• If Google Wave is the Future, Google Buzz is the Present

Let me just say that this feature sounds friggin’ awesome. I always believed and still do believe that Google Wave won’t be as successful as all these so-called (some self-claimed – the worst kind by the way) SEO Guru’s proclaim. I’ve had a chance to use Wave and it’s just odd and oh I dunno, about 5 years to late to the social game. I can’t see people migrating from Facebook or Twitter even to Wave, especially as they become more and more comfortable with those dashboards and grow their social circles.

However where Wave fails, I think Google Buzz will prevail. And the #1 reason I believe it will be a success is because of the genius idea to place it inside the GMail interface. I am a daily GMail user, as well as Yahoo mail and some others. GMail outperforms all by miles as is already, not to mention the massive amounts of GMail users and the fact that GChat has been on the rise (at least in my personal experience).  Stay tuned as Google rolls this out as I will give my full review and personal experiences. I actually checked the App Store the second I read that line in the article to see if my GMail app had an update yet. Unfortunately there was nothing.

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I started this blog as my SEO outlet pertaining to any and everything under the SEO sun that I learn or find interesting on a daily basis as I entered my first consulting gig.

My first consulting gig  I realized would soon become my new job. To make a long story short, these guys were big fans of my work and the results I was producing that they wined and dined me until I ultimately accepted. Actually to be honest it wasn’t hard at all to accept, considering it was a sizeable raise not to mention 3 miles away from my house in Center City (Philadelphia) as opposed to the 35 miles I was driving each way.

My new company is also very different than my previous place of employment which is something I enjoy and feel was a must if I wanted to accomplish my goals of expanding my SEO resume. My last employer was a network of e-commerce stores that specialized in the automotive industry and my new company is more in the internet marketing and lead generation game in many a niche. I feel that my experience in mastering SEO on some very large e-commerce stores will mesh perfectly with newer, faster paced world of IM.

We are working on a lot of cool projects that I had only theorized about while at my last place. I’ll explain the jist of a few right now and follow up with individual posts in the near future as they either work, fail, or starting ruling the internet.

Operation 301 – We just obtained a really good domain name with awesome keywords to start promoting relevant offers which was parked, had 0 backlinks, and was a PR0. Also obtained a pagerank 3 extremely related website, no-so-great domain name, with incredible backlinks, 90% of which were highly relevant, for an incredible price nonetheless. Looking to 301 the PR3 with good links to the new domain and SEO from there.

Operation ViralShat – A huge product recently just came out by a giant tech company and we obtained a very viral domain name to try and list quickly for some terms. With Google placing some much weight on domain names we decided to see what we could do. Currently list under huffingtonpost and npr for what was a really hot term and should be for some years to come.

Anyway so far so good, and I’m just starting to get my feet wet, so watch out fellow internet marketers.

I also started my own e-commerce store which I may have mentioned in an older post here. While at my last place it happened to dawn on me that this doesn’t seem THAT hard to do. Run an e-commerce site that is. So I searched and searched and searched, Google of course, for any niche that from an SEO standpoint (backlinks, keywords, competitors) I would be able to jump into relatively quick and see some results. I ultimately found a niche that had some of the ugliest top 10 websites for a giant keyword and decided to do work. A few months later and I’m listing #4 and #6 for my biggest keywords respectively and well on my way to the top spot.  Don’t worry fellow SEO’s I also have roughly 20 other very nice keywords in the top 30 at the moment too.

Anyway, I can’t say too much but you get the drift. I love a challenge. I love SEO and I’m good at it, so bring it on. Got questions or comments, contact me.

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Not only is this week dreadfully hated by many for being the first fully in a while, it’s also going unusually slow from what I can remember.  This is usually the busiest time of the year when it comes to the Internet and there really just doesn’t seem to be that much going on in the IM sector.  I guess since I work in the e-commerce niche, a lot has slowed down since the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas rush to my sites.

Anyway, lets get to the links.  I came across some cool finds on the ‘Net this morning while doing my daily rounds and checking out my Twitter trends and interesting folk I follow.

• Google Nexus One Phone – 4 Pros and 4 Cons from Mashable
• Nexus One vs Droid vs iPhone
• An article and video based on the scary thought that Google is slowly taking over the world. I’ve had this discussion with some co-workers numerous times and it is pretty fascinating to see the amount of tools and products that Google has rolled out to its users over the years.
• A remote control drone, however the remote control is your iPhone.  I want one of these.
• Matt Cutt’s looking back on the last ten years.

