Disclaimer: the story is based on true events but all the names and website URLs have been changed. Any resemblance to actual people, agencies or sites is coincidental and accidental.

Part 1,

In which we set the scene and meet Jenny, the honest whitehat.

It was a warm, bright late spring morning. On a morning like this, nobody expects any bad news. But Jenny got a call from her boss telling her that the traffic to one of the main clients’ site has dropped badly all of a sudden. She started digging into the logs and stats and blog posts…

Jenny has been working for a mid-sized online marketing agency for a few years already. She considered herself lucky enough to get the trainee position right after graduation. Her family was not particularly happy with her getting into this whole Internet thing after she had spent so many years studying serious stuff but Jenny felt this was where the future is. Over time, she learned a lot of things and progressed in her career, and she liked her job. She was subscribed to all the popular SEO blog feeds in her RSS reader and usually read them in the morning during her commute to work.

… They named it Penguin. It was the “anti-spammer” update Cat Mutts had warned about weeks before. Jenny spent the whole weekend in the office with a few people from her team, digging the stats and analysing the SERPs and trying to find some rhyme or reason to it – and finding patterns only to see them overthrown completely by the next analysed set of the SERPs. It just did not make sense. There were too many signals involved, and the way they interacted in each case was totally unpredictable.

Jenny’s team was a squeaky clean whitehat operation. They never did anything sketchy that could put a client’s site at risk. And this was a “Spammer” update… what a kick in the butt! Never before have they lost a site, the horrible Panda had never hurt them in any of its incarnations – but this was something new, scary and inexplicable.

Rumours had it that the client was quite impulsive and, being pitched things, could act without much syncing with the agency. Could it be one of the side contractors doing something dirty, promising him quick returns? Jenny did not know for sure.

The common verdict on Penguin (much in line with the official Google’s stance) was that spammy links were causing problems and they had to be removed. It had been a few weeks after the initial drop when Jenny’s team finally dug out some really weird links. That was when they started showing up in the site’s Webmaster Tools account. But it was not just a link or two – there were thousands of them all of a sudden. Jenny’s suspicions of a side contractor’s activity grew stronger. How does one go about removing links? They have always been building links, but removing them? The whole team was bewildered and unsure of how to approach the task.

Weeks after weeks, they tracked down site owners and sent out emails. Only this time, it was not begging for links, it was begging to remove links. But hope was vanishing as most of the emails got no reply or webmasters promised to remove the links only to forget about the plea.

Eventually, they gave up. The client’s traffic was stale, despite a few bad links finally getting removed. The new idea that Jenny had was to build a few quality links so that maybe that would change the balance and the site would get better. More weeks passed, yet the evil Penguin didn’t seem to loosen its grip.

If only Bing had a bigger market share, Jenny sometimes caught herself thinking. In Bing, the client site did not drop. But even if it did, Bing has just announced this shiny new disavow tool where you could just drop all the bad links you had no control over and be done with it. Truth be told, Jenny never used the Bing disavow tool and was not sure if using it actually resulted in sites ranking better, and there were only anecdotal references online to people testing it – but in all seriousness, who has ever cared as much about Bing penalties or bans as people did about those in Google? Yet, the disavow tool was considered a great step forward and an example of a search engine open to working hand in hand with webmasters, so Jenny stuck to the same opinion. She even started dreaming of reading the news one morning of Google launching a disavow tool of its own.

And that morning once arrived…

Part 2,

In which using the Disavow Tool leads to more discoveries.

Despite the rain outside, the spirit in the office was elated. Banners reading “Welcome Disavow Tool” were hanging across the room. It was like somebody’s birthday party. People were smiling, many of them for the first time in the last few months.

Jenny read the official Google announcement twice on her mobile during her commute and re-read it once more when she got to the office. She watched the video taking notes. She read the launch coverage in all the main industry blogs. The instructions seemed vague and the warning sinister, but that was better than nothing. Jenny was hopeful. She knew all the bad link URLs by heart by this point. They had managed to remove quite a few links, now it was time to deal with the stubborn ones that they could not manage to get rid of for various reasons. Just one last check in the Webmaster Tools, and she will be ready to put together the disavow submission.

