SEO Book

Neil Patel has always been a self promoter #1. He has some good info, but you have to filter through him talking about how awesome he is and the guru crap he's always hocking. Rand & Dr. Pete/moz in general is one of the best places, along with http://seobook.com/ for a more cynical perspective.

http://www.seomoz.org/ http://www.seobook.com/ Not really SEO, but I love this book: http://www.calltoactionbook.com/

http://www.SeoBook.com is probably my favorite, great signal to noise ratio. http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com is a less frequent poster, but gives a lot of good gray/black hat stuff that you should at least understand, even if you don't use it. http://www.seomoz.com is the obvious one, although most of thier content is more beginner oriented. http://www.sphinn.com is the digg-style seo site, and tends to have about 10% useful content (IMHO).

From the outside I saw Google going downhill in the late 2000's when it started trying to push SEO-oriented publishers to becoming Adsense publishers. I have been reading this blog for a long time (my alter ego was a major commenter) and it tells the sordid tale in great detail if you dig deep into the history http://www.seobook.com/blog

Sites like this need to be called-out and shitlisted. You can complain to Google here about their AdWords policies: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/176378?hl=en&ref_topic=2… or use the following command line for expedited service: >> cat complaint.txt >> /dev/null As an advertiser, you have very limited options for controlling the ads. If you try to manage them one by one, you'll be playing whackamole for forever. Probably the most effective method is disallowing all ads for software on your pages (via the Ad Review Center interface, handy picture available here: http://www.seobook.com/images/google-get-rich-quick.png), but if you're a software company, that a) denies legitimate advertisers the ability to put ads on your page and b) will result in you making very, very little revenue.

Absolutely shady. It's a shame we don't have consumer laws or JustFab would have been closed a long time ago. Good thing they raised some money, at least they can afford lawyers for a while. Another major deception going on is on search engines. All of them. They deceptively designed ads in a way so a lot of people (roughly half http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results ) do not know that they clicked an ad. Imagine seeing a commercial and thinking it was CNN content or reading an article and thinking it as an unbiased one from NYT? If you're buying an item and search for it, the ads do not have your best interests in mind, so this matters a lot. Of course, if you think the result is unbiased you're more likely to buy it. That is fraud, plain and simple and it has been going on for a long time.

AOLs and content farms are nothing new: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/02/you-may-not-like-it-but-aols-co… Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo

Aaron Wall has documented the decline of organic search very well over the years. Worth checking out: http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine

Check out http://www.seobook.com/ and http://www.seo-theory.com/

All you need: http://www.seobook.com/ http://www.seomoz.org/

http://seobook.com/ http://seojuicer.com/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/ (sometimes has seo content)

They have a nofollow meta in the head of the page, which according to http://www.seobook.com/robots-txt-vs-rel-nofollow-vs-meta-robots-nofol… is as good as rel="nofollow" when it comes to PageRank.

You might want to try some of Patrick's tips (of Bingo Card Creator fame) here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-companies/ I'd also suggest taking a look at http://www.seobook.com/ The one thing I would say is to look very carefully at what you want to achieve via SEO. I'm fairly certain that the majority of potential customers in our sector (information security) don't want to fill in a form, although we do have a few visitors. For us our site is more about communicating what we do for our customers, than getting people to invite us to do work for them, but of course that's a world of difference from trying to get someone to sign up to a web app.

Also Aaron, I would read this article... :-) http://www.seobook.com/how-choose-great-domain-names

"you can nofollow links created by users but you should not nofollow links to content that YOU decided was worthy of inclusion on your site." +1 ... Preach on!!! The only reason there an (alleged) need for nofollow is because they are scraping tons of content & displaying it without any editorial curation. If they actually were a human powered search (as they falsely claim to be) and did editorial review of the links then why would they need to add nofollow to links that passed their editorial guidelines? Further lets not forget that in the past Mahalo did provide direct outbound links. 18 months ago I predicted them adding nofollow at some point, Jason stopped by with what he called a "fact check" ... and then they later added nofollow...pretty funny! http://www.seobook.com/when-will-mahalo-add-nofollow-outbound-links

