Online Marketing Blog

Watch out link-and site-buyers alike! Matt Cutts is in town!

For those of you know don’t know (is there anyone out there who doesn’t?), Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team; which means any secret we are hearing at SMX Advanced, Matt is making sure the shady tactics aren’t working anymore next week.

Beginning with a pop culture comparison, Matt states that risky link building behavior is a lot like Milli Vanilli. If you do something that will benefit your site right away, like lip synching your way to a Grammy, you will get caught and it wont benefit your company in the future. You will be stripped of your Grammy and acquire a drug problem. And your site will be banned.

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Sometimes a Monday blog post deserves a good collection of links:

• The Fox on viral link building and listening to your audience
• Smackdown on Matt Cutts re: spanking SEO blogs
• Jeff Jarvis @TheGuardian and the social whirl driving the development of search
• eMarketer says B2B’s are buzzing over Marketing 2.0
• Vox on Video: Measuring engagement of user generated video
• SEO Lowdown on the LED: “You’re doing the SEM industry a dis-service by characterizing the level or complexity of SEO work according to the size of a company.”

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Are Paid Links Evil? Optimus Prime versus Megatron.

As I attended “Are Paid Links Evil?” as my last session of Day 2 at SES San Jose 2007, I was glad to see that everyone there was still in high spirits after the long day of learning, blogging, networking and preparing for the Google Dance. However, I didn’t expect to see a battle of the Autobots against the Decepticons.

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I haven’t participated in a blog meme for a while so Andy Beal who was tagged by Nathan who was tagged by Randy went and tagged me, so here goes:

1. Like Andy, I started blogging (Dec 2003) as a way to save information, comment on it and share with coworkers.
2. Blogging is a fantastic marketing tool. Our biggest clients ($30bn to $80bn) had read our blog for several months and then called to do business. What’s not to like about that sales cycle?

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Is it an April Fool’s joke or the real thing that Google’s Matt Cutts blog has been hacked by Dark SEO team? Either way, there’s a ton of buzz about it already ranging from at Search Engine Land to several forums to Digg.

Danny Sullivan reported Matt’s site has been slow and that he’ll be offline until Monday so the hacked page will be up for a while. Interestingly, Matt’s blog and this blog are both hosted with the same company - at least from what I can tell from his DNS records.

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Rand posts a great interview with Neil Patel and Cameron Olthius from ACS and the Pronet Advertising blog where he asks about their tactics, their business and some of the politics and intrigue surrounding Digg.

20 Real Facts about Matt Cutts from Chris Winfield including fun tidbits like: Matt is 34, goes to Burning Man and no longer has his top secret security clearance.

Google AdWords Ingnores Redirected Landing Page URLS - Chris from e-consultancy reports the problems he’s having with Google ignoring the redirect urls they use in the AdWords campaign. Google sends those visitors to the web site home page rather than the redirect destination.

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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7148079713264516081
Matt Cutts of Google was nice enough to take a minute to do a quick interview on his way out from the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. This was something we had coordinated via email before the conference, but I was lucky to catch him at the last minute.

Matt gives his take on Pubcon parties as well as the “Site Review” panel and sticking up for the mom and pop sites that make silly mistakes because they don’t have good information. Thanks for taking the time Matt!

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I have to say, the Pubcon conference last week was one of the better search marketing conferences I’ve been to. The overriding impression from just about everyone I talked to was that the content was great and the networking even better.

Below is a roundup of Online Marketing Blog’s blog posts, photos and videos from the WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas 2006. I have to say thanks to everyone that let me put my Sony CyberShot to the test and do these 1 minute “interviews”. :

Videos
Brett Tabke - WebmasterWorld
(Happy about the conference, speakers and the next one in Vegas)

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Marketing Sherpa Gets Acquired by MEC Labs Group (Marketing Experiments)

Quintura LSI Keyword Research Tool Updated - SEOBook
The Digg Algorithm - Unofficial FAQ - Cristian Mezei
Transcribing Matt Cutts’ Videos: One through Fourteen - Peter T. Davis
Elite Retreat - Learn to optimize your business with Dave Taylor, Shoemoney, Aaron Wall and Lee Dodd

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Jim Boykin is taking a break from blogging and getting down to business, a very good idea worth exploring but sad because Jim puts out some excellent information.

Matt Cutts interview with eMarketing Talkshow

Jobs in Search turns 2 years old

New SEO candidate articles at Marketing Pilgrim

Putting Blogs to Work for Wall Street - CNET article on using blog and social media tracking services to give traders competitive intelligence on investor sentiment

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Yahoo gives a new weather report that they rolled out a search index update but not any more detail than that.

There’s a particular phrase that’s very competitive on Yahoo that I spot check every time an update is announced (286,000,000 search results) and we have 2 of our sites in the top ten for the phrase. With this most recent Yahoo update, we dropped from #1 to #3 and the second listing moved up to #5 which is fine, but Yahoo is completely ignoring our 301 redirects and showing the wrong domain names.

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John Battelle has posted an excellent interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the subjects of webspam and human influences to search quality. Regarding “human contribitions” to search quality, for some reason, lately I’ve been wondering if Google will acquire or implement something like StumbleUpon?

In other Matt Cutts’ news, does he have an evil twin? via Barry at SEW

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