Link Building is a fundamental skill for SEO practitioners, but many go about it in ways that could hurt their long term ranking benefit.

Just over a year ago I wrote my first and only guest post, as an entry into Marketing Pilgrim's annual competition.
At the time when I published the article, I joked that "I had been robbed", you wouldn't believe the number of comments suggesting a way to get my revenge, file DMCA, report to Google or recover my "stolen" article…

Oops. Bad, Google. Occasionally the service inserts direct answers to searches at the top of its results. It makes guesses at this, and in the case of michael jackson died, it’s making the wrong guess. Henry Elliss tipped us that Google’s showing that Michael Jackson died in 2007, at age 65.
The problem? Google’s drawing on [...]

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Here’s a new one on me. I just got an email telling me that I’ve won nearly $1 million from a “drawing” randomly selected from those searching on Google. Suffice to say, it’s a scam. I can assure you that Google’s done no drawing like this. Add the spam to those about missing fortunes in [...]

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Want To Make a Living on Google Money?

AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand…

In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.”

It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog…

With recent launch of the Google Analytics Data Export API, Google Analytics data is starting to show up in some new places. One of the most exciting places is on your mobile phone.In the past it was challenging to keep up with your performance data while on the go. Using the new API, a number of developers have created mobile solutions to tackle this challenge. Note, it still takes our system some time to process your data, so if you’re checking today’s data, proceed with caution…

At Google, we are moved by the life and untimely passing of Michael Jackson. As word spread of his death, millions and millions of people from all over the world began searching for information about the pop icon. The following chart shows the meteoric rise in related searches around 3:00pm PDT:Search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. As you can see in Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson’s passing (others pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett)…

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get data 10 times faster so you could make your bid & ad decisions in days instead of weeks or months? If you are presently only tracking sales conversions in AdWords, there may be a better way.

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Huge congratulations to Daniel Halasz from Hungary, who was awarded the Google Photography Prize this week. This was a global student competition to create themes for iGoogle. More than 3,600 students from across the world entered, and a couple of weeks ago we asked you to vote on the shortlist. The six finalists who got the most public votes were Amelia Ortúzar (Chile), Fahad AlDaajani (Saudi Arabia), Matjaz Tancic (U…

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
Yahoo Bike Girls:

King Albert II Visits Google Data Center:

Max Morgan performs @ Yahoo:

Yahoo Police Women?:

Happy Birthday Pamela [...]

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As consumers you and I see many product images (both on ecommerce and B2B) on websites weekly. How do you make a product image stand out from all of those? What I want to highlight are the best, the most persuasive, the unforgettable ones. Who has them? Do you have a favorite?

Here are a couple of my favorites:

This one is from Harry and David:

Here is one that shows an ordinary product like paper, that is hard to distinguish, in an extraordinary way:

Do you have a product image that tells a story? One that invites visitors to imagine owning your product? Please share it with us by adding a link below…

TechCrunch yesterday reported on the results of a focus group conducted by NY design firm Catalyst Group comparing usability on Bing and Google. The study showed that in many instances Bing was preferred but that users already familiar and comfortable with Google would likely stay with Google. What’s partly interesting about this is that the [...]

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Being in a wheelchair, I’m not able to shop in every retail store. Sometimes stores have a few steps outside the door, or have levels only accessible by stairs or escalator. Others have aisles too narrow for my chair, or shelves too high to reach. But I can access any e-store without a problem. It’s not that easy for visually impaired shoppers, illiterate and those who can see but do not have full hand function…

In this continuing series (part 1, part 2), I’ve shared some tips and tricks specifically for the search marketing professional using Microsoft Excel. The feedback has been great (thank you!), so I’m going to expand these posts to not just include tasks associated with SEM, but into a mini-Excel training course for search marketers [...]

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Update: Google representatives responded to complaints of the Google News delay with the following explanation:

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We’re sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for…

There are a lot of parallels between Google AdWords and SEO, and a lot of the beginner mistakes are the same for both traffic acquisition strategies. I figured it would be worth outlining some of the most common ones to help save you money on your search engine marketing campaigns.

1. Weak Domain Name
2. All Search Traffic Driven to Homepage
3. No Link Building
4. All Links to the Homepage
5. No Link Anchor Text Variation
6. No Focus on Quality
7. Lacking On Page Optimization
8. No Site Structure
9. Site With No Value Add
10. Competitive Saturated Market With Inadequate Budget
11. Picking a Market for 1
12. Pick a Market Which Does Not Monetize
13. Over-Aggressive Monetization From Day 1
14. What Other Common SEM Errors do You See?