"On the conference call, Ms. Porat noted that mobile cost per clicks continued to strengthen, and that the gap between desktop and mobile is narrowing." (1) It's no surprise that after the "mobilepocalypse" earlier this year we're seeing mobile profitability grow for Google. Google effectively forced advertisers hands in bundling their inventory and is agressively raising min CPC in a number of categories (2) And they are breaking many of their OWN rules about how aggressively one can promote advertising on mobile - excellent, and entertaining breakdown of that here -> http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly I don't have much of a point other than sharing some of the information behind what's actually driving these earnings, and the major changes I've seen / experienced as a guy that spends a lot with the GOOG. (1) http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-results-top-expectations-143707774… (2) http://searchengineland.com/google-showing-fewer-ads-per-search-219834 (3) http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly

This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site). Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name? I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO. Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea. 1: https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800 2: http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die

The issue here is that it's still really easy to game SERPs, it just takes more money to do so and a willingness to step in gray hat territory. Search plus your world has the potential to make it very hard if not impossible to game SERPs, however. The takeaway from the infographic should really be that Aaron Wall (of seobook.com) runs a business that teaches (white hat?) SEO to small business owners. It's in his best interest to make SEO seem incredibly complex, difficult, and full of dangers. Which is relatively true: effective SEO is hard to do. Wall, like any good SEO, keeps up with algorithm changes. He's a smart guy, and he's most likely figured out how to overcome all of the challenges in that infographic (for $X.XX he'll show you!). It's linkbait. And great inbound marketing. Also, Aaron Wall is a very outspoken critic of Google. There's a post every week or two on his blog about Google's ethics (or lack thereof). It's really fascinating stuff, well worth a read [1]. 1. http://www.seobook.com/blog

"less than a morning Starbucks trip" I wouldn't think that a comparison like that would work. For one thing there are many people who feel they are pissing away money on Starbucks, or feel some guilt (I myself spend about $4.00 per day and sometimes twice that. That's at least $1500 per year. I don't want to be reminded of that, especially when business is off.) (So you are making a comparison to a potential sore spot. You want a positive association. Comparing to Starbucks but without mentioning price might be an example but that wouldn't make sense for your product, right?) Now, to sell it's product, Starbucks (or any premium brand) doesn't make comparisons to what other things costs. They make you feel special in some way by the product or by the experience or create some value that justifies the price. Making comparisons is good though if you are saving people money. Have you tried raising the price and offering an unconditional money back guarantee? "Cancel at any time and owe nothing". That seems to work with many things I've seen that cause people to be fence sitters as long as the price is high enough. Seo book does that (p1 for seo and search engine optimization) http://www.seobook.com/

Matt: This is a lie. I have seen you talk about quality at SMX and it is laughable. These quality guidelines you speak of might pertain to others, but they do not pertain to Google's own content. 1. When I search for a restaurant, 99% of the time Google places shows up before Yelp. So you are telling me that Google places always has better content than Yelp? Look at these reviews for Gary Danko - http://maps.google.com/maps/place?num=100&hl=en&biw=1366&b… "love it" and "our favorite restaurant" Does Google Places have much better quality content 99% of the time? 2. Look at http://www.seobook.com/images/google-google-google-google-google-googl… A. Look at all of Google's sites in the results. B. What are those Youtube videos doing in these results? Every other result in this set has the words hollywood and cauldron right together(except the leaky-cauldron domain result), but since Youtube is a Google property it shows up. It's funny. Do this search on your own and you will see that the top 40 results have "Hollywood Cauldron" in its title, but the ones in Youtube do not. So your results are all about quality unless it comes down to your own content. Then, it doesn't matter. By the way, I can't wait for Google Plus to start hogging…

