Sites Selling Text Links Get Google-Slapped, Should They Worry?

It is all over the blogosphere – sites known for selling text link ads or Google PageRank have been slapped with a PageRank reduction for their own sites by the almighty Google itself. Is this a worldwide PR update with a possible algorithm change or is it more along the line of a hand job?

Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation

Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation

In today’s socially connected online world, reputation management is becoming more and more a concern for any business. Sure, most companies are able to secure the number one spot in the organic search results for their brand via their company web site. However, what about the remaining first page real estate and even that of the second and third pages?

Guidelines for Link Building With Blog Reviews

Loren Baker has put together some guidelines in using blog reviews as an effective link building tactic. What I like best about Loren’s post is that he provides sound advice without revealing any specifics such as blogs that sell reviews or even companies that actually provide this as a service. With the war that Google has waged against paid links, it is comforting to see posts such as these that provide useful information without helping Google to identify those who are buying or selling the reviews.

Irma Wallace Interviewed For Women of Internet Marketing Series

Li Evans has been after Irma, my wife and half owner of our company, for some time now to do an interview for the Women of Internet Marketing series. Well, Irma finally obliged and the interview is included in issue number 23 in an ongoing series Li has been publishing for some time now.

Small Business Brief Re-Invents Itself

Small Business Brief, a site devoted to all aspects of small business, which is produced by Robert Clough and company, the same folks who also bring us
Search Engine Guide, has re-invented themselves by converting into a Digg type of site where anyone can submit stories, vote them up or down and of course comment. Built off the same platform as Search Engine Land’s Sphinn, Small Business Brief is now a lot like Sphinn however, not strictly limited to the topic of search engines and search marketing.

The Paid Links Industry Needs To Go Underground

If Danny Sullivan’s report over the weekend that Google is in fact reducing the PageRank for sites that are suspected of selling paid links isn’t enough to send the entire paid links industry underground, then I don’t know what is. Add to this the storm of controversy that recently occurred over Rand Fishkin outing sites that sell paid links.

SEO Myth: All Reciprocal Links Are Bad

We are having a discussion over at Small Business Ideas Forum where Dale King starts things of by questioning the effectiveness of reciprocal linking tactics. He basically says that once upon a time, reciprocal links were one of the number one ways webmasters acquired links from other sites. However, in current times, reciprocal links have been greatly devalued by the search engines, at least as far as helping a SEO effort. So are reciprocal links a thing of the past?

Awesome Plug-In To Fight Comment Spam on Movable Type Blogs

I wish Movable Type had something better than Akismet which does a pretty good job filtering spam but still very quickly populates Movable Type’s junk folder. While this keeps junk comments from ever appearing on your blog, it still takes time to sift through them in order to locate any good comments which end up in there (which has happened). So late last night, with a little searching, I found an awesome plug-in developed by Jay Allen simply called Comment Challenge plugin.