Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

I gotta say, SES San Jose was awesome. While the sessions themselves are always interesting and there's always something to pick up from them - it's usually the networking and "aside" conversation that you have that are the most memorable. This thought inspired me to post a "the people that you meet" post with some of the more memorable people that I had the pleasure of meeting in San Jose.

Jim Boykin - WeBuildPages.com
It's been a long time that I've wanted to meet my arch nemesis. Jim's site and the Beanstalk site tend to bounce back-and-forth in the rankings and have done so for the last year. If we're not #1 for "seo services" I don't even have to look to see who is.

It was great to finally meet Jim and learn that, aside from being a thorn in my side in the rankings from time-to-time, he's an alround good guy and knows his SEO (I should certainly hope so or I'd have to take it personally that they oust us periodically).

Kristine Schachinger - TravelWorm.com
Kristine was awesome to meet and a ton of fun. She managed to keep up with us SES'ers as far as the partying went but always kept her wits about her.

I also had the opportunity to meet the Travel Worm. This friendly little critter tried to eat my lunch but after a quiet threat to stick him on a hook and drop him into the ocean he let me eat in peace.

Ken Jurina - Epiar.com
Ah Ken, ya gotta love him. I had to give him huge props for this shot. The camera wasn't working properly and he managed to keep my 180 pounds aloft for quite a while. Was it worth it, not so sure.

The truly shocking things about this pic is that we'd each only had a couple beers by this point in the night. ;)

Robert Garcia (rumblepup) - Banler.com
Robert is the guy on the right. If you follow my Flickr posts as well you'll recall that I first met him at SES New York a few months ago.

I spent many hours over the course of the week discussing everything from SEO to politics with Robert and look forward to the next SES to chat with him again. A great guy and, while he won't say so, a very good SEO - even if I did make him wrong once ;)

David Brown (neo) - Neo1SEO.com
Running into David Brown reminded me that he is indeed a nice guy even though he tried to hit on my wife in New York (this is a joke). With forearms as large as my calves and a sense of humor that's even larger I'm now tagging him "the strongest SEO in the world".

In fact, if you're an SEO or blogger I'd truly appreciate if you'd link to http://www.neo1seo.com/about-neo1-seo.htm with the text "the strongest SEO in the world". It's an inside joke but it's a funny one. You can gather from this pic where the name came from and I'll note, he didn't lose an arm wrestle all night even though he was up against people coming in fresh. Nicely done David !!!

Glenn Convey - Metamend.com
Glenn is the President of Metamend, my old arch nemesis before I started competing with WeBuildPages.com. Now I hope Glenn knows it wasn't personal (seeing as how he didn't work there at the time). They're also a Victoria, BC based SEO firm so of course, they had to make my "hit list".

"Unfortunately" I got to know Glenn at this SES event and I learned, well, darn it - he's a nice guy and I look forward to seeing him again at future SES events and hopefully at some local tech functions.

Michael Gray - Wolf-Howl.com
Michael gave what was easily one of the most talked about presentations at SES San Jose 2007. He discussed paid links and basically blasted Google for having the "nerve" to tell webmasters what they can and cannot do on their own websites to monetize them.

While I don't necessarily agree with everything Michael said I do have to agree that it's Google's job, not ours, to find ways to determine whether a link should be considered a vote towards a site. And for you few Google employees who visit our site each day (and you know who you are) please note that Michael in no way paid for the link above. :)

Ken Leonard - Hackersafe.com
Ken hosted a dinner and man, can he pick great food. I had the pleasure of sitting beside Ken and he's both a gentleman and a scholar. A truly enjoyable meal with great company.

Also sitting at the table with me was Christian Wilson (see below), Bryan Eisenberg (author of a book I'm a huge fan of, "Waiting For Your Cat To Bark") - Bryan, it was a true pleasure to meet you, Cresta Pilsbury (also from HackerSafe) and others who were sitting farther away from me and thus, I didn't have the pleasure to get to know.

Christian Wilson - WebsiteMagazine.com
As always it's a pleasure to chat with Christian. I met him at SES San Jose last year, again in New York and once again had the pleasure of his company this year.

Christian is an all around great guy, a credit to his company, and was kind enough to hold on to my bag of geek-toys overnight saving me from having to hit the hotel before heading off to the Google Dance (and with the lineups to get there, that saved me about an hour).

Big thanks to Christian and his fine publication to which I am a subscriber (and you should too, heck - it's free :). Click here to sign up.


Big apologies to the many people that I met who couldn't make the list. There were a couple criteria I had to weed it down to - I needed to have a picture, I needed to have chatted with you for a while, and well - I needed to think that it was great to have met you. Admittedly, the picture issue is the most limiting as I often found myself so interested in the conversations that I didn't stop to get a picture taken such as occurred in my many conversation with Bill Slawski (and if you read this Bill - you really did make me nervous as heck in the personalization session :).

