Even if I already am, I want to be your friend again on Facebook.

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I leave Utah for less then a month, and Dave Bascom goes and spends 5 million on the domain name SEO.com. I read this report first over at Marketing Pilgrim, but wanted to talk about one of the comments left on MP.

Jeremy Luebke stated:

“The way I look at it is an asset that will only go up in value. Even if they had paid $10 million dollars, it would still be worth the money in the long run. Even is the SEO firm behind SEO.com fails, the domain will still be worth more than they paid for it in the future.”

I could not agree more, but I am curious, being an SEO firm, how long it will take them to rank for the term SEO on Google? Google does give authority to the named domains, but there still has to be people behind the domain name that know what they are doing. Dave will be going up against the likes of Aaron Wall, Search Engine Roundtable, Rand and of course Wikipedia for the top “SEO” spot. For me, it will be interesting to see if he can outrank the stock ticker for the term “SEO”, (which I highly doubt), but there is no question he will be getting a lot of type in traffic.

This makes me think back when Business.com was bought for 12 million (or something) and it was crazy at the time. Business.com can’t even outrank CNN for the term business (as of today), but I don’t think they are losing any money (or sleep), or regretting the decision to purchase the domain name.

With an SEO related site (in my opinion) it is different - my point is an SEO company that owns the domain name SEO.com better start ranking quickly for their domain name, or they lose a lot of credibility. Me linking to you Dave (along with all the others) is gonna help, so your welcome! I guess you can’t spend 5 million and people not notice. Things this big usually don’t happen in Lehi, Utah. At least not since Cabellas opened!

But who cares huh Dave? With a domain name like that, you can fail like no other and still be, at the very least worth 5 million! Congrats on the VC for the purchase, and I look forward to see what the domain is going to do for you!

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I was going through some links today and I found an interesting page, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/home/.

It seems Harvard Law is hosting Blogs off of a double Sub Domain. I came across a guy selling links on his 3 that he owns in a forum. What is interesting is the wording on the page that says, “Weblogs on our server are hosted within the harvard.edu domain” not that it wasn’t already assumed that the blogs are hosted on the .edu domain but it is interesting that they mention that.

The sweetest part is if you make one it gets listed on this page, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/home/list it is a PR 7 (with over 103k links coming to it according to yahoo) that links to each blog after it is created.

I’m not sure why they would do this, maybe they want more traffic and internet saturation, maybe they just want a lot of users coming to their site and blogging. Who knows, but they are already being sold in forums. Maybe they are thinking kids will do some good posts and get them dugg and tagged and all that, to try and increase their presence. I’m not really sure.

A couple of months ago I noticed another college doing this but it was free for anyone it didn’t matter if you had the .edu email or not. Cameron showed me it has since been de-indexed. So who knows how this will be treated in Google.

I checked a couple and didn’t find any with decent rankings, I quickly tried the mesothelioma blog (wasn’t suprised to see that there) because I have a client that kills organic rankings for mesothelioma words and I hadn’t noticed it in my regular searches. It wasn’t anywhere in the top 10 pages, but was indexed and had a little pr so I could at least know it wasn’t brand new. There may not be very much juice from this. In all the .edu link testing I have done it is all about the in context reference links from the non sub domains, especially not double sub domains that send the love.

I checked a bunch that were non keyword titles and I couldn’t find anything ranking, maybe a little late, Google might have caught it first. I guess I don’t need to start emailing students to hook me up

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Just getting my life back to normal after moving, then three days later going to Seattle for the big SMX Advanced Search Engine Expo/Training/Conference/Networking Show. (more…)

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Just wanted to make sure and give a quick reminder for those trying to do everything they can to gain favor with Google when setting up a website. About 8 months ago I started optimizing a clients site and sent out the normal requests to designers and what not which included 301’s and re-dir-ing the non www’s to the www’s. My oversight, but I never checked to make sure it was done, and for the last several months he has been dominating on the search engines for almost every word he wanted. A couple days ago he stopped ranking for his domain name, and a sub page was ranking about 6 spots down from the top with his homepage nowhere to be found. If you typed in other keywords though he would rank for his homepage.

After a little bit of research I figured out he was having a canicol issues with his non www getting indexed (with no backlinks etc) … got it all switched, and fixed and he is now ranking again for his domain name and no damage done to other keywords. Its just a good reminder to make sure and double check the simple steps.

If you are running an apache server and are looking for the 301 re-dir code check this out below: (this is taken from a post I did almost a year and a half ago)

Here’s the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(Make sure your Apache installation has mod_rewrite enabled.)