… This cannot be right, Jenny thought 20 minutes later glancing over a CSV with links downloaded from the Webmaster Tools. At the top of the list there was a domain she had never heard of before, with a total of over 1,500 links pointing to the client site from it! The dreaded sitewide links…

Every newbie in Jenny’s team knew from day one sitewides were a no-no. Building a sitewide link was like confessing of stabbing your own grandma. Nobody would have ever done it for a client site. The gloomy shadow of the mysterious evil side contractor that had been rumoured about for the first few weeks since the site drop became almost material again. Either that – or the dreaded N word, a negative campaign by a competitor or just some sick individual haters with too much time on their hands. The client, however, never had any real issues with online reputation or too many bad customer reviews – nothing outstanding in their niche anyways. Who could possibly hate their site so much?

But Jenny had to look at the actual site linking to their client. Maybe, just maybe it’s one of those links that somehow occur naturally, like because of a “Recent Comments” blog plugin – maybe their client commented on some blog that had this functionality in place? Hmm, not likely, their client didn’t really do much by himself, even when asked to do something specifically. Or maybe it’s some scraper – there haven’t been many of them in the SERPs lately but it doesn’t mean they ceased to exist completely. Maybe, just maybe it’s something that can be easily fixed, after all we now have the disavow tool, if nothing else works we will just disavow it, right? – thought Jenny.

Little did she know. When she looked at the site in question, what she saw was nothing like she had expected. It was one single page, with no link to the client site anywhere! But where did all those 1,500 links in Google Webmaster Tools report come from?

Hours later, after doing lots of digging, Jenny still has not managed to discover anything meaningful. Apparently the site was pretty new judging by its whois data, Web Archive had no records for it, Jenny felt lost and did not know where else to look for any clues. How can you do anything about links that do not exist? Yet, she felt these links could be the ones causing trouble, at least partially. She was at her wits end.

With an uneasy heart, Jenny went home at the end of the work day. She couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of possible ways to uncover the mystery that was torturing her. By morning, she made a decision. She would ask for help. Luckily she knew someone who could probably solve this puzzle.

Part 3,

In which a blackhat consultant steps in and the mystery gets solved.

Shane woke up late. His head was hurting a bit after last night’s secret meet up with some old school blackhat buddies. He wasn’t a very public person and wasn’t going to many SEO conferences (after all, being in business for over a decade, what new could he hear at those conferences? and what valuable info did those sissy whitehats that most conferences were infested with, possess and could share anyway?). But he loved an occasional informal get together with fellow old schoolers. They have all been in SEO for ages, since before it even got the name of SEO. Shane didn’t drink much usually but last night one of the guys threw a party to celebrate the much-anticipated purchase of a really cool and old domain name that nobody was supposed to mention in public as one belonging to him. Only the closest circle of old time friends knew and celebrated – and boy did they celebrate!

But it was time to get up. Shane noticed a few missed messages in Skype on his iPad. Somebody has been pinging him all morning. He looked at the name. It took him a while to remember who it was. Somebody called Jenny. Ah yes, that whitehat girl he ran into at that free conference afterparty last year that he got tricked into going to by one of his friends. The afterparty was ok – quite a few of his old spammer friends turned up so it was fun catching up. And this girl, despite her being whitehat, at least wasn’t the close-minded kind of a whitehat, she did not start any of the stupid “ethics” talk, just asked a few rather naive questions and clearly believed in Google’s good intentions. But what could she possibly want now?

Another hour later, after a shower and a coffee, Shane finally could be arsed to reply.

“What’s up”, he typed.

“Sorry to bother you Shane but I don’t know who else could answer a question I have”, Jenny typed back.

“And why would I want to answer your question?” asked Shane.

“Out of love for SEO maybe? Oh, and I’ll buy you a drink next time I see you”, said Jenny.

“How likely is that, huh! OK, go ahead with your question.”

The question was indeed quite interesting, thought Shane. It’s not every day that you see examples of Google being broken that are so vivid. He started digging.

Digging this one was no easy task. No archive, apparently due to the site banning the archive bot in robots.txt (he guessed that through some Web Archive clues as the actual robots.txt file was no longer available). No Google cache for a single page of the site, due to a nocache meta tag that likely was in place. Yet, 1,500 pages indexed – for a site that no longer exists…

By searching for bits and pieces Shane managed to recover off no longer existing pages, he finally got some clues. The picture that unveiled before him looked magnificently evil and terribly stupid at the same time.

