Marketing Pilgrim

I would have sworn up and down that Google organic listings operated without any integration of Google AdWords or AdSense data. Every engineer I’ve see talk about the subject has said as much and even the AdWords help documents stated this was the case. That was until now.

Jeremy Mayes noticed that Google has deleted the documentation. It used to be located here. You can still see the page in Archive.org.

Quote from Archive.org Page:

Will participation in AdWords or AdSense affect my listing in Google’s free search results?

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Maybe now with the new evidence of Google punishing link sellers we can get a large scale movement towards content blended paid links; something that has been an uphill battle so far. Here’s a list of basic rules to live by when selling links.

Do not talk about selling links.

I have come across a large number of websites that openly advertise you can buy a link on their site. This is a big no-no. If you have an advertising page on your site, do not list anything about plain text paid links even if it is an option.

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Yesterday I mentioned one of my favorite Google gadgets and today I’m going to talk about my least favorite gadget.

There is a lot of sensitive information stored in a persons Google account. Adsense, Analytics, Adwords, and the list goes on. If I were a Phishing scammer, a Google login would be almost as good as bank account information. Maybe even better as stealing money from a bank would draw the attention of the FBI. I’m not sure how much action I could get on a stolen Google account.

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As much as I try to remove myself from Google it seems I always end up coming back. The services and features they offer interconnect so easily and make life so convenient, how can I not? My new favorite Google toy is the iGoogle personalized homepage.

I think I also just found my new favorite Gadget. The Analytics KPI Gadget from the guys over at Monitus

From the Analytics KPI Gadget website:

Analytics KPI Features

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Blog comments have long been a link building tool for many SEOs (unfortunately). Before the nofollow tag, comment abuse ran rampant, and now with the nofollow tag in place, many people search high and low for blogs that have it removed.

I am personally against the nofollow tag. It’s one of the most absurd ideas to come out of the search engines in a long time. It has done nothing to stop the daily influx of automated comment spam it sought to stop.

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There seem to be a million and one open source content management systems these days. Just look at Open Source CMS. The problem is none of the developers seem to actually grasp in depth search engine optimization issues that such systems create. That is until now.

ModX is still young compared to projects like Drupal and WordPress but that can be a good thing. It gives the ability to learn from others mistakes.

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That’s because real businesses have real business models. So much of the web has been created by throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. Only then do many entrepreneurs mold a business model around a website and most of the time unsuccessfully.

As the Internet grows into it’s teenage years, much as with real children, we see it starting to comprehend economic logic. Making money costs money. The majority of successful businesses around the world are built on the foundation of ROI (return on investment) not ROTSBFC (return on time spent building free customers).

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So I’m sitting here listening to some old school jams, reading my daily mundane marketing RSS feeds, and preparing something to put me out of my misery. But wait, what is this? A blog post, and not an article, that is more useful than any article I have read in a month (or longer)?

I’ve covered link cloaking before. It’s usually not hard to spot. Those that do it usually do so in excess. While discussing SearchEngineWorld.com and possible link cloaking David Naylor brings to light that Google is showing site => redirect => site links compared to Yahoo only showing site => site links with a backlink check.

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Woke up this morning to find DavidNaylor.co.uk had been hacked and defaced. I don’t see any malicious code being inserted, only this note shown below replacing of all pages. Hopefully nothing more than the blog was affected and he is able to get the previous contents back up. I am wondering if this is the same person as before or just another random idiot.

Haxed hahahahahah

Black hat this, ****.

Update: Per comments by DaveN below, the site was moved and not hacked. He just enjoys humorous placeholder pages.

I see questions pop up in the forums every once in awhile with people asking if images that are linked to a website count as links. A link is a link so the answer would be yes. But what about images that are not surrounded by link (a href) tags. Can an image on it’s own count as a link? Well according to Yahoo Site Explorer they do.

I was reading a magazine the other day when I came across an article on JangoMail. Liking what I read I went to check them out. Being the SEO freak I am I had to check their backlinks even though my visit had nothing to do with SEO. Does anyone else here suffer from that disorder?

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Back in April Marketing Pilgrim reported Google was allowing select advertisers access to a new report named “Placement Performance.” It appears Google is as of today starting the official roll out of this report to all of it’s Adwords advertisers. The Placement Performance Report details the specifics of your ads running through the adsense network.

From the official Google release:

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What would happen to your business if you suddenly died in an accident? Would if fall apart or run smoothly in another persons hands?

Being Memorial Day I was thinking about our troops when it it dawned on me that out of the thousands of reservists who are now active duty, many own their own businesses and some probably own online businesses. What did they do when called up?

Whether it’s in relation to death or just incapacity to oversee day to day operations, we all need a plan to make sure our businesses are self sufficient and can provide for our families future. Here’s a good start for such a plan.

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