FeedBurner FeedSmith 301 Redirects Not 302

Earlier today I was running a small SEO audit on a small WordPress site and I noticed that all Feedburner links were 302ing. This means that the search engines only view them as temporarily moved. So I looked under the hood and saw that the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin was installed. Apparently this plugin uses 302s to redirect the feed. So I went in and edited the plugin to handle 301s. You can download my edited version below.

Download FeedBurner FeedSmith 301 Redux

Hope you enjoy!

Dear SEOs, Please Shut Up

Ok, so this post will probably make me the odd man out. But honestly I am having a hard time staying quiet any longer.

I have noticed a recent trend with in the SEO community to push Google to take action in several areas that I believe have an adverse effect on SEO. In many cases I see very well respected SEOs pushing Google to in effect make their jobs (and everyone else’s) harder. Here are two examples:

Exact Match Domains So you are upset that some domain that has exact match, ranks higher than you. I get that. What I don’t get is pushing Google to do something about it. Buying exact match domains has to be one of the best ways to aggressively take over a niche. But guess what? If you keep complaining about it, they will do something about it! So shut up already and buy your own!

Content Farms This one completely boggles my mind. Content farms exist because they are highly lucrative. I know that you are tired of seeing them out rank you at every turn. But how about instead of complaining publicly about it, you build your own! I am not saying that you need to spam the results with low quality content. But you can learn a lot about content development, content monetization, and syndication by mimicking content farms. And the greatest thing is that they are cheap to get started, and maintain. Google will even help you monetize them!

There are a whole host of other things SEOs complain publicly about that I wish they would just shut up about. I understand the desire to hold Google to a higher standard, and make sure they deliver on what they promise. But why do that at the expense of making your job/income harder to achieve?? Just shut up already!

Does Google Sell Ads To Other Search Engine SERPs?

Today I did a Google query for “equal housing logo requirements” and a funny looking ad caught my eye.

As you can see from the screen shot, Ask.com is buying ad space for the term “equal housing logo requirements”. When I saw this I thought, I wonder if Ask is getting into the real estate design business. But, I was curious, so I clicked the ad and found that it points to an Ask.com SERP.

Sure, I have seen ads in Google to other search engines, but never to another SERP. Google has always had a long standing policy about including other SERP’s in their organic listings, even if Ask.com has found a way around that as well. So is this something new? Or is Ask.com’s dieing effort to stay relevant?

Why Quora Is A Dead Man Walking

Let me begin by saying that I have only used Quora briefly. Mostly because I don’t see the value. I understand the concept of crowd sourcing. But crowd sourcing only works if you have a large diverse crowd to draw from. That’s the underlying premise, pull the best answers from a large diverse group of opinions and ideas. Compared to other question and answer sites, Quora isn’t large or diverse.

I have only posted one question and that will probably be my last. Here’s why: Earlier today I posted: “Is Quora an appropriate place to ask silly questions for comedic value?” I then posted it to Twitter and one of my twitter followers responded. Then a few minutes later I get a status message that says someone has redirected my question to “Is Quora only for ‘serious’ questions?” At first I was thinking, Well that’s cool they are trying to help by pointing out an already existing thread.

But then I realized that no, they are actually 301ing my original question thread! Meaning that if you go to my original question you will now be redirected to another user’s question instead.

So here we have a site that completely thrives off of user submitted content and they think its OK to highjack that content whenever they want.

I know what many of you are thinking, But, Joe, its the same question. They are trying to help. I don’t care if its the same question. Its not the question that I even care about, its the answers. Just because someone else has posted the same question, doesn’t mean we are going to have the same dialog as well.

So why do I think this means the end of Quora? Because, users don’t like to have their conversations high jacked, and Quora killing their own content mill.

Can you imagine a moderator at Twitter redirecting similar tweets from different users, completely derailing their user’s dialog? I was looking forward to continuing my dialog with my twitter follower that posted a question, but that conversation was cut short (or off rather).

If you ask any web entrepreneur what’s the biggest value in question and answer sites they will tell you, content generation. These types of sites churn out very high quality content that works very well in search engines. But, if your content is riddled with 301′s and redirects then you can kiss that value goodbye. I know what you are thinking, what about duplicate content? aren’t they doing the right thing cutting down on duplicate content? This isn’t duplicate content, because it would take nothing less than a miracle for similar questions to create identical answers and dialog!

Which is where the real value is to begin with! In the dialog! Which in my case no longer exist.

Content is king, not an SEO after-thought.

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How To Hack Bookmarks Like A Pro

So the other day I came across a post from non other than the amazing Rhea Drysdale. Rhea is a real web tools guru she knows all sorts of tools and services that can put your productivity through the roof. One of the tricks that Rhea mentioned is Rae Hoffman’s approach to hacking bookmarks. [Read more...]

Help a Charity and Get MASSIVE Amounts Of Links

It’s the holiday season which means that its that time of year that I feel a bit generous (yes, just once a year, live with it). Here’s a great way that you can show your generosity by helping a charity in need and getting massive amounts of links for your good deed.

Here’s the secret: Give the charity of your choice a page on your web site. The vast majority of work that we do at jozsoft is web development for non-profits. From my experience there are LOTS of small non-profits and local charities that could greatly benefit from a web presence, however lack the funds required to make that presence a reality. If I could I would give away all my services for free to non-profits, but then I would be out of work and never finish with the TONS of them that need web help. Trust me they are out there, just start looking.
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WhosTalkin.com Video Demo 2

Google Profiles Has SEO Friendly Links!