Thanks to everyone who made SES San Jose the great success that it was. Special thanks to Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan, Incisive Media, Bill Slawski, Jim Hedger, and my wife for creating the environment that I get to share and partake of new and insightful ways to do the job I love so much.

Labels: bill slawski, bryan eisenberg, chris sherman, danny sullivan, david brown, epiar, hackersafe, jim boykin, jim hedger, metamend, michael gray, robert garcia, ses sj 2007, website magazine, webuildpages

My friend and veteran SEO extraordinaire Jim Hedger will be moving on. For the past year Jim has been the Sr. Editor of Jayde Online, helping change the face of SiteProNews.com, the ISEDN.org and keeping us informed with his blog posts, articles and of course, his show "The Alternative" on Webmaster Radio which I had the great pleasure of co-hosting with him.

We all wish Jim the very best of luck as he pursues to advance his SEM consulting firm Markland Media, I know he'll succeed wherever the SEO-world takes him.

He will be missed as the voice of Jayde Online, but I have a hunch we'll still be hearing from him often (call it a hunch).

Labels: jim hedger, sitepronews, webmaster radio

Technology is a wonderful thing ... until it doesn't work.

When you're business is dependent on a fax machine to be functioning (getting signed contracts is handy) and it's not it can be, shall we say, inconvenient (not the word I was using at the time but this is a corporate blog so we'll stick with "inconvenient"). Well a big thanks goes out to Metro Fax for coming to our rescue.

Mark over at Metro Fax Internet fax services became aware of our predicament and a few minutes later, without asking, I received an email confirming that I had an account, the number to use, and instructions on how to use it. Thus far it's worked smoothly and signed contracts are going out (and more importantly, coming in).

I'll of course be keeping their services past the emergency period they were kind enough to give us in a pinch. Cheaper than a dedicated fax line and, as far as I'm concerned, superior in that I always have a backup copy in my email folders.

So once again, a great big thanks for Mark from Metro Fax Internet Fax Services. You get to be my hero for the day !!!

Labels: internet fax services, metro fax

Reputation management is an important part of running any business and to that end I like to periodically search the web for mentions of our company, my name personally (lost in many mentions of the Kinks let me tell you) and and what we've been doing. In a search over the weekend for references to my speaking engagement at SES on personalization I found the site SEOBEAN (owned by SoftBean). Admittedly I can't recall the phrase I'd used however that's besides the point.

I found a few similarities between our services and theirs. Let's take a couple examples:

From the Softbean property (SEOBEAN.com):
"SEOBEAN Search Engine Positioning ranks your website in the top positions on the major search engines. We know that your business needs success to survive in today's competitive economy, that's why we offer a 100% money back guarantee on our guaranteed seo and search engine positioning services."

From the Beanstalk site:
"Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning ranks your website in the top positions on the major search engines with our GUARANTEED SEO services. We know that your business or firm needs success to survive in today's competitive economy, that's why we offer a 100% money back guarantee on our guaranteed seo and search engine optimization services."

Hmmmmmmmmm.

And there's more

From the Softbean property (SEOBEAN.com):

• You will attain a minimum of 5 top 20 rankings on the major search engines across all of your targeted keyword phrases.


• Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more of the major search engines.


• You will attain a minimum of 3 top 10 rankings on the major search engines across all of your selected keyword phrases.

From The Beanstalk site:

• Your primary targeted phrase will appear on the first page of one or more of the major search engines.
• You will attain a minimum of 3 top 10 rankings on the major search engines across all of your selected keyword phrases.
• You will attain a minimum of 5 top 20 rankings on the major search engines across all of your targeted keyword phrases.

And just a pet-peeve, the claim to be "Keeping Promises Since 4 Years" and yet a simple whois shows that neither SEOBEAN nor SOFTBEAN have been around that long (both registered last year).

So a warning to SOFTBEAN, you've been reported to all the major search engines, we've contacted the directories you're listed in, and we'll be contacting the article directories you've submitted bastardized versions of our articles to. Oh, and this blog post will likely rank #1 or #2 for your name.

As a note, we are not malicious people. We just put in a LOT of hard work writing quality and educational content (we hope you agree). Copyright is a big issue for us and I certainly don't want the likes of SEOBEAN or SOFTBEAN (or whatever other properties they might own) benefiting from that.

Labels: copyright infringement, seobean, softbean

I'm sitting in my hotel room in beautiful (and incredibly warm) San Jose. I decided to take a moment away from going over my presentation on Personalization to write a quick blog post with a big thank you to all those that made the first night in San Jose a fun one.

