Google Local Business Places Showing Actual Website URL

Interesting. Linking straight to the website and not to a places page.

Tommo from London, UK, most likely an SEO guy had a question on how to generate ranking reports. Here was his specific question:

What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings, e.g if I wanted to target a new phrase and wanted to check the progress of its ranking – whats is the best way to check it? Should I just search Google and scroll through the results?

The Answer…

Google Engineer and head of Anti-Web Spam replies:

The Comment…

Nice funny comment from ScienceAround.

Ranking tool comment to Matt Cutt's reply

That was an answer from the land of rainbows and unicorns The best way to check your ranks is to use Firefox addon.

LOL!

Michael Gray and Rae Hoffman have been talking about Google being unfair in profiling SEOs, where links are devaluated simply because they are the works of SEO people even if the intent was purely clean and done in a whitehat method. But if they were not by SEO people, no devaluation is received even if the methods look going against Google Webmaster Guidelines. Rand Fishkin sums it all up with some tips on going SEO stealth mode and flying below the radar.

I have always thought getting popular in this industry was advantageous and has tried my simple humble ways to get there and hopefully rubbed elbows with the industries top SEOs. And now this makes me want to think again… I’ll rewind my myself and reset my thinking back to 1999… *rewinding…ok reset done* What was I talking about? SEO? Actually, I don’t know about SEO. What is SEO? I’m a Web Designer/Developer and I do not care about SEO. I’ll leave that to the SEO people.

He basically compared oldschool marketing and current day Internet marketing. And he explained this by example and has used a lot of McCain – Obama examples although he said there is no political reasons behind it. It was simply just observing the two political campaigns in a marketing point of view and the steps they took online.

One thing I liked about the presentation is what he has discussed about the long tail. Everything still holds true and has shown the usual long tail graph. With the current presence of not only SEO, but many various types of online social media, the long tail graph still looks the same but has experienced a shift in the graph, but the graph is still basically the same. Just more opportunities where to apply the long tail. And to spice up interest and add some mild humor, he even shows a photo of a tail of a cat, where today… is different and he shows a photo of a tail of a crocodile.

Shawn ends his post by summarizing everything into: Discover, Evaluate and Evolve.

For a quick showing of hands, he asked how many people has seen a decrease in sales and how many has seen an increase in 2008. As how I expected to see more hands of an increase, I was surprised to see almost like an equal amount raised their hand that has seen a decrease. And when I raised my hand when asked who has seen an increase in sales in 2008, the people that has seen a decrease who were sitting near by seemed to be surprised also that such companies existed. He then asked the people who were optimistic to see things to get better and there seem to be some significant amount of about half probably.

My Personal Reaction to the Pubcon LV 2008 Conference Introduction by Brett Tabke, CEO of Webmaster World

Now this is nothing that Brett mentioned, but in my personal opinion, why we did see an increase in sales, I believe we should even see more. Because as the economy goes bad and companies want to save more, spend less and earn more, they make marketing decisions wisely, having minimal cost with maximum gain.

Thus if you want to make more money, you think of the cheaper marketing methods but with the best ROI. Now look at the cost of TV ads, radio ads, print ads and internet marketing. Internet marketing so far still seems to be underrated and is the cheapest among all marketing media. And when you do PPC and SEO, your audience is so targeted, that conversions seem to be better than in the other media. Companies that do all types of marketing mediums, may naturally choose SEO/PPC to earn the most and spend less. Very important during these times of crisis.

But then again, in smaller companies, some really do not have budgets for TV Ads, Radio Ads, or Print Ads, because they are a smaller company and really relies on Internet Marketing alone. If they are affected by the economy and needed to cut on cost, probably this has affected their SEO/PPC budgets as well which has also affected their sales.

I have no official study on this, but this is my guesstimate why there seemed to be a 50:50 split of the audience saying their sales increased and others their sales decreased. SEO/PPC companies with bigger clients has seen the increase. While SEO/PPC companies with smaller clients has seen the decrease.

Noon, nakakatagalog pa tayo sa SEO Philippines na umaasa tayong hindi tayo maiintindihan ng mga taga ibang bansa.

• Una sa mga namimirata ng kung ano ano. Maiintindihan na.
• Mga sekreto na panlaban sa mga taga France at Indonesia sa mga SEO contest. Tayo tayo lang naman naglalabanan dyan.
• Mga kakaibang pang maitim na subrero lang na SEO na ayaw natin ipaalam sa mga hindi Pinoy.
• Mga sinisiraan ninyo na mga SEO ng ibang bansa. Patay lagot kayo. Nyhahahahahaha
• Mga pinoy na nasa ibang bansa na nag blo-blog na sinisiraan ninyo mga boss ninyo.
• Mga monitored ang chat session sa trabaho ninyo pero tinatagalog ninyo sa mga kapwa Pinoy para hindi maintindihan ng banyaga.

Tignan ninyo ang page na ito, translated sa Ingles

Ito, mga susunod na salita ko pang testing lang ng translation.