Next day, Shane pinged Jenny in Skype. “Ready to hear the weirdest story you’ll ever hear?” he asked and proceeded telling her about what he had found.

… Once upon a time, there lived a spammer. He may appear smart to some, but those who know better would notice at least a few mistakes he made. His business model consisted of finding a competitive niche, finding a large site with plenty of content in that niche, copying all of that content and putting it on a newly registered random domain. Then he would spam some links to it, let it acquire minimal PageRank and proceed by selling links off his new site via one of the link selling sites that did not care much about the quality or background of their equity. Because his sites were plenty, in different competitive niches, and with lots of pages, and he would sell sitewide links, the business was profitable. It went on for months without a glitch until he scraped a site in the same niche as the client that Jenny’s agency was working for.

The site he scraped belonged to the people that did not like anyone messing with them. Infact, they were known for taking people to court for even lesser reasons – and winning in the court. A few years ago they messed up the business of a certain company that was their competitor because that company’s representative was careless enough to get caught accusing them of things that could not be proven.

They first did not notice the scraped site but eventually it started ranking better than the original, biting off a good piece of their long tail traffic (which, because of the nature of their site, constituted the larger part of traffic). That’s when they decided to show the spammer nobody could mess with them and filed a DMCA complaint. Only, instead of sending a copy of that DMCA complaint to Google as it usually is done when content gets stolen, effectively leading to the offending pages removal from the SERPs and DMCA notices appearing in those SERPs instead, they forwarded it to the spammer’s host.

That’s when all the hell broke lose. The host removed the site – what Jenny was seeing was the default Apache page. However, Google did not know about it. Over 1,500 pages were still in the index, still outranking the original scraped site for a bunch of long tail queries. Google Webmaster Tools backlink report still showed them all as well, and they were still causing trouble for Jenny’s client, although it was now impossible to do anything about them. How do you remove the links that do not exist? How do you disavow them? Things were ultimately broken.

“So”, Shane said then, “you have two options now. Either wait till Google actually catches up and reindexes the site and sees that those pages no longer exist – or go to Google URL removal tool and submit all the 1,500 pages, one by one, and pray that they take action fast.”

There was a pause in the conversation. Jenny was digesting what she just heard. After a long silence, she said, “Thank you” and finished the talk. She knew she had a very long day ahead.

50 Shades of Spam is a post from: 01100111011001010110010101101011

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The recent Angry SEO posts (Angry SEO #1 and Angry SEO #2) have gone down really well and today we have issue #3 to deal with. Like the title? Sex sellsss.

In today’s issue our secret SEO appears to be a bit upset with a certain section of the industry. As normal if you’d wish to vent about a client, company, co-worker, the SEO industry, this blog etc get in touch! 

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You Know What Really Rips My Knitting?

Small time cliquey SEOs with big egos and attitudes.

Here’s the deal. I work as an SEO in what could be considered a “big” agency. I’ve worked for many years on clients that certain cockstar SEOs could only dream of. I’m conscientious, I work hard, I know my stuff inside out and I have achieved some great results and amazing campaigns over the years. I’ve even won a few major industry awards along the way. But you’ve never heard of me, and that’s good.

I work with some incredibly talented and knowledgeable people. Indeed, some of the best in the industry. Most of them you’ve never heard of. In fairness I work with some of the worst too but that’s just big agency life. The shit ones usually get found out and move on to somewhere  in-house pretty quickly. But that’s a different rant

But here’s what gets me. I’ve met various big name SEOs over the years and often they are very nice, very decent people. Oops, sorry, no those are not the ones who get me. The ones who seriously get on my goat are egotist wankers who might have known what SEO was 10 years ago but spend their days now promoting themselves at conferences while their provincial companies fill the web with spam.

I was introduced to one once and within minutes he informed me that my company doesn’t do very “sophisticated” SEO. Like he would know what the fuck we do. The week previously I had uncovered a quite frankly pathetic blog network trail that had his company’s grubby fingerprints all over it. I decided not to mention it and sent the details to Google next morning. Dick.

He also forgot that his barely literate blog posts are both public and popular. I therefore knew the weaknesses in one of the previous blog posts he had written and proceeded to school him on it. Arse. Didn’t get a single drink from his group either, after buying them all one. Says it all really.

