Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Well here we are at the end of a great year for SEO's, Internet Marketers and of course, Beanstalk. It's been a true pleasure to attend my first Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose and I look forward already to speaking at the New York conference in April. It was also a pleasure to make it through yet another year with our guarantees in tact without a requirement to pay back any clients due to missing them.

We would like to genuinely thank each and every one of you, clients or just visitors to our blog, for the part you played in making 2006 such a great success for Beanstalk. We look forward to serving you through 2007.

And now, let's get on with it shall we? Below you'll find some great links with info from 2006 and predictions for 2007.

Webmaster Radio - Yesterday on Webmaster Radio, Jim Hedger and I discussed some of our predictions for 2007. Give it a listen. In may cases we disagree so you'll have to decide for yourself who's right. (Hint: It's me ;)

101 Biggest Stories In Search - Chris Winfield of 10e20.com posted a list of his top 101 stories in search for 2006. There's some genuine info and some humerus tid-bits. Well worth the read. He includes links to a ton of great info as well.

Jim Hedger's predictions for 2007 - Jim Hedger lists his top predictions for 2007 as it relates to search (and Duke Forever). I've had to link to the printer-friendly version as SitePro still hasn't taken my advice and isn't posting their homepage content in a secondary (permanent) location.

Rand Fishkin's Predictions - Rand Fishkin posts on SEOMoz his predictions for the Web in 2007. He's always worth paying attention to.


And here are just some of my predictions for 2007:

1 - Google will launch or at the very least we'll start hearing some serious rumors that they are going to launch their own network-based computer system. They will work with manufacturers to provide an extremely low cost PC that doesn't have a hard drive but rather boots from Google's servers, provides free of charge Google's apps, is based on the Firefox browser. The only major hurdle they will face is allowing for the installation of programs. They will get around this by having a large online gaming area (fee based) and allowing for either an external hard drive or other memory source.

2 - MSN will gain ground in search. There are many who will disagree. This is based more on a hunch than anything else so we're just have to wait and see.

3 - Social media will continue to gain ground. SEO firms will need to add divisions to accommodate this growing area of Internet Marketing.

4 - Ask.com will throw at least 5 huge parties in 2007 winning the hearts and minds of SEO's everywhere. Already looking forward to seeing them in NY. :)

5 - Enquisite will become much more influential as a provider of search referral data.

6 - BJ & Tyler will win the Amazing Race 11 (assuming they're racing together in it). Season 11 will be a "best of" and I'm already anxious to see my fav AR duo head for the finish line.


And that's about it for this entry. I hop that you've all had a great holiday season thus far and look forward to serving you further through our services, blog, articles and emails through 2007.

Thanks again and HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

Labels: enquisite, jim hedger, predictions 2007 seo search engine, rand fishkin, webmaster radio

The new rankings for the SEO community are holding with no additional changes recorded across a large number of search phrases. It appears that there is a hold on any update though it may simply be a "calm before the storm" scenario with Google testing the results before applying the new algorithm.

The URL in the title issue has been addresses and is not appearing on any of the datacenters we check (dozens).

We will be monitoring this closely over the next few days and will keep you posted here on our blog.

Well leave it to Google to spank SEO's by making us work on the Friday night before Christmas. :) There's an update starting. At this time it appears to be fairly minor with only a few tweaks however there are some odd "goings on" across various datacenters with some only showing domain names as the title in the results so monitoring is definitely on the agenda for the weekend.

The last such update hit SEO and a number of other category sites first and then migrated to the "real world" within a couple days. Perhaps they feel it's best to test their algorithms on those hired to game them. :)

At this time there appears to be a slight shift towards onsite factors with body text holding more weight than previously and backlinks slightly reduced in their overall weight. There are some apparent adjustments to the way backlinks are being weighted though we only detected the update about an hour ago and thus, we haven't had time to fully analyze this yet. As soon as we've had more time to dig deeper into the backlink issue we'll report back.

