Sphinn: Comments

Comment on Is Bing a viable competitor to Google - a 1st month review

cosmiccarl — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:41:02 PDT

It has less results than Google and more trash. Bing is not my thing. M$ needs to spend money and get some good coders, their algorithm seems to miss a lot of content.

Comment on Lead generation best practices white paper

flexrorg — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:00:01 PDT

Sorry to disappoint you, but it is not about minimizing barriers. It is actually interesting stuff about best practises acquired during several years of lead generation for a Fortune 500 company. One of the points is how to effectively follow up generated leads, a less covered topic.

Comment on Some Rules To Follow As An Internet Marketer

robinbal — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:01:06 PDT

I am glad you have been saying this too :). Dont grumble :), just stick to what you are saying :)

Comment on Online Genesis: Chapter 1 (And Part Of Chapter 2)

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:15:27 PDT

I remember something about eating the forbidden fruit of commercialism or something. Or was it Black Hat?

Comment on Some Rules To Follow As An Internet Marketer

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:26:10 PDT

I've always been saying this, but noooooooooooooo, *someone* always tells me that Americans aren't interested in what some shitty Malaysian is saying...*grumble*

Comment on Free PDF SEO Guide Ebook by Hobo-Web.co.uk

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:59:33 PDT

:) Thanks for the post. I'll be reading this for a while.

Comment on Should Your Small Business Have a Blog?

MiguelGomez — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:19:24 PDT

To me it seems clear that the danger in blogs, and to a greater extent Social Media, is when people (companies) use these mediums in unauthentic ways. If you care and invest yourself in meeting people, providing good content, and being authentic, then I think you can avoid the risk of blogs and social media.

Comment on It's All About Local Organic Domination

ReinierNL — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:53:10 PDT

@earlpearl: How dominant should a website be in both the organic and local search listings in order to get a one-box listing?@David Mihm: You're right; Dr. Gordon Dubois' website appears once in the local search results and four (!) times in Google Maps. Oddily, all Google Maps listings are for the same website. I agree that this website will dominate both the local and organic search results if Will were to improve the GLBC listings.@David Rodecker: What do you mean with "geomodifier ambiguity"? Would that be the same as e.g. "hotel new york", where "new" can be considered both an adjective and part of the location "new york"?@Will Scott: It is not a matter of claiming the other listing; you simply need to update the details in the GLBC listing and request them to be updated on the referring websites, get listed in one of those local directories you have in the US and A, add the two appropriate categories (as suggested by Google), add a Google Map and throw in a KML-file. It will probably be sufficient to only add the two appropriate categories to get the top position in Google Maps, since there is no fierce competition. About the two examples your provided: none use the appropriate categories and both face some stiff competition.

Comment on Accidental duplicate

ianmacfarlane — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:30:33 PDT

Original Sphinn is here http://sphinn.com/story/120424

Comment on Accidental duplicate

ianmacfarlane — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:25:05 PDT

Sphinn appears to have allowed the same post to be Sphunn in two places, with exactly the same URL. Can a mod please take this second one down?

Comment on Lead generation best practices white paper

morgret — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:34:07 PDT

I'm not going to fill out the seven required fields to download the white paper, but I'm guessing that the white paper on lead generation discusses minimizing barriers to getting the lead.

Comment on Pros and Cons of Pay for Performance SEO Pricing Models

seobro — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:33:51 PDT

A guy offered me 10% of every sale, if I helped him. He was not selling anything and about to go under. This guy was into debt heavy. I agreed to the deal and got him position one on many of his keywords. Sales started to come in.Then he said that he did not have to pay me. This is because he only paid people if he felt like it and that I was greedy because I wanted 10% and that I was a crook because of expecting him to give me money. He also did not pay the web hosting company. Needless to say, his website is down and he is now making zero sales.

Comment on Real time search engines; the hype and the reality

theGypsy — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:42:07 PDT

Agreed on that point as well - it is a rare occasion that I actually care about up-to-the-minute news/information. A lot of this really is a 'buzz' monitoring approach more than anything and the flavour of the month as well. As we noted, much of the current stock are little more than social aggregators anyway... bah humbug...

Comment on FAKE GUCCI GUNS!!! a lighthearted look at Adwords guidelines

Maeve1985 — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:25:30 PDT

Good stuff, great for anyone new to PPC

Comment on Moonfruit, the most talked about company on Twitter

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:13:02 PDT

Damn, that was good!

Comment on Users prefer Bing but unwilling to switch

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:55:12 PDT

Adoption curve, fellas...

Comment on Bing Indexes Twitter Posts in Real Time

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:52:09 PDT

If Google and Bing DO integrate Twitter into their search results... damn. How would they decide which tweets are most relevant?