Malalim Kastila at Tagalog na Puro
Kimika
Kapnayan
Silya
Salumpuwit
Berde
Luntian
Subrero
Sambalilong

Magkatunog, baka magkamali
Libog
Libag
Kabag
Kabog

Slang
Jologs
Gamol

Ispesyal na Letra
Piña

Bastos
Kantot
Puke
Pekpek
Titi
Suso

Isa lang katubas na salita sa Ingles
Kanin
Bigas

Isang salita natin na dalawa katumbas sa Ingles
Araw (Tignan natin kung Day o Sun ibibigay nya)
Ang ganda ng araw ang liwanag.
Sarap mag kumain araw-araw.
Anong araw ba ngayon?

Mga parepareho ibig sabihin
Bagamat
Datapwat
Subalit
Ngunit
Pero
Baka (LOL baka maging Cow ito)
Kumain ako ng baka kanina.
Baka hindi pa luto ang baka?

Kasusubok ko lang. Madami pang sablay pero nakakatawa. Pero simula na yan. Balang araw gaganda ang translation nito at maiintindihan ka na kahit ano pa sabihin mo.

• Contest rules on the Domain/URL
  • The contest keyword is an amazing 5 words. But only 2 are allowed in the domain name entry. I guess this is good to give too much of a domain name advantage. I like this rule since often in SEO contest, who ever get the .com of the domain has a good advantage.
    Example: http://www.promotionalitemscorporategiftssrednarbs.com is not allowed because all keywords are in the domain. But a domain like http://www.promoitemscorpgifts.com is allowed since only two keywords are included in the domain.
  • Subdomains containing keywords are not allowed. Only folders and filenames can have the keywords which I think is also a good rule. Although I don’t really believe in the big strength of the subdomain’s power in ranking, it still does have some advantage.
  • A competitor must own the domain name. This rule already filters out the blogspot and wordpress accounts that are knowned to rank higher in short amounts of time.
• Contest Linking Rules
  • Of course all SEO contest has links to the sponsors/organizers of the contest. What is unique about this contest, is there are several link variations. And you have to choose at least 10 and they are deep linking. Very interesting since making it more varied and linking to various parts of a page makes the link building seem more natural.
  • Links are on the page for the whole contest duration. Good since some just place the links when it is near the end of the contest.
  • Now all the links should be above the fold on a 800×600 resolution. And this is wow, in the first place is who uses that resolution nowadays. And placing all 10 links in that small space will look like a main navigation in my opinion.
• No Dynamic Pages
  • I like this rule. It eliminates the use of any popular CMS of any kind. Even your own CMS will not be allowed. And sometimes that is all the SEO some people know. They only know WordPress SEO, Drupal or Joomla SEO.
  • Sometimes the design of a site will help in link baiting. And some just rely on modifying existing free CMS templates to start with. This will show the well roundedness of a competitor.
• Prizes for Traffic
  • Competitors are required to place their Google Analytics code and shared when contest ends. Which is needed for traffic awards.
• All Hats In
  • Blackhat, Whitehat, Greyhat, whatever. Do whatever you want. Although having only static pages already limits a large amount of blackhat you can do, whatever blackhat techinques you have left, you can still use. I kind of understand this rule since it is hard to monitor and police. People can always claim they did nothing even if they did. And you can attack others claiming they did blackhat even if they didn’t. It’s just a hard policy to follow and make everyone 100% comply. Now if you get banned, then that’s your problem. My suggestion is keep it clean so even after the contest you still have a site and try to make money out of it in whatever way you can.
• No Traffic/Lead Fraud
  • They claim they have their ways of determining this and it should not really be that hard. There are several patterns you can see in traffics and determine if traffic is really authentic.
• More Prizes
  • They have good spread of prizes, for top traffic sites, top referrers, best built coding, highest ranking in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live and highest overall ranking. Up to page 2 of Google has a prize.
• Every Contest Entry Cannot Mention it is Part of an SEO Contest
  • I think this is a good rule. In fact I feel like I do not want to join another SEO contest that requires a new domain with keywords about SEO. I just can’t make another site about SEO. They are too many already. Which is why the Global Warming SEO contest was my favorite. Everything else is about SEO and that always sounds like spam the world to me.
• The longest keyword phrase in a contest I have ever seen
  • Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb is a mouthful. WTH is srednarb? *LOL* Well it is an SEO contest. We have had others in the past that were also nonsense words.

Contest starts September 19, 2008 and ends a few days before Christmas on December 22, 2008 at 9pm Pacific Time. Good luck to all competitors. Click for more information on the Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb SEO Contest.

For SEO veterans, probably not really something new you will learn here. But for people with novice to intermediate knowledge SEO may appreciate the podcast. Lon Safko is an authority in the Social Media space and co-author of the upcoming book The Social Media Bible.

I apologize to Lon for probably having a hard time to just get the common time to setup this podcast schedule but thankful as well to give me the opportunity to be interviewed in this Insights’ podcast.

I have no problems speaking in public for presentations but putting me on the spot with some questions sound to casual to me. But I guess it also sounds more real as well.

Lon has some very interesting questions like what was my secret to winning the 2007 SEO World Championship. The answer I gave is in the podcast. Listen to it here.