SEO awards bring out the worst in certain smaller SEO companies. I’m glad to say my agency tends to conduct itself in a friendly and decent way. I’m sure that’s not the case 100% of the time, especially with drink involved but you know what I’m saying. Put it this way, we would not boo the winners of an award in an award ceremony. No matter which competitor won. To this day we don’t know what we did wrong. Maybe we’re not part of the clique, maybe we stole someone’s client, maybe we shagged their wife. We’ll never know but to that company / those people I say – Get over it and try not to be dicks all your life.

In summing up, I’d say don’t judge an SEO by their company unless they started or own the company. In which case you should feel free, the arseholes.

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So last week’s post by Angry SEO #1 appeared to have struck a chord with you guys. I think it’s nice to be able to anonymously vent about a client, company or co-worker so if you would like to do likewise get in touch!

In today’s issue SEO Anonymouse appears to have a few issues with a co-worker… This post not only made me laugh but appears to have had a positive effect on our Angry SEO “It’s been cathartic and I feel better for it, exorcised.”

Great news! Have a excellent week kids

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Dear Useless Bastard,

Yes you, the person who thinks they know this shit but doesn’t.

The person who’s been fucking things up for as long as there’s been a website.

Yes you, that person who has talked bollocks to everyone who knew no better and lead them down a path of misinterpretation.

This is for you, because you are everywhere, you keep popping up like a bad penny and you waste everyone’s time money and energy, and if it were allowed I’d put you in a cage and squirt you with a water pistol, hourly.

You see, in that meeting we all had, I couldn’t really sit there and tell you to STFU. I couldn’t, and to be frank would rather not waste my time and energy with you because you are like some house of cards, some matchstick house out in a hurricane, I’ve seen more substance on the knee of a sparrow but pfft.

I had to smile and disagree gently, I had to spend ages telling you politely that you were misinformed and that your understanding of things digital was a little out of kilter. I had to use 10,000 words of nice and spend ages painting pictures and telling you stories. I did tell you this was pro bono right?I can’t help that my gentle metaphors were lost on you, I can’t help that you mentioned that you had a myspace page. That was your doing. I wanted to tell you that it’s actually 2012 but thought that the big calendar on the wall was clue enough.

Maybe I’m a big baby but look, the moment when you smiled at me with those squinty little piggy eyes of yours and tried to diminish what it is I do was your first and biggest mistake. Why did you do that!? Do you think I’m some kind of weak mother fucker!? Does my 6 foot 200lb frame of confidence tell you nothing? Do I really look like I’d just sit there and take your nonsense!?You dismissed PPC out of hand. Ok, it can be a tricky one. It needs work (like most things) and tbh was never a big focus for me, but it’s still worthy of consideration and with a bit of honing can be very useful but I digress. The point is you dismissed it and sneered at it, having never even entertained it in your 4 years of tenure. Why? because some nameless ‘professional’ as you called them, told you it didn’t work! Right.

The worst part though, was when you dismissed my whole objective and had the cheek to refer to what I do as that ‘SEO’ thing; when you tell me that you’ve done ‘social media’ and have a background in ‘twitter’ then my instant reaction as I grapple to hide my drop jaw face expression is that really, you know shit worth knowing and need to just shut up. When you confuse a fucking email newsletter as digital marketing, when you fail to…

OH FFS.

What’s the use.

The point is that going forward, you need to either just fuck off out of it or STFU.

I don’t really mind which. If you’re extra nice then you even carry with that email marketing thing, for now.

I think it’s fair to say that I don’t like you.

You my friend, are my proverbial fart in a sleeping blanket, stifling and sickly and not very nice. And yet, in that meeting we had I had to be all nice and tippy toey. It’s a new relationship after all and I don’t want to go and alienate everybody as for some crazy reason most of the people in the room have overtime, bought in to your skewed idea of how this shit works. God knows what you’ve told them as their traffic dwindled or never really got off the 22nd page of Google.

I’m a believer in karmic outcomes so I’m going to speak to your boss and tell them indirectly that someone needs to communicate that I’m not here to nick your job or show you up for the knob that you are, I’m far more tactful than that. I get that your insecure and that’s fine, we’ve all had those times at one point or another. In fact if you were smart you’d see this for the big opportunity that it is. A chance for you to check back, relax, learn and if you’re really smart take credit for the upsurge when I’m gone.

The thing is that I have a job to do.

