Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz takes some time to explain PageRank as it was when it first came about vs how it is today. Admittedly, it's greatly simplified in this video BUT it's probably the most easy-to-understand explanation I've heard to date and covers the changes in the system well. For those of us watch the PageRank on our homepage and internal pages it we've likely witnessed a lot of what he's taking about.

To candy-coat it even more, Rand covered the explanation as part of his Whiteboard Friday series so you don't even have to read. :) Here's the video:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Has Pagerank Changed? (visit for the comments) from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Labels: google, pagerank, rand fishkin, seomoz

This morning I had brought to my attention (by Daryl Quenet, Beanstalk's Director Of Optimization Services) a trademark application for - of all things - the term "SEO". Jason Gambert has filed for the trademark. After his initial applications were declined he's managed to wear down the fine folks at the trademark office and it's passed the initial stages.

As part of the application Jason has referred to SEO as a process not a service. He claims to want to establish standards and anyone who doesn't meet those standards cannot use the term SEO to refer to them. And who will dictate these standards? Why none other than Jason Gambert himself. Why do I have a hunch there will be a paid review fee to insure that your processes (not services) meet his "stringent" requirements (of course, this is just a guess).

Now one thing that REALLY irks me (well - one among many) can be encompassed by the question, "Who is Jason Gambert?" Before this issue arose I'd never heard of him, a number of other SEO community members had never heard of him so I have to ask, who the heck (the word I'll use in a blog post and save more colorful terms for later) is he to appear out of nowhere and claim to know the standards we should all live up to? While the term SEO is so obviously a generic one that my main objection is that he shouldn't be able to trademark it in the first place, my next opposition would be that Jason Gambert himself is not in a position of authority in the industry to set standards at all.

While I'd still object is it was Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan or the like - at least I'd be able to sleep knowing that the standards themselves would be legitimate ones. But Jason Gambert? I don't think I'm going to try to build my business processes around tactics from some guy I don't know and have never heard of.

But I digress. This is a HUGE issue. If you're at all involved in the SEO or Internet communities you NEED to file a complaint.

Sarah Bird, legal counsel for SEOmoz was the first to file a formal complaint. You can read theirs at http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?qs=91183449. You can also read an awesome summary of the issue, the history, etc. on the SEOmoz site here. It was a huge pleasure to have Sarah on the show to discuss this important issue. Now the work is up to you ...

To file your opposition to this act (and you certainly should) you can do so on the Trademark Office site at http://estta.uspto.gov/filing-type.jsp. If you need more time you can also simply file for an extension that will give you 30 days to complete the process.

It important that you do one of the two today at it's the last day to file.

On a slightly different note. Should this not work and should Jason Gambert actually get the trademark we're going to have to ready ourselves for battle. it's going to be important that the SEO community (I CAN still use that term for now) rallies together in defense of any companies charged by Jason. Beanstalk will commit to a $1000 donation to the first company taken to court in the event that Gambert actually get the right to do so to help cover the legal fees. I'd challenge other major SEO companies to do the same. We'll need to make it so expensive to fight these ridiculous battles against anyone involved that it's not worth it.

Now go get filing.

Labels: applied seo, christmas rand seomoz neil patel, danny sullivan, jason gambert, rand fishkin, sarah bird, trademark

In what can only be considered a devastating leak of information from Google HQ in Mountain View, a confirmed but as yet publicly anonymous executive from Google has leaked papers detailing some of the key fundamentals to Google's link value calculation system. The announcement by Google earlier today details some of the contents of this information as they work hard to minimize the effect that this will have on their algorithm as SEO's around the world scramble get their hands on it. The news, first leaked by SEO-guru Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, comes as a shock of sorts and leaves SEO's scratching their heads figuring out what to do. There has been startled reaction from the community but first - let's cover a few of the key points (we'll provide a link to more thorough information below).