Today's lineup of sessions looks to be entertaining and informative. Unfortunately I won't be attending any from the morning as I'm much more comfortable speaking on the phone, in person and on the radio and I expect that for the next few hours I'm going to feel ill in preparation for my speaking session later this afternoon. I am however looking forward to the Search Behavior session which follows after the one I'm doing and I'll probably feel a lot more relaxed at that point. :)

Watch for another post later this afternoon and updates on our SES San Jose 2007 page with details on my session, some jewels from the session after and some resources to accompany my presentation (it's hard to cover something as vast as Google personalization patents in 12 minutes).

Labels: personalization, ses sj 2007

Any one with any experience trying to get a site listed on DMOZ, knows that most of the time it can be a battle. One of my sites I have submitting 4 times over the last 2.5 years, without it being listed! This happens for various reasons, the most common is the editors just don't care, or they don't have time to maintain their category. The second was they seem to constantly have technical difficulties, at one point they lost several months worth of submissions (Although they don't admit to this fact). Check out this Form posting here to see just a few of their recent issues.

But that is just a side note as to why my faith was originally lost with this fine directory. Last week I was working on optimizing a client website, and was looking at the SERPs for their keyphrase. They are currently trying to compete for a state wide health insurance keyphrase (ie Alaska health insurance but a much higher competition state). And I noticed an anomaly in the results all the sites listed were between PR4 - 7, except for a single PR2 site. Let me tell you how quickly alarm bells went off. After a quick analysis of their backlinks I quickly discovered how they manipulated their results.

The website followed the standard header, top navigation, left navigation, then right content. Now this is how they got sneaky, in their header instead of their company name they listed their keyphrase (ie Alaska Health Insurance), with their real company name listed under the left navigation in small text. Then submitted their website to DMOZ under there keyphrase, and had it accepted in the regional health insurance page!

Now you might be asking how can just a DMOZ listing make such a different in a sites results? Firstly DMOZ is rather old with a lot of authority the Web Archive lists its first version cached as Jan 25, 1999. Secondly DMOZ isn't just one site, anyone can take the data from the directory and post it any where they like. So you can easily end up with 2 dozens links just from one submission over the course of time (I don't think most people tend to re-download the data set after the first time they set it up, so get listed as soon as possible).

So being a good netizen (Internet Citizen), and purely with the Google and the quality of the Internet at heart I filled out the "report abuse/spam" form documenting what had happened. Needless to say I was shocked when I looked at DMOZ yesterday to find out that in less then a week they had updated the listing with the actual companies name. As a result they have currently dropped from position 5 to 8, and I'm sure they will continue to drop at least a few more pages.

Maybe it just might be time again to submit my site to DMOZ!

Labels: backlinks, dmoz, search engine spam

The long delayed Google PR update is now at hand. Originally predicted for mid July 2007, it is only a month late based on previous Google trends. Honestly this comes as no surprise with the amount of minor Algorithm changes we have seen nearly week on week, for around the last 2 months. The last thing Google wanted to do was post an update with some of the bugs that we've seen in the last couple weeks in the SERPs.

The update looks to have started on Sunday, August 5th when Google started giving new sites (PR 0) more Authority. My conclusion about the update starting on the 5th has to do with a brand new site having its Google traffic increase around 5x overnight. Next we observed sites that had been incorrectly assigned higher PRs see significant decreases (this seems mainly to happen to PR2 sites showing as PR5 or PR6), as well as domains that had expired seeing a PR drop, or a complete loss of PR.

This morning I observed the new website mentioned above which was setup in the end of June drop from a PR4 (this was an incorrect value which actually belonged to another site that google had assigned to both domains) to a PR0, then this afternoon jump back up to a PR4 which is inline with the amount of Links, and strength of links that are linking to the site.

We have guestimated in house that the PR update should be done by Wednesday night or Thursday at the latest. The big thing we haven't seen finish is the main domain PR update, and update of PRs for internal pages.

Labels: google update

I received an email inviting me to enter the Rank Race. The Rank Race is an SEO competition that will span over six months. Many of the competition details are a bit vague, likely to keep entrants from getting a jump start on things. I have submitted our application and we will be entering.

I'll be sure to keep you posted on how it goes, who ends up winning, and what tactics we used to get the positions we secure. I'll also post our contest domain here so you can monitor what we're doing though I won't be releasing all the details about why we're doing what we're doing until after the competition is over. I'm not trying to hide anything from you, our valuable blog readers, just the other competitors. :)

You can read more about the competition, who's in it and what it's all about on the Rank Race site.

And if you decide to enter, good luck (but not too much of it ;).

Labels: rank race, seo contest

I received an email this morning from Gareth Davies from GSINC (great last name by the way Gareth ;) In his email he let me know about a new SEO game that just came online. If you like SEO and/or you like boxing games, you'll enjoy this one. You'll battle all the scourges of SEO from the Hidden Text Kid right up to the Spam Lord himself.

Good luck and may your white hat keep you protected. :)

You'll find the game (read: you'll find the link bait) here.

Labels: black hat, link bait, white hat