I’ve been asked by your boss to give my opinion on his product, that opinion will look at the whole product. It’ll look at everything it is that touches that website. It’ll look at all the opportunities, it’ll look at processes, keywords, traffic, conversions. It’ll look at who’s doing what where when and how often. It’ll give views on your competitors, what they do, why they are winning, why they are doing better than you. It’ll try and inform and educate and move forward. It won’t take no for an answer and will do its utmost to drive this piece to where it needs to go. To do that, it needs buy in and flow. It needs people to be 100% on board with the strategy and tactics presented. If we want to play Beethovens 9th then we need more than a glockenspiel and a metal triangle!! We need everything to be played in harmony, all of the pieces need to fit in with all of the others, in the right way, at the right tempo, otherwise it just ain’t fuckin beethovens 9th!

So I guess you could say that this is a little warning. I won’t involve you in much of anything going forward as I have all the access I need, FTP, uid’s, psswds, root access, WMT etc etc blah. I’ll get your boss to buy in completely and he’ll be directing all of the stakeholders to where it is they need to get to. We will be playing Beethovens 9th, eventually. You can ding the triangle.

PS. CEO’s, bosses, owners who know jack.

You might have one of these people in your organisation fucking things up and bullshitting you daily.

Train their arses or GET RID.
1. If your sales are poor, then ask them why.
2. If your rankings and traffic are crap ask them why.
3. And if you don’t really know or fail to understand what it is they tell you then seek a second opinion.
It’s your business, the jobs of 100′s may be at stake, don’t let it die a death just because some knob jockey told you it was ok.

POSTSCRIPT if you are anything like this person then please, just stop it.

Go see a shrink, get counselling, have a wank more often but whatever you do, just stop it. Thanks.

tl;dr “Give your SEO a chance, stop, listen, absorb. Don’t be rude, don’t be a know all idiot”

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I’ll stop adding guest posts when people stop sending me stuff. Today we have a  heart felt plea from SEOBastard, a fine young fellow who just wants to be understood.

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Dear client,

It may not have occurred to you at the time you hired me to do your SEO for you, so I’d like to spell it out for you:

I am an SEO expert, not a fucking magician. For clarity: I do not violently jerk rabbits out of hats, juggle fireballs or perform for children’s birthday parties. I don’t have a comely assistant and the only things I can make disappear are tin cans of microwavable chili. I’m not David fucking Blaine over here.

I am, in fact, responsible for dealing with the structure and content of your website and leveraging those to best satisfy the merciless dream crushing machine known as Google.

It’s okay though, I know the two are awfully easy to confuse.

I’m more like a chef. If you give me the right ingredients, I’ll whip you up a goddamn chicken cordon bleu meal so good your eyes will roll back until you can see your frontal lobe. But if you supply me with an ongoing pile of horseshit and dick-all, don’t be surprised if turd sandwiches are the only thing on the menu.

In other words, I need you to reply to my recommendations and actually do some shit on your end. I know you’re busy running a business and you’d probably rather not be responsible for writing a bunch of poppycock or tweaking your code. Good news: you don’t need to. There are people for that.

But contrary to popular opinion, I do not keep top rankings stuffed up my ass for easy retrieval.  I’m out there wrangling hot opportunities like some sort of perverted cowboy. All I’m asking you to do is step in and take advantage. There isn’t some secret garden of links I can just go merrily traipsing through like a school girl on morphine. We’ve gotta create that shit. Get people talking. Make people care you exist. This is high school prom all over again, and right now you’re the acne-laden chess co-club captain wearing sweatpants and khaki shorts. I’m trying to help you sort it out.

All I need is for you to give slightly more than no shits about your online presence. We’re trying to do some marketing here. You want more online leads? Sales? Market share? Give me MORE to work with. This is basic-ass math.

With love,

Your SEO

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I’m getting increasingly lazy with age so today we have yet another awesome guest post this time by Patrick Hathaway who when not busy being married to catwoman (stealing Google quality rater guidelines above) does some online marketing stuff for Ideasbynet the stress toy specialists.

Anyway enough from me…

Before I start, let’s just get one thing straight – Yes, Google need our websites so they have content to serve their users, but we need Google a hell of a lot more than they need us. We have no ‘right’ to be included in their index, nor do we have any right to good rankings. It’s their party and we should play by their rules.