As long as your Apache installation has mod_rewrite enabled then you should be able to use this fix on almost any host.

Second: If you have any old page urls that are being replaced by new search engine friendly ones, but do not want to lose your page rank then here’s the code for that:

redirect 301 /old/oldurl.html http://www.newurl/new.html

MAKE SURE you DO NOT include the http://www.whatever.com ONLY USE whats after the .com starting with the / or it will not work! Also make sure to only put ONE space inbetween everything!

There you go! That is as simple as it gets…or atleast as I can make it!

Remember why we do the 301 redirect:

Mainly for Google. Google does not like a bunch of error pages and if you have alot of 404 error pages that do not exist anymore (maybe after doing a redesign, or introducing new SEF naming conventions) then its harder for Google to crawl and you can lose the page rank the page has. With the 301 redirects you do not lose PR and you will not have to worry about duplicate content issues with your www and non www’s. That alone is worth doing it!

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If you are not familiar with the term “Parasite SEO” it is the practice of creating an optimized web page on sites that Google has placed a lot of trust. Schools and College web sites have become very susceptible to this as the Google “Trust Knob” has been turned way up for .edu domain names. Not just anyone can get a .edu domain name, there is a very lengthy process of approval. In as such there is an SEO Wise tail that claims links from .edu domains will help you rank higher and gain more trust in Google. I think there is some truth to it, I have done presentations on SEO at colleges and recieved links only a couple steps down from the homepage and seen some nice trust passed, I have tested Parasite SEO on different things and found some interesting results. But perhaps the most valid aurgument for .edu’s hording trust is the Google Searches “Buy Viagra” and “Buy Cialis.” (more…)

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Lets say I have a website that gets a steady flow of decent traffic (and I do - several in-fact) and I have people that want to pay me to advertise on my site because of that, and they feel they could benefit from it, then where the hell is the problem Google? Don’t try to tell me there is no problem if I only disclose paid links by putting a big ugly sign above the paid ad that says: Look here Google - “I am a paid link”. That is bull!

So Google wants to take away your right to make money by selling links, or take away your right to buy a link on an amazing site that could get you good traffic by scaring you? Personally, if I buy a link on a site like that, I do not want an ugly sign that says “Google this is a paid link”!

I agree that hiding links is a bad practice, one that I do not follow, but this is completely different and should not have even been brought up in the same context.

I would love to see the day when the Yahoo Directory has a big disclaimer at the top of it that states: “All of the people listed in this directory have paid to be here - Are we clear on that Google”? Are you really going to take away the value of a directory like that Google?

Here’s something for thought? If buying and selling text links were such an evil practice, then why has Google attended almost every Search Engine Conference whose some of the main sponsors are companies that sell text links?  (OH - and they sell links themselves too - hypocritical?  …. just a little) hmm…..

For a company that is suppose to have a “do no evil” policy, they have fallen to the dark side of the force pretty quickly, and I am starting to think of them like Microsoft. (And that’s lead me to buy a MAC)

Here is another thought:

• What if I wrote a really amazing story with great link bait, and a bunch of bloggers linked to the story because it was good (Well couldn’t I have just paid for a ton of bloggers to do that?)
• What if I had a story dugg and made it to the popular list ( I could have paid a bunch of people to digg that story?)
• What if this article got saved on del.icio.us a ton of times (I could have paid a ton of people to save it - right?)

DO YOU SEE THE POINT? Ok, I am done with this rant because this whole topic of Google hunting out websites that buy and sell links is ridiculous.

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I have been messing around a lot lately with Twitter and just trying to “get it”, and I finally have and want to share my top 10 reasons for using it. I suggest everyone become a part of Twitter today and add me as a friend! If you can get past the site showing quite a few time out errors, and the slowness of it right now, you will love what you can learn from it, and what it can do for you! Here’s why: (more…)

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With everybody talking about the 5 reasons “why they blog” I wanted to take a different twist on it, and talk about the only 5 blogs that I think are worth reading (and why I am glad they have 5 reasons to blog). I thank Aaron Wall for giving me the idea (via his blog) to take a different approach with this. (more…)

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I freaking think I had seen it all the last 4 years living in Utah, but Utah has gone and proved me wrong - I read this story talking about Rep. Dan Eastman banning keyword advertising and instantly thought (WTF)?

I would love to hear from anybody who may have more insight into this ridiculous waste of time that Utah law makers continue to dabble in. Is this a joke?

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