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The reason we want to implement the canonical tag is that we do not want to have any duplicate issues between our blog and our main site.  My feeling is that, if the canonical tag is supported across domains and sub-domains, we should definitely utilize it and post our content on our blog.  It allows for us to re-use great original content that has been buried on our main e-commerce site for months and getting it in front of fresh eyes on our newly designed blog.  However I could be wrong, but that’s just my opinion.

For those of you that don’t know what the canonical tag is, here is a quick synopsis according to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Now, you can simply add this <link> tag to specify your preferred version:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678

and Google will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

After some quick Googling, it appears that Google has recently confirmed on its Webmaster Central Blog that its algorhythm does indeed support cross domain canonical tags.

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
**Update on 12/17/2009: The answer is yes! We now support a cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element.**

I’d love to hear if anyone has done this or tested it and noticed anything strange or odd.  Until then, I guess I’m going to go for it and give a whirl myself.  Keep you posted as to what happens.

Update – Some more sources confirming this should work.

• http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-2-0-google-to-add-cross-domain-support-27222
• http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021363.html

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The first day back from a nice holiday break is never really that fun. Getting back into your morning and office routine’s after waking up feeling nice and plump from a weekend full of good food and drink. (By the way I am definitely hitting the gym after work tonight for a good long workout this evening.)

I tried to distance myself from everything search over the holiday weekend and managed to barely even open my laptop. Mainly in part to a few holiday dinners and the new Nintendo Wii my girlfriends parents bought me. I am obsessed with MarioKart and will dominate anyone who wants to challenge me. (send me your Wii user # and lets do this)

So of course opening the multiple in-boxes this morning was a little bit of a shocker with a ton of email and PMs to read and dissect. A few hours later and most of my email sorted out and I can finally get to checking my Twitter account to see whats ‘Trending’ and all the buzz the day after the biggest holiday of the year.

Go figure that ‘Xmas’, ‘NYE’, and ‘MusicMonday’ are all trending today. Nothing too exciting or new.

In the world of awesome links to check out, I have a few very good reads that might stimulate some SEO strategies or goals for the final days of 2009 and 2010. Without further ado, the links:

• Very good op-ed piece from the NYTimes on net neutrality – ‘Search, but You May Not Find‘
• Want a Job at ShoeMoney Media Group?  Check out Shoemoney’s post about a performance-based blogging opportunity.
• Looks like Global Associated News is faking stories and getting them indexed in Google’s Real Time results. Danny Sullivan’s on top of it again – http://searchengineland.com/natalie-portman-is-not-dead-despite-google-32498

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Me: So what you’re saying is that you didn’t think to restart the servers on Monday when you found out about this issue?
IT: (Silence)

And I still managed to land 14 links by the end of today (Thurs)

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Being an in-house SEO and primarily a link builder, I would say that 80-90% of my work week revolves around email.  Email is my main source of communication with webmasters as well as the most frequent medium I use in order to land a link or online advertising deal, therefore rendering this week useless.

And our incredibly helpful, outgoing,brilliant IT department has been working around the clock to try and fix this issue….

Can you smell the sarcasm?

Because they definitely were not working around the clock, nor did they even give two shats about how it affected our department.  Come to think of it, they have not been helpful at all ( I usually fix my issues before one even gets to my desk) and the complete opposite of outgoing.  Sometimes I really do wonder what people think exactly it is that we (SEOs) do on a daily basis, specifically my co-workers.  I’m convinced they really have no idea what we do, and probably think we just mess around on the internet all day.  Little do they know that SEO accounts for almost 75% of our annual sales.

Anyway, there isn’t too much to discuss in regards to the SEO world today, been somewhat slow.  But I do have some links and thoughts for you to check out.

Yesterday Google also merged its Hot Trends into Google Search results.  So now if you Google something that happens to be a hot trend for that day, you will see it in your SERPs.  It appears at the bottom of the SERP though, actually took me a sec to find it.  Here it is:

Google launched its beta testing for Google Wave today to a few select developers.  I had a chance to check out Wave a ways back when they first rolled it out like a month or two ago and found it pretty useless.  Seems to be a mash-up of all types of communication centralized into one on Google’s domain.  Go figure.  Anyway, I am much more comfortable with the social networks I am already on and probably won’t move over to Wave (unless it becomes a need, kind of like Twitter).

Decent Reads:

• Essential Guide to an Effective SEO Backlink Strategy
• 69 Free (or low cost) Tools to Enhance your Website
• Perform OCR with Google Docs – Turn Images into Editable documents

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After that early morning mess, there was some stuff breaking on Twitter about Google releasing a ‘new Search-Based Keyword Tool’.  So I went and checked it out, and lo and behold it was the same keyword tool they released back in April I believe.  I think it was the fact that Google finally added a link on the old keyword tool with the following ‘new’ icon that made everyone go crazy about it and tweet away.