It doesn’t mean we have to like it.

I’m Wasted Here, I Should be Matt Cutts’ Wingman. is a post from: 01100111011001010110010101101011

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http://twitter.com/#!/PointBlankSEO/status/242743796864020480

Please feel free to rant in the comments I’m off to get a beer.

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In line with Google’s mission to organise the world’s information, Google has deemed it necessary to take over running of the Olympic Games, starting at Rio 2016. The Google Organising the Olympic Games (GOOG) Committee is committed to delivering the best user experience for everyone involved in the Olympics, including but not restricted to the sponsors and other international brands. GOOG is determined to stage a mostly athlete-centred Olympic games, whilst retaining a significant focus on legacy and/or sustainability.

Google will determine the winner of each race based on their clear athlete guidelines:

• Competitors must compete ‘naturally’ – compete as hard as you can, without competing so hard that it looks like you cheated.
• Do not under any circumstance pay for performance enhancements, but if you do, make sure it looks like you haven’t.
• Any competitor, regardless of ability, may however pay Google directly; in which case the highest bidder will succeed.
• Athletes may gain a competitive advantage by changing their name by Deed Poll to the name of their specific event (e.g. ‘Men’s Synchronised 10m Platform Diving’) – this is considered a strong indicator to Google that you are good at said event.
• Similarly, if other competitors refer to you by the event name rather than your real name, Google may reward you. Google may also punish you however if this happens too often or by people that Google does not deem worthy.
• In some events the winners will be predetermined by Google.
• At all times, in all competitions, you must wear a white hat.
• Any athlete found to have secretly worn a black hat may be ejected from the competition at any moment.
• Competitors are encouraged to attract sponsorship, however displaying too many sponsor logos may result in elimination.
• Competitors may not Tweet, Like or ‘Pin’ photos of the events, but sharing via Google+ is highly encouraged.
• You may find at any stage that a competitor teleports in front of you – this is normal, and definitely not a result of said competitor paying for performance enhancements.
• In some events, Google may decide to enter their own team, who will always win.
• At any stage during the competition, a large black and white animal may land on your head. This could be deemed to be your fault, and as such you may be disqualified.
• Competitors that appear to have won may find they have been disqualified without notice.
• Competitors who may have taken performance enhancements in the past may receive an email notifying them of ‘unnatural speeds’. They either should or should not take action because of this.
• If another competitor has copied your exact performance, this could be deemed to be your fault and may result in a penalty.
• Rules may be changed at any point, even during a race.
• Athletes looking to fine tune their performance may contact an external training agency, although they may choose to contravene all of the here-stated rules.
• For any competitor that finds themselves disqualified, they may submit their appeal to Lord Cutts, who may choose to get back to you, but may not.

By participating, watching, talking about or hearing about the Olympics, you give Google the rights to all of your personal information to use however they wish.

This is a guest post by Patrick Hathaway, who is in-house SEO for promotional gifts companies Ideasbynet and Yes Gifts, and is currently promoting his rather cynical view of the Olympic sponsors via this interactive infographic: Advertise to a Generation

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Dan suggests writing more technically-focused posts; and, Sean wanted me to write something actionable for readers.  I’ve recently been looking at my blog’s stats via Google Web Master Tools.  I came up with a few ideas while spelunking in there the other day.

Contest Closed Shut

Are you running a contest on Twitter, or using other marketing means to host such consumer ‘partays’?  Perhaps you’re hosting the contest page on your blog.  Hopefully, the contest gains much interest.  What happens when entries are final or the contest is completely done?

At that point, you don’t want Google showing your contest site link in search results.  Moreover, Google may host that page link underneath the major heading for the site domain.  That would be misleading also taking real estate away from another page G may feature (such as the blog or service pages).

Tell G to “86″ that now unneeded site link.  Do this:

To demote a sitelink URL:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Sitelinks.
3. In the For this search result box, complete the URL for which you don’t want a specific sitelink URL to appear.
4. In the Demote this sitelink URL box, complete the URL of the sitelink you want to demote.

(From WMT: you can demote up to 100 URLs, and demotions are effective for 90 days from your most recent visit to the Sitelinks page in Webmaster Tools.)

Kind of a Big Deal in…

Where in the world is your brand relevant?  For instance, I know Alessio Madeyski optimizes sites in several areas of Europe.  I don’t know if he markets his own services in those areas.  If he did he can communicate with Google about it.

