Why You Should Not Hire a Cold Calling SEO Company

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.

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)

The Guilty Pleasures of Social Media

My buddy Owen Weed put this on his Facebook and I had to share!



Great work Bud with Lime!

Go Canes! Back in the top 25

I only had the chance to watch the first quarter and a half from the President's Club in Tocumen Airport, Panama, but it was great! I asked the custom's agent if Miami won when I landed and received a play by play breakdown of the best game of the year! Glad the Canes won and look forward to a challenging Georgia Tech game. I have a few Blog posts coming up: University of San Francisco's Advanced Analytics and Measurement course, Copa Airlines Training, my Flight on Copa (Wow), My local move with All My Sons, and more!

Joe Laratro Named To Top 40 Under 40 List

I was named to The South Florida Business Journal's Top 40 Under 40 List. It is quite an honor.
Here is a link to more info about the event: http://southflorida.bizjournals.com/southflorida/event/5071

Very Conflicted About Star Trek Movie's Ending

I have to start by saying the movie was spectacular. It was probably one of the best of the entire franchise. I would put it right up there with the last Transformers movie, but with even more action.

Spoiler Alert!!!

I have a problem with Timeline movies. I do not appreciate walking out of the movie and thinking "So that last 20 years of my life watching Star Trek movies and TV shows just got thrown out the window because of a major timeline change?"

What if Anakin Skywalker did not become Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars Episode III? We would have to trash the original 3 movies (Parts IV, V, VI).

I could take the timeline change to save the whales.
I could sort of take the timeline change where Data sacrifices himself to save Picard, but leaves behind his memories in a Data twin.
I had a hard time with Enterprise's massive killing on Earth, but so far all things things maybe did not affect the future that we knew.

Now, at the end of Star Trek, there is a new timeline. No "Next Generation", no "Deep Space 9", no "Voyager", No original Star Trek movies.

Poor Gene Roddenberry

We are left with a new vision of Star Trek. I think I will like it. I may even love it. But I am left conflicted - The Star Trek that I know is now gone.

I will write more about this after I see how other's respond to the change in timeline. It is only SciFi.

Google's Ad Auction from Google's Chief Economist (Quality Score)

This is an excellent video from Google about the Adwords ad auction and how some of the variables like bid, click through rate, and quality score affect the price of the click.