Monkey See, Monkey Do …Monkey SEO.

so i did a little vanity search today and found a really odd result. there was a page from about 3 1/2 years ago which i took down about 2 years ago and was a subdomain on a free hosting site. the entire thing has been deleted. this site hasn’t shown up in the SERPs for about 2 years and even then it was on page 5. now suddenly it’s up to #6 even though it doesn’t even exist anymore?

this sucks because it is extremely irrelevant and associates me with several things i don’t want to be associated with anymore (no, nothing illegal or anything) which is why i deleted everything.

i’ve read about speculations regarding Changes to the Algorithm:

I think there has been a change in the Google algorithm which is upgrading older pages and downgrading newer pages.

notes “britishblue” on SEOmoz’s YOUmoz.

but, google, really? you think a page that was deleted 2 years ago is more relevant to searchers than, i don’t know, something that actually exists???

I just finished reading Dan Theis’ SEO Fast Start. At only 100 pages it was a quick and easy read. Dan really tries to engage the reader with his (somewhat odd) sense of humor throughout the guide. I found the material to be quite basic. Though I believe Dan is targeting small business / website owners rather than professional SEOs, as he states on his, not as ugly as the majority, sales landing page:

Before you spend a dime hiring someone else to optimize your website for search engines, why not take a moment to consider how much you can accomplish on your own? You may decide to hire a professional at some point, because search engine optimization isn’t for everyone, but after reading my book you will be far more informed about the process.

I suppose if I had a website and didn’t know how to optimize it for search engines this guide may be quite valuable.

As someone who does SEO for clients for a living there wasn’t a whole lot of new info here. He did get me thinking about internal linking strategies and distributing PageRank (oh my god, yes I did use that word!) internally. However I am not sure that I agree with Dan’s over-zealous use of NoFollow. This is a DoFollow blog after all.

Dan suggests adding NoFollow to all outgoing links and to internal links as well. I guess it makes sense that it is not necessary to have the bots follow a link to your privacy policy or legal disclaimers. But would that really make that big of a difference? And why then do I not see more sites implementing NoFollow in this way? Is this some big secret that only Dan knew until now?

Has anyone else read SEO Fast Start? What do you think of Dan’s use of NoFollow?

Target is my favorite store by far! Gotta love the one stop shop. I can get my groceries, a trendy new outfit, a toy for my niece, a toy for my dog and a stylish floor lamp all at one place. Apparently Target is now in the business of selling keywords as well.

Now, PPC is my least favorite part of SEO and although it is not my strongest suit and I haven’t really been managing any Adwords accounts for a while now, this seems so silly. I would think a company like Target would have a decent budget to pay some big guns big money to manage their PPC campaigns for them. How can something like this get through the cracks?

At least it’s not as bad as Ebay selling African slaves as they have advertised in the past.

I guess my background in QA makes me a little nitpicky detail oriented. My rule of thumb when creating anything I post on the web, particularly for clients: check, double check, test, test again, repeat. A simple typo like a missing { can drastically alter your ads. What do you suppose the click through rate on these ads are like?

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Update: I accidentally discovered another example of Target using Dynamic Keyword Insertion with less than desirable results, I’m sure.

I found these while I was searching for Monkey SEO and monkeys on Ask.com. Like I said, I love Target and have been there many times and I have yet to see chimps for sale or monkeys baby for that matter. Surely I would have noticed a thing like that, surely I would have my own chimp by now…or a monkeys baby.

So I was just “stumbling” (something I haven’t done in a while and should to do more often.) and found a gem!

Everybody has seen “The Apprentice” on TV, well now everybody has the chance to get advice from “The Donald” himself. I “stumbled upon” The Trump Blog at Trump University. Yes, that’s right Donald Trump has his own university (why am I not surprised?) The site offers courses in business and real estate investing. Now anybody can learn the secrets to success from Donald Trump himself at Trump University.

The coolest part is you can visit the blog and ask Trump a question. They are having a contest where they will select 10 lucky winners from the questions to answer. The winners not only get their question answered (which would be cool enough if you ask me) but also get a free course from Trump University. How cool is that?

See? I should “stumble” more and you should too.

Wow. This just cracked me up. I watched iCaught on ABC tonight and they had a story on what they called E-venge, or internet revenge and reputation management. The show featured a company called Reputation Defender. The story reports:

For $10 dollars a month, ReputationDefender will monitor what’s being said about a client online, and for $30 an item will contact Web sites to remove negative content.

When asked how they do it ReputationDefender’s founder Michael Fertik said in the interview that he couldn’t “give away the secret” to how this is done. I checked out the company’s web site and it looks very professional and to some it may be a good deal but it took me a while to stop laughing after hearing that statement. Their “MyReputation Advocate” service claims:

Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web.

Proprietary techniques to completely remove content from the web! Golly. That’s amazing! What an awesome power!

