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Cartoon - Mona Elesseily Considers “What Next?”

by Jeff Quipp.

This week’s cartoon is dedicated to Mona Elesseily (of PageZero Media), who has been pushed dangerously close to the edge trying to put the finishing touches on a 100-page report titled

Mastering Panama

SEP Cartoon - Jim Boykin and the Link Ninja Mishap

by Jeff Quipp.

Here is this weeks cartoon funny. For those not in the industry, Jim Boykin is a popular figure in the industry, and is credited with coining the term “link ninja”.

Enjoy!

See more Search Engine Funnies!

Neil Patel’s Dilemma - Search Engine Funnies

by Jeff Quipp.

This week’s cartoon is not at all a dig at Neil, but more a sign of respect. Neil is a well respected individual in our industry, who is a permanent fixture on all panels at related conferences discussing social media. He’s also cofounder of ACS SEO. What’s truly really impressive though, is that Neil is only 22, and is known as one of the definitive gurus in the space.

My good friend Ross Dunn of StepForth recalls years ago when Neil was just 15, and would call Ross and Jim Hedger to prod them for industry information when he was just getting started. Well, I’d say it panned out well for Neil, and he’s now a leader in our space.

Week 4 Wrap-up of the SEO Lyric Contest

by Jeff Quipp.

Week 4 of the contest has seen an increase in the number of submissions. And the quality … WOW! See for yourself below. We’re also seeing a number of people using social media very effectively … good ’cause that’s a compontent of the scoring algorithm.

1) ‘The Real Search Guru’ - Parody of ‘The Real Slim Shady’ by EscapeTheRake

2) ‘Dave Naylor Went Down to Google’ - Parody of The Charlie Daniels Band tune‘The Devil went down to Georgia’ by CountryCritter.com

3) ‘She Thinks My Ranking’s Sexy’ - Parody of Kenny Chesney’s ‘She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy’ by LunaMetrics

Week 3 Wrap-Up of the Search Lyrics Contest

by Jeff Quipp.

Week 3 of the contest picked up a little, with 4 new entries. Voting has been very brisk. We’ve even seen forum postings talking about how to game our contest system … we are mostly SEO’s btw. Suffice to say … how could this be an SEO contest without our using an ‘algorithm’. Let me say this. The winner will not necessarily be the site with the ‘Highest Average Score’ as shown on the “Highest Rated” page, although this will be a factor. The number of votes will also be considered, as well, the voting patterns will be analyzed for inconsistencies. We also have opted not to show the real scoring since it makes the system easier to game (especially knowing who you all are) … oooooooh does that sound alot like Google. We don’t quite have 200 variables, but definitely more than 5. Matt … I can sympathize with you to some extent. We want the best lyrics possible to win.

Week 2 SEO Lyrics Contest Wrap-Up

by Jeff Quipp.

Apologies for the long delay getting the week 2 wrap up out, and even week 3 for that matter. Between attending SMX in Seattle, sponsoring and attending SES in Toronto, and trying to operate a business, I got really busy somewhere along the line. Imagine that.

In any case, enough about me. Back to the contest. To be honest, week 2 was very slow. Lots of voting, but very few submissions. The 2 submissions received were:

1) ‘We Are the Champions’ - Parody of the Queen Song by Angele

2) ‘Hello I’ll Link You’ - A Doors ‘Hello I Love You’ Parody by Umb

Week 1 Wrap-up of the SEO Lyric Contest

by Jeff Quipp.

Well, week 1 of the SEO Lyrics Contest has been a resounding success. We’ve received 19 entries to date, which is suprising given it takes time to put pen to paper and construct a song. Voting has been brisk also. Most surprising however, is the quality of the lyrics being submitted … nothing less than spectacular! Any number of these submissions could be classified as an industry anthem.

Something we would like to see yet are some submissions by the search engines or social media themselves. While many of us in the SEM community write about rankings, I’m certain the other perspective would sing a different song so to speak.

Day 3 of the SEO Lyric Contest Wrap-up

by Jeff Quipp.

What a day for the SEO Lyrics Contest. The contest is beginning to get some really good traction, resulting in 10 new song entries for the day. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but wow, there are some really good creative minds out there in the search space.

For those of you submitting, please do remember to include a link to your site. We want to drive as many links and as much traffic to your site as possible. You deserve it!

Without further ado, here the 10 submissions for Thursday May 24th:

Google Using Click Volumes/Link to Value Links?

by Jeff Quipp.

Given the barrage of new link development techniques and spammy approaches that Google et al have had to contend with over the past year, it appears obvious to me that Google needs some divine insight (he says jokingly assuming that their myriad of PhDs haven’t already considered this possibility) in their efforts to define and value inbounds links in the ranking algorithm. People are always trying to game the system, and understandably so when the value of high rankings is soooooo outstanding.

That said, how do the search engines really know if a link is a vote or not, or if it should be counted towards rankings? Its quite obvious that current link valuation techniques have their share of problems, and consequently Dave Naylor’s posting today that Paid Links are being devalued on mass. So we know that Google is trying to solve this problem of link manipulation, but how else can they work to solve it?

Lets look at this from a different perspective. What if the search engines were able to create a ‘checks and balances’ mechanism that provided a second opinion about the value of a link? To some extent they’re already doing this by filtering based on content relevance. So now, lets add a powerful checks and balances mechanism which we’ll call ‘the click test’. In its most simple variation, the click test is just, if a link from site “A” to site “B” is not ‘clicked’ on over a prespecified time period, then Google would set the value of the link to “0″. If it was clicked on, then perhaps Google gives the link a value of “1″. The click test value could then be multipled by the previous value yielding a score of either “0″ or the previous score. Voila … link values are validated on an ongoing basis, and only quality links are scored. Those scoring a “0″ value are completely discounted.

This of course begs a number of other questions, namely:
a) wouldn’t the search engines need to make sure the links aren’t being gamed? The answer is yes … but the search engines can use simple technologies to ensure that the same person doesn’t click on the same links each month. This would be relatively easy to do for a Google, very similar to the algorithms used by Digg and other social media.

b) what if the value of a link was a multiple of the number of clicks it receives, so that the value is not merely as simple as assigning it a “1″? What if sites with links that did not receive clicks received negative points? Certainly possible, but far beyond the scope of this posting. Our main contention here is that, gaming the system should not be your goal, as the effort is doomed to fail long term. Google can use a number of relatively straight forward approaches to validate link worthiness.

c) could they gather these statistics? Absolutely, given all the tracking information Google has (see Why Does Google Remember Information About Searches and Yesterday’s “the SEP guy” posting on SEP You Have the Right to Remain Silent. It wouldn’t even require a whole lot more computing power to be frank.

So where does this leave us? Apparently, its going to leave me with an experiment to perform. That said, stay tuned, as I’ll set-up and report on the experiment. In fact, special offer; subscribe to our feed through Feedburner, and we’ll make the research findings available only through the feed. Regular blog readers going direct, will not see these results.

Stay tuned!

4 Ways to Increase Sales Using Yahoo Answers?

by Jeff Quipp.

If you haven’t heard of Yahoo Answers before, perhaps its time to familiarize yourself, as there are 4 means of using it to increase your company’s sales. The concept is that people with questions pose them, and numerous other “do gooders” (and those with more obvious commercial motives) post answers to these questions. The “Asker” then evaluates the answers, and the one with the best answer is awarded points and status. No more 10 million results as found with search engine result sets, just a finite number of answers using the human logic algorithm (which is still superior to search algorithms by the way).