Search Marketing with ventureN

NOT!

Shouldn’t the bottom line be about relevance? I am not completely sure that I understand the point of a paid link being considered as something as evil and taboo. If I am running a shoe store and I have the opportunity to pay for a link in a blog about basketball shoes, should I? Of course I should. It is relevant and useful for the visitor of the basketball shoe blog and for the visitor to my site.

Instead, the search engines like Google feel it is “better for the user” if I create some B.S. link bait to get other sites to link to mine. How can you say that me creating a silly “throw the ball in the basket game” and getting other sites to link to mine (many off topic) is better than me spending $20 a month advertising via a link purchase. I just don’t get it. How is the more value to the user by generating link bait? There isn’t.

Greg Boser brought up this point at SES. He asked why coming up with irrelevant link bait is rewarded while purchasing a relevant ad on a niche site violates Google’s guidelines.

Google, please get your head around this one.  At the very least, lay out your reasons.

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I would consider this one of the first steps that you should take when establishing a new web site. If you are searching for “301 redirect” you probably already know why. Here is a simple .htaccess file that you can use to do the redirect.  You will also find this referred to as a “mod rewrite”

1. Create a new file in your favorite editing program. Notepad is an easy choice.
2. Paste the following:
   Options +FollowSymLinks
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursitenamehere\.com [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursitenamehere.com/$1 [L,R=301]
3. Save the file as .htaccess
4. Upload to your server
5. Test by going to yoursitenamehere.com. This should redirect you to the URL www.yoursitenamehere.co
6. Check the server header response to be safe. Should return “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”

If you are using a web design program like Dreamweaver, it might tell you that it can’t find a valid editor for this extension (it doesn’t have one). Simply right click on the file and select “open using Dreamweaver”. You can also open/edit, in notepad.

If you are on a windows host, you can view the following method to handle an ISAPI rewrite using IIS.

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Webcast Online Publicity and Link-Building 2007 (2/15/2007)
Presented by: Eric Ward, President EricWard.com

This is a summary of the webcast. The topics were a bit basic, but informative. The Q&A could have been a little longer and would have had more value if the question submission took place in advance. Eric Ward did a fine job and offered some good advice.

Read the rest of this entry »

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For those of you who have always wanted Google to open up their back link check (example “link:www.example.com”), the time has come. Well, sort of. Google isn’t going to display every single backlink to your site, but they are at least getting better. This is especially helpful since the last update to the links that could be viewed using the “link” command dropped dramatically. Some were complaining that it was 1/10th of the previous data. Depending on the quality of the links, that was sometimes the case, sometimes even less than that number.

Read more about the backlink update here: Google back link update

The new tool is found within Google Webmaster Central and can only be viewed by the site owner (in theory). Remember the little issue that Google had when they released sitemaps? I have faith that GOOG will be able to keep this one secure. In fact, I like the fact that this will be a private tool. When you put a lot of effort into building some nice links, you hate to simply give that list of sites to a competitor (Are you listening YHOO and MSN?).

I wonder if there will be a day when Google doesn’t display any link information to the public. Can you think of a reason why they should or shouldn’t?

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