Good luck to all of you though this update and happy holidays. :)

Everyone at Beanstalk would like to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas. As we settle into the weekend and subsequent holiday (yeah, we get a day off !!!) I'll be taking some time to think about the past year and what's coming in 2007. It's been an interesting year for Beanstalk and for the search engine world in general. For those who are interested, on next Thursday's Webmaster Radio Jim Hedger and I will be discussing the past year and making predictions for 2007. Definitely worth tuning in at 5PM EST.

But where's the chuckle?

As promised in the title of this post we'll be closing off here with a VERY funny page on the SEOmoz website (gotta love that Rand). On the page they've created a very funny comic (for us SEO geeks anyways) out of pictures from the Chicago SES conference. Our good friend Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising is a feature in the comic so I was won over.

When you've for a few minutes for a good chuckle be sure to visit http://www.seomoz.org/articles/ses-chicago-comics.html.

Labels: christmas rand seomoz neil patel

Our friend Matt Cutts (OK, maybe "friend" is a bit off as he likely wouldn't know me from Adam) has posted a series of videos on Google Video, answering some of the better questions he gets asked (likely a lot of the questions he most commonly gets asked). In one in particular he answers questions regarding multiple domains (what SEO doesn't get asked THAT question), launching sites with too many pages and Google images. You'll find it on Google at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3583760678227172395.

You'll also find link to a number of his other posts there. Well worth the view.

Another great post by Matt can be found at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1756437348670651505. Some great advice and clarification - I especially liked the info on strong vs b and em vs i. Thanks Matt!

There are few voices in the SEO community as well-educated and well-known as that of veteran SEO Jim Hedger. Well there's now a vote going on at Search Engine Journal regarding SEO blogs and new sources. Jim is up for "best blogger" (sadly, I'm not but you can't win them all).

He's up against some great competition but as someone who reads tons I'd recommend voting and put your check beside his name. There are some great bloggers out there for sure and if I was on the list my request would definitely be different however I'm not and so I'll recommend my second choice. If you have a few seconds pop over to the voting page. As a bonus to you, you'll likely find many great sources of info you've never stumbled on previously. :)

I just discovered a VERY kewl site today NationMaster.com. This is easily one of the more useful resources for people doing research, looking for facts to win (or lose) a bar room bet, or who are just geeky and love knowing a bunch of things they'll never use.

The site is basically a large, searchable depository of facts and stats. Want to know which country has the most websites per capita - I'll be honest, I didn't know it was Germany. Which countries' military has the largest number of weapons per capita? If you guessed the United States you'd be wrong (they come in in 46th). In fact it's Isreal with 2,546,600 weapons per 1 million people .

From the very useful to the very mundane, if it's been measured and reported on - you'll find the stats here. They even have a "Random Facts" page which, by the looks of it, is the site owner's own personal favorite bits of trivia, quotes and thoughts.


A site worth adding to your Favorites (Bookmarks for FireFox users).

Labels: statistics stats

I just received Jill Whalen's newsletter (which I HIGHLY recommend subscribing to) and in it she replies to one of her subscribers on how someone with less links is outranking them. This is a point I've discussed MANY times on the phone and in emails but I thought it worth posting her comments here as a refresher. The question/answer is:

++Fewer Links, but Better Rankings++

Hi Jill,

I have better backlinks than my competitor and my site is also optimized,
but why is my competitor's ranking better than mine? Our backlinks are
around 90 and the competitor's backlinks are around 55. What can I do for
better rankings than the competitor?

Thanks,

DS

++Jill's Response++

Hi DS,

It's important to note that the number of backlinks your site has is not as
important as the quality of those backlinks. So basically, you'll need to
have a great site that attracts other high-quality sites to link to it.

Well said with few words. :) Once again, good advice Jill.

Labels: jill whalen backlinks

Warning: venting ahead ...

For our regular blog readers you may recall a time back in June when I first wrote of phone issues caused by our phone provider, Telus. On that day we were told our lines would be up shortly and they were down for 3 hours. We switched to Shaw Internet phone and haven't had any problems.