Have you noticed some site URLs end in country code?  For example “.ie” represents Ireland.  What if you were kind of a big deal in France?  Wouldn’t you want to target that area of the globe?  You can.  If you gave a ‘geo-netural’ domain ending, such as .com, Google will assume you want to market evenly across the globe.

If you don’t have a geo-specific domain ending, but would like to target a specific location, communicate it like this:

To set a geographic target:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Geographic target section, select the option you want.

If you want to ensure that your site is not associated with any country or region, selectUnlisted.

However, think about it.  It helps optimize toward a specific location, but is also making it more difficult for consumers in other lands to find you.  Is your site and services segmented, meaning some portions of the site are targeted toward specific locales and some not?  Google allows Web masters to geo-target sub domains and folders.

Guest Post Management

James Agate does a lot of writing, especially guest posting.  He bundled a bunch, hosting them here.   I have also done guest posting.  I’d rather host the content from my site.  I must think about duplicate content though.  Hmm, I can use a robots.txt file to block a particular ‘guest posts’ page on my site.

This way, my blog readers can still view and read my guest posts; but, the posts will be kept from Google’s bots, not influencing my rankings or penalizing me for duplicate content.

Let Go My Ego

Last week, John Doherty wrote a post about stealing authorship.  There has been some quirky occurrences related to rel=auth and author integration.  What if for fun or fiendish reasons someone does ‘steal’ your authorship?  You could draw swords at dawn, or look to WMT for a solution.  I think there is one.

It’s not an optimal solution.  In a way you are biting off your author profile to spite your blog.  However, you can remove snippets, ridding the SERs of rogue authors…and snippet references of all authors for that matter.  How to remove snippets.

Keywords of Discontent

As a writer, I’m interested in words used.  As a marketer, I’m also interested in keywords leveraged.  Admittedly, I don’t really do any technical SEO for my blog.  Its primary purpose is to host my writing skills, industry insight, and personality.

However, I can use Web Master Tools to peer at keywords and their significance to my blog.  In WMT, go under Optimization and then click on Content Keywords.  Some top-ranked words for my blog are brand, marketing, consumers, etc.

Nothing too unusual there, yet “it’s” caught my eye.  Do I use that contraction a lot?  Yes.  It appears 1,599 times in my blog’s 40- posts!  It’s It is a large number!

Maybe I should look into what words I’m slinging more often to ensure diverse writing and better reads.  I’ll borrow a quote copyblogger borrowed from Hawthorne, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”  (No posthumous offense, Nathaniel, but The Scarlett Letter – not so easily enjoyable for me.  Sorry, chap.)

Anthony isn’t guest posting for a link but because he enjoys writing.

You other guest post, link thieving bastards make me sick.

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Are You ‘Marketing’ to Me or…You?

Have you ever met those people who feel like they need to constantly market themselves?  There’s a difference between confidence and raping my ear with self-petting narratives.  I hope you think you’re great with room for improvement…to be mo betta great…each day.  I hope you give yourself a little pat on the back, an extra cookie, or treat yourself to those badass pair of Crocs you always wanted.  Go ahead.  You deserve them.

Let me interrupt your verbal security blanket for a brief intermish – aside from the aforementioned self-concroculatory sentiments, allow others to be your fanboys and girls.  How about this?  You do something with what mama gave ya and we (may) take notice and approve.  Let others send you trophies.

You’re That Jock Guy or Hot Girl

Mannnnnnnnn high school was cool…for four years.  I learned a lot there, like how to sneak out at lunch, hangout after school, and talk that fine line between teacher-prodded participation and sarcasm.  I also learned of the Uncle-Rico variety of guys and gals.  Those who are pretty popular in a little microcosm of space and time, but live eons away from the notion the larger world really doesn’t give a hoot they’re a present or former ‘jockie’ or ‘hottie’ in their microcosm, and does not entertain their self-entitled approach to real life.

You’re popular, whether that’s because we’re sheep, you do a couple things well in this infinite world of possibilities, or your popularity is what’s popular and not so much you.  (Remember Ronald ‘McDonald’ Miller?  He wasn’t so ‘McDreamy’ to chicks once he wasn’t so popular, was he?)  Be humble.

