January 2007

I’m not sure what Yahoo is doing, but they seem to be altering site titles in the results on some searches. Not real sure what the story is on this one, but where the hell do they get off changing my titles? I know it’s their damn engine, but I’ve done countless tests on my titles and have optimized it for the best CTR possible. Changing it to a generic lowercase keyword isn’t the optimal way to do this. Also, for some reason they don’t seem to be changing all the listings, just a select few. There seems to be conjecture that this is coming from the wikipedia listings, but I’m not sure yet. Anyone have any ideas?

On a side note, the algo update Yahoo seems to be doing is killing me. The results also suck. There are pages ranking for highly competitive terms that don’t even have the terms in the titles or on the page, and are not showing any decent backlinks at all. Anyone else notice this? I’m going to file a formal complaint with the Yahoo complaint department, otherwise known as my local bar. A few beers will do me good.

I’m heading out to NYC tomorrow so I’m doing our Friday tea time a little early. Even without the Friday there were some great posts for the week. So once again on my Unbirthday, here is the news from the world of search:

* Blackbeard SEO makes ABC World News with this post about Apple iPhone and Ringtones and he sounds surprised, but he always has some good stuff. He was the first to market with that idea and after reading it I tend to agree with him. I think there might still be some money to be made, but it’s certainly going to go downhill.

* ALERT THE MASSES! PAGERANK UPDATE!! Okay, glad we got that one over with. Move on folks, nothing to see here….

* Search Engine Journal reported on an article from Smaran Dayal that apparently YouTube is now more popular than MySpace. This is certainly complete speculation. Do you think the ignorant crowd on MySpace or the tech crowd on YouTube is more likely to have a bunch of crap sending data to Alexa? Who knows? Good post and interesting topic, but I don’t think it’s the fact everyone is making it out to be.

* The MyBlogLog revolution has taken hold! Come join me and my fellow bloggers at TheMadHat Community! I thought this was a great idea when I first came across it. It’s great for bloggers because it caters to our never-ending ego and it gives us a good feeling when people are visiting. It’s more than “72 visitors from Google”. It’s DigitalGhost came to visit today! Hopefully he read something he liked and didn’t just come around because I commented on his blog. I’ve added the widget to mine, get with the program and add it to yours.

* One of my favorite bloggers is Darren Rowse, creator of ProBlogger.net. He has some of the best advice you can find in the world of blogging. This post, however, comes from one of his guest bloggers. Tony Hung writes about how to market your blog and it’s worth a bookmark. ShoeMoney will have Darren on the next Net Income radio show on Webmaster Radio so shut up and listen to it.

* Danny Sullivan has a good post on the age old debate on how SEO is for simple folk. Again I’m going with the move along, nothing to see here statement. 99% or so of the online world doesn’t know a thing about SEO, so think what you want and wallow in the abyss.

* Finally, a shout out to all the Stuart flock….Go Hawkeyes! I know you probably don’t have a clue what the hell I’m ranting about, but thanks for visiting anyway. Good luck against Minnesota and Indiana. Nate…remember the dancing elf? I could make you pay. Remember that.

Everyone have a good weekend, get off the damn computer and go do something!

I’ve been tasked with adding an additional member to our team so I am posting about the process. These are the questions I’ll be asking in the first interview. If you’re looking for an SEO position, these might be some questions to be familiar with before you head into it.

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

5) Have you attended any search related conferences?

6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?

7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?

13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)

20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

42) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

Thanks to Rand at SEOmoz.org for this post on SEO hiring. It helped quite a bit in assembling this list. Any additional questions anyone can think of?

*** UPDATE ***

I got several excellent questions from a couple forum postings. These get into the more complicated end of SEO.

22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)

23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

26) In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

*** UPDATE ***

For in-depth answers to some of these questions, visit SEO Interview Questions Part II.

