Not since the famous “Troubled Times for SEO firms” article has there been so much controversy in the SEO world. On April 14th, 2007 Google’s Engineer/unofficial spokesman Matt Cutts announced on his blog that Google has initiated a new “spam reporting form” in the Google Webmaster Console. Matt Cutts says the new form will allow webmasters to report “paid links” as a form of spam. The announced came shortly after the SES conference in London, England.

In Matt Cutts blog he states “Something thing I heard at SES London was people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d want a few paid link reports anyway because I am excited about trying some new ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.” (more…)

On March 19^th Utah’s own Governor Jon Hunstman signed the “Trademark Protection Act” which won by a unanimous vote. With little fanfare, this bill drew almost no attention, that is until Google and other major corporations started to notice. The new law would allow companies to create electronic trademarks to prevent competitors from using those marks. While this law sounds innocent, the implications are far reaching and affect most companies doing business on the internet, most of all those in search engine marketing. (more…)

In late 2006, an article by Dave Pasternack titled “Troubled Times for SEO” describes the “staggering” “statistics” of a recent study published by Marketing Sherpa. This article has sparked a great deal of interest and debate on the topic of search engine optimization industry growth and the ultimate viability of the industry as a whole. While there is always room for debate, this article is an absurd oversimplification and an abuse of statistics, leading many to believe the article was written controversially as a source of link bait. Anyone who understands statistics realizes the fallibility inherent in them. The statistics for this 2000 person case study state that there was a growth of out sourced SEO work from 2004-2005 of 124% while in 2006 the growth halted to 6.7%. If this is true these numbers are interesting but indicative of an industry lull, I do not think so. The study methodology and the participants should be questioned (if there ever really was a study at all). However even if you ignore the fact that the study is questionable, they later go on the claim the SEO boats the highest ROI at 67.7%. (more…)

When major search engine companies want to test out new products and services they don’t always roll out a huge new platform. Sometimes they do beta testing in the shadows so their results are not skewed. Google has been testing out some new features on a search called SearchMash. Now at first glance appears to be arbitrary programming project, but if you look in the private section you will notice “SearchMash is a website operated by Google Inc.” So what is the true purpose of this search engine? It’s purpose is simple; (more…)

“The Google Sandbox” does that make sense to you? There is a theory in the (more…)

In the world of SEO there is a certain culture. And this techie, savvy culture likes to use their own words. There are times when two SEO professionals talking shop is like listening to an alien conversation. Some of this SEO vocabulary includes CPM, PPC, SEM, SEO, CPA, Linkbait, anchor text, blogroll, feed and of course, the main ones black hat and white hat. It is not important that you understand all of these terms unless you work in SEO however a few of them are very important. Black hat and White hat are important (more…)