TopSEOs.com - A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service
March 31, 2010
Who is going to pay to tell people that they are good enough and their lives are fine as they are? A fundamental truth of advertising is that advertising the truth usually isn’t very profitable - which is why there is lead generation, affiliate programs, public relations, negative billing options, small print, bogus medical research, and so on… 
Ever wonder how an SEO professional can charge first world rates to do do third rate, third world work and still get a top rating from a heavily advertised SEO rating website? Edward Lewis has the lowdown on Top SEOs, including TopSEOs complaints.
A big part of the problem with the affiliate business model is when people offer fake rankings / ratings and only promote whoever pays them the most. The person/company which can afford to pay the most for leads often can only afford to because there is hidden risk or hidden cost in the service, or because they don’t deliver on their promises. An analogy here is those AAA rated mortgage backed securities where an S&P employee explained, “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”
The biggest brands don’t pay as much per lead because they don’t have to. They invest in brand and quality of customer service. The best service-based companies don’t need to pay cut-rate ad prices to advertise. The best SEO companies have far more demand for their time than time to pay to hunt for customers.
I remember back in 2006 when one of the currently “top rated SEOs” did work for my wife’s website (before she met me). That SEO firm did nothing but outsource overseas irrelevant reciprocal link exchanges and her website *would not rank* for any semi-competitive keywords until *after* the reciprocal links page was removed from her site. After we took down those reciprocal links and built some quality links the site started to rank. We changed the FTP details as well because that guy’s services were not only not worth paying for…the reciprocal links were proved to be damaging, and we didn’t want him to put them back up. And in spite of not doing any services for months (and certainly no services worth paying for), this person wanted ensure they got paid for 12 months of service. And they didn’t want to let the contract end when it was supposed to either. They were all sales all the time.
What eventually stopped the credit card charges was when I wrote him via email “If her credit card is charged again we will be doing a reverse charge and a full writeup on the service.”
He responded to that with the following:
I would watch your comments and threats my friend as you have no idea of what I am capable of or who I am - this is a small industry and if you are trying to be a an up an coming player in it this is not the way to do it by bashing your competition. A simple email professionally stating that you were unhappy with the service would have sufficed and I would have looked into to make sure Giovanna got what she paid for.
I have run 2 optimization companies and have been in this business for 12 years now. With my contacts at Google and the other main engines I can get your ebook website banned within 1-2 days if this is how you do business - with threats and slander - keep it up.
The funny thing is all I said was that if he tried charging again (past the contract) that we would reverse charges. And yet the sleazeball told me to “watch your comments and threats” and that he could use “contacts at Google and other main engines” to get my website banned. What a jerk.
I have always had contempt for blowhards, and for pure hard-sales salesmen who put sales first and are willfully ignorant of their trade and/or who are willing to sell garbage product without any concern for the customer’s welfare.
I am grateful that the above mentioned person sucked at what they did & ripped people off back then. If they were not out scamming people and actually provided a useful service then my wife wouldn’t have had a reason to contact me and meet me and marry me.
I let it go for over 3 years, but if they are still scamming people then that needs to stop. I figure its only right that I write this post as a fair warning. All good things must come to an end. And so should bad things. Hopefully these clowns quite scamming people. Enough is enough.
Average Page Load Time of Top Ranking Websites in Google
March 31, 2010
Does how quickly your page loads affect your position in Google That question may remain unanswered but it is certainly true that websites that rank highly in the search engine load quickly — and are often commercially successful because visitors don t like to be kept waiting. How fast should your website load to keep up with these online stars Keep reading for the results of our study….
Microsoft BPOS - $10 Per User Per Month* *Includes a 12-month subscription. Minimum 5 seats required.
eBay launches new Classifieds site
March 31, 2010
In an attempt to reenergize the classifieds business, eBay introduced today a new classified site called eBayClassifieds to replace its old site Kijiji in the United States.
Kijiji was never able to trump Cariglist in the United States. According to Compete, Craiglist received 4.5 million visitors in February while Kijiji had only two million. Kijiji is successful [...]
Technical glitch caused Google searches in China to be blocked
March 31, 2010
Google said that a technical glitch caused Google searches in China to be widely unavailable in China Tuesday.
String of text contained the letters “RFA,” which has been associated with the phrase Radio Free Asia, began appearing in Web addresses when users use the search engine. These letters caused China’s censoring system to block the searches. [...]
