Texture design

Posted by randfish

As always, there's all sorts of good stuff in the search world this week:

• Best response to the Wall Street Journal's odd article on site moves goes to... Lisa Barone┬?- who goes to great depths to really explain the issue.
• Hey, look at Design, getting involved with German webmasters just before SES Munich. Very nice touch.
• ComputerWorld magazine did an interesting piece on┬?Design's "secret sauce"┬?that featured Designmoz in a roundabout way. Since ComputerWorld forces an interstitial and breaks up the content, I've linked to the far friendlier article at MacWorld.
• While I really enjoyed the blogger face off between ProBlogger & ShoeMoney, something about the one between Lee & I just isn't as compelling - can't quite put my finger on it.
• Wow... The Ask team is right, their new map drawing functionality is amazing.
• Design, you're making a big fan out of me with this privacy protection announcement (swoon)
• Man, Brett Tabke's blogged more in the last 10 days than the previous 10 months; very interesting material, too.
• Why is Reddit my favorite social site? Because... it linked to this on home investments, this on rental cars, this on homework, and this on this on how Marty McFly & Doc Brown were totally right.
• Tool of the week? Article Checker - similar to Copyscape, but you can pre-check text (a very nice feature).

Anything you'd like to share?

Technorati Tags

roundup, search, articlechecker, brett tabke, computerworld, time travel

Posted by randfish

Rae Hoffman, in all her brilliance, devised a round-robin link interview on Sugarrae that truly rocks. She asked five experts in the link building space (myself included) to generate their toughest questions around link building and then had all five of us answer each question. The results are terrific. I'll share some of my favorites:

What are the factors you would take into account before buying a link from a directly contacted site (not a link broker or seller)?

Roger: Backlinks. Take a look at the backlinks then note any from the same site. Remove those similar sites and search again. So if you’re in Design and you’re doing this:

1. linkdomain:linkseller.com -site:linkseller.com

2. And find they have a bunch of inbounds from anotherlinkseller.com, do this:

3. linkdomain:linkseller.com -site:linkseller.com -site:anotherlinkseller.com

In sectors where links are particularly tough to come by (retail, B2B in boring industries, etc.), what are content tactics you’ve taken to appeal to relevant sites in those industries (specific examples would rock)?

Todd: ...A specific example would be if I had an site about accounting (I don’t) - even accountants have a sense of humor to appeal to. Rather than writing a tutorial on how to file a 1099 - why not write the 23 ways most people cheat on their taxes, or the top 12 worst audits of all time. In boring industries you have to think twice as hard, and put in ten times the effort on creating interesting compelling content. The hardest sell on this stuff is the championing of a project like this internally because it takes some real stones to explain an "off the wall" concept like this. Think about who might link to you and create something compelling for them. Your users will most likely enjoy it too.

Automating the link acquisition process: How far do you recommend going with it? What are the benefits and pitfalls of automation?

Rae: ...I have no problem locating potential links automatically or researching the competitions backlinks via automation (a mechnical grunt is a good thing) - it is the contacting of those possible link sources that needs to be natural. Benefits of automation is obviously speed, with the downfalls being noticeable footprints - mainly for those who use automated sources to display those links as well as those who use the same automated technology and therefore have the same “paths” as many other sites using the same programs in their niche.

There's so many good responses to very timely and relevant questions that it's going right into my favorite articles about links list. Great work, Rae (and everyone else involved). Now - go read it!

BTW - I should add, since it's relevant, that Designmoz is producing a new version of the ranking factors article in the next 10-15 days. That should be an exciting one, too - I just love the community responses; the depth and breadth of content and overall quality is drastically improved when you put smart people together on tough topics.

Technorati Tags

link building, link development, rae hoffman, sugarrae

Well, after this morning's little rant about Matthew Rankin I thought it might be nice to speard some good cheer. And so we launched another tool.

The tool launched today it the first in our onsite Design section and is a Search Engine Saturation Tool. Basically it provides the details on how many pages you and your competitors have indexed on the major engines. As you likely know, the more pages you have indexed the strong your site will appear to the search engines. There's also a handy by-product and that is that the more pages you have the more phrases you're likely to rank for.

You'll find this new tool on our site here and all our Design tools on our free Design tools page.<

It's not too often I use our blog as a public whipping post but today is such a day. And today's target, Webmaster and owner of PPC engine SearchPronto.com (URL purposly not hyperlinked for obvious reasons) Matthew Rankin.

Now, why would I come out and name a person and a site that are ticking me off? Because he's stealing from us, that's why. Basically since the time we first started publishing articles and I've been tracking where they're being picked up I've seen the name Matthew Rankin noted as the writer of our works. Today I again came across an article titled, "Choosing Effective Keywords" and when I visited it I found that it was exactly the same as the first of our 10-part Design series "Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website: Step One - Choosing The Right Keywords".

I've emailed the publishers in the past and many have changed the reference or removed the article(s) however it's just become too big a job to keep up with. I'm sure he's stolen from others too. I can't be that special.

So Matthew Rankin: you've managed to tick me off and get yourself a special, personal mention in our blog. Unfortunately it's more in line with Steve Wilson than Jim Hedger.<