You’re Selective

Do you ever notice those people that will like something or do something if it ultimately serves their reputation or vanity?  They’re selective, like people are commodities to them, entities of leverage rather than equality.  You can almost hear the “you are so last year” or “please spray me with your opportunity juice” or nothing, just silent-snubbing (because some people wouldn’t be caught dead in ‘WalMart’) subtitles emanating through speech and actions.

It’s kind of strange to think one can so adamantly champion some, as if they really love ‘hugging-up’ on people, yet ignore others.  What is it then?  What is it that gets one so stoked or so stone-faced toward others?  Because deeds are attached to princes or paupers to be celebrated or shunned?  Be one who laughs and cries with both parties.

You’re Not Golden, Ponyboy

Before Ralph Macchio was crane-kicking his way into our hearts, he was in the bromantic-everyone must read this book in middle school-drama, The Outsiders.  While writhing and dying under Hollywood set lights, Ralph lets a little eighties-meme gold roll of his mind: “Stay gold, Ponyboy.” Maybe it was the bar-none dramatic excellence of Macchio, maybe it was because he and Ponyboy’s character previously read Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay poem, maybe it was the appellation of “Ponyboy” given to a teen-aged boy, but it stuck.

If you read the poem (I expect a full five-paragraph essay from all of you), you’ll notice that Rob was pretty much getting at staying pure, genuine, and other warm-fuzzy feeling kind of words and sentiments.  Be the Delirious and Raw Eddie Murphy.  And stay on your game.  Keep that newborn feeling regardless of your progress or present station.  People liked Ponyboy, people like when others ‘stay gold.’

“Anthony Pensabene” is a personality created by the algorithms. It writes at Content Muse and wherever programmed to do so on the internetz. The shade of Anthony’s online self lives in Colorado and has a lot of fun being active, enjoying the company of good people, and Scotch’in it up in Aspen.

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This awesome guest post was written by the Online Marketing Owl. SEO webslinger. Content Creation Caped Crusader. Social Media Watchman. PPC Yie-Ar-Kung-Fu. SEOmozer - Andrew McGarry - Find out more about him here (look natural anchor text!)

In an industry full of self-proclaimed experts and no proper certification, SEO sometimes feels like a biggus dickus competition.

Some days you’d be forgiven for thinking SEOs spend all their time online trying to prove to everyone that they actually know what they’re on about.

The idea that you’ve been doing something for ages so therefore you must be good at it, would mean that Jim Davidson is funnier than Frankie Boyle, and Bill O’Reilly is a superior journalist to Jon Stewart. This leads us to today’s handy guide…

TOP 10 SIGNS YOU ARE A SEO DIVA

10. Writing super annoying ‘Top 10’ articles as linkbait in the vain hope that the SEO industry will notice your thought leader status.

9. Whenever someone votes your SEOmoz comment with a ‘thumbs down’, you have an emotional response to it which makes Charles Manson look like a rational human being.

8. Checking Google Search blog posts daily for opportunities to tweet “I’ve been saying that all along”, which would have been number seven in CNN’s 6 most annoying things kids say.

7. Your online avatar has been created to convey how clever, creative and outspoken you are. Especially as you’ve never forgiven your parents for THAT lunchbox they made you bring to school.

6. The idea of ever saying, “I don’t know about that aspect of SEO” would be as desirable as walking naked through town on a Saturday while holding up a sign that says your favourite band is Nickleback.

5. You have your own WordPress plugin which you believe will carry on your legacy after you’re gone.

4. In team meetings you roll your eyes and exhale loudly whenever a developer says that doing a particular thing would be good for SEO. Like he could possibly grasp what has taken decades to learn.

3. If your partner looked at someone for too long you’d get jealous. But not as jealous as you get when you see other SEOs on Twitter chatting to Matt Cutts, Duane Forrester, or even Rand Fishkin. I mean c’mon, look at how many followers I have!

2. Believing your job title as manager / director / overlord / insights guru reflects your status and worth as a human being and would crush your soul if you ever lost it.

And the number one sign you are a SEO Diva is that you are a man. The opposite sex is far too evolved to waste time with online posturing and chest beating. Besides, as far as they’re concerned, while you’re being a diva you won’t notice them stealing your clients.

***Bonus #11!*** Writing holier than thou comments on (non)ranking weight of factor X, regurgitating what you read elsewhere with zero proof.

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