SEO is a huge part of what I do. I don’t really consider myself an SEO, but at the same time my business relies pretty heavily (some might say too heavily) on the 50k or so people I see every day from organic search. So I pay attention to SEO trends, stay WAY on the ‘whitehat’ side of things (even though I am an active member at blackhat world). I also read ShoeMoney a lot, because he is a smart guy (even if he has bad grammar). Shoe is giving away a trip to SEO Thinktank 2008 to the person who writes the best post on how they could contribute to ThinkTank 2008.
Shoe is giving away the $2499 entry cost plus room and board for the event and surrounding days, for a total of $4100. So why do I want to win? Yes, I could easily afford the entry, and since I never win anything on Shoe’s blog (*cough* daily t-shirt contest *cough*) I will probably end up paying. But why should I win? What do I bring to the table? Funny you should ask:
- I have been making real money online since 1998
- The first ‘real’ job I had was working for a company called Microsoft doing web development for this new product they had called ‘msn’
- My last ‘real’ job was for a company called MP3.com and we released this product called My.MP3.com that got us sued for $300 million
- My last ‘real job’ was in 2002, since then I have survived - nay, flourished - on my web marketing, development, and SEO skills
- I have worked closely with search guys at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and Search.com
- I was invited to the eBay Affiliate roundtable in Chicago in June of this year - only the top 15 or so affiliates were invited.
- Working out of my house and mostly for myself breeds a closed mind. To make sure I am still interacting with other like minded people who can help me grow in my quest for internet dominance I regularly go to places like CoWorkingSanDiego, and lunch a few times a month with guys like Shawn and Ryan who challenge me with their superior intellect. This proves I am willing to share my mojo with others - maybe you!
- Bonus: I live in San Diego, in Pacific Beach to be exact. So the cost of awarding me this prize would only be the cost of admission to the conference, which I am hoping Shoe has covered
- Extra Bonus: I will challenge shoe (I will pay for the shots up front) to a drinking contest of some sort and win!
So yeah it felt good to write all that stuff (especially about not having a real job for 4 years :-), thanks for the opp Shoe hope to see you in SD.
other
seo, shoemoney
When Microsoft promotes its search engine and its web browser inside of its 80%+ market share operating system, that’s a violation of antitrust laws. So when Google uses its 80%+ market share search engine to promote its content, what is that?
Jason Calacanis has rightly been raising a stink about this. I was trying to link to him but confusingly he is “retired from blogging” so I can’t link to his comments. I guess he is too cool for his own blog but not too cool for twitter and friend feed?
Anyways Jason has a good point. He is complaining, of course, out of self interest. His “human powered search engine” Mahalo is in essence a one-source wiki or a MFG site = “Made for Google.” I wonder what their ratio is of page views from their search box vs. page views from google. At any rate, Jason is understandably upset at this knol development, since they will be taking up a lot of room in the SERPS that probably used to belong to Mahalo. And the big elephant in the room, will Google the search engine give preferential placement to Google the content company? Jason has taken three steps to handle this. 1) Complain to his sizeable audience - loudly 2) complain to Matt Cutts - repeatedly 3) create a bunch of his own Mahalo pages on knol. Not a bad strategy, just like Jason: intelligent and shrewd.
So combine that with Aaron Wall’s breakdown on knol. Aaron does some more tests with knol, and pretty much proves Google is giving itself priority placement in its search results. Well, kind of. It’s not ranking #1 for anything yet, but compare that to a site you start 3-4 days after launch. You won’t even rank for your own name. Danny Sullivan did some tests for knol SERP results and found it was “giving pages an advantage they might not get if they’d been hosted on some other brand new web site.”
My thoughts? Well, everyone is making this big fuss just a few days after they launched. We all know that Google’s algorithms can take hours, days, or months to decide what they want to do. Also, everyone is comparing knol to a brand new site. Yeah, a brand new site on a domain with a pagerank of 10. The domain that INVENTED pagerank. Nevertheless, Google moving into content when they promised us they would only be there to ‘index the world’s information’ is a disturbing development, and certainly has a lot of potential for abuse.
other, ventures
google, knol, seo
Wow. Someone write this down as a historical day for internet marketing. Oh wait, I am. Let me preface this by saying I use StumbleUpon a lot. I am an avid Stumbler and Stumble Marketer, and I participate in a lot of group Stumble marketing so when I find a new technique that seems intruiging, I pay attention.
So to the good stuff. I fired up Firefox (yeah i meant to say that) this morning and had a wierd red 1 by the stumble button. Curious of course, I moused over it and it said I had a “site waiting for me.” Wow, I’ve been working in web development for 9 years and I’ve never had a “site waiting for me.” Naturally, I was excited. I clicked, and got a message from a SU user drcoolj telling me about a house for rent in Canada. I am friends with drcoolj so I am sure we have done some SU exchanges in the past, but this is a whole new level of SU marketing.
I did some investigation (clicked one button on the toolbar) and found that he accomplished this through the “sent to” functionality of SU. Currently there is no way (that I saw, am I wrong?) to send a page to all your friends at once, but even with a rapid fire cut and paste recommendation it seems pretty effective. Nice idea drcoolj, especially for something like a rental ad.. immediate google love!
geek stuff, stumble, web marketing
seo, stumble, stumble upon
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