Chinese Users Cannot Access Google…At All
March 31, 2010
It’s not like we didn’t see it coming. When Google announced last week that it would be redirecting its Chinese users to the Hong Kong version of its site, everyone expected Chinese retribution.
There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty
March 31, 2010
The SEO industry has been plagued for years by a lack of consistency with SEO terms and definitions. One of the most prevalent inaccurate terms we hear is “duplicate content penalty.” While duplicate content is not something you should strive for on your website, there’s no search engine penalty for having it.
Duplicate content has been [...]
Determining Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)
March 31, 2010
Posted by randfish
We’ve been hearing some requests lately for some really advanced, expert-level content, and this post is here to deliver. I’ve built up a short list of topics that deal with more cutting edge SEO, and if there’s interest in this series, I’ll try to make it a regular part of the blog. These tactics aren’t black or gray hat (we’re not advocates of that kind of thing), but they’re very specific in use and tend to be at the opposite end of the "low-hanging fruit" basket.
The first in the series touches on a common SEO problem - determing if a link has value and how much. This tactic isn’t low effort, so it should only be employed when the link or link source is particularly critical.
Testing Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much)
Scenario: You’ve found some potentially valuable, but possibly suspect link sources. These could include things like a seemingly high quality directory that requires payment or a site you’re worried may have aroused Google’s ire for one reason or another. The need for a credible answer applies anytime you’re unsure whether a link is counting in Google’s rankings and need to know.
Tactic: Find a page that’s already in Google’s index and a somewhat random combination of words/phrases from that page’s title and body for which it ranks in position #3-10. For example, with the query - http://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+presentation+morning+entitled+link, my blog post from last week on Link Magnets ranks #3. The query itself is not particularly competitive and the pages outranking it don’t have the exact text in the title or domain name (a critical part of the process).
If I now place a link with the exact anchor text from another page (like the blog post you’re reading now), e.g. new york presentation morning entitled link, I should be able to see, once this post is indexed by Google’s spider, whether it passes link juice. The result will be positive if the page moves up 2-4 positions in ranking and I can be fairly assured that the link is indeed "Google-friendly." With that knowledge secure, I can change the anchor text and/or repoint the link to the desired location. I don’t simply use the anchor text I want initially because with competitive queries, a single link may not make enough difference for the ranking impact to be visible and I don’t want to waste my time/money/energy.
(Metrics displayed in the SERPs via mozbar)
Special Requirements: To make the testing work, you’ll need to be able to repoint the link, change the anchor text or 301 redirect the linked-to page (though the last of these is the least desirable, since 301s lose some link juice in the process and good anchor text is so valuable for ranking in Google). Also, here at SEOmoz, we don’t recommend buying links, so while this tactic could be applied to that process, remember that manipulative links may later be devalued, wasting all that time and effort you spent acquiring them.
Results: With this technique, you can not only get a yes/no answer to questions about whether the link passes ranking value, but a rough sense for how much (depending on the position change - this can be a good reason to use pages that rank in the #7-10 range). Do take care to record the ranking positions of all the pages in the results and leave the test running for 1-2 weeks (longer if there’s very fresh results ranking for the query). If you don’t, other factors may conflate to hide the true results.
I’m looking foward to your feedback about this technique - and let us know if you’re interested in seeing more of this advanced/edge-case content on the blog, too. Below, I’ve listed the topics I could tackle in future "Advanced" level posts.
- Hosting Pages on Third-Party Sites
- oDesk/Mechanical Turk for Content Development (and Link Research)
- Email Marketing for Search Personalization
- Modifying Product/Business Naming Conventions
- Spiking Search Volume and Capitalizing on QDF
- Protecting Inter-Network Links & Domain Acquisitions from Devaluation
p.s. If you do like this kind of thing, I’d also suggest:
- Register for SMX Advanced: Seattle or SMX Advanced: London - both are quite good and SEOmoz will be sending speakers to both. You can use the code SEOmoz@SMX for a 10% discount to either event.
- Check out the SEOmoz Expert Training Series DVD, which just launched last week. The video alone will get you pretty excited
- PRO members should check out our libraries of tips, video content and webinars.
I’m in Tampa, then Miami this week, but will finally return to Seattle for some much needed time in the office next Monday. Until then, blogging, commenting & email may be a bit slow from me.