Comment on Avoiding Twitter Spammers

FuzzyMarketer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:33:16 PDT

TwiChuck sounds like an interesting app.

Comment on Lead generation best practices white paper

ricardo — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:27:45 PDT

Good to see someone pointing this out. Data I have from respected source Marketing Sherpa is that most companies have already invested in Google Ads and SEO (filling in the pipeline bucket) but NOT in ensuring our Sales Funnel does not leak . I found the details in this White Paper pretty persuasive and found their best practice tips helpful.

Comment on Google Says: No More Page Rank Sculpting Using NoFollow Tag! Revisited

cheapconsoles — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:45:16 PDT

its not for google to decide. sometimes webmaster's have to do this when the "terms and conditions" and "about " pages out rank all the others on the site it can be confusing for visitors who then go elsewhere.

Comment on Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps

SebastianG — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:47:06 PDT

Michael, thanks for updated on this. I will run few test on larger sites to see if XML sitemaps will help to get them indexed.

Comment on How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself

gdcs — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:48:41 PDT

this is a great info!

Comment on Real time search engines; the hype and the reality

amabaie — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:38:14 PDT

The reality is that there is very littel real-time information I search for. I mostly look for information that is accurate. Veracity and immediacy are rarely compatible.

Comment on It's All About Local Organic Domination

willscott — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:55:50 PDT

Dave and David, thanks! I can always count on you guys to offer good guidance.Reinier, I appreciate your enthusiasm and input and I wish I was smart enough to have planned the multiple 10 packs too, but as David points out it was unintentional and it WOULD be a good idea for us to claim them. I'll have my team do that shortly.And David R., As the following indicates, no one searches with New Orleans LA as the location modifier:flickr image of Google Adwords Keyword ToolAnd as I said over in the Search Engine Land comments:There are plenty of examples where an exact domain name match doesn't drive this behavior.For example:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=san+francisco+chiropractor (.net, not on map - down the page)http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=newport+beach+plastic+surgery (.com, #1 organic and in the map, but not dominant)So, regardless whether it's maps, organic, paid or whatever comes next any position may only last a limited time :)And I want to thank everybody for their thoughts on this. It makes me want to deconstruct the cause even more so we can continue to replicate it for all of our clients!Will Scott

Comment on Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps

graywolf — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:51:32 PDT

@sebastian yes pinging was turned off@stevec828 sometimes when you work on large sites with over 100,000 pages you'll want to speed up the natural crawling of really deep pages. And yes there are legitimate sites with over 100,000 pages.

Comment on Should I Advertise on Bing?

kirstenharrison — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:39:02 PDT

I think Bing is starting to make ripples in the search engine market. Especially now they have aquired 1 employee from google and yahoo. This should help them develop

Comment on It's All About Local Organic Domination

drodecker — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:19:01 PDT

Ahh.. Quite nice when Google does exactly what you want. If only all our customers could get such exclusivity!What we're seeing here is the result of an exact name match combined with ambiguity on the geomodifier. The "New Orleans" token is not deemed as a specific location landmark. This used to occur more frequently in Google; but as they've expanded in understanding more geographical identifiers, the 3 and 10 packs will take over.For example: "chiropractor new orleans" still shows the single exact name match.However: "chirporactor new orleans LA" removes the geomodifier ambiguity and then shows local "chiropractors" in the traditional 10 pack.As a natural growth of information continues; I would expect in time, that this nice single result will go away."Sorry, this exclusive position may only last a limited time!" ;) David Rodecker Founder & CTO, RelevantAds "getting local business online"

Comment on Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps

stevec828 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:03:15 PDT

Pretty lame exercise. Who really cares about getting a site indexed just to say it can be done?

Comment on It's All About Local Organic Domination

davidmihm — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:53:54 PDT

ReinierNL, thanks for taking the time to comment on this. First of all, I only see ONE local search result (an authoritative onebox) when I search for "New Orleans Chiropractic","New Orleans Chiropractor", and "New Orleans Chiropractors." So I presume the additional listings you are talking about are on maps.google.com?The additional listings that I can actually see have not been claimed by Will OR Dr. DuBois.Rather than ABUSING Google Maps, I would venture to say that if Will claimed and consolidated these listings on behalf of his client, he would actually dominate his SERPs MORE than he does right now. This is a flaw in Google Maps but not one created by Will; the incorrect listings are probably getting pulled from poor/un-updated historical data sources.The reason I think this is noteworthy of a Sphinn is that it presents simply and concisely the amazing ability of Local SEO to dominate SERP real estate for SMBs. The visuals Hanan uses are stunning. It is/was my hope that this article would convince more SMBs to consider hiring an SEO shop with their advertising dollars (see my comment on Greg Sterling's post earlier today) rather than national PPC aggregation companies.