The leaked information confirmed and illuminated the following information:

• The PageRank we see in the green bar has no bearing on how a site will rank. This information is generated internally based on user expectations and not as a ranking factor.
• The weighing of factors occurs in the following order: Google's internal PageRank, position on page, number of links on the page, anchor text, relevancy. I found it VERY interesting that trust is not yet a calculation on link worth though this may be an omission in the information provided.
• Reciprocal linking is detectable and while it is not penalized, no value is given for the links. A limitation outlined in this is the Google apparently has little ability to to detect legitimate linking sites that happen to link to each other.
• Paid links are not detectable. There is currently no architecture for the automatic detection of paid links. Google relies on reporting by SEO's and webmasters.
• There's a lot more in there - this is just what I've gleaned at the time of this writing. There's a link below to the documents themselves.
  

I had a chance to have a very brief chat with Matt Cutts (quality control guru from Google) who has told us he will be responding on his blog once more information on the leak becomes available (and I'm sure when he's given the OK by the Gods of Google to talk). His response to this leak was, "... this is obviously an issue we are going to have to deal with quickly. We expect SEO's to take quick advantage of this information and a strategy is being developed to deal with this and make adjustments to the algorithm shortly." You can monitor Matt's comments on his blog and a big thanks to him for taking a moment out of his understandably hectic schedule to answer a couple questions for me.

On the other side of the coin sit the SEO's. While we're all obviously reading all the information we can on the leak - we do so with some concern. In an email from Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz he noted, "You might think this is a great opportunity for SEO's but it's not - in fact this is one of the worst things that could happen. All the information we're all reading will be invalid by the time we could employ the tactics and we're about to head into a period of significant instability in regards to Google's rankings . Not only do we have to fear for the rankings we've worked hard to attain over the years - we also have to deal with rankings that will be in a constant state of flux over the next few months. Clients are NOT going to be happy." Good call Rand and you can monitor his comments on the subject on their blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog.

This is obviously an issue you're going to want to research this issue - there's a lot more about this and links to the documents on the cnet site at http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9907571-36.html. Well, the article is actually about Google's April Fool's Day joke but we think ours was fun too. :) Enjoy the day. ;)

Labels: april fools day, danny sullivan, google, google update, link building, rand fishkin, seomoz

Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz (OMG, that's two post in a row about the guy) had his whiteboard Friday today (as he does every Friday). Whiteboard Friday is an "event" during which Rand uses a whiteboard to illustrate complex SEO theories, technologies, etc. in layman's terms. He does a damn good job at it too.

This weeks whiteboard was about how the engines can "sniff out" the origin of a story through links and rank the first source of a story even if a stronger source posts about it later and even if other sources have better anchor text. It's a great post that right now discusses only the news and blog searches but which Rand asks, "could this be expanded to include regular search?"

Now, in my opinion I don't believe that this type of analysis and ranking really works in the regular search arena. If I write a 500 word summary of a new Google patent and I'm the first to cover it and, after reading my post, Bill Slawski over at SEO By The Sea writes up on the patent (like he wouldn't have found it already) and writes a 10,000 word summary of it's ins-and-outs and an analysis of it's application in the real world and links to the Beanstalk blog post as the first source he found out about the patent on (thanks for the imaginary link Bill ;) which of our two pages should rank when people look up information on that patent? Heck, I love traffic but even I'd have to say that if Google wants to provide good results they're going to display Bill's 10,000 word analysis above my 500 word summary in every search regardless of where it first appeared.

Of course, Rand is covering the technology in simple terms to illustrate an idea and of course the algorithms are more complex than simply a link mapping system to determine first source with the source ranking regardless of content. Just wanted to make sure that was understood before you watched the video however. :)

So without further ado, here's Rand Fishkin explaining how engines recognize first source for blogs and news:

Labels: bill slawski, blog, rand fishkin, seomoz

Every now and then one sees a result in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) that you know isn't going to change. If I enter windows I'm going to get the Microsoft site. If I search again in a year, it'll be the same. In the realm of SEO these exist as well, or at least I thought they did.

