So Google are trying to weed out the un natural links, paid links call it what you like. What Google are doing now is flying in the face of traditional marketing, and the BIG agencies will slap them down for it (in the Uk anyhow).

WHY does a guy sit in a bath of beans? WHY does someone run the london Marathon in a suit of armour? PUBLICITY that is why. and WHAT is publicity translated into in Web terms? LINK BAIT plain and simple. The traditional marketers from the offline world (Like myself) have promoted link baiting constantly from day 1.  NOW Google think it is wrong

On the one hand they say create content worth linking to. On the other hand they now say, dont try to attract links by link baiting and false linking methods.

So I get 5000 backlinks because I write something that goes viral, and that is ok? but I buy 5000 backlinks and that is wrong. Google can’t tell the difference so assume that it MUST be crap linking.

Tis a sad day for web marketing when this happens.

Well hallellujia praise the Lord, Google have at long last corrected this ridiculous situation. Now _=- or to put it another way _&- are = .

According to Matt Cutts you can read more here at Cnet News

This is a common question, and one that is asked across forums day and night. My reply would be that SEO is personal to everyone as there is no real carved in stone definition of it, with even the wiki definition of SEO being an opinion. 

I would say that the key is in the last word. OPTIMISATION. Optimisation means simply to reach an optimum. so that means make your site the best it can be. For me SEO goes WAAAAAAAAYYYY beyond the easy bit of getting a site to the top of the search engine reusults pages. For me and many other top practitioners of SEO, we take a hollistic SEO approach, looking at the whole thing, NOT just the rankings (although of course they are very important). Hollistic SEO’s look at everything, including ALL the potential keywords, not just the one or two site owners want to rank for.

Professional SEO for me is hollistic, it is about about conversions, profitability usability visitor retention maximising spend etc REAL WORLD outcomes. The things that matter. So you think that the most important thing is to be at the top of the search engines? NOPE.

If I was to ask you all what your goal is for your site, you would mostly say ‘to get to number one for all my keywords’. This is so sad. A person goes to the hardware store to buy a drill bit. WHY? does he WANT a drill bit? NO he WANTS a HOLE, but you need a drill bit to MAKE the hole, to insert the hanger to hang the picture of thee family on the wall. The drill bit is simply a means to an end, NOT the end goal itself.

So ask yourself again, what do I want from my site? 

let’s say what you want is £30,000 per year. HOW can you achieve this? Say each visitor is worth £0.25, then you need 120,000 visitors right? WRONG. While getting to the top of google might well bring in this volume of traffic, it is NOT what a true SEO would recommend as a sole course of action.

If you can up the visitor value to £0.50 then you can earn £30k with 60k visitors. Assume for the purpose of illustration that your conversion ratio is 1 in 100. Get the conversion ratio down to 1:50 and you can earn £30 with 30,000 visitors. With me so far?

HERE IS THE KICKER THOUGH.

You now have an optimised site and are earning £1 per visitor. Remeber that 120,000 visitors you needed to earn £30,000and how being at the top of Google was going to earn you your £30,000 a year goal?

 NOW it will earn you £120,000

THAT my friends is my take on professional SEO!

Recently I have been getting a lot of emails asking about the merits of so called multilanguage optimisation. These are normally from so called ‘SEO’s’ who offer this service for anything from $200-500 per language.

Is it worth it OWG I get asked. Well the answer is NO… and YES

Is it worth having multilanguage pages on your site? YES if they are done well AND provided you can deal with an enquiry in that language, because f you can’t then you are going to appear like a big ole fraud to that potentially large customer. Large in the meaning of spend, not calling them fat or anything like that.

Another thing to consider is the quality of the translation. Let me tell you a story about that. A while ago someone came up with a script that exploits the translation facility of the Google toolbar and also Yahoo toolbar etc. This script was circulated around, and eventually it, or a script LIKE it was sold for a chunk of money in one of these fantastic ‘use it or lose it , the next big thing on the web’ type broadcasts.

Google has now decided that as it is against the acceptable use terms and conditions to auto-query Google, and as these scripts ARE auto-querying Google, it will block the IP of the site that is using them. So think about the implications of that for a moment if you will.

To put it simply, using these scripts is against the terms and conditions of Google and yahoo etc. While not getting your site banned (apart from for the translation side of things), it might well raise a Google flag above your site, and might gain you unwanted notice.

Most of these SEO’s offering multilanguage promotion use these tools.

So to everyone who has asked me if it is worth it, I say… Draw your own conclusions

Not much has been mentioned about the fact that when Google bought Double Click, they also bought their SEO company that came with it. Performics is the SEO arm of double click, and I have to say that I can not see how Google can retain ownership AND credibility within the business and online community.

Google have the motto ‘do no evil’ , but I fail to see how owning a search engine optimisation company when you are the biggest search engine in the world can possibly NOT be evil!

I firmly believe that it is a matter of time before (Read on …)

Odd isn’t it how within a day or two of losing the battle to Ebay to buy stumbleupon (or not as the case may be ) Google roll the dice with their new ‘no search phrase search results’ called Google dice.

It works rather simply, in as much as they base it on your search history run through an algorithm to serve up 50 pages they thing will interest you.

Have Google stumbledupon a winner, or are they simply likey to suffer from chasing too many rabbits syndrome?

Ok So now Google are asking all the ‘kind people’ of the internet to shop a site that is selling paid links. Apparently, according to Matt Cuts  Google have decided that it is wrong to sell links (i wish to state that I do not sell links), but if I DID it is my lookout. It is NOT the selling of links that is bad per se, it is the….. (Read on …)

Google Move further into offline advertising with a deal for an undisclosed amount with Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio advertising company in the US. (reported by the New York Times today) Now we all know that google are pushing further and further into areas that are seen as … (Read on …)