribution sites as a source for “industry news.”
Jimmy Wales - Google Killer
Can Jimmy Wales Really Kill Google?
I doubt it. But it’s been fun reading some of the ridiculous posts that are all over the web right now. The first one I came across this morning was a post by Isabel Wang titled:
Wikipedia Founder Launches Human Powered Search Engine; Goodbye to SEO?
Jimmy is going to kill Google and SEO? Now that’s a post I needed to read.
Unfortunately, Isabel must have forgotten to post the part about SEO. Not a single mention of it.
Then I moved on to TechCrunch. They got me to click and read because they had an “exclusive screen shot” of Jimmy’s Google killing app. Now that is something I needed to see. But it turns out that all they really had was a picture of a mediocre “MSN Quality” SERP with some Adwords ads and a few wiki tags thrown in at the top.
Are you kidding me? That SERP is what’s going to kill Google?
Then I surfed on over to Jimmy’s site. He’s got a message posted on the homepage telling everyone that TechCrunch is full of crap. That screen shot has nothing to do with his top secret Google killer. (Of course, he doesn’t provide any information about the real project. In order to get that, you need to subscribe to his mailing list).
I certainly hope he’s telling the truth. I know if I was Amazon and I’d just invested a bunch of cash, I’d be pretty pissed to find out the “great idea” was to use Nutch to crawl all the external links in the Wiki….
Frog Talk Part 2 - Gord Speaks on Behalf of Searchers
While we’re busy arguing organic vs. ppc from a marketer’s point of view, Gord was putting together a great post about actual search user behavior. Definitely worth a read.
Look, David Pasternak can ring the funeral bell for organic all he wants, but the fact is, it’s not his call. It’s the user’s. Yahoo has actually done exactly what he and Kevin are predicting. They’ve moved organic down the page, jamming more sponsored on the top. Based on Did It’s comments, this should be good for the user, right? It should be more relevant, pushing the "spam" down below the fold. Wrong. Google kicked Yahoo’s ass in user experience in our latest study by every metric we looked at. And they’re definitely winning in the big picture, including stock prices. The difference. About 14% of Yahoo’s screen real estate (at 1024 by 768 pixels) was reserved for top organic. 33% of Google’s real estate went for top organic.
My only real complaint with Gord’s post is the fact that he’s missing an R in Guerrilla. 
The Half-Truths of Talking Frogs
When Dave Pasternack first began running his mouth off about the death of organic SEO, I decided it was best to refrain from commenting. I came to that decision in large part due to the amount of respect I have for Kevin Lee. Kevin’s an extremely intelligent and savvy guy. He has also been in the game a long time, and he is clearly the pioneer of modern day ppc marketing.