By Danny Sullivan

In the old days, getting listed on Google just meant having a web site. These days, you can get in by selling products through a virtual store, by having a book, by having a small local business that’s listed in a yellow pages directory and many other ways. To help centralize submission and inclusion information, Google has updated its Submit Your Content page to make it more into what I’d call Content Central, a guide to the many ways of being listed. Google’s also launched an actual Content Central blog, to coincide with the update.

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By Aaron Wall

Three years ago Todd Malicoat published a blog post titled Balancing the Link Equation, which offered conditional tips about how to improve the link profile of a website. I think of that post nearly every time someone asks for SEO advice because the field has grown so complex that both yes and no are often mutually wrong answers. The correct answer to most SEO questions is “it depends” followed by a whole bunch of qualifications like brand size, site age, content quality, site size, and marketplace competition.

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By David Roth

So what’s the ROI on this SEO program you’re recommending? How much revenue upside is there? What will it cost? How does this stack up against the fourteen other projects we’re working on right now?

Are these questions familiar to you? They are to me. I hear them in my sleep. I have had to answer each of them at some point (and most more than once) when making SEO recommendations both in-house and to clients. As SEO continues to grow as a viable marketing channel, you need to be prepared to answer these questions as well. Why?

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By Jill Whalen

As I’m reviewing company websites to prepare for our August SEO Training Class, I’m struck by how often I see the same website mistakes.

Since we’ve been offering the SEO classes over the past 7 months, we’ve reviewed over 40 websites. In each class of 6 online marketers, there’s never a dearth of problems to point out to them. I’m not talking about minor glitches here, but stuff that prevents the website from reaching its full potential with the search engines. In other words, as long as these problems exist, they’re not going to be able to gain all the targeted search engine traffic that they could be.

To put it into terms that anyone can relate to–the company is basically losing money every day they don’t fix their website.

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By Stephan Spencer

Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use “redirects” to alert the search engine to your changes, to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank dilution, you’ll want to employ redirects so as not to squander any link juice (PageRank) that your site has acquired. There are multiple ways of redirecting, and it’s important you get it right if you want the SEO benefit without risk of falling outside search engine guidelines (such as is the case with “conditional redirects”).

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“Strong international growth as well as sustained traffic increases on Google’s web properties propelled us to another strong quarter, despite a more challenging economic environment,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “As we continue to focus on innovating in our core business of search, ads and apps, we also look forward to enhancing the experience of our users and expanding the reach of our advertisers and partners with new technologies and formats, particularly as our integration of DoubleClick gains momentum and creates new opportunities in display advertising and elsewhere.”

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By Eric Enge

I always like to see what types of link building things that people talk about and/or present. Based on some basic tips provided by Roger Montti in the “Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques” session at SMX Advanced, this post will expand upon those to describe a specific link building plan that nearly any site can use.

Here is my expanded version of Roger’s tips on how to extract which .EDU sites link to a competitor of yours (or to an important company in your space). These commands work on either Yahoo or Microsoft Live Search, but not Google at this point:

linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “resource”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “directory”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “links”
linkdomain:domain-to-check.com site:.edu “favorite”

Using this technique you can find a ton of link targets to pursue, all from known linkers. You can expand upon this as you see fit too. For example, you can add the industry category name for products or services like yours to the list. You can also try this on .ORG sites. Once your brain gets going you can just keep going and going.

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Mariya Moeva and Bergy Berghausen of Google posted an excellent step by step instruction manual and video on when and how to submit a Google request for reinclusion in Google. In short, the steps are as follows:

Login to Webmaster Tools and check for any crawl errors, such as “URL unreachable” or “URLs restricted by robots.txt” errors. If you find those errors, dig deeper and see if you can open up those access errors. If those are not your issues, proceed to step two.

Check in Webmaster Tools the Message Center for any notifications of site issues. If there is something there, then follow those recommendations.

Then you want to review the Webmaster Guidelines and patch up any issues with your site that may have caused your site to be deindexed form Google.

Finally, go back to Webmaster Tools and submit a “reconsideration request,” but only after you are confident your site is in compliance with Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

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By Barry Schwartz

Saul Hansell from the New York Times reported on an interesting discover that uncovered that Google may look at more than just your previous query to tailor the ads you see on the search page. Now, Google may look back several past queries to tailor your search ads. Yes, this is a major difference - let me explain how.

Obtaining the previous query of a searcher is technically different then obtaining a query conducted five searches ago. Obtaining the latest query does not require cookies to be assigned and tracked for that search. But to track a query from five searches ago, you will need to assign a cookie to that searcher and track his queries. Then Google can use that ‘cookied’ data to tailor the ads from a query done several searches ago.

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By Barry Schwartz
Over the past few days, many webmasters and SEOs have been noticing an update to the PageRank score found in the Google Toolbar. Usually PageRank updates aren’t that noteworthy, but it seems something is different about this PageRank update

In particular, it has been a really long time since I’ve witnessed such widespread discussion about a PageRank update. I have been writing about PageRank updates since 2003 and been discussing them with other webmasters years before that. The last time I have seen this much discussion was in the times of the Google Dance, when toolbar PageRank updates actually coincided with ranking changes. Those days are long gone, but yet, SEOs and webmasters seem to be even more obsessed with a toolbar PageRank update. (FYI, I am one of those that believe we should not obsess about PageRank, let alone new toolbar PageRank updates).

I have asked Google for a comment about this PageRank update, since this is sparking such discussion. I will leave it open to discussion at our Sphinn forums, where several threads on the subject have started, such as this one.

My advice remains the same as always. Do not worry about PageRank. Try on focusing on building out a better site, with better content and a better community.

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