Category Archives: local internet marketing

This is a question I get all the time. In short, the nofollow attribute in HTML is a way for you to tag a link to suggest to the search engines that they ignore this link’s existence. When I say ‘ignore the link’, I mean that Google won’t use the link for any of the 3 ways that Google uses links. That means they won’t visit the link to find new content, they won’t give link popularity through it, and they won’t take the anchor text as a clue for what keyword the content should rank for.

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Anyone who’s ever read anything about SEO knows that building links is important, but what does it mean? There are potentially millions of reasons for one site to link to another

Everyone is looking for the silver bullet with linkbuilding – how to create a process where you can easily, quickly, cheaply, and reliably create links that count and make a difference in your rankings? I’ll tell you that there is no golden gun (James Bond reference, anyone?) for getting awesome links.

Scalable vs. Effective

In linkbuilding, scalability and effectiveness share an inverse relationship:

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As an internet marketer, I hear a lot of talk about reputation management.  I was recently impressed by a great success story. It wasn’t really done to manage reputation, but to live up to one of the companies values statements: “Caring about our communities & our environment.” For most companies, I think a value statement like this is just lip service, so it was very refreshing to see a company actually living it. Like Cervantes said, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Read On

So, PageRank is dead, right? Oh no, it’s definitely alive and well. It’s not being used as a factor to determine a page’s ranking anymore, but it’s certainly not ignored. Let me explain.

Google would never trash PageRank – it’s what made Google great! Before Google, the other search engines simply relied on what you say about yourself to rank you, usually in the form of how many times a given keyword is repeated on a page. Google innovated and started basing rankings not only on what sites said about themselves, but also what others said about the site – or its popularity. This popularity came in the form of links. Read On

In achieving success in the world of online business, SEO plays a very important role. SEO makes it possible for a website to rank on the top list in the search engine results page. A website at the top of the list will, of course, be visited by more people who are looking for the related information or products. It also works hand in hand in the online reputation management realm for a company or individual. Significant amounts of money are lost everyday because of misleading and erroneous information in search engine results. Read On

In the graph of ranking metrics that SEOmoz puts out, the largest slice of the pie (24%) is called “Trust and Authority of the Host Domain”. This means that just under ¼ of how you rank is determined by your site’s trust and authority. Why would the #1 most important factor in ranking be your site’s trust?

How much does Google spend each day to combat spam and other low-quality sites? I don’t know if I can quantify it without some help from the Big G, but I do know they have a whole team dedicated to fighting Spam, which is headed by Matt Cutts. That’s a whole team of overhead and salaries, potentially all over the world. With millions of dollars spent every year to combat spam, doesn’t it make sense to reward trust and authority as the largest part of the algorithm? This serves to naturally boost those with high trust and keep down those with spammy profiles. Read On