I hope this doesn't seem self serving, but seomoz.org has some of the highest quality information you can find on SEO. In addition to that, I'd suggest articles on http://searchengineland.com/ - they offer high quality content and news in the industry. Anything written by Vanessa Fox on SEL is usually great. Guides like Excel for SEO shows some of the basic stuff we do: http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/ For high level patent / research based SEO, nobody does it better than http://www.seobythesea.com/ (his URLs are ugly, but his content is great) For specific beliefs on how the algo works, this is a good resource: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors SEOmoz has webinars and a PRO Q&A. Distilled.net also offers videos of our conferences. As for books, the best I've read are Art of SEO, which is co-written by Rand, and SEO Secrets by Danny Dover (formerly of SEOmoz, now at AT&T) which talks more about the consulting side. The problem with books is that stuff can go out of date quickly. If you're reading a book that talks about PageRank sculpting, for example, it's dated. Other great sites: http://www.seobook.com/ - high level opinions and analysis of industry issues http://www.seroundtable.com/ - recap of industry news and forums http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ - lots of tactical articles Things I've written for…

Jason likely hates Google as it killed his search-engine-result-spamming startup Mahalo with an algorithm tweak: http://www.seobook.com/matt-cutts-eats-mahalo-spam

Goddam the links on that article are annoying. None of them are sources, just links to general "topics" under bloomberg. Completely confusing. It's ILA: Internal Link Architecture. It was the hot thing several years back. http://www.seobook.com/archives/002332.shtml

Yes, however the mechanics for SEM are a bit different because you still have the ability to track which keywords (ads) ended up creating the incremental revenue, an option that has been taken away from SEO's over the past year's roll out of GA's (not provided) data. I am not an SEM expert, but I think this kind of technique could be interesting to explore: http://www.seobook.com/business-lessons - Simon

I wrote a bash script to check the top 1000 websites and huge percentage of them responded with heartbeat extension (30-40%): INPUT=websites.csv OLDIFS=$IFS IFS=, [ ! -f $INPUT ] && { echo "$INPUT file not found"; exit 99; } while read rank website do echo "checking $website for heartbeat..." echo -e "quit\n" | /usr/local/bin/openssl s_client -connect $website:443 -tlsextdebug 2>&1| grep 'TLS server extension "heartbeat" (id=15), len=1' done < $INPUT IFS=$OLDIFS You can download a list of top 1 million websites from Alexa and Quantcast: http://www.seobook.com/download-alexa-top-1-000-000-websites-free Chinese websites timeout on port 443 so you'll have to skip them.

>> At the same time, I feel like I'm doing impactful work, with some very smart people. Ah, you must be one of the stars getting people to click on ads, even more. No matter how you spin it, you make money by what can rightfully be characterized as fraud (1,2,3), or confusing ads with unbiased content(if there's still a thing like unbiased content at Google) while ripping your users off. But whatever makes you feel better 1. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/18/for-google-it-pays-to-be-evil-d… 2. http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results 3. http://www.afr.com/p/technology/google_top_product_search_results_LyPp…

http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo By my count the company fronting the content has something like ~100 million machine-generated pages polluting the internet as of 6 months ago, being hosted and re-hosted under dozens of different domains. At what point does it become spam in your opinion?

Note that the FTC agrees with you and recently made an announcement[1] regarding the shading of the ad result box, among other requirements for search engines. The study the FTC cites[2] indicates that fully half of individuals didn't even realize the page contained ads. [1] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm [2] http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results

It's sad but the reality is that you need adblockers to use many websites, Google and other search engines being among the worst offenders. The world's biggest advertiser has made the use of adblockers necessary, if you want to use their engine http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Google-A… or http://www.seobook.com/images/google-serp-layout.gif and not see just ads. Once activated for a site that has abused ads, others are hurt almost by default.

Working harder, producing better content ... still, MANY folks still have Yahoo, AOL or MSN as their homepage :-(. And of course, Google wants to be the web's only affiliate [http://www.seobook.com/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam], but will give a pass to "brands" (read: brands + cash = not spam), while labeling small sites as internet spam. Its all looking pretty dire for the common (wo)man. Business as usual, i guess.