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October 21, 2010 by Jonah Stein Leave a Comment

Keep The World Safe From Internet Marketers

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The CEO of a startup I helped form recently wrote a bio of me for our website, describing me as an” SEO Guru”. I quickly asked him to change it to “Online Marketing Veteran” because the reputation of our industry has been so besmirched by the get rich quick hucksters who run pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing scams that are designed to prey on the hopes and dreams of desperate people who have been left behind by the new economy.

Their million dollar launches profit from exploiting the weak and the innocent and once you pay them the money they even tell you how to do the same. I won’t name name (I leave that to the Salty Droid and his Kajabi Scam Review), and I won’t say this syndicate is committing fraud (until they are convicted), I hope everyone in our industry who is committed to adding value remembers to take a stand and use your knowledge and your backlinks for good instead of evil.

Meanwhile, I will use my time and effort on little things, like the movement to Vote No On Prop 19. Not because pot is bad or evil or because I want to regulate what people put in their bodies. Hell, I am a libertarian on social issues: it is none of the governments business (ironic how many libertarians want to arrest people for drugs and regulate morality). My concern is that California’s marijuana prohibition provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of people and keeps them from doing something terrible — Like becoming affiliate marketers.

Filed Under: Punditry

April 22, 2010 by Jonah Stein 4 Comments

We All Agree – CAPTCHA SUCKS

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Tired of choosing between the lessor of two evils? Here is something Republicans and Democrats can agree on

CAPTCHA SUCKS CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and was originally foisted upon the citizens of the internet by Carnegie Mellon in response to a call by Yahoo to develop a system to keep computer generated Spam out of email and comments. While effective, the solution was a failure from the beginning because it placed the burden of proof on the user, a burden that has become increasingly difficult every day.

  • CAPTCHA suck time and money; each day human are forced to solve 200 million Re-Captcha’s plus countless other puzzle. Do the math and CAPTCHAs waste about $12 Billion of human productivity every year.
  • It really sucks that the hackers have gotten so good at solving them that CAPTCHA is now more of an obstacle for legitimate users than for dedicated hackers.
  • It really, really sucks that you can outsource Mechanical Turks solutions via a CAPTCHA farm in China or the Philippines for about $.02 each.
  • CAPTCHA really, really, really sucks because it is an obstacle for conversion, with some estimates showing that as many as 25% of people fail the first attempt at solving it and between 3% and 10% of your potential customers simply give up.

The only thing that sucks worse than CAPTCHA and ReCaptcha is not having one to protect your site from the inevitable onslaught of Spam and bot users being held at bay by this brittle defense.

There is hope, however, as Pramana introduced two new products today that are designed to help webmasters in their battle against blight. The first is call bot alert, which allows webmasters to quantify bot activity much the same way analytics lets you quantify human activity. The second is Bot Block, a true CAPTCHA alternative that is invisible and doesn’t require your users to do anything.

BotBlock™ is the first and only real-time weapon that keeps the bots out, but lets all of your real customers in. It integrates directly into your web pages. It invisibly analyzes and interrogates each interaction, and makes a reliable, real-time determination between human and bot.
Once detected, you can deal with an automated process as you please. You can block them outright. Give them a 404 that the page doesn’t exist. You can shut them down. We provide you the control to deal with them the most effective way for your web property.

The battle is far from over, but perhaps today will mark the turning point in the war between humans and bots.

Filed Under: Punditry

March 25, 2010 by Jonah Stein Leave a Comment

Your Name Belongs To Google

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It has been almost two years to the day since I left Alchemist Media to focus on ItsTheROI, yet Google still ranks the Alchemist homepage #2 for my name, “Jonah Stein”. This is despite the fact that my name ONLY appears deep inside their site in a couple of comments on blog posts I wrote three years ago. It is also despite a lot of other post about Jonah Stein like SEO Book, a dozen or so speaking engagements with my bio on authoritative sites, Twitter and Facebook profiles and lots of other mentions in the press and the blogosphere.

As with any page that is only ranking based on back links, a quick glance at the cache confirms that the words are not on the page.

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: jonah stein

The challenging part of this type of mini bombing is how difficult is it to undo once you have generated any buzz at a company. I have contacted everyone I could find with my name linking to Alchemist Media and one exception, they have updated the links (Hi Matt) The 15 remaining links showing in OpenSiteExplorer.org with the anchor text of “Jonah Stein” still pointing to Alchemist Media are all obviously scraped copies of the SEOMoz Ranking Factors Version 2 that are not even in English. The only thing on these pages in English are the names of the SEOs who participated. The moral of this story is that even if you are a professional SEO, your name belongs to Google.

Update: Neither Yahoo or Bing rank Alchemist on page 1 or 2 for my name. On the other hand, neither of them have ItsTheROI in first place. Yahoo doesn’t even have me on page 1 or 2!

Filed Under: Google

March 5, 2010 by Jonah Stein 2 Comments

Why Do We Care About Pagerank

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SEO’s frequently talk about PageRank (not Page Rank).  To prove we aren’t noobies, we quickly add that PR is not important anymore and to stop thinking of it as magical green pixie dust™.  While other external signals are just as important and ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) doesn’t represent the actual value Google puts on a page, there are some assumptions about PageRank that I think we can all agree on — at least until Google changes the rules on us.

  1. Pagerank is still the most meaningful indexation metric
  2. Higher PR is better than lower PR within a domain
  3. PR0 is better than graybar
  4. Graybar PR ~ supplemental index
  5. If the URL you are viewing is not the canonical URL, the PageRank will not match.  You can see the canonical URL by viewing the Google Cache
  6. If your page in not showing as cached in the index, it is not going to rank

If you are not familiar with what PageRank is or want to learn more about, read Danny Sullivan’s excellent, frequently updated and exhaustive (exhausting?) guide to PageRank, which he explains nicely:

Let’s start with what Google says. In a nutshell, it considers links to be like votes. In addition, it considers that some votes are more important than others. PageRank is Google’s system of counting link votes and determining which pages are most important based on them. These scores are then used along with many other things to determine if a page will rank well in a search.

™2005 Greg Boser, 3Dog Media

Filed Under: Google

March 2, 2010 by Jonah Stein 2 Comments

SMX West 2010 – Pagination and PR

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The ROIGuy is presenting on pagination at SMX West 2010 on Wednesday at 1:30 pm as part of the Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Technical SEO Tactics session.

This presentation includes a case study along with some very interesting and confusing graphs. Download the PPT and follow along in the fun. SMX-West-2010 Pagination Presentation

Pagination decisions are made by webmasters every day, generally with very little thought.  Nothing is seemingly as innocent and “solved” as adding the links at the bottom of the page they lets the user find additional results.

For on-site SEO, the decisions made about how many links to display on the first page, how to order those links and how to name to pages within the pagination scheme are consequential and require significant thought.

Attendees will leave this session with actionable items they can go home and implement to make a immediate impact on their sites.

This presentation includes a case study along with some very interesting and confusing graphs. Download the PPT and follow along in the fun. SMX-West-2010

Filed Under: Speaking

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