Well recently I began hosting the Webmaster Radio show "The Alternative" with Jim Hedger. To do the show we have to be accessible from a landline (not Internet) telephone. For the first few weeks this meant scrambling to find a landline phone to use nearby, and so when I received a call from Telus inviting me back with great long distance, great Internet access and assurance on two separate occasions that the downtime on the phone line during the transfer would be no more than 10 minutes I decided to go for the switch thus making my Thursday afternoons much less chaotic.

I'm not sure exactly what time today our phone lines became inactive as outgoing calls were working through Shaw (who I've still yet to have a problem with). I just thought it was a slow day at the office and perhaps a great opportunity to get some work caught up, until I received an email notifying me that the caller was forwarded to a Telus non-descript answering service. I tried calling myself and sure enough, I was going to a mailbox.

Of course I called them up to find out what was going wrong (and maybe why they never told me that the line was switched and live). They haven't done the transfer yet though the system seemed to disagree. I went to check the phone jacks, tested it out and now I wasn't even getting to the voice mail, just a "not in service" message. A call back, not sure what happened but no we can't get your messages - the mailbox was deleted. OMG.

So now we've been down a phone line all day, all the messages we missed not knowing our phones had been switched are gone and if we want to keep Show for our phone we're going to be down for 10 days which the number gets ported back. Oh, and they're not sending someone out to fix the problem - we've been told that someone will be over some time tomorrow though they won't confirm a time, that's not their policy.

So our sincere apologies to anyone who has tried to contact us today. Email is working as that's under the control of Shaw and W3 EDGE (where our site is hosted). We'll of course post again as soon as the lines are back up.

Oh, and if anyone would like to help with my venting then link to this post with the anchor text "Telus" or "telus" or "telus bc". I would love for this post to rank for one of those phrases. :) This link should point to http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/2006/12/beanstalk-phone-lines-down.html.

Labels: telus bc phone

I just stumbled on a very good article by Donna Bogatin on the ZDnet site I felt was timely and definitely worth sharing. In the article she rebutes claims made by Google that the click fraud rate sites in the single digits at roughly 2%. She quotes Google point-man Shuman Ghosemajumder and his definition of a fraudulant click:

According to Google, its advertisers are charged for "valid clicks," but not for "invalid clicks." A straightforward analysis of Google's accounting for clicks, therefore, ought to start with definitions: What is the definition of a "valid click" and what is the definition of an "invalid click."

Clarity is difficult to come by, however, as Google often publicly defines the two terms simply in relation to each other.

I asked Google for the definition of an "invalid click." Google's base response: "Any click Google doesn't charge for." A "valid click," in Google’s view, therefore, is one that Google charges for.

Hmmmmmmmm. This reminds me more of a conversation with my kids than a real justification. In my world it goes something like this:

Me - OK bud, time to clean your room.
Kid - But I don't want to clean my room.
Me - Well you have to.
Kid - But why? It's my room.
Me - Because it's a mess and I don't want to look at it.
Kid - Then don't go in there. You don't have to.
Me - Alright how's this: because I said so.

Not the most intelligent arguement I can make but sometime your kids catch you off guard. I don't have to feel so bad about my lack of brilliant counter-point as I'm dealing with cleaning a room, Google is dealing with billions of dollars of advertising revenue.

You can read Donna's full article here.

Labels: google click fraud

For any of our blog readers who also listen to our weekly segment on Webmaster Radio to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the search engine world you'll know that Jim Hedger has been promising a big story for the past couple weeks. Well it's finally out there and as promised, he doesn't disappoint.

Allegations of Click Fraud, inadvertent terrorist funding and more add smatterings of a Hollywood drama to the tech world in what could well be one of the biggest stories since Google was first developed. Even Matt Cutts (Google engineer and quality control guru) is in on the action with multiple blog posts attacking the claims).

An interview with Clarence Briggs of AIT sparked the investigation that has been going on for weeks and involves many independent and involved personalities.

As I'm closely tied to Jim as a co-host of the weekly radio show I'm going to keep my personal impressions aside and simply provide some important links for your viewing/reading. These are links to the original interviews, press conference at SES Chicago as well as some posts on the issue. For anyone involved in PPC or the search engine world this is important news. I also need to mention that the story has only been released as part one (as noted on the Webmaster Radio site). There is more coming and as it becomes available we at Beanstalk will be sure to keep you informed.

