aimClear Search Marketing Blog

If your website is lost to Google (aka “The Man”), not just buried in the SERPs, it may have violated Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) by singular or multiple violations. This isn’t a mistake, so be prepared to get on your knees, confess your crimes, wait for the Googlers to flip the switch back on and release you from spammers’ prison. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational. It turns out Google’s not adept at some situational searches which, to some minds,  leaves them vulnerable to services like Twitter in a substantial segment of emerging search inventory. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing page value distribution, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing.

Who cares, we don’t need noFollow. What bothers many is that know we’ve learned Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while offering misleading public information. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get this out of the way: Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team. He is perceived as a rock star in the industry and everywhere he goes he is a followed by a giddy horde of search marketers. SEO trends and techniques live and die by the words of the affable Mr. Cutts.

Yet there remains a healthy degree of skepticism and about Google’s advice. At the end of the day, the various teams at Google are doing what’s best for Google’s search users, which is not always best for an SEO’s clients.

Continuing the SMX Advanced tradition, Matt was kind enough to sit down with Danny Sullivan once more to take on audience questions in a You & A with Matt Cutts. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media has crept into nearly every aspect of SEO to where it’s now quite difficult to imagine them disentangled from eachother. Keyword research traditional to SEO is being used to advise every tag, tier, and title in brand social media efforts. Go ahead and find me an SEO who says “I don’t do social media”,  they’re either speaking figuratively, are blissfully unaware, or have an extremely rare vendor relationship.

What do we now know to be true about SMO that we didn’t know 1 year ago or even 3 months ago? What social media principles have stood the test of time? Should we reignite a serious dialogue on ethics in social media optimization?

Search Engine Strategies New York 09 brought some of the best and most outspoken search & social media marketing figures together for the session “An Update on Social Media Optimization“, moderated by Search Engine Watch’s managing editor Kevin Newcomb. Read the rest of this entry »