I just made my profile using the new Google Profiles. It appears to me that the links found inside the profiles are SEO friendly! Check out the screen shot I took below using FireBug to look at the code.

Sceen Shot

Am I dreaming here??

Links are making people go crazy!

OK, I want to first start off by saying that this will be a short one because I am really busy today.

Lets start things off by pointing out a post at Michael Gray’s blog where he talks about Guy Kawasaki writing reviews for products that he has been given. This prompted the debate over the link aqquistion only for us all later to find out that Guy doesn’t really know that much about links to begin with!

Maybe Guy should take a look at Dave Snyder’s most recent post.

A local police department in Wisconsin opens up a criminal investigation after a woman links to their web site. The police department ordered a cease and desist of the link. The woman responded with a law suit against the city at large! Moral of the story here is what ever you do, don’t send any link juice to the Sheboygan Police Department (Oops!) What makes this get even more interesting is this article that describes this whole insanity. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and tell me if you see anything funny at the bottom right. :-)

Hitwise data misses the mark when it comes to Real Estate.

Not long ago, Marketing Pilgrim posted about some Hitwise data on real estate search terms and real estate web sites. As expected Realtor.com did very well ranking #1 as both the most visited real estate web site and the most used real estate search term. This wasn’t much of a surprise to those in the real estate industry. What surprised some (and still confuses me) is the list of most visited real estate web sites.

Hitwise Most Visited Real Estate Web Site Rankings
1. realtor.com – 9.08 percent
2. HomeGain – 2.44 percent
3. Yahoo Real Estate – 2.25 percent
4. RE/MAX real estate – 2.21 percent
5. Rent.com – 2.19 percent
6. Zillow – 2.06 percent
7. Apartments.com – 2 percent
8. Move.com – 1.91 percent
9. ZipRealty – 1.86 percent
10. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – 1.42 percent.

When I first saw that list I had this gut feeling that something was off. If any of you are familiar with my work in the past you know that I love crunching the numbers. So, lets take a look at what the numbers say:

zillow.com trulia.com remax.com century21.com







As I expected my analysis shows Zillow.com doing better than REMAX.com. And, even more interesting is Trulia.com doing better than remax.com as well! Trulia.com isn’t even listed on Hitwise’s report!

Confused? So am I. But, don’t worry, I will explain all of this and more in a future guest post at Wolf-Howl.com….stay tuned!

Top 5 National Real Estate Franchise Web Sites

UPDATE: I wrote an updated version of this post, with lots more data here.

Earlier today Janet Meiners posted an awesome post at MarketingPilgrim.com about the top ten most visited real estate web sites. One of the things that surprised me the most was that there was only one national franchise site in the list. I think that this is interesting because it shows something that I have been feeling for awhile. Most of the national real estate franchises are dropping the ball against more savey web 2.0 business that are attracting all the traffic.

Despite that it might be a good idea to get a grasp on who in the group of national franchises are doing better than the others. Therefore I have done a bit of research and put together what I think is a good assessment of the top 5 national franchise real estate web sites. To conduct my analysis, I used four different traffic firms to make averages for each. The list and results for all are below:

Top 5 National Real Estate Franchise Web Sites:

  1. remax.com
  2. century21.com
  3. coldwellbanker.com
  4. prudential.com
  5. kw.com

Google Trends for Web Sites

Quantcast.com

Alexa.com

Compete.com

ICANN Hands Out SEO Gold Nuggets to Large Corporations

Internet regulator ICANN recently voted to over haul the way it handles web addresses. Starting next year they will allow companies the ability to register their brands as TLDs. Which means we can start to expect www.mickey.disney. You can read more about the decision here.

What I am concerned about is all of the large corps reaping the SEO benefits of these branded URLs. Think about it: www.trucks.ford is going to rank allot higher than a small used car dealer that sells Ford Trucks, even with geographic search terms. It won’t matter how much money he puts into SEO he will never be able to market his product like the corporate competitors! Now of course if you own a local Ford franchise then I suppose that corporate could set up a site for you at smithautos.trucks.ford but that only means that you need corporate affiliation to compete in the same market place. I think this move is a win for large corporations that want to dominate SERPs. And if you think this will be the last of this type of behavior from those that regulate the internet, think again, this is just the beginning!

RE/MAX is the most searched for Real Estate company on the internet.

A recent article at MarketingPilgrim.com shows that RE/MAX is the most searched for real estate company on Google. The article, which talks about how to best use an internet marketing technique known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), shows that RE/MAX beats all of it’s competitors including CENTURY 21, Prudential, Coldwell Banker, and Keller Williams in search volume.

The data used in the article comes from Google Trends. Google Trends charts how often a particular search term is entered into Google. The data shows that RE/MAX has dominated it’s competitors since at least 2004 which is as far back as Google Trends data exist. The data also shows that RE/MAX has not only dominated its competitors but has also shown significant gains in its search volume over the last four years.

While Google Trends only tracks data from Google, many industry experts agree that it acts as a good indicator for search engine activity as a whole because of Google’s prevailing market dominance.

It seems at least that it is no surprise that RE/MAX is doing so well on the internet given that in the 2007 Swanepoel Trends Report, Stefan Swanepoel, proclaimed RE/MAX to be the leader in cutting edge of technology in the industry.

RE/MAX International has a network of almost 115,000 agents in 65 different countries worldwide.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE