Fantastic Linkbait: Google doesn’t need to find Chuck Norris for you!
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while – I saw this mentioned on John Battelle’s blog. Type “find Chuck Norris” into Google’s search form, and then hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, and you’ll get this:
The result is a Google search results page with no listings and the message at the top states:
“Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”
But wait! This result page is actually a hoax, only pretending to be from Google! It’s actually produced by Arran Scholsberg. Arran is a student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is a web designer and photographer. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/28/2008
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Filed under: Google, Link Building, Marketing, Searching, Tricks Chuck Norris facts, Google, hoaxes, linkbait
Treat your Customers like Royalty and the Traffic (and Links) will Come
Have you heard the words, “reputation management” applied to SEO before? Well, if you haven’t, you certainly should. Where some corporations might argue that the blogosphere isn’t important, Zappos, the web’s biggest shoe store would, no doubt, disagree. If you have any questions about how positive the blogosphere can be for links (and traffic), grab a box of tissues and read this post entitled, “I heart Zappos.” The blogger bought a pair of women’s shoes for her mom. The post is currently ranked #12 in Google for “zappos” (and #9 in Yahoo). Want to learn how you, too can garner link love and traffic for your brand? Here are some great lessons we can learn from this story to help you manage your online reputation…
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 11/30/2007
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Filed under: Link Building reputation-management
Now MS Live Search & Yahoo! also treat Underscores as word delimiters
So, I earlier highlighted how Stephan reported on Matt Cutts revealing that Google treats underscores as white-space characters. Now Barry Schwartz has done a fantastic follow-up by asking each of the search engines if they also treated underscores just like dashes and other white space characters, and they’ve verified that they’re also handling them similarly. This is another incremental paradigm shift in search engine optimization!
I’ve previously opined that classic SEO may become extinct in favor of Usability, and announcements like this fluid handling of underscores would tend to support that premise. Google, Yahoo! and MS Live Search have been actively trying to reduce barriers to indexation and ranking abilities by changes like this plus improved handling of redirection, and myriad other changes which both obviate the need for technical optimizers and reduce the ability to artificially influence rankings through technical improvements.
I continue to think that the need for SEOs may decrease until they’re perhaps no longer necessary, so natural search marketing shops will likely evolve into site-building/design studios, copy writing teams, and usability research firms. The real question would be: how soon will it happen?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/02/2007
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, Link Building, MSN Search, URLs, Yahoo
The Simpsons & Great Participatory-Viral Marketing
This past Saturday, I mosied over into central Dallas to check out the Kwik-E-Mart that was created to promote The Simpsons film, set to air nationwide later this week. The Kwik-E-Mart was created out of a 7-Eleven convenience store – surely the first ever instance of the subject of a satire being remade to more closely resemble the satire itself. The Dallas Kwik-E-Mart is one of the eleven created nationwide out of 7-Eleven stores, and it’s a simply fantastic piece of viral marketing, participatory marketing – and yes, linkbait.
Read on for more details…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/23/2007
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Filed under: Link Building, Marketing linkbait, Participatory-Marketing, The-Simpsons, The-Simpsons-Movie, Viral-Marketing
Search Marketing Basics Tip: Include a URL on Your Products
This may seem like a no-brainer because, well, it is — but if you manufacture and sell products you should think of ways to include your contact information on those items so that people could find out where to get them – particularly you should include a URL. The typical person encounters and uses hundreds of objects every day, so leaving your company info off of your products can represent a lot of missed opportunities. Read on for details…
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/22/2007
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Filed under: Advertising, Link Building, Marketing Marketing, Offline-Promotion, Product-Marketing, search-marketing
Technorati Authority Number Now Decides Blog Rankings
On Friday, I noticed that Technorati instituted a new change in how they report info about blogs they track. Previously, they displayed the total number of inlinks from the total number of blogs linking to a blog. For example, they’d state “__ blogs link here” and “X links from Y blogs”. They now only state the total number of blogs that link to a blog, and they’re calling that measure the “Technorati Authority” number.
Technorati only counts the total number of blogs which link to another blog for the Authority number, not the total number of links – which is good, since various blog features like categorization pages, preview snippets, and other pagination and navigation schemes common to blogs can cause a link from a single posting to reappear multiple times from a blog’s site.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/08/2007
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, Link Building Blog Optimization, Blog-Rank, BlogRank, nofollow, Technorati, trackback-submitter
AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran
The San Francicso leg of the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Marketing this past Friday was really great! The crowd was intimate, which allowed all of us speakers to mingle and have some quality discussions with folx, and the seminar/conference/workshop was excellently organized.
Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/25/2007
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Filed under: Conferences, Google, HTML Optimization, Keyword Research, Link Building, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Seminars, SEO, Social Media Optimization AMA-Hot-Top-Series, AMA-Search-Engine-Marketing, American-Marketing-Association-Hot-Topic-Series-on-Sear, Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Search Engine Optimization
Podcasts of Neil Patel, Eric Ward, and Vanessa Fox
I’ve been interviewing speakers of the AMA’s Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing events taking place April 20th in San Francisco, May 25th in NYC, and June 22 in Chicago (all three of which I will be chairing). I had fascinating and insightful conversations with link builder extraordinaire Eric Ward, Googler Vanessa Fox, and social media marketing guru Neil Patel. There’s some real gold in those interviews.
Download/Listen:
- Neil Patel interview (15 minute MP3, 3 megs) – getting to the front page of Digg and other social media sites
- Eric Ward interview (36 minute MP3, 8 megs) – tips and secrets on how to garner links
- Vanessa Fox interview (40 minute MP3, 9 megs) – Google’s webmaster tools, SEO impacts of AJAX, Flash, duplicate content, redirects, etc.
More podcasts to come from other speakers, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss them. Also be sure to register for the conference at one of the three cities, it’ll be great!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/28/2007
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Filed under: Google, Link Building, SEO, Site Structure, Social Media Optimization digg, Google, Link Building, link-baiting, podcasts, Social Media Optimization, social-media-marketing, Webmaster-Central
In other news, a new free Clinic
Search Engine Journal today opened free SEO Clinic for sites in need of optimization or with specific challenges that have not been overcome.
A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).
It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences. If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse. I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see. That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).
To participate, simply contact the team here.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/27/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, General, HTML Optimization, Link Building, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Structure, Spiders help, optimization, review, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO-consulting, SEO-critiques, website-design
Blog Tag – You’re It!
Okay, so, I’m late to the Blogtag game, but better late than never, right? I’m not sure who came up with this, but the idea behind the game is that you have to tell 5 things about yourself that most of your readers might not know, and then “tag” five other bloggers by linking to them. Stephan tagged me back around Christmas timeframe, and I was so busy vacationing, and then getting back into work-groove that I neglected to play out my piece in this cool little SEO meme. So, here goes.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:
1. – I’m fascinated by the Voynich Manuscript. It’s compelling to me as an enduring mystery — likely one of the top seven mysteries in the modern world. Many cryptographers and linguists have attempted to decode it, and failed!
If I thought it was more than an antique hoax, I’d be writing my own Perl scripts to try to break the code down. My first decoding book was written by Martin Gardner, and I used what I learned from it in third grade to break a coded message I found in my great-great-grandmother’s autograph book. I guess the takeaway is that I’m just damn compelled by puzzles. I used to compete with people in high school to see who was the fastest at solving mixed-up Rubik’s Cubes. I think my record was right around 42 seconds. (I’m not that fast anymore, but I’m obviously still a geek.)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/16/2007
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, General, Link Building blog-tag, Link Building, linkbait, Links
