Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Google turns 9 today and what a nine years it's been. From a garage startup to an entity paralleled only by Star Trek's Borg in information and influence. Let's take a brief look at how the past 9 years have gone shall we?

• 1996: Larry and Sergey begin work on the BackRub search Engine, forerunner of Google.
• 1998: They raise $1m in investment and open Google’s first offices in Menlo Park, California. Google is named in PC magazine’s top 100 websites and Search Engines for 1998.
• 1999: Moves offices twice, first to Palo Alto, then to Googleplex, its current home in Mountain View, California. The beta label comes off in September.
• 2000: Announces partnership with Yahoo. Officially becomes the world’s largest search engine – it now has a billion-page index.
• 2001: Eric Schmidt joins Google. Google Images launched.
• 2002: Google News and Froogle launched.
• 2003: Google AdSense – a program that chooses advertising according to a web page’s content – is launched.
• 2004: Gmail is launched.
• 2005: Google Earth is launched.
• 2006: Google China, or Google.cn, is launched. Google purchases YouTube.com for $1.65 billion.
• 2007: Google open Gmail to everyone. Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Of course, this is only a brief summary of what they've done. Other than throwing the entire SEO community for a loop back in November of 2003 (ugh) you can view more of the timeline of this leviathan at the following sites:

• Google Corporate History - Google.com
• Google Acquisitions - Wikipedia.com

There are of course countless other sites where one can gain more information on Google if you're interested.

And so a big happy birthday goes out to Google. As much as many of us may complain about them from time-to-time, they are the reason I have a job, we have a company, and you have an interest in this blog post. :)

Labels: birthday, google

Well we're going to go off on a slightly personal tangent here so that I can wish a very happy birthday to my now 10-year-old boy Teli. Ah the joy of birthdays. My personal joy was waking up to him enjoying his new gift - an electric guitar. :)

So now there may be something that can pull him away from the computer though, once he realizes how expensive new equipment is I imagine he'll get back to working on his Pokemon pictures website or some other fad to reap the AdSense revenue (ah, brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it). :)

Happy birthday little buddy and thanks for 10 great years.

Labels: adsense, birthday

Today on SEOMoz's Whiteboard Friday Rand Fishkin discusses links. He gives some valuable advice on how to value links. What might have appealed to me more than anything else is the ego of it. Rand advises us to treat links as an entity outside of Google. His basic advice is:

If the link would be valuable even if the search engines didn't exist then it's a good link.

This matches well with what I discussed in my article "How To Win Links & Influence Engines" when I was discussing paid links. In it I wrote:

The only advice I will give to those looking to purchase links is this, ask yourself, “Am I expecting to get traffic from this link?” What this will weed out at the very least is small footer links and links on irrelevant sites. Basically, if the link is worth it without the boost in rankings then continue to pay for it and consider any ranking increases a bonus. If you aren’t getting any traffic from the link then it’s likely not worth paying for. If you’re not getting traffic then the site likely isn’t relevant or the link is in a poor location. The engines will likely pick either of these up and you’ll end up paying for a link that isn’t passing on any weight anyways.

This rule translates well to virtually all types of links.

I won't go into all the details of the video, it's only 6 minutes and that's 6 minutes well spent. You can watch it below:



And a big thanks to Rand for summarizing this topic so very well. That's why you're one of SEO's "Rock Stars". :)

And to our visitors, enjoy the weekend !

Labels: link bait, link building, paid links, rand fishkin

Earlier today Jessica Bowman, of Business.com announced on her blog that she will be leaving her position with Business.com to become Yahoo!'s Sr. Technical Marketing Manager.

Jessica has earned here right to stand among the major players with insightful analysis of both SEO/SEM and how to work successfully as an in-house SEO. I've had the opportunity to chat with Jessica on a number of occasions at SES events and have been repeatedly impressed by both her charm and her intelligence.

We at Beanstalk would like to extend our sincere congratulations to Yahoo! for this acquisition.

Labels: jessica bowman, yahoo

Google is sponsoring a HUGE contest. The prize: $20 million. The task: To successfully soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth.

Here's a press release from Google:

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space and orbit the Earth. Two years later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space (she orbited the earth 48 times -- take that, Yuri). By the end of the decade, the Apollo teams, rising to President Kennedy's challenge, made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin the first human beings to walk on the Moon.

Great things can happen when you reach for the stars. That's why we're thrilled to be sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE, which will award a total of $30 million to teams competing around the world to land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.

Why does Google love space? Well, for one thing, we just think it's cool. More seriously, space exploration has a remarkable history of producing technological breakthroughs, from ablative heat shields and asteroid mining to invisible braces and Tang; the X-PRIZE, too, could lead to important developments in robotic space exploration, a whole host of new space-age materials, precision landing control technology, and who knows what else.

Finally, we hope the contest will help renew public interest in fields like math, engineering and computer science, especially among the young people on whom we'll all be depending to tackle tomorrow's technical challenges, whether they're on the web or among the stars.

As Neil Armstrong famously pointed out, small steps lead to giant leaps. We hope that our sponsorship of the Lunar X-PRIZE is one of those small steps, and we can't wait to see what giant leaps result. By the way, just so the teams can scout locations and plan accordingly, Google Moon just went live. For more information, visit the Google Lunar X-PRIZE site.

Alright Google I gotta say (as a Star Trek fan): that's really cool.

Labels: google, lunar x-prize, seo contest

When one thinks of Internet marketing's rockstars the list is fairly short. Rand Fishkin, Matt Cutts, Neil Patel and a notable few others. These are the people that have not only made a splash based on their skills but have also become the voices and faces of the industry. For this reason above most, I love publishing news on them (always good for some traffic) and good for the health of the Beanstalk blog (good quality information).

Well I discovered today on the WebProNews.com site that Neil Patel is giving away the secrets to becoming an expert Digger. For those of you who don't know, a Digger is one who uses the social bookmarking site Digg. Due to it's popularity, experts are those who can also use Digg to generate large volumes of traffic for their clients. Neil is such a person and is the face most closely associated with social media marketing and today he's put out a video explaining how to do it yourself. I won't bother describing the content, it's only 2 minutes and 51 seconds. You can watch it below:

Labels: digg, neil patel, rand fishkin, social media, webpronews