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Veeple, Inc. (http://www.veeple.com/), today announced an agreement with BitGravity (http://www.bitgravity.com/), a global leader in online video, as well as several new service enhancements to its platform.Under the agreement, BitGravity will offer Veeple’s simple and innovative video solution to content owners and businesses to easily upload, manage, deploy and measure interactive videos across the Web…

Unrehearsed discussions about web analytics, marketing, web design and testing with experts in the field. In this episode, web analytics experts and Googlers Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski talk with Jeff Gillis from the Google Analytics team about the best ways to segment data.

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Brian Carter is one of those people who grows on you until one evening you sit typing the intro to an interview and you realize you can't even pinpoint the moment you got to know him; he's just always been there.

Brian's sense of humor is quirky, funny. If you pick the wrong set of tweets by one of his many @ handles you'd be excused walking away from them with a dismissive shrug of the shoulder and a heartfelt "weirdo!"

In fact, Brian's been the only contributor to the Search Engine People blog who tried to negotiate — and reason! — posting light hearted, "silly" blog posts…

A few of the changes we’ve made in the new AdWords interface improve how you manage your campaign settings. In today’s post, we’ll cover these changes. Edit Settings for Multiple CampaignsHave you ever wanted to quickly see which of your campaigns are running on the Google Content Network? Or compare ad scheduling settings for multiple campaigns at once? Now you can, using the new account-level Settings tab…

I can’t believe I’m writing this post. But on a day when both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson have died, people are clearly ready to believe anything. And a rumor that Jeff Goldblum has passed away is making the rounds, unable to be squashed because all the sites talking about it keep crashing under the [...]

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This week, Rand is joined by one of our in-house data geniuses, Ben Hendrickson, to talk more about some of our recently released correlation data to support guidelines for SEO best practices.

While correlation doesn’t always equal causation, it’s still very interesting to look at the attributes and features high ranking sites tend to have in common.  Comparing this data to known and accepted SEO practices can help to reinforce widely held notions or give us some insight into how the algorithms are changing; both important areas of analysis for successful online marketers…

So I’m a big fan of CSS image replacement, for several reasons, most importantly because it allows for a semantically correct page while having some text replaced with images, but also because I love sprites and I love using them well.

I’ve also always been in favor of the use of CSS Image Replacement for headings, while not wanting to fake the search engines, I’ve kept a simple rule: if you OCR the page, it should be exactly the same as when you read the HTML…

We’re lucky to have Avinash Kaushik, web analytics practitioner extraordinaire, on our team here at Google. We’re also lucky to have Nick Mihailovski, our developer programs manager who was a member of the Urchin team before the acquisition by Google. And they’re lucky to have each other - they are two peas in a pod. If you know one of them, you know what I’m talking about.It’s said that you can sum up a friend in three words…

Earlier this month, I covered various ways people are spamming Twitter in my Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article. Since then, I’ve been diligently reporting some of the more annoying spam I see. Despite this, none of the reported accounts have been closed. So, it’s time for a public spam report [...]

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Last week, we kicked off a five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown. This week, you’ll hear tips from Ricardo Prada, a user experience researcher at Google, about designing for the user. As we continue to share tips about attracting more visitors, increasing your revenue potential, and attracting more advertiser budget, we invite you to share your own suggestions for growing your business by leaving comments on each post…

A couple of months ago we announced Google Voice, a service that gives you one phone number to link all your phones and makes voicemail as easy as email. We are happy to share that Google Voice is beginning to open up beyond former GrandCentral users. If you requested an invitation on the Google Voice site or previously on GrandCentral, keep your eye out for an invite email.Once you receive your invitation, just click on the link and follow the instructions to setup your new Voice account…

There’s a lot of confusion regarding Google’s recent change to conversion metrics with the AdWords conversion tracker.  Previously a “1″ in the “Conversion” column would tell you there was at least one conversion that happened within 30 days of that date. You were happy with this limited knowledge.Messy and/or complex data was disguised as clean & simple data.  The “1″ was all you knew…

While I was working on a new system for my WordPress newsletter, a system that uses its own custom feed (skipping FeedBurner which caused errors last week), I had to figure out how to exclude a category from my blogs regular feed as well as my homepage and some other pages.

There’s a couple of ways to go about this, but what I decided to do was the following:

function mail_feed_query($query) {
if ($query->is_home || $query->is_front_page) {
$query->set(’cat’,'-120′);
}
return $query;
}
add_filter(’pre_get_posts’,'mail_feed_query’);

(120 is the category ID here)

This filters out the query from the home page and/or front page of your blog…

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