Time for our weekly roundup of news from the search industry. There have been a flood of good posts lately and I’m having trouble keeping up with all the great stuff out there. It seems like the frequency of posts are increasing across the board. Anyway, let’s see what TheMadHat has on his Unbirthday…

* ShoeMoney has an interesting post on hiring Matt Cutts with responses from some of the big players. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t hire Matt, even outside of the search sector. But does Matt really need to work for someone else?

* Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder responds to The Sausage Manifesto, an open letter to the search engines on click fraud issues. Good response in my opinion.

* Loren Baker writes up a post on Should Digg be listed in Google. I thought about this and might offer my opinion a little later. I’m not sure what the popular opinion is.

* Search Engine Land reports that LinkedIn has launched their own answers service. Personally I’m a fan of LinkedIn and am interested in seeing if this can gain some momentum.

* DigitalGhost from Speaking Freely has a new blogger showing us internet marketing from a teenage perspective. This week she tells us what teenagers are buying on the web. Check it out, might give you some good insights to niche market opportunities.

* SEO BlackHat shoots down a post on click fraud from Rsnake when he disses banner ads. I’m in agreement and I am always eagerly waiting for posts from QuadsZilla.

* I initially wasn’t going to include this, but Google pulls it tips from searches. Overreaction in my opinion, I didn’t mind them.

* Great post from Andy Hagans on maintaining your revenue stream. Definitely worth a read and thinking about.

* Good post from Brian Provost on developing new SEO business. Always great reads from this blog, check it out more often.

* And finally, 11 reasons to be an SEO. I can think of a few more, but the main reason is cause we kick ass.

We all know to take everything read in forums with a grain of salt, and the majority of the time outrageous statements are debunked by more expert members. However, being an active participant of several “high quality” forums, there seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around, even among those who appear to be experienced marketers. Here are a few from just today, so lets take a look.

* The text content ratio is the percentage of the page which is actual content, as opposed to the portion which is HTML tags, scripts, etc… …search engines use this ratio to determine the relevancy of your page and the higher this value, the greater your chances of ranking higher.

Please go and find something better to do with your time. This may have had some significance long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but not since the dark ages. Basically you should take out all your style info and just use as much text as possible. In fact, just go and copy the Mortgage Encyclopedia and rank #1 for mortgages! Sweet, I’m quitting my job to go live on a sandy beach.

* yahoo prefers a KW density of 8 % but the synonyms are counted as the same keyword.

Google prefers 2 % KW density and synonyms are counted as different KWs.

Keyword density again. Sure. Seriously how did that person even come up with those numbers, much less how he could possibly argue that point.

* Sitewide external links will give your site a penalty. Put the links in the content area instead.

* Sitewide links to your own sites or any other sites are discounted to 1 link of value.

* Yeah,it’s not good to have outgoing links in one page, you can add the “nofollow” attribute to the links if you are afraid of the pr leak.

* Hi, on my site I am going to be having a few links to other sites and I’ve read that’s bad for PR.

Here we go with PR leakage as it relates to outbound links. Of course….don’t link to anywhere, we wouldn’t want to give away our precious PR. Then we have the “don’t use sitewide links” group…. Sitewide links sometimes make sense people, it doesn’t hurt anything (unless of course it’s to a bunch of bad neighborhood junk).

Moving on to the completely ignorant argument that a nofollow tag can help you keep your PR. I’m not sure how some of these things start circulating, but nofollow is to combat comment spam, not anything related to the mythical PR leakage. How well do you think a site with absolutely no outbound links is going to do? You can keep all your PR and rule the world. With the exception of something.com ranking for [something], I think you’ll find yourself sitting in a deep sandy box.

And what the hell does “discounted to 1 link of value” mean? One outbound link negates one inbound link? I don’t even want to speculate on that one.

* the title is very important, i would recommend having it on a white background

Say what? Google ranks pages with a white background and black text higher? Sweet, more money for my beach living.

So in conclusion, the secret to defeating Google is to have a white background, as much black text as possible, only paragraph tags, and no outbound links. Anyone want to join me for a Pina Colada?