Anybody reading this who is interested in their $10 a month monitoring service, I’ll help you set up a Google alert for your name for a one time $5 and you’ll be able to monitor your name daily. As for magically deleting content from the web…well I’ll leave that to those with proprietary techniques.

i just installed the DoFollow plugin for WordPress. WordPress, by default will add NoFollow to all comment links. this handy plugin will remove it and allow search engines to follow comment links in blogs.

yay for me. yay for you.

i was inspired to add this to my blog by internet marketing guru, Mark Barrera. Mark discusses the over use of the NoFollow tag and the growing DoFollow community on his blog.

i realize my tiny little blog doesn’t have a huge readership (yet!) and my link juice probably won’t do much (yet!), but the NoFollow tag just seems ridiculous to me.

Mark’s opinion on NoFollow:

I see no reason why people should nofollow the links to people who comment on their blog since these are the people who matter most. It only makes sense to share a little link juice with the people who actually take the time to comment on your site.

what a novel concept, i couldn’t agree more.

(and now the word “follow” looks funny to me.)

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edit: this thing is catching on like gangbusters! for more info and to join the masses check out the Bumpzee No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community and the Life is Risky: DoFollow Challenge.~monkey seo,

stephen colbert is the greatest living american, to me anyway - regardless of google’s recent cencorship.

tonite he interviewed jimmy wales, founder of wikipedia. it was interesting. stephen and jimmy seemed to have a good rapport with each other. even as they discussed stephen being banned from wikipedia on several occassions including the african elephant population incident.

both google and wikipedia cite democracy as a driving force behind how they operate, however i see quite a lot of irony going on.

anyway, i got side tracked. i just wanted to get the word out…librarians are hiding something. please beware.

~monkey seo

okay, so google’s motto is “do no evil“…but i’m kinda on the side of the fence that this personalized search stuff is pretty evil. of course i am an seo, so that should be taken with a grain of salt. i suppose for the average joe personalized search may seem like a good idea. but i still think that the most relevant content should be presented no matter who you are or what you’ve previously searched or clicked on.

anyway…so there’s the &pws=0 thing you can add to your search query every time, but now there’s something even better. Joost de Valk created a most handy plug-in that will keep your search results clean whether you are logged in or not. “google de-personalized search for firefox and ie7″ will add &pws=0 to your search query and give you clean results every time.

yay! thanks Joost!

i recommend, whether or not you are in seo to get and use this plugin. i also recommend you get and use firefox 2 browser, if you’re still using ie, you’re living in the stone ages - well the nineties anyway. it’s just too cool not use.

what are you monkeyin’ around here for? go get you some firefox and de-personalized google search already.

~monkey seo

I was just monkeyin’ around on the internet tubes and found this site for Digital Witness, a Coppell, Texas based video surveillance company. They provide digital video recording cameras and video management software to businesses who want monitor their business and increase security. A recent survey of their customers, consisting of businesses in the hospitality and small retail industries, shows an average profit increase of $2,400 per month with the Digital Witness video surveillance system.

The cool thing is their online video surveillance library, where some of their customers have shared some of their amazing footage. There’s a guy trying to seal a 400 pound safe with his bare hands in broad daylight and then decides to run over it with his truck, someone driving a forklift through a wall, and my favorite…an unfortunate fellow who somehow finds himself caught not only on video but on FIRE!

So, if you like watching stupid people do stupid things head over to Digital Witness’ video surveillance library.

If you’re a business who wants to stop these stupid people from doing stupid things and hurting your business, then head over to Digital Witness and get hooked up with digital video surveillance equipment and software and reap the benefits of video surveillance like their customers do, including IHOP, Subway, Outback Steakhouse and more.

~MonkeySEO

CAUTION: there are portions of this post bordering on tmi for a public blog. i’ve been thru some major medication changes lately. along with many other changes i’ve noticed an increased appetite (this is a good thing as i am on strict orders from my dr. to gain actually gain weight). the strange thing though is that i’ve never had much of a sweet tooth at all. only on rare special occasions would i divulge in what had to be considered by me a an exquisite dessert. but now, i’m grabbing sweets of my boss’ desk all day long and craving nutter bars for breakfast. my boss had a bag full of easter candy and i swear i ate every piece of dark chocolate he had!

speaking of chocolate (smooooooth transition, monkey :P)…

okay, so i’m pretty cheap. but last time i paid for my cell phone charges for verizon i noticed that my little “new every two” bar is getting close to the end. now, i’m not exactly sure what the heck that means. i think it means i get a new cell phone, but i’m not sure if it’s free or at a discount…or maybe it’s a threat to buy a new phone from them or else…? i dunno. just assumptions.

anyway…onto the segue…

i’ve been thinking about getting either the Motorola Krazor or LG Chocolate cell phone with mp3 player available in several colors (i’m thinking cherry red or mint green chocolate. wishing they had purple!)

i’m looking for reviews and recommendations for a cool new cell phone, preferably one that has a built in mp3 player, because i am a poor monkey and cannot afford an ipod.

gimme your feedback!