This post actually may not even come out the way it’s being thought of in my head and it’s just for discussion purposes, I may not be on point on a few things or maybe even just the basic principle of paid links and why Google deems them ‘evil’ almost…right? Do no evil.

I think all SEOs and those who want better rankings (WEBSITE EXPOSURE) should be allowed to buy links if for the right reasons. It seems link buying is always associated with a negative connotation and how it’s all about manipulating the search algorithm for better search rankings.

I guess we have to think about certain things in practical manners. Why would Google punish a company for purchasing links? What about the purpose of buying those links? Besides links helping search rankings, many links that one could buy can and do provide real benefits in regards to traffic which leads to sales and lead referrals.
What about paying for a directory link? Why isn’t that penalized? A directory is a business that is purely made for profit (if they charge for links) and create content of no real substance (not in todays web.) SO, a blogger who consistently works on his/her blog and puts good content will get penalized for selling a link somewhere in their content (or wherever they choose) because a company approached them for a link. They worked hard at building their blog and content…why not let them be rewarded? What about the company buying the link? Besides having a benefit of having a new link placed in a good blog, that company may see a real benefit from that link, more than just POSSIBLE better search rankings.

Google on Paid Links: “…However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”

So, Business.com or the Yahoo.com directory aren’t directories that people choose to buy for ranking (pagerank) purposes and are do-follow links? It seems that statement is too general to apply to a world wide web. If you’re a website that sells beatles memorabilia, shouldn’t you have the option to buy a link from a website with the intent not only for traffic but to better your search engine exposure as well as having the publisher provide a service (passing authority, pagerank, whatever you want to call it) to an advertiser as a perk. After all, that publisher is creating content that is also serving Google.

The web MADE Google…Google didn’t make the web. They shouldn’t penalize link buying but should have a better method of ‘quality control’ or I guess that’s what Matt Cutts and his team is there for, really trying to make the web a clean place…I just don’t see paid links as spam unless a company like a big department store decides to buy links from something like a network which places links in porn websites, etc…I give this example because I was looking at a backlink profile (don’t remember whose now) and came across a few adult websites with followed links to this big company…I should have saved it.

We all want an anti-spammy web. I just don’t believe companies/websites should be penalized automatically for purchasing links from websites as it’s not only about better rankings but also an economy based on work (content) by many bloggers, website owners who could monetize (and deservingly so) their content.

I guess the argument would be that if all link buying was OK, any company with a lot of cash can come, buy thousands of links and dominate the search result for specific keywords. For the most part, I can tell you that that may already be the case with most big companies that have the money to really promote their website.

Like anything else in this world, theres some good in link buying and some bad. My thoughts on this aren’t finished…I’ll get back to them.

Just a rant…still thinking about this one.

p.s. i dont buy links and i love google. really.

Here is why I think the Pandora stock is exciting and may be a good long-term investment. With Pandora signing up a new registered user EVERY SECOND, the potential to monetize the website is enormous if it keeps growing its registered user base. We’re talking about selling MP3s, big ad money in its display advertising model, concert tickets, and expanding into other sectors of entertainment such as tv shows, etc.

The stock is said to open at $16 (does seem high to me) which was raised from about its initial $8-10 IPO. I look forward to seeing how this stock plays out in the next few days and in the next few months and what changes happens in this market as I see GrooveShark as a real threat to Pandora. The stock will be offered under the stock symbol, “P” traded in the NYSE.

Check out this post: PANDORA IPO BY THE NUMBERS.

So, I personally called AOL to get this issue resolved and get the account restored because he lost capabilities to log in to his email. I called a customer service number I found online and sure enough I got through to someone (It was nearly impossible back in the day.)

I explained to the customer service rep the problem and for the next 20 minutes, the conversation about them (AOL) insisting we purchase a security plan for the email that would protect the account with added security settings. At this point…I’m starting to think AOL hacked the account themselves to try and capitalize on this up-sell that would mean turning free email subscribers and monetizing them since AOL was all about a subscription model since its first days and then of course that went real sour and is now pretty much a content company.

