Caydel’s SEO Blog

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.

This afternoon, Aaron from the City of Angels Children’s Home in Tijuana, Mexico contacted me for some SEO advice. It seems that since yesterday, the homepage of the site (just the homepage, not the entire site! http://www.tjkids.org) has been dropped from the Google index.

I’ve taken a look at it, and identified a few possible factors:

1. Very low link strength - The site has only 17 backlinks according to Yahoo, with only 14 distinct domains between them.
2. No internal links to the root domain - The menu bar linked to http://www.tjkids.org/index.html rather than to the root page.

If you have a spare minute, here’s some things you can do to help Aaron and the orphanage.

• Are you an SEO? Do you see anything else on the page that could be causing Google issues? I’d appreciate it if you could post anything else in the comments, so I can relay it back to Aaron!
• Are you a blogger or webmaster? It would help a lot if you could write a post or story linking back to the City of Angels Children’s Home. This will help them to get indexed again.

Thank you for taking a second to read this, and please consider helping out!

Roughly one month ago, on December 11, I signed up for Jim Kukral’s BlogKits service. Blogkits was designed and is marketed as a way to monetize blogs, aiming at taking over the advertising positions on blogs most often filled with Google Adsense or a similar PPC service.

The truth is that the vast majority of blogs don’t make more than pennies per day using Google Adsense. And here’s a little secret that even the “big” bloggers (the ones with tons of traffic) don’t want to tell you… Even they only use Google Adsense to supplement their blogs. They make a lot more money selling other ads because they have traffic.

It’s true, if you don’t have a ton of traffic like the vast majority of blogs, running Google Adsense is a waste of time. Take our challenge. Sign up and run BlogKits partner ads on your blog for 30-days in place of your Adsense ads. Then compare the earnings, and you decide which one is more worthwhile.

I was definately interested in giving it a shot, so I signed up and placed a BlogKits block on my blog, which is visible to the right, above my existing Adsense ads, as well as in a text link following the title of each post. Now, nearly a month has passed, and I have made my decision.

Before I comment on my earnings, I should mention that I cheated on the BlogKits challenge a bit - I did not remove my existing Adsense ads. I figured that the influence each ad service had on the other would be minimal; if people are interested in an ad, they will click it, regardless of what else is on the page.

For the time period from 11/12/2006 to 08/01/2007, BlogKits has taken 61 clicks, with a 0% conversion rate, and $0.00 earnings. For the same time period, Adsense has had 22 clicks, with $8.33 in revenue.

Now, I realize that the click volume to each is somewhat small; it may take more clicks before I see any conversions with BlogKits, and even a single conversion has the possibility to pass my Adsense revenue. Nevertheless, after just under 30 days, BlogKits has not performed for me!

I will leave BlogKits up for another month or two to collect more data, but so far I am not holding my breath! How has your experience with BlogKits been - has it worked well for you?

After reading Guy Kawasaki’s post on ‘Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn‘, I realize that LinkedIn is catching on at a quick rate.

I think it has a lot of potential both for job hunting and just for having a professional contact network. Additionally, with the new LinkedIn Answers section, it will only become greater as a resource for professionals to rely on.

I’ve had up for about a month and a half now, and have built a small contact list. However, there is nothing about it that even really shouts out my interest in SEO or Web Design. I know I am a capable programmer and decently knowledgeable about the SEO industry, but due to a lack of professional experience (I’m only in University, remember), I don’t have a wealth of previous positions to include which might indicate my knowledge and interest in these fields. Additionally, none of my previous employers use LinkedIn, and so I can’t draw on their recommendations either.

I want to clean up my act a bit on LinkedIn. So how would you suggest I optimize my LinkedIn profile and make it more professional looking? I want to be able to apply for jobs via LinkedIn and not immediately dismiss me based on the sparseness of my profile.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated. Additionally, if you want to add me to your contact network, go right ahead. My email address is . Thanks for any help!

Wow - the last couple days have been full of surprises.

A few days ago, I wrote an article called, ‘‘. I didn’t think it was anything special; I was just rewriting something that was written in the comments of a previous post.

Well, much to my surprise, Search Engine Land picked it up (thanks Barry) as well as . WebProNews is of course scraped to high heaven, so I immediately got tons of backlinks as a result of that.

The post on SEL was seen by a number of prestigious bloggers, and soon the story was getting linked from ProBlogger.net and among a large number of other sites.

Here’s where the big surprises came in - the article started getting linked from sites in different languages such as Korean, and a German sites.

At it’s peak, the post made the Techmeme frontpage, which sent about 150 readers.

As a result of this post, my Technorati rank dropped greatly, sitting me at 98,277. From tracking my referrals, I suspect that I got between 200-300 new backlinks, and the number of RSS subscribers reported by FeedBurner has doubled. My Blog Juice jumped from 2.1 to 2.6.

Welcome to the new readers - I hope you are somewhat entertained and informed by my posts. Thanks for the link love everyone who linked to the article - I will be giving you tons more like it

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

Ever since my early days in the webmaster sphere, Shoemoney’s adsense check has been a motivation and an inspiration to me. Well, now I’ve had mine and become a successful webmaster myself, so I would like to provide a new image so that the next generation of marketers will have something to work towards:

Adbrite is perhaps not proving themselves to be the most efficient company by sending checks for that amount, but I can never say they didn’t pay me in a reasonable time. I only ran Adbrite for the last day of that pay period… Hopefully the next check is somewhat more impressive