Jennita also made an intriguing blog post over at SEOmoz about four unexpecting places to get some followed links from.  The one I found the most interesting was Facebook via the use of some Facebook Mark Up Language(FBML) apps that are readily available by using the search bar on your Facebook page.

That’s all for today.  Not much in search today.  Hopefully tomorrow is a little bit more exciting.  Until then.

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Aaron Wall made a very interesting Twitter Post in regards to the Big G purchasing links.

Cough. Who is buying a footer link here http://bit.ly/PooPo ? None other than Google, that’s who! Don’t buy links. Do buy links + influence

Notice the pagerank of the page, Google is supposedly purchasing links on.  Not too shabby.

Some good tips on how to utilize your title tags and h1 tags and how they should never match, so that can hit as many keywords and variations as possible.

Yahoo officially went live with their new Search user interface. It seems pretty cool, as it provides different inferences about your search query and places relevant links to these inferences in its “Search Assist’ right sidebar. If I wasn’t already a devout Googler, I might consider switching to Yahoo Search with some of these features. I bet if I was a newbie to the Search world, I would definitely be more inclined to use Yahoo and Bing search, as opposed to Google.

Here is a search for the term “Philadelphia Eagles” since I love the Birds.  Yahoo provides some very interesting and relevant links in their sidebar pertaining specifically to my search.  For instance, ‘NFL.com”, “Philly.com” and “YahooSports.com”.  All very relevant links that a user who is searching for ‘Philadelphia Eagles’ might consider clicking in their search travels.

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My boss also pointed this gem out to me, posted by Rand at 1:30 am on Thursday of last week (interesting time?) in which he ‘officially’ changed his personal stance on paid links.  I read this post twice.  Here were my two very different reactions. My first:

This article made me rather irritated and angry, because I know for a fact Rand used to condone paid links and link brokers.  I also think that for the majority of his clients, he most likely still purchases links.  Whether he calls that advertising, or link buying, its still some form of link buying.

Until Google’s spiders can 110% without a doubt tell a paid link from a natural link, and they can successfully devalue the sites that buy links and those that sell links, there will always be paid links.  And for Rand to successfully run an SEO company, he’s going to need to buy links.

Seems like Rand is just giving the SEO world the same old runaround we get from these gurus every 6 months or so.

Now here is what I thought after the second read:

Definitely uncovered some things that I completely missed on my first quick read. I think once I learned of his change in position on link buying I became irritated and read the rest of the article in that mindset.

With a calmer more focused demeanor where I tried to dissect what he was stating, Rand makes some very valid points that I most definitely agree with and consider to model my link building tactics after. The fact he mentioned that there was ‘an inherent risk’ associated with the size of a company. I loved this point and totally agreed and took from it that it had to with your companys (sites) age, the size of your brand, your sites backlink profile, and the current position (rankings) in their current markets.

Maybe some more background about myself here. I was brought in to an e-commerce setting where all of the SEO was done in-house. My bosses started back in the day when buying links was all the rage. They were in with linkworth, pay-per-post and all those slumdog link slangers. They benefited from the early days of search and link building but have since began to turn the page and focus on a more natural link baiting strategy utilizing online advertising, better press, sales items (ecommerce) and of course some occasional link buying.

These guys pushed links left and right. It became a competition on a week to week basis in the SEO department. We literally had a scale for PR1 links through PR7’s. I think PR7’s were like 250 pts, 1’s were 20 pts. After a few months of swooping the internet high and low in my niche (and thinking I’ve come to the end of the internet) I started getting seriously concerned having reading more and more about becoming de-indexed and the perils of the sandbox and potentially losing my job. How crazy would that be? Because I’m working my ass off for these guys, I could potentially screw us, de-index the company, and lose my job. Nuts.

Either way, this was constantly in the back of my head for a while and during the majority of our weekly SEO meetings. I would always bring it up, along with a co-worker, who is a passionate SEO, and we would butt heads with our boss quite often on the stance and direction of our link building plan at the time.

Wow… rambling here… to make a long story short, our boss has changed his stance, and we practice a more natural link building approach (thanks to the constant nagging of some of us) yet he agrees that there is an ‘inherent risk’ depending upon current positioning…. With that said, he still feels that we can purchase links.

I think that every SEO has enough ‘in-the-field’ experience to determine whether or not purchasing a link will hurt or help your perspective client. I also think that the majority of SEO’s know that a ‘paid link’ can be cleverly disguised in a plethora of ways to be more inconspicuous to the engines and look as natural as possible.

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