Comment on It's All About Local Organic Domination

earlpearl — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:50:31 PDT

ReinierNL: I read your comments. actually check out the placement of the subject site both in organic and maps. Not only does the subject site have the one box placement but the site has the first two rankings in organic search. In fact that is a great combination-dominance in maps and organic and dominance of the search page. Its a two part process, not just an effort in Google Maps.Having similarly accomplished that for some other businesses and other markets I can say with authority it works very well; it is dominance. One way to check that is to run a ppc campaign for the [exact term] Cripes, run it very cheaply, so that your ads are at the bottom of the page. At the very least you will see all the searches for that phrase. Then check your analytics to see how often the site gets hit for organic phrases, check the dashboard in the LBC and see how many visitors go directly to the more information provided in the LBC.Add it up. My experience is that when you hit the combination of onebox and top two organic rankings for a phrase you do DOMINATE. You get this incredibly high percentage of hits to the site as a percentage of all searches on the term.What more could one ask for?One could do deep research. Are the other competitors (chiropractors) in New Orleans aggressively using search engines to market their services. Did they claim their listings in the LBC. Why aren't they showing for the term. Is the term competitive or not. Where does it list in terms of activity for the variety of search terms for chiropracters in New Orleans.Frankly, again, my experience--when you have that dominance on the search page with that combination of maps and organic (and if you like #1 prominance in ppc) you simply take in the vast majority of the traffic for that phrase. Its a killer.The other thing I've found is that the percentage of "conversions" (probably contacts in this case) goes through the roof when this combo on the search page occurs.Well done, Will...and thanks for the article, Hanan. Until one sees the results and compares it to results when you don't have this combination of dominance it is very hard to compare.

Comment on Pros and Cons of Pay for Performance SEO Pricing Models

soulfood — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:34:46 PDT

No pay, no game. In todays economy, what right mind fronts for anything? I feel that most performance based SEO agreements are perfect recipe for disaster. These situations allure companies to engage in less than desired techniques to generate needed results in order to stay profitable.

Comment on Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps

SebastianG — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:17:11 PDT

Well, I'm not sure how accurate this test is. Wordpress by default pings Ping-o-Matic which sends information about new post/page on Wordpress to over 20 pinging services. If pinging feature hasn't been disabled then the real reason of indexing may be pinging - not the XML sitemap.Unfortunately Micheal didn't metion if he has disabled pinging or not in his post.

Comment on It's All About Local Organic Domination

ReinierNL — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:10:22 PDT

What is so fantastic about this case study?! Hasn't anybody noticed that this chiropractor has no less than three top-ten listings (positions B, C and F today)?! This could be a case of Google Maps/Local Search spam (is that worth to be sphunn?), cleverly abusing a flaw in the Google Local algorithm where one can get two listings at the same address using different telephone numbers. This could also be a recently created LBC listing that hasn't been consolidated with the other listings yet. And just perhaps Google likes Dr. Gordon Dubois' photo. Hanan Lifshitz hasn't given any analysis as to the reason(-s) why this website has received a one-box listing in the Google Local Search results.David Mihm, I admire your work. Your post about the local search ranking factors is truly sublime (and so are your other posts), but this is seriously disappointing! I would love to read the analysis of this case study, either from you (David Mihm) or Will Scott. Kind regards and keep up the good work!

Comment on Pros and Cons of Pay for Performance SEO Pricing Models

o3man — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:57:47 PDT

You will soon find out that a signed contract is not worth the paper it is written on.

Comment on Marketing With Twitter

Brandwise — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:47:36 PDT

I agree. Not only is Twitter driving traffic to our site, but it is also helping us keep our clients, prospects and friends up to date with our company and what we are doing.

Comment on How BING Can Impact Your Business' Online Marketing Strategy

Brandwise — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:45:17 PDT

This is hard to believe, but the promotions and ads have been running pretty aggressively. We started seeing some links comming from bing already. This is pretty cool.

Comment on Winning On the Web Begins With An Inbound Marketing Strategy. What's Yours?

Brandwise — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:42:48 PDT

Inbound marketing is something new we added this year and we are starting to see some very impressive results.

Comment on Facebook or Just Face-Look? Are People 55 And Older Really Using Social Networking Websites?

MiguelGomez — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:05:34 PDT

I think sometimes we might not give this 55+ generation enough credit, given time, they will also adapt to social networking trends. In general most generations do not sit still, but evolve overtime as their environment changes.

Comment on The Importance of Commenting on Other Blog

mascholik — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:57:33 PDT

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Comment on Maximize Traffic With Proper Use Of Stumbleupon

sithburns — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:03:09 PDT

Did you read the article? It might help you find more traffic :)