For those of you who are SEO's or are learning SEO you've likely heard of Matt Cutts (and if not, you will now and it was worth the trip to this blog if for no other reason). Matt Cutts is easily the most public of Google employees who publishes tip s and information on Google (and other ramblings) on his blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

With the massive number of links (literally in the many hundreds of thousands) to his site he basically owns the phrase "seo blog". I monitor the phrase as it's one of our secondary terms and have basically known that until Matt quit Google, grew to be 100 years old, died, and about 100 more years passed and noone bothered to renew the domain - only then would someone else rank for the phrase. And yet I was wrong.

I happened to be searching for SEO information (it happens) and so I looked up blogs to see if there were any new ones I hadn't been watching. That's when I noticed it, Matt was now in second place. I was shocked but not by who it was. if youw ere to tell me that Matt would lose his #! ranking and made me guess who I would have been right - but I was still very surprised to see him drop at all.

So who toppled the king? None other than Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz team at http://www.seomoz.org/blog.

Congratulations Rand !!! That's definitely a job well done.

On the plus side for Matt and Google, at least we know you're not cheating. :)

Labels: google, matt cutts, rand fishkin, seomoz

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

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

Well it appears that I'm just not going to be going to any sessions, and that's a good thing. :) Today has been spent networking and interviewing some excellent guests. Let's cover the interviews first:

Rand Fishkin From SEOMoz.com:
Anyone involved in SEO either does or should know the name Rand Fishkin. Whether it's as one of the most notable SEO's in the industry or as the man who ruined it for the rest of us by proposing to his fiance in arguable one of the most romantic manners every (come on Rand ... how can us mere mortals top that?) his name has become synonymous with Internet Marketing.

For those who don't already know, Rand purchased some commercial time on Veronica Mars (his fiance's favorite show. Here it is:

Want to know how she reacted (gee, is there even a doubt whether she said yes? ;)

See? Now how the heck do we compete with THAT??!!!???

Congratulations Rand. :)

Other than a little lecture on toning it down a bit Rand and I discussed a number of SEO issues. We discussed the movement by Google towards personalization, the benefits this has for some searchers and the issues it's causing (such as when you're referring to a resource by it's position in the results ("just enter "blue widgets" into Google and click on the first result" ... "no, not that site" .... "ugh, OK - what do you see in position 4?" ... and so on). it's also an issue for SEO's who send ranking reports for the same reason.

Rand and I also discussed Google's 0.02% claim regarding click fraud (we agree, that's a bit low ;) Rand is also friends with a number of the fine folks from the major engines, I just had to ask him how he can openly state that purchasing links is alright when it is in clear violation on the engine's guidelines. The the client is your client, not the engines. Again, we agree. :)

Of course we covered more. I was supposed to try to keep the interview to 5 to 7 minutes at the request of Webmaster Radio but it likely lasted closer to 15 to 20. Rand, you're a great interview and thank you very much.

I'll post the podcast as soon as it becomes available.

John Marshall From ClickTracks:
After Rand I had another great pleasure in chatting with John Marshall from ClickTracks. Despite being sick he was a trooper, showed up, and was great to chat with.

John and I discussed the future of analytics and some of the enhancements that were likely to come over the next year to ClickTracks and other analytics tools. The main point here was beginning to track individuals differently using scripts so repeat visitors and monitored and (I'l inferring here) patterns among types of users will be tracked.

We also discussed some of the recent enhancements to ClickTracks which I haven't had the chance to install yet. The goal is to make reports easier to read for the layman. From the sounds of it, mission accomplished but most of our clients have no problems reading the current set. :)

We went on to discuss a variety of other issues (sorry WMR team, I just can't keep it to 5 to 7 minutes when I'm interviewing people like this). You'll have to wait for the podcast to hear it all. I'll post a link as soon as it's available.

