This is a post I originally wrote when working at Latitude back in 2013. They’ve refreshed their website since then, so it’s no longer available. I was reminded of it by Paul Stevens this week, and thought it would be worth revisiting, as it is probably still as valid now as it was 5 years […]
Category Archives: Search Marketing
Let’s Talk About Engagement
Ernest Hemingway is not for everyone. It is hard work to read his novels. Not because of the language used, but because of the language not used. The books are deceptively short, and the style is sparse. Because so much is left unsaid in his writing, the reader becomes a participant in the creative process, […]
My Book About SEO
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here. Mind you, it’s not the only place I move pixels around. One of the reasons why I haven’t written much about SEO or social media here is because I’ve been working on a book. You can download it here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B016HCRPS4?*Version*=1&*entries*=0 It’s a pretty comprehensive tome. In it I’ve […]
Oh Semalt. What are you doing now?
My exposure to Semalt is pretty much limited to filtering their crawlers from websites and removing their referrer from Analytics so my data isn’t being uselessly polluted with visits that never happened. I’m sure that some people probably get some benefit from them, but given that their website doesn’t actually say what they do, it’s difficult to give a reasonable opinion. […]
Link Networks: The links are the footprint
Google’s been a lot more aggressive in going after spam over the past couple of years. Aside from the headline updates like Penguin and Panda, there’s also been a few high profile penalisations handed out – most recently Rap Genius got a brief kicking for some obvious spamming. The one area that Google (and by […]
Right, what’s left?
About a month ago, I wrote a piece about the ultimate fate of SEO being ground out in discussions about how companies are going to distribute their digital marketing budgets over the next few years. Predictably, this led to a few strange looks around the Latitude office the next time I was in there. […]
SEO’s Not Dead Until I Say So
Here’s a Google Trends Chart showing the UK search interest in a few SEO type keywords: See those barely visible lines at the bottom of the chart. That’s where “content marketing” and “inbound marketing” are in relation too SEO. Link Building’s down there too, but that’s our dirty little secret isn’t it. We don’t talk […]
Wake Up SEO
The fact that there have been so many plausible theories put out about why Interflora got penalised says a lot about how far over the line they’d gone with their SEO recently. We had @searchmartin‘s theory about Interflora overdoing the guest post / blogger outreach thing. A bunch of bloggers getting free stuff in exchange […]
A Master Class in Link Bait
The Australian electrical goods retailer Kogan hit the headlines this week by telling the world that they were going to start levying a browser tax on any users who arrived at their website using ie7 rather than a more modern browser. According to the company spokesman, they’ve just finished redeveloping their website, and the need […]
Penguins, Spinning, Spam, and Outbound Links
“the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” Matthew 8:12 Google launched their Penguin update on April 24th, and Matt Cutts wrote about how it was another laudable step in “rewarding high quality sites”. In the post, Matt made […]