Live at Search Engine Strategies. I just went to the Organic Listings Forum, where we asked questions and discussed techniques related to “organic” search engine listings. The session opened with an audience member asking the heated question: Is Google ranking sites higher that purchase Adwords? This kicked the session into a heated debate, with a panel of experts providing answers.
Chinese Wall. Mike Grehan, author of Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guideike, said, “There is no relationship between paid and organic listings in Google. Google has built a Chinese wall between its sales and technology departments.”
Here’s the Interesting Part. A man who works for a national corporation had this comment, “For two years, our two brand sites were number one on Google for the key phrases we were targetting. After the recent Google update our listings were dropped. Our sales rep called Google and was told the company’s brand sites were dropped because they were cross-linked to our main corporate site due to duplicate content.” To me, that’s not satisfying. Post your comments here.
Are .govs and .edus ranked higher? Yes. Craig Silverstein, one of the original Google developers, says, “Google leans towards .edu and .gov sites, because it was developed by college students, and is therefore non-profit centric.” That’s definitely something to keep in mind..
Neighborhood Watch. For a general website linking policy, Brett Tabke of Webmasterworld warns “that you should always be careful not to link to bad neighbors and to check a website’s backlinks via the Google toolbar before linking to them. What is their neighborhood like? Who is linking to them? Who are they linking to?” What do you think?
Anthony Muller, Director of Natural Search Operations, Range Online Media says, “It’s wise to get into trusted feeds with Inktomi, as this directly feeds into the search engine, so you’re not going to have any Google nightmares.”
Forum spamming. At the Advanced Link Building Forum, Greg Boser of WebGuerilla, LLC tells us “forum spamming is a fine art.” By that he means use tact when promoting your site in a forum. “Do it in the right place. Use a discussion marketing whisper campaign… pretend you’re not with the website you are promoting.” Just don’t do it on WebProWorld! 😉
I’ll be reporting live for the next few days so stay tuned!
Garrett French is the editor of murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