The AOL customer service rep on the phone began taking some steps back when I started to explain that if I could not restore the account without purchasing this ‘plan’ that meant AOL can hack everyones free email account that’s had their account for many years and charge them to basically get access back to it. The customer service rep then started taking some steps back and saying it was necessary at this point but believe you me, it was a big selling point and left me curious at the end.

Nevertheless, we did restore the email account free of charge but you never know what a company is willing to do to raise capital or gain subscriptions.

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SUMMARY: CLEANER CODE = BETTER SEO

I’m always looking to see what top ranking websites may be doing to get the rankings they do. One of the tasks of any SEO I guess is to really analyze competitors, right?

I want to really stress that what I am writing here is completely opinion based and have not (due to time) validated this correlation enough but would like to get the discussion started. Nevertheless, I did enough research to see that there may be a correlation between code validation and top ranking websites, at least for certain queries where the number of real big players/brands is limited or non-existent.

So, what do I mean? http://validator.w3.org/ validates code on websites. This tool shows you errors and warnings that may be making it harder for search engines to crawl your website. Looking at top competitors for certain niches, I was surprised to find that top sites had very few errors compared to 2+ page rankings. That’s not to say that all the sites on the first page had fewer errors (cleaner code) than websites in the 2nd page plus. However, again, top ranking websites for keywords that I was looking at had cleaner code which may have a correlation in regards to organic rankings.

What’s your take? Does this have any effect in regards to SEO in your opinion?

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Inc. Magazine has a great piece on using social blogging to grow your business and touch on 8 tips to grow your business:

1. Position Yourself as an Expert
2. Share Experiences and Information
3. Keep it Fresh and Mix it Up
4. Encourage Interaction and Feedback
5. Use Schedulers and Update Apps
6. Make Your Blog the Central Hub
7. Link Back To Your Website
8. Use a Personal Touch

If you use these tips, I promise you, you will start seeing an improvement within your websites traffic and even search engine optimization efforts. If you look at the top experts in your niche, they may already be using these channels to get more exposure to their cause.

Some individuals, and I’ve personally seen this, you may have also, have actually grown larger businesses than actual companies by really being active in social media channels and establishing a presence and making themselves an authority in their niche. That’s the trick…positioning yourself as an expert as Tip #1.

To be successful in social media, you must understand the way people interact THROUGH social media. If you want to start building channels to just link to your own stories, talk about business, you will lose from the get-go. Social media engagement is about personal touch, connecting with your fans/followers and creating a good source that will can use and engage.

There are many bright people out there and while school is very important, there is nothing like good hands on experience. One of PayPals co-founder is now paying young people to pursue their programming career which is in full demand in this digital revolution.

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You’re watching Venture Capital – ‘The Early Show’. See the Web’s top videos on AOL Video

As Google explained, “Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1?s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1?s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

Of course, as we’ve seen with some major Google updates in the past 2 months or so, this button can very well and I believe will be used as an algorithm signal. This is Googles best attempt at competing against Facebook in terms of sharing content.

Will this button have that much of an influence on users sharing content as compared to hitting the like button? I really don’t think so. Whats the real benefit for your typical user to hit this button instead of the Facebook Like or Twitter button? Nevertheless, of course, you should add this button and again, can have impact on your content and how it ranks.

Google also goes to say the +1 button can and most likely will have a page crawled or recrawled. “Once you add the button, Google may crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click.”

If you look at the biggest blogs or sites in the industry, you’ll see that Siztrix, the company that crunched through 1 millions keywords, put out a report about the visbility index loss and other key metrics which shows the affects of this Google algorithm change.

The biggest losers seem to be article submission websites where duplicate content has always been an issue as SEOs submit content for link building and turn one article into 10 different ones and submit them.

The biggest losers in the article directory space:

-eZine.com
-Suite101.com
-Hubpages.com
-Buzzle.com
-AssociatedContent.com
-ArticleBase.com

There are many more losers that lost serious rankings and visibility in the search engines and now, more than ever, Google is really showing us the value they put on unique content which has always been a white hat push on SEO.

Get the full listings of the most hurt online properties: Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?