Jon Kelly From SureHits.com:
Jon and I had some fun chatting about SureHits.com, and insurance and loans focused CPC agency. We discussed Click Fraud (it's a CPC engine after all - I couldn't resist), the processes they have in place for detecting it (I have to admit, they're pretty good) and the hurdles they face as tey try to expand into the UK market with different regulations in their industries.

I'll post a link to the podcast as soon as it becomes available.


The Party:
Last night I didn't get to attend the party, I did however get to ride the bus to-and-fro (I'll post pics as soon as I get them off my camera) complete with the Bruce Clay team, the Google Webmaster Tools presentation team (very nice folks though I couldn't get a card out of them :)

After the party ended (that I only got to ride the bus to) I had the opportunity to hop back on it to head to a night club (Club 320 if you care) and then on for more resulting in a 4:30am bedtime and a sigh of relief in the morning that I switched to water at around 2am and stuck with that decision for the remainder of the night.

A picture is worth a thousand words an these pics might be worth more. The bus was amazing with TV's, laser lights, music, beer of many varieties and great company. I had a great time with the host of the bus Ken Jurina and Epiar. Thanks Ken - it's awesome and I'm glad I had a chance to chat with you and your team through the night.


So, that's "it" thus far aside from business development and networking issues that don't really need to be blogged about. :)

But stay tuned, there are more great interviews and parties to come. We're only half-way through day 2 of 4. ;)

Labels: clicktracks, cpc, epiar, google click fraud, john marshall, jon kelly, paid links, rand fishkin, seomoz, ses ny 2007, statistics stats, surehits

Well here we are, 3 interviews later. Haven't had a chance to go to a session yet but I did have the opportunity to interview Mike Moran from IBM, Michael and Mikhail from ClickFacts.com and Stephanie Krebs from DominionEnterprises.com. Here's what we talked about.

With Mike From IBM:
Mike and I discussed the launch of a free search engine Omnifind Yahoo! Edition. While I haven't had a chance to put it through it's paces yet he describes it as easy to install, light on technology and resources provided you have a dedicated server at your disposal. Some of the features that tey provide such as symantic search functionality are impressive and I will definitely be giving it a peek when I get back from the convention.

One thing I didn't enjoy finding out was that the product was launched back in December. What disappoints me about this is not finding out about it until now. At first I thought that perhaps it just slipped past me but after asking a number of well-informed SEO's I discovered that we were all in the same boat. And so my big advice for the day is to Yahoo! and IBM. When you have great launches like this ... LET US KNOW ABOUT IT !!!

Mike and I also had a chance to chat about a book that he an Bill Hunt wrote on SEO. An interesting read I'm sure as it covers SEO from it's general standpoint but also notes some of the difference when you're dealing with enterprise-sized websites. The book it SEM Inc.

I will be posting a link to the full podcast of the interview as soon as it is available.

With Mike and Mikhail From ClickFacts.com:

Jim Hedger and I had the opportunity to discuss web analytics with Mike an Mikhail. Where it is, Google's 0.02% figure an where it's going. This interview would be tough to describe so I'll just post the link to the podcast when it becomes available.

With Stephanie Krebs From DominionEnterprises.com:
The lovely Stephanie Krebs and I had the opportunity to discuss print media and the migration of Dominion Enterprises from traditionally print to dominantly online. While you may not know the name Dominion Enterprises you've likely seen their work with such publications as Boat Trader, Real Estate Trader, etc. (know you know them right?)

We also discussed how ad purchasing works and how the small business owner can get involved without breaking the bank (and not just through her properties). Dominion Enterprises also provides SEM services for their clients. Stephanie and I discussed SEO and the difficulties in being an SEO firm that provides services to multiple companies in the same sector, in the same region.

Like the others, I'll post a link to the full interview when it becomes available.


And Tomorrow:
Tomorrow you'll definitely want to mark your schedules to check back on our blog. I'll be interviewing Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz and John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks. As well as reporting on the events of the night.

Labels: clickfacts, clicktracks, dominion enterprises, mike moran, omnifind, rand fishkin, ses ny 2007

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