No, not Matt Cutts home phone number. No, not a homepage link, with anchor text of choice, from yahoo.com. It’s a new virtual card game, SEO Trumps!
Fresh from the fevered hive of activity that is Gray Hat News, the SEO Trumps site allows you to create your own cards, build and print your own deck.
Astound your friends! Lampoon your enemies! Cheat when competing against non-BH savvy kids (”No, my littleman card DOES beat your Matt Cutts. I’m cloaking my SEO-fu score, it’s REALLY an 8. *ruffle* Look here’s the card viewed with a different user agent”)!
Well, it seems there’s a blogging meme going round - “5 things” Blog Tag. You’re supposed to post 5 things the world in general may not know about you, and then “tag” 5 others.
I was tagged by Scott Boyd, who was tagged by Aaron Shear, and I was tagged by Chris Winfield, who was tagged by Aaron Pratt and Kim Krause-Berg. The whole sorry mess mess (the SEO branch, at least) was started by Jeff Pulver, and you can track it at SoloSEO’s Blog Tag Tree.
Phew! Hope I got all the links right…
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Hat tip to Dave for tipping us all off on TickMe. As a backhanded “thank-you” I started a group there, “Stalking DaveN“. Since he’s already joined, it shouldn’t be too onerous a task. Feel free to join up, people
Well, a fast moving story, this one. The VERY first response to the Threadwatch story is from Elisabeth Osmeloski, denying everything, essentially :
you’ve got it completely wrong, FYI. This is a result of a simple miscommunication between me & the developers - i was asking them how to update the blogroll, so I could add SEL, as well as a few others I thought could get added.
trust me, it’ll get fixed - I have no intentions of ‘blackballing’ my colleague & friend, and he knows that… to say otherwise, well, that’s just ridiculously catty, and clearly you don’t know me at all.
NFFC quickly counters with :
So to get this straight, you asked them to add Search Engine Land but they thought you said remove Daggle and SearchCast?
Excellent points there… miscommunication is one thing, but this smacks of taking your ball home, basically.
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Via Threadwatch, it seems that Incisive have just started to realise the magnitude of their error in not only letting Danny Sullivan (et al) go, but without a non-compete too…
In a knee-jerk reaction, they have taken a few handy steps to remedy the situation :
1) Failed to link to SEL in blogroll (despite Danny having linked to SEW)
2) Removed Daily SearchCast link from blogroll
3) Removed Daggle from blogroll)
Given the way the industry works, I suspect that it’s the recent announcement of SMX, Danny’s own conference series that has them spooked. SES makes plenty of £££ / $$$ etc, and owning that was probably the driving consideration behind the purchase - shame their due diligence didn’t extend beyond running greedy eyes over the books.
I guess all of this makes a good object lesson in making sure you understand where the value in a purchase is, before handing over the cheque. Incisive seem, belatedly, to have cottoned on, but seriously guys, how