Source: SixRevision.com

SixRevisions.com listed 8 excellent wordpress SEO plugins that can really improve your search engine optimization efforts on the blogging platform.

1. SEO Rank Reporter
2. All in One SEO
3. SEO Ultimate
4. SEO Content Control
5. SEO Friendly Image
6. SEO Smart Links
7. Google XML Sitemaps
8. Platinum SEO Pack

Read The Post —-> 8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

Source: SEOMoz.org

We all know anything that Google may even show a slight signal, 1,000 SEOs or webmasters try to game that system. Nevertheless, the social space is providing some good data to online marketers as well as Google.

On SEOMOZ, there is a great post today titled, “A Tweet’s Effect On Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study,” which first hand shows the effect of a Tweet by a significant Twitter account and its impact on a certain page for the SEOMoz blog. From this post, we can certainly see that a Tweet that can catch “fire” can have SIGNIFICANT search engine rankings impact.

See the story @ SEOMOZ.org —–> A Tweet’s Effect On Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study

Why does this help? If you’re an SEO looking at backlink profiles or trying to scrape keywords from competitior/relevant websites, this tool is super duper awesome because it lets you see relevant URLs in a matter of seconds. This discovery tool, if you’re not currently using anything like it, can save you a lot of time in looking through the search engine results to gather URLs to analyze.


See more of this awesome tool and story @ SearchEngineJounrla.com —> Discover Pages Similar to the Current One with “Similar Pages”

The story comes down to J.C. Penny using link buying into link farms, etc to rank first for many terms as it was discovered by looking at their link profile with the right keyword anchor text.


“The New Yorks Times presented their findings to Google. Googler Matt Cutts, head of webspam, confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and shortly after, the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for.Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.”

Read The Whole Story (very good snapshots of investigation) —–> New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

Source: MarketingPilgrim.com

The Facebook fan page layout allows those admins of fan pages actually engage in Facebook activity as the name of the Facebook page instead of an individual. So, if you want to leave a comment on someones page, your business name (Facebook fan page name) will appear instead of your own. What does this mean? This means you can drive those users back to your Facebook fan page profile instead of back to your profile.

Hopefully this doesn’t bring about a spam element to how some marketers will engage with this new element.

With the growth in traffic for both news aggregator websites, sharing on the web is stronger than ever. Where is Digg in all of this? With the growth in traffic of both Stumbleupon and Reddit will tech companies now go back to trying to grow social news websites?

Digg continues to have its big problems as the companies new CEO tries to take the company in a new direction by actually trying to bring features back that really helped build that community. For one, one of the biggest complaints is about homepage activity which seems to slow down at night and weekends and its said its to keep sending a large amount of referral traffic to those in the front page.

Just last week we revealed the leaked AOL guidelines to push stories to better rank in the search engines. Google has come under fire as of late by the SEO industry to see how they will combat content farms. Many SEOs are concerned about the quality of stories on the web regarding low quality content ranking well in authoritative websites.

The purchase of HuffingtonPost by AOL is rumored to be a big part of its SEO efforts to rank well for big trending stories. Slate has a GREAT piece on this and starts by reporting, “Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News.

See what I did there? That’s what you call search-engine optimization, or SEO. If I worked at the Huffington Post, I’d likely be commended for the subtle way in which I inserted all those search keywords into the lede of my article. In fact, the keywords above are taken directly from HuffPo’s page announcing its acquisition, and my first paragraph is a rip-off of a search-engine baiting article the site posted on Sunday, “What time does the Superbowl start?” HuffPo’s facility with keywords seems to be one of the main things that Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO, loves about the site. Armstrong, a former Google exec, can’t get enough SEO—according to an internal memo that Business Insider posted last week, he’s pushing for the company to use an “SEO checker” to look over 95 percent of AOL’s stories by the end of March. He believes this will yield a big payoff for AOL; 40 percent of its traffic, the memo says, will come from search engines.”

What if Google changes its whole search algorithm tomorrow and affects HuffingtonPost? Will the acquisition be a total failure?

Read the whole story @ ——> HuffPo’s Achilles’ Heel