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Posted by Oatmeal

Patrick Sexton (aka feedthebot) over at Designish contacted a few big names in the search marketing industry and asked:

What would you do if you only had 100 dollars to market your website?

This excellent post includes responses from Aaron Wall, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Kid Disco, Lee Odden, Todd Malicoat, Neil Patel, and Patrick himself.┬? This is a great read for someone who is just getting started with online marketing and is on a very small budget, such as a college student or a single parent.┬?┬?

The responses varied in their degree of specificity.┬? Some recommended simply building quality content and attracting links that way, others recommended buying Aaron Wall's Design Book. There was also plenty of mention of how to leverage social media and using blogging to become an authority in your sector. For the veteran Design, this post is an excellent resource to send clients who perhaps can't afford your services or are looking to set out on their own in the search marketing world.

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Posted by rebecca

That Joe Whyte sure has been busy lately. With the amount of time he spends on IM pestering me and Jane, I'm astounded he had the time to get a new site up and running and post this entry about how to get links from .edu sites. Basically, he urges you to find .edus who have a job posting section and then post job openings. A lot of the job opening bulletins allow you to post your company's website, which is exactly what Joe did.

Joe's idea is a good one, but what if you're actually not looking to hire anyone? It's kind of crappy to get a bunch of starving students' hopes up just because you want a strong, high quality link to your site. This brings me to the point of my post. Three of the results in Joe's screenshot for a search on "cialis" are from .edu domains, which is just ridiculous. The reason .edu and .gov domains give so much weighted link love is because they are thought to be trusted, authoritative domains, but the recent increase of gaming .edu sites for links is starting to make me suspect otherwise.

How is selling Cialis relevant to an .edu domain? I can understand if a university is doing a study on the drug, or some student has researched the drug for an essay, but clearly these results are no exception. They're blatantly spammy, and you would think (or hope) that the search engines have to be noticing this. Every now and then I see an Design post pop up with "X Tips on How to Get .edu Links!", and while these posts are generally useful and white hat, it's frustrating to see poorly written, spamalicious results pop up so effortlessly and undermine white hat Design attempts to score the holy grail of links.

Clearly, the search engines wouldn't ban an .edu domain, but wouldn't you think they'd have to start addressing these spam results somehow, maybe by adjusting the weight of .edu links? Designmoz would become less of an authoritative Design resource if we started writing posts about belly buttons and unicorns, and pretty soon we'd lose our audience to other tried and true Design sites. I'm not saying this will happen to .edu sites any time soon, but it disappoints me to see an .edu result pop up for porn, pills, and casino searches.

I don't necessarily think that .edu links shouldn't have more link weight to them--I'm just wondering how sustainable their authority is. Clearly, the search engines are going to have to do a better job of weeding out the spam in order to keep .edu sites relevant and authoritative--if not, then look for viagra-cialis-penis-enlargement-a&m.edu to pop up sometime soon.

What do you think about spamming .edu sites? How can the search engines combat this effectively without sacrificing the weight of .edu links?

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On today's Webmaster Radio show I had the pleasure of chatting with Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design (they're the folks who designed our site for us) as well as Jeff Quipp from Search Engine People. Jim and I had out usual banter for the first 20 minutes however rather than bouncing through a few topics we discussed Design Universal quite extensively. The show is definitely worth a listen if only to get a better understanding of this interesting twist on search and the challenges it presents for search marketers.

But that's not what the title's about now is it?

While he was on our show Jeff discussed an interesting Design competition that they have running. Top rankings for an interesting phrase? Nope. Who can get a site into the top 10 fastest for a competitive phrase? Not even close. No, the fine folks at Search Engine People got a bit creative and are having a "write the best Design song" competition. That's right, if you can write the best song about Design you win their $1000 prize.

An interesting notion and I wish them luck. I assume the primary purpose of the contest is as link bait and I wish them the best of luck. it seems to be working well 'cuz here's a link to the contest. <