This is a great article on why not to hire a cold calling SEO company.
I would go a step further and not even take their call. Nothing is more annoying that when one of my clients calls me after being ear banged by a moron about how bad their site is. Then I have to explain why cloaking or link farms will get them banned in Google. Even worse is when someone sells hard that they have backend access to "Inktomi" to change the rank of the site. Seriously? Inktomi has been gone for years!
Work with someone you trust and build a relationship with for SEO services. And make sure you keep ongoing communication happening to ensure the long term success of the relationship.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
A Blog A Day - Yahoo Shutters XML Feed
I am going to try to write a Blog a day. I keep reading about Twitter killing blogging. Twitter is awesome, but Blogging still had its place so here we go.
Yahoo announced they are shuttering the Search Submit and Search Submit Pro programs by the end of the year (2009). It is the end of an era in SEO. I grew up on Inktomi trusted feed and value of the XML feeds. For those of you who were not familiar with the program, it was a direct feed of a Web site to the backend of a Search Engine. It was treated as "trusted" content and could be manipulated for search rankings. It was a great achievement in the SEO world. Early spiders sometimes had difficulty crawling sites. This feed resolved that issue.
In the end, the Yahoo spider was certainly good enough of a crawler to make the Search Submit program obsolete. They did not stop it, because it was a money maker. Now that we know the end of life date it does present a few interesting points:
1. Google was right, we don't need "trusted spam"
2. SEO companies that depended on this need to find a new sales pitch and source of revenue
3. Looks like the press releases were correct and Yahoo really is going to can Inktomi search technology for Bing
4. Looks like the timeline of the Yahoo / Bing integration may be sooner that we were first told (Summer of 2010)
Yahoo announced they are shuttering the Search Submit and Search Submit Pro programs by the end of the year (2009). It is the end of an era in SEO. I grew up on Inktomi trusted feed and value of the XML feeds. For those of you who were not familiar with the program, it was a direct feed of a Web site to the backend of a Search Engine. It was treated as "trusted" content and could be manipulated for search rankings. It was a great achievement in the SEO world. Early spiders sometimes had difficulty crawling sites. This feed resolved that issue.
In the end, the Yahoo spider was certainly good enough of a crawler to make the Search Submit program obsolete. They did not stop it, because it was a money maker. Now that we know the end of life date it does present a few interesting points:
1. Google was right, we don't need "trusted spam"
2. SEO companies that depended on this need to find a new sales pitch and source of revenue
3. Looks like the press releases were correct and Yahoo really is going to can Inktomi search technology for Bing
4. Looks like the timeline of the Yahoo / Bing integration may be sooner that we were first told (Summer of 2010)
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