The press conference - The press conference at SES Chicago where this all was brought to light.
The interview - The interview with Clarence Briggs that sparked the investigation.
Matt Cutts' initial response - Matt Cutts responds to the allegations. I notice he's been numbering his posts on it so there's surely more to come.
Matt Cutts' second response - Matt posts again on the topic 13 minutes later.
Article by Kevin Newcomb - An article on the subject on ClickZ.com.
A post by Jim Hedger - Jim Hedger describes the story and how it's being taken by the press, SEO's and public.

Keep watching, we'll be posting more as soon as new information becomes available.

Labels: google click fraud

I've just discovered a great video series by Gareth Davies (gotta love that last name and no, there's no relation ;)

There are 6 videos in the series that range from 60 seconds to 5 minutes and cover a lost of the SEO basics. Garether does a good job of giving his viewers an understanding of the basics without using geek-speak or getting technical (at least, any more technical than necessary). The topics covered include:

• Title tags
• The site command
• Google's allintitle command
• The tilde command
• Google's cache
• Google's allinanchor command

For most SEO's there won't be anything new here for those of you who are just getting your feet wet these videos provide some useful information that's easy to understand and is explained with examples (always nice :)

You can watch the videos on Garreth's site at http://www.gsinc.co.uk/video/seo-videos.html.

This is also a good time to remind our readers about link baiting. It's becoming an increasingly important part of a solid link building strategy so be sure to read Andy Hagan's article on the subject.

For those who visit our blog regularly you'll have to pardon the lack of posts over the last few days. As I've been moving houses there has been a LOT tieing up any available waking hours I've had (and many of the hours I *should* have been sleeping as well). But from all this a learned a very valuable lesson and the lesson came from a painter I hired here in beautiful Victoria, BC.

As we were renting our house and had decided that we just didn't like "eggshell white" my wife and I decided it was best to paint it. 5 rooms and 2 halls were painted (we weren't overly concerned with the bathroom and kitchen). Well, it was time to move out and the property manager decided that it had to be put back to it's original color. This is where the fun began.

We started painting about a week before the final moveout day (delaying so we could have the majority of furniture out prior). A snowstorm (a rarity in Victoria, BC) set us back by two days and it wasn't until Tuesday that we realized that we only had one room completed and 3 others with a coat or two of primer. And so we called up a professional painter (maybe we could have gotten the painting done but there was no way we'd get the cleaning done too - Note: I have two boys aged 7 and 9 ;). He got done solo in those 2 days more than my wife and I could have gotten done in 3 or 4 and it was certainly done to a much higher quality.

So what did I learn? That I am NOT the exception to the rule. People inquire about SEO and sometimes even ask why someone would hire a company like Beanstalk when all the information is available on the 'net somewhere. Here's what I discovered through the past week:

• Professionals have experience and work better/faster
• Professionals know what's right and what's wrong when they see it
• Professionals know which tools to use, and
• Professionals allow me to do what I do best while they do what they do best

If I had called up the painter a week earlier and simply had them do the entire job and had I called up professional cleaners to do their job I would have been left with numerous hours to do, well, what I do best and had the hours spent painting and cleaning been spent working and marketing I would have made far more than I had to pay out. It's not just a matter of the cost, it's a matter of the time. I may have to pay a painter $x per hour but one has to keep in mind, a professional can do in 1 day what would take me 4 or 5 to accomplish. Unless they're charging 5 times what I would make in that time - it's worth hiring people who will just do it right.

As it turns out the painter was excellent. His card is still buried somewhere among the boxes still waiting to be unpacked (I will post his info when I uncover it for anyone in Victoria, BC who may be in need of such services). I can't use a better testimonial than this - in our new house we will once again be painting and doing some light renovations. We will this time begin by bringing in a professional - fortunately we already know someone who can get the job done right. :)

Labels: victoria bc painter