Where In the World is SEOmoz - April-May 2010
March 31, 2010
Posted by jennita
Whew! The Spring conference season is in full swing, and the mozzers are coming soon to a city near you. You’ll find us anywhere from Charlotte, NC to Munich to Singapore in the next couple months. The coolest part is that we’re attending and speaking at some conferences for the very first time. It feels good to get out and stretch a bit! Plus, the developer in us will be attending conferences like Chirp and CCGrid 2010 which will both enhance our geek factor!
As always, if you’re attending any of these events, please say hello! We may never get to know you if you don’t wave, nudge, or kick us. Ok, you really shouldn’t kick Joanna, she’d probably pull a ninja move on you. Included in the list below are both SEOmoz employees as well as associates. Come… take a peek and join us!
SMX Toronto - April 8-9
You definitely don’t want to miss SMX Toronto! Not only will Gillian be moderating several panels, but she is also organizing a Search Spam Party (of PubCon notoriety). RSVP now!
| April 8 | 1:50pm - 2:40pm | Link Building Strategies and Ranking Tactics |
| 6:00pm - 7:30pm | SMX Search Spam Party | |
| April 9 | 8:30am - 9:35am | What’s Next In Search: The Crystal Ball Panel |
Joanna at PubCon 2009
PubCon South - Dallas - April 13-14
We have quite the crew heading to PubCon South this year. As always, PubCon has tons of great sessions and speakers to knock your socks off. We’re excited to be speaking and attending this excellent conference with gusto.
Check out where to find Gillian, Joanna and Kate Morris:
| April 14 | 11:30 am - 12:45pm | Gillian | 2010 - SEO |
| 4:15pm - 5:30pm | Joanna | Competitive Intel | |
| April 15 | 10:15am - 11:30am | Kate | Social Media Landscape: Hot Tpoics and Trends |
| 2:55pm - 4:10pm | Kate |
Chirp - San Francisco - April 14-15
Twitter is having a first ever developer conference, called Chirp. Nick will learn about their new ad platform (hopefully) and what they’re doing with their API. This is super interesting to us for both our tools and our API businesses. Sounds like an awesomely, geekified conference! Be sure to say hello to Nick if you’re there.
Danny at SEOmoz training in London
SMX Sydney - April 22-23
We’re all quite excited about SMX Sydney this year (ok we are every year… but still). This year Danny will be helping run the Developer Day (filling in for Vanessa Fox) as well as speaking about using rich applications and search. Gillian will also be speaking at this power-packed event on post-click optimization.
| April 22 | 3:55 - 4:20pm | Gillian | Checkout Process Optimisation |
| 5:00 - 5:30pm | Gillian | The Long Table | |
| April 23 | Gillian | Keynote Session – The State Of The Search Union | |
| 10:30am-2:30pm | Danny | Developer Day (the sessions in blue) |
Pacific Conference - Singapore - April 27-28
"This will be my first time at Pacific Conferences. I’ll be running a power-packed two day workshop that covers everything from the basics of search marketing to integration of social media into marketing plans and tracking ROI from the multitude of search marketing opportunities available to us. I’ll be sharing the stage with Dennis Yu, CEO BlitzLocal, who will be covering PPC, Facebook advertising, social media marketing, and more. In truth, I expect this will be one of the most valuable conferences in the region this year. If you’re in the area, don’t miss this one!"
- Gillian
You can still get a 20% discount on your ticket by mentioning this blog post when you register.
SEMPO event planned, too. Stay tuned for tweets with specifics on a SEMPO event to coincide with Pacific Conference Singapore.
Tom at SEOmoz training in London
SAScon - Manchester, UK - April 28th
Two of our esteemed associates, Tom Critchlow and Richard Baxter will be speaking at SAScon. Reading over the session topics and seeing the list of speakers, makes me jealous I won’t be attending!
| April 28 | 11:15am – 12:00pm | Tom | Black Hat/White Hat – does it matter any more? |
| 2:30pm - 3:15pm | Tom & Richard | Advanced Link Building Panel |
Pacific Conference - Hong Kong - April 29-30
"If you miss the Singapore Training event, you can catch us in Hong Kong the same week! Dennis and I will provide the same presentation. Again, if you go to only conference in the region this year, come to Pacific Conference. This will be one amazing show."
- Gillian
Search & Social Spring Summit - Tampa - May 3-4
The Search & Social Spring Summit is pretty much the place to be in May! Really… Florida in May just sounds like perfection! Plus with topics like "Outsourcing Secrets: Cut Costs & Spend More Time on the Beach" and "In-House SEO : Tactics for Managing Multiple Sites & Headaches" it will definitely be hot! Lindsay and I will be attending and blogging from the event. [Plus I get to meet the Wassell babies YAY!]
