I’ll be sharing best practices for assessing and recovering banned sites this next Wednesday at WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas.

It’s pretty hard to get ‘accidentally’ banned by Google these days. Either someone reports your site for a borderline technique or you are knowingly pushing the boundaries and trigger a flag with the engines. In both cases, there is intent.

We’ve been through the process of advising our friends and clients for the recovery of hundreds of banned sites. It’s not always pretty, but I’ll share what we’ve learned in the process.

In this presentation, I’ll show the most “mortal” sins, and those that generally fall in the “forgivable” category. I’ll share what tools to use to assess your situation and give you one of my own analysis scripts. We’ll end with a sample of an effective re-inclusion letter (modified from Todd Malicoat’s example posted on Search Engine Watch).

It’s sure to be a noteworthy panel with Aaron Shear, Roger Montti and Michael Gray weighing in. See you next week.

Conversion specialist Bryan Eisenberg just posted a great list of 69 Free or Low Cost Tools to Improve Your Web Site :

http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/09/free-tools-to-improve-your-website/

Here are a few of my other favorite tool lists:

SEO Guru Todd Malicoat's summary of "Tool Time With Todd" twitter sessions: http://www.stuntdubl.com/tooltime/

An older, but still functional list of SEO tools: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

Of course, the seoMOZ tool sets: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox

And then some excellent research tools from AdCenter Labs: http://adlab.msn.com/alltools.aspx My favorite is the Commercial Intent Tool.

Bookmark 'em.… Continue reading

Dear Google,

I used to Love your webmaster tools. You have lots of great features, like site map configuration, crawler diagnostics and top search queries and positions. But why must you tease us by pretending to report on incoming links?

Sure, you call it a "sampling" and carefully word your descriptions with phrases like "links we have available to show you."

If "Links to your site" is a sampling, and the basis isn't known or consistent, then what is the intended use of the report?

Case in point: Throughout 2009, Webmaster tools reports… Continue reading

I am very sad to have lost a friend and colleague, Alan Rimm Kaufman, this last Saturday, July 18, 2009.

Alan's experience and knowledge made him a great partner for us at Market Motive. His character and kindness made it easy to be his friend.

Early Days at Market Motive: Alan, Michael, John, and Tyler in 2007

Our times working and visiting with Alan were truly a joy and we will miss him.… Continue reading

Back on June 13, 2009 over 500,000 Facebook users managed to grab a Facebook Vanity URL as their own unique mark in the social media landscape. Now millions are grabbing the chance to have a distinct, indexable web address for a personal or business presence through Facebook.

In the first land rush, Facebook imposed some account age requirements to limit name squatting and the organization offered some allowance for trademarked names, but this also has ended.

As of last Monday, June 29, 2009, the account age restriction… Continue reading

Last night we noticed that Google dropped links from the Twitter Profile page for a significant number of web sites.

For our own web sites and our clients' sites, we monitor new links and links lost. It's a good practice for any SEO. More importantly, we monitor when Google recognizes or disregards incoming links to a website as reported in Google Webmastertools.

We've noticed these events seem to occur in clusters, and last night indicated that Google is thinking less of links from Twitter. In one sweep, Google dropped the Twitter Profile "URL" incoming link for every site we monitor.

Examples from a… Continue reading

Google AdWords has finally relented and now shows advertisers the exact keyword behind every click on our ads.

It's very simple to view this new data:

Select the "Search Query Report" under the "Reports" tab in your AdWords account.

In the example above, we are prompted to place a negative match on the keyword "Free".

Use this report on phrase match and broad match groups to find negative keywords as well as surprise phrases that generate better-than-average conversion. …

I'm shopping for another new bicycle chain. My wife suspects I buy them based on fashion because I get a new one every season (oh no - that's last season's chain - everyone's riding titanium this season). No, sweet girl of mine, it's not the passing seasons per se that dictate a new chain, it's the stress of being propelled up the Santa Cruz Mountains. This causes the chain to stretch, which in turn causes the gears to wear rapidly because the chain spacing no longer lines up with the gear teeth. I change chain every 1-2000 miles of… Continue reading

If you're a marketer working online, you know that consumers are distracted and have an ever diminishing attention span. When we're teaching companies how to market online we have to keep reminding them to reduce the amount of copy to bullet points, headlines and scannable text. Consumers simply don't read body copy anymore. On the other hand, those doing SEO will repeatedly hear that you need good copy in your pages so Googlebot knows what the page is talking about. So there lies the paradox: Googlebot is the only entity that can be bothered to read your carefully crafted copy, and even… Continue reading

10 years ago people needed hyperlinks from page to page because finding stuff was so hard. We needed a human being to tell us where other relevant stuff was, via those handy instructions baked right into the content.

Google then exploited these links as a way of determining which page is most relevant, creating the famous PageRank mechanism.

I'm wondering if people use these in-content hyperlinks less these days. After all, relevant stuff is just a search away. With the advent of browser toolbar search boxes, it's even easier for people to search instead of using hyperlinks.

Will content writers continue to link… Continue reading