Caydel’s SEO Blog

For the last year or so, I have been regularily been using the Search Status and SEO for Firefox Firefox browser extensions as part of my daily routine for researching competition, SERPS, and sites.

On the recommendation of David Ogletree, I recently install the SeoQuake, just to test it out, and to see if it fit with my workflow better than the two plugins I am currently using. So far I am reasonably impressed, apart from a few small issues; namely that a number of the link checks performed by the tool are broken.

As you can see in the image above, a few of the functions are broken. In both the site-specific bar and the SERP checking functionality of SeoQuake, the Yahoo Link and Link Domain queries always return 0 queries. This is of course an error, since a quick check of the sources indicates that there are a few thousand backlinks returned by both. Addtionally, the MSN link check always returns an error.

This results in the broken SeoQuake being severely handicapped until these bugs are fixed; hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for the next release.

On the positive side, once these bugs are fixed, I will likely include SeoQuake in my regular toolset. Although the SERP information returned by SeoQuake is not quite comprehensive as that returned by SEO for Firefox, it loads quicker, and has a useful per-site caching system, so that if the same site is seen multiple times within different SERPS, it only fetches its information / statistics once. This leads to quicker results when researching similar SERPS within the same niche.

Overall, SeoQuake is quite a cool tool, and I think it will totally rock once they get those bugs out of the works.

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A recent post at SEOmoz once again brought up consider the plight of the Search Engine Optimization industry; as effective and needed as SEO consultants are, blackhats and webspammers have given the industry a black eye.

People see the search community in two camps: Search Engines (good) and Spammers/SEOs (bad). The way they see it, the search engines work diligently to reduce spam, and show the most relevant results for their queries. On the other side of town you have the SEOs and spammers, who try to make sites rank for their own ends, therefore throwing off the good, pristine search engine results.

What the public needs to realize is that real SEO isn’t about making pillspam or other useless garbage rank - SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries. For most site owners, there is little or no value in ranking for non-relevant queries. Often, the pursuit of rankings by SEOs forces them to review the content, make it more relevant and of better quality to induce links, and all around creates better websites and an overall better user experience on the Internet.

I think the SEO community needs to reach out to the public in some way to raise our profile in the public eye, differentiating ourselves from the communities of webspammers and other devious characters. We need to present ourselves as a legitimate, valuable industry. I think that we are on the right track as far as it goes, but more has to be done.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to better clean up the SEO image? I would appreciate your thoughts.

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A while back, I first commented on the fact that the entire .cm (Cameroon) TLD appears to be redirected to the Agoga.com parking page in my post ‘Typo Squatter loses Thousands of Dollars Due to Missed Details‘. This post generated tons of interest and comments, and a large amount of search traffic.

The move by the government of Cameroon has become an ongoing mystery for many domainers - few could fail to see the benefitsof owning the .cm registry. Think of the profits - any time you mistyped ‘.com’ as ‘.cm’, you went to an ad-driven parking page. It is estimated that millions of people make this sort of error every day, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad revenue daily. In essence, whoever redirected the .cm registry pulled off the perfect coup of the domaining world.

Well, the mystery is finally solved. According to a recent article on CNN, the mastermind behind the .cm switch is Kevin Ham, domainer extrordinaire with an estimated net worth of $300 million dollars. According to the CNN article, Ham sent a group of his employees flying to the nation of Cameroon to convince the government-run registry the value of landing-page redirection. Ham splits his profits off this scheme with the government of Cameroon.

According to sources, he is also eyeing Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) for the same type of agreement he has with Cameroon.

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So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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and Barry Schwartz are reporting today that there is yet another Toolbar PR update.

When the Jan. 9 update hit, it only appeared to affect older, established sites. Most of my sites 18 months or older had some changes last time around, but none of my newer pages had any changes. This blog, for instance, which is nearly a year old remained at a solid PR0.

This latest update appears to affecting more sites. *All* of my older, established sites dropped PR by a point while new pages, such as this blog, finally got their first Toolbar PR value.

The fact that the PR dropped on the older pages, which have only been growing over time, leads me to wonder if perhaps the displayed PR values have been normalized differently this time around. For example, does a new PR3 signify a higher ranking than a PR5 may have a year ago?

Many of my pages which were previously PR5 are now PR3-PR4, despite major increases in relevant links from a variety of *trusted* sources. I find it hard to believe that these pages could have *lost* value over time in the eyes of Google. I am not so confident to believe that it is totally impossible that my pages could ahve gone down in quality over time, yet the fact that this trend appears across *all* my pages seems to indicate that something has changed.

Have you noticed anything different? What kinds of gains / losses have you seen this time around.

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LinkedIn has been generating a signifigant amount of buzz in the last few weeks. First, a lot of noise was made over the launch of the new LinkedIn Answers section, then Guy Kawasaki’s great ‘10 Ways to Use LinkedIn‘ post.

Where is the value of LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a network of over nine million professionals, with full profiles on them including their education, their industry, and their work histories. In short, LinkedIn has control over a staggering amount of data. This information is a goldmine for data mining purposes, market research, or any one of a thousand different uses.

But that is only the smallest part of the value of LinkedIn. The real value becomes apparent when you go to Account Settings > Advertising in your profile and read the following text:

LinkedIn is developing or has developed a method to serve ads based upon the content in your LinkedIn profile. Any time you are logged into LinkedIn, the ad code they are developing will likely read a cookie in your browser to gain the stored profile ID, then delve into your profile to pull out the information to serve ads.

Think of the value in this - they know your industry and your work experience. They could tune advertisements exactly to what you as a professional want and need to see. This technology could be worth potentially millions to the Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing programs. For all we know, LinkedIn is already licensing out this data to other companies for marketing purposes.

Before too long, we will likely see LinkedIn purchased by either Google or Yahoo! in order to get control of this data. It could potentially form a large part of the algorithm of either company when determining which ad to display on a site to a given end user.

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Today, a set of Wikipedia articles about Barry Schwartz, Matt Cutts, and Ben Pfeiffer were moved into the Articles for Deletion list by Wikipedia editors.

The editors are removing them on the basis of a lack of notability. Of course, these editors are obviously not involved in the search industry; otherwise, they would immediately recognize that these three are household names to the industry.

In order for the editors to acknowledge the notability of these three, they need a set of news sources about each of these men and their contributions to the search industry. If you know of or can find articles mentioning or about Barry, Matt, or Ben, please post them into the discussion pages at the following Articles for Deletion pages:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barry Schwartz (technologist)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Matt Cutts
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ben Pfeiffer

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