Conversion Conference West 2010 - San Jose, CA - May 4-5
| May 4 | 2:00 - 3:00pm | Gillian | Spiders Versus People - SEO & Conversion |
International Search Summit - Innovations - London - May 13-14
| May 13 | 11:50am | Gillian | The State of Search in India |
A4U Expo Munich - May 18-19
"I was so surprised by the depth and breadth of the speakers and presentations at A4U Expo London, I’m really looking forward to being a part of this conference in Munich. Focused on affiliate marketers’ needs, this conference covers everything from SEM to SEO, analytics, and on page optimization. Our friends at Distilled will be there and Ben Jesson who helped us with our own conversion rates will sharing secrets. I’ll be speaking on the convergence of Local-Mobile-Social marketing and how to grab this tiger by the tail."
- Gillian
| May 18 | 2:30pm - 3:30pm | Gillian | Local - Social - Mobile: The Power Triumvirate of 2010 |
| 4:00pm-5:00pm | Tom | Data Feed SEO & Advanced Site Architecture | |
| May 19 | 10:30 - 11:30am | Jane | Link Building for Highly Competitive Markets |
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Rand giving an interview in London
eMetrics & SMX London - May 17-18
Both eMetrics and SMX London are happening at the same time, in the Grand Connaught Rooms, Covent Garden. You can get a combo pass for both conferences, then you don’t have to decide between the two! Sounds like the best of both worlds to me.
| May 17 | 10:30am - 11:45am | Rand | SEO Ranking Factors In 2010 |
| May 18 | 1:15pm-2:30pm | Will | Top Ten Customised Search Analytics Reports |
CCGrid 2010 - Melbourne - May 17-20
Chas will be attending the 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing. It’s a great opportunity to be exposed to new ideas/methods in high performance distributed computing. (That’s geek talk for kick butt!)
Search Exchange - Charlotte, NC - May 17 - 19
Search Exchange will consist of keynotes and panel discussions on search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay per click advertising, and web analytics.
"I am so excited for Search Exchange, its the first conference of its kind down in Charlotte. It’s tackling the trifecta of marketing channels–organic, paid and social. Not to mention the lineup is top-notch with industry all stars like Chris Winfield, Rae Hoffman, and Chris Brogan."
- Joanna
| May 18 | 1:30-2:45pm | Joanna | The Latest Social Media Tools From The Experts |
| May 19 | 10:00-11:20am | Joanna | Landing Page Optimization Tactics |
| 1:30-2:45pm | Kate | Measuring PPC Campaigns |
International Marketing Conference Copenhagen - May 19-20
Gillian will be speaking on New Social Media Oppportunities.
We look forward to seeing you on the road! Oh, and just for fun I thought I’d throw in a wordle image based on this post. Enjoy!
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Joanna’s photo courtesy of Andy Beal
Danny and Tom’s photos courtesy of foliovision.com.
Prevent Comment Spam from Damaging Your WordPress Website
March 30, 2010
Comment spam is the bane of bloggers. It hurts the user experience takes up space you need for other things and can even adversely affect your ranking in the search engines. If you run a WordPress blog and feel like you re at the end of your rope due to comment spam issues take heart. This article will show you how to make it a thing of the past….
Microsoft BPOS - $10 Per User Per Month* *Includes a 12-month subscription. Minimum 5 seats required.
Diagnosing Google Crawl Allowance Using Webmaster Tools & Excel
March 29, 2010
Posted by Tom_C
There’s been some talk recently in the SEO industry about ‘crawl allowance’ - it’s not a new concept but Matt Cutts recently talked about it openly with Eric Enge at StoneTemple (and you can see Rand’s illustrated guide too). One big question however is how do you understand how Google is crawling your site? While there are a variety of different ways of measuring this (log files is one obvious solution) the process I’m outlining in this post can be done with no technical knowledge - all you need is:
- A verified Google webmaster central account
- Google Analytics
- Excel
If you want to go down the log-file route then these two posts from Ian Laurie on how to read log files & analysing log files for SEO might be useful. It’s worth pointing out however that just because Googlebot crawled a page it doesn’t necessarily mean that it was actually indexed. This might seem weird but if you’ve ever looked in log files you’ll see that sometimes Googlebot will crawl an insane number of pages but it often takes more than one visit to actually take a copy of the page and store it in it’s cache. That’s why I think the below method is actually quite accurate, by using a combination of URLs receiving at least 1 visit from Google and pages with internal links as reported by webmaster central. Still, taking your log file data and adding it into the below process as a 3rd data set would make things better (more data = good!).
Anyway, enough theory, here’s a non technical step by step process to help you understand which pages Google is crawling on your site and compare that to which pages are actually getting traffic.
Step 1 - Download the internal links
Go to webmaster central and navigate to the "internal links" section:
Then, once you’re on the internal links page click "download this table":
This will give you the table of pages which Google sees internal links to. Note - for the rest of this post I’m going to be treating this data as an estimate of Google’s crawl. See a brief discussion about this at the top of the post. I feel it’s more accurate than using a site: search in Google. It does have some pitfalls however since what this report is actually telling you is the number of pages with links to them, not the pages which Google has crawled. Still, it’s not a bad measure of Google’s index and only really becomes inaccurate when there are a lot of nofollowed internal links or pages blocked by robots.txt (which you link to).
Step 2 - Grab your landing pages from Google Analytics
This step should be familiar to all of you who have Google Analytics - go into your organic Google traffic report from the last 30 days, display the landing pages and download the data.
Note that you need to add "&limit=50000" into the URL before you hit "export as CSV" to ensure you get the as much data a possible. If you have more than 50000 landing pages then I suggest you either try a shorter date range or a more advanced method (see my reference to log files above).
Step 3 - Put both sets of data in excel
Now you need to put both of these sets of data into excel - I find it helpful to put all of the data into the same sheet in Excel but it’s not actually necessary. You’ll have something like this with link data for your URLs from webmaster central on the left and the visits data from Google Analytics on the right:
Step 4 - Vlookup ftw
Gogo gadget vlookup! The vlookup function was made for data sets like this and easily lets you look up the values in one data set against another data set. I advise running a vlookup twice for each data set so we get something like this:
Note - that there may be some missing data in here depending on how fresh the content is on your site (this is possibly enough room for a whole separate post on this topic) so you should then find and replace ‘#N/A’ with 0.
Step 5 - Categorise your urls
Now, for the purposes of this post we’re not interested in a URL by URL approach, we’re instead looking at a high level analysis of what’s going on so we want to categorise our URLs. Now, the more detail you can go into at this step the better your final data output will be. So go ahead and write a rule in excel to assign a category to your URLs. This could be anything from just following a folder structure or it could be more complex based on query string etc. It really depends on how your site structure works as to the best way of doing it so I can’t write this rule for you unfortunately. Still, once this is done you should see something like this:
If you’re struggling to build an excel rule for your pages and your site follows a standard site.com/category/sub-category/product URL template then a really simple categorisation would be to just count the number of ‘/’s in the URL. It won’t tell you which category the URL belongs to but it will at least give you a basic categorisation of which level the page sits at. I really do think it’s worth the effort to a) learn excel and b) categorise your URLs well. The better data you can add at this stage the better your results will be.
Step 6 - Pivot table Excel Ninja goodness
Now, we need the magic of pivot tables to come to our rescue and tell us the aggregated information about our categories. I suggest that you pivot both sets of data separately to get the data from both sources. Your pivot should look something like this for both sets of data:
It’s important to note here that what we’re interested in is the COUNT of the links from webmaster central (i.e. the number of pages indexed) rather than the SUM (which is the default). Doing this for both sets of data will give you something like the following two pivots:
And:
Step 7 - Combine the two pivots
Now what we want to do is take the count of links from the first pivot (from webmaster central) and the sum of the visits from the second pivot (from Google Analytics), to produce something like this:
Generating the 4 columns on the right is really easy by just looking at the percentages and ratios of the first 3 columns.
Conclusions
25% of the crawl allowance accounts for only 2% of the overall organic traffic
So, what should jump out at us from this site here is that the ’search’ pages and ‘other’ pages are being quite aggressively crawled with 25% of the overall site crawl between them yet they only account for 2% of the overall search traffic. Now in this particular example this might seem like quite a basic thing to highlight - afterall a good SEO will be able to spot search pages being crawled by doing a site review but being able to back this up with data makes for good management-friendly reports and will also help analyse the scope of the problem. What this report also highlights is that if your site is maxing out it’s crawl allowance then reclaiming that 25% of your crawl allowance from search pages may lead to an increase in the number of pages crawled from your category pages which are the pages which pull in good search traffic.
