SEOmoz is a Seattle based search engine optimization company and online community that provides SEO, web marketing, web design and development services to companies around the world, and also serves as a community and educational resource for those in the search marketing industry.

They have a pretty cool page strength tool that every webmaster should probably check out from time to time. They use a proprietary blend of factors from publicly available sources (Yahoo!, Google, Alexa, etc.) to come up with an overall "Page Strength" score that shows you how "strong" your site is on the web.

Posted on September 21, 2007 08:57 AM | Link: SEOmoz Page Strength Tool | Comments (0)

Here is a pretty interesting discussion with some SEO pros. They all seem to admit to doing "shady" things from time to time - which I thought was pretty funny.

My advice is always to never do anything "black hat" - it just isn't worth it. If your business plan/model doesn't allow some time for natural search engine growth, and a marketing budget to get off the ground, then you probably need to rework it. I will be writing more soon with some specifics on what you can do to help a new site get found.

Posted on June 8, 2007 08:16 AM | Link: SEO Tips | Comments (0)

WebProNews has a video site (they call it "Beaking E-Business News"). They caught up with the host and creator of Search Marketing Expo Danny Sullivan Editor-In-Chief of SearchEngineLand.com and the President of ThirdDoorMedia.com Chris Elwell who are the producers of Search Marketing Expo in Seattle. Danny and Chris share how SMX was put together and the future events for SMX.

There is a lot of good video to look at and some real meat and potatoes stuff for webmasters and marketers.

Posted on June 8, 2007 07:51 AM | Link: WebProNews Video | Comments (0)

TechCrunch reports the following:

$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed

Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

Posted on May 24, 2007 04:23 PM | Link: Google buys Feedburner | Comments (0)

Jensense is another site/blog you should be checking out on a regular basis if you are trying to make money from your website - especially if you are using Google's AdSenes program. The site has grown up a lot of the last couple of years and Jen has branched out and seems to be doing more consulting/speaking than writing, but she is pretty authoritative in this field. This latest story from Google that she covered is a big deal:

Google AdSense disabling arbitrage publisher accounts as of June 1st

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts... and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

Click here for the whole story. Hopefully for content sites like ours her hypothesis is right and Google's current actions eventually bring more money back to the content network.

Posted on May 24, 2007 04:12 PM | Link: Jensense | Comments (0)

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. (NasdaqGS:GOOG - News) has emerged along with Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqGS:MSFT - News) as a contender to buy DoubleClick Inc., presenting competition that stands to increase the final sale price of the online-advertising company, people familiar with the situation said in The Wall Street Journal.

Posted on April 2, 2007 03:24 AM | Link: Google interested in DoubleClick purchase | Comments (1)

A new article from Reuters today "Google says advertisers face minimal click fraud". I am not prepared to take this fraud rate of less than 10% at face value from Google. I think click fraud is still a big story that may cost Google in the future, but that it won't be simply bogus clicks but ads on really horrible sites that many advertisers may not even know they are on.

"SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile , Research), on Wednesday disclosed data showing that while its pay-per-click Web advertising system is under regular attack from fraudsters, virtually all such tricks are automatically detected, rebuffing critics who say its online ads are a magnet for fraud."

Posted on March 1, 2007 06:28 AM | Link: Google says advertisers face minimal click fraud | Comments (0)

Sunstone Herb Farm is a small business run by my cousins in NY state. Awhile ago we gave them some advice about their website - to name the files with the actual names of their products - like black-birch-oil.html - and to use those same names in their title tags - "Black Birch Oil". Twelve months later their business had doubled. You have to do these little things when you are setting up a site or you are wasting your time - use commons sense, use the words that accurately describe the page or item you are selling from it, and make every page title and file name unique. They have more work to do, but this was a really big improvement for very little investment.

Posted on February 26, 2007 12:09 PM | Link: Sunstone Herb Farm | Comments (0)

This is an interesting idea, and I think not just for Google, but for Yahoo! and MSN and Ask as well:

"Google should hire an ombudsman.

This is not a new idea. But given Google's recent problems in court, its pageranking dalliance with a Moldavian hacker, and a report calling for third-party review of its click-based advertising programs, it may be time to revisit the proposition.

Because Google has become the de facto arbiter of information online, because Google publishes and changes information daily that affects the livelihood of thousands of businesses and individuals, and because there are no transparent forums for the redress of perceived wrongs, Google needs to demonstrate that they have their users' best interests at heart."

More here from Publish.com

Posted on July 6, 2006 02:42 PM | Link: Google Ombudsman | Comments (0)

The Google search results appear to be going through another major upheaval. It started about 3 days ago and it seems like many sites are suffering. There is a lot of talk about it over on the Webmaster World forums. Usually changes that seem this drastic and sporadic tend to correct themselves in a week or two - we shall see - someone always seems to lose/win in the end though (for every site that moves up in the results, one has to move down). We have some sites that have been affected and others that are showing no change at all.

Posted on June 30, 2006 09:11 AM | Link: Another Google update? | Comments (0)