Hello Affiliate Marketers,
welcome to the first week of the SEO Roundup. This is the first entry in a weekly look at whats been happening SEO wise across the net. The feature will look at the top SEO bloggers stories, official news from Google, MSN and Yahoo and the latest tip, trick and techniques to get you in the higher position of search engines.
SEO Roundup will also be a place for you, the affiliates, to become involved. We want your opinions on the news, questions for our SEO team or even stories that you think should be covered in our next post. Comments are always a good way to be noticed but you can always get in touch with us by email using seoteam[at]moreniche.com.
On with this weeks roundup!
One of the hottest debates in this SEO field this week has been caused by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall criticising SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin over attacking a competitor in a way to diminish Google themselves. It’s not the first time Fishkin has used the tactic and it’s clear that more and more people are getting annoyed with it.
Essentially the problem is that Fishkin is using a higher status as an online marketer, one particularly involved with SEO, to selectively police SERPs. He puts both Google and Webmasters in a difficult position which often ends up with the smaller webmaster losing.
I want to make it clear that I agree with Fishkin’s post that the company are certainly not 100% brilliant white hat but there are much, much bigger cheaters out there to be concerned about.
Persoanlly we are with Aaron on this one, whining to Google just because you can is an unfair SEO tactic and with the way Google can be so zealot over certain search terms (such as SEO) it can be very easily manipulated, especially when you call on the SEO community to help.
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Michael Gray did an interesting post discussing PageRank sculpting, worth checking out if you have time.
If you didn’t already know PR sculpting is strategically implementing nofollow tags through navigation and internal linking to keep PageRank focused on certain pages. While not considered a “black hat” practice it is still generally seen as negative.
Gray states that in his opinion it can have a huge positive effect, but only on certain styles of site. I am personally with him on this one, it can be useful for certain types of sites but basic review sites like many affiliates use are often only a few pages large anyway.
If you site is huge with lots of different features controlling PageRank is worth the effort, if you have a five page affiliate review site it’s best to steer clear.
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Not much from the official Google camp this week, a useful post about sites containing malware should you be unlucky/silly enough to end up with this problem.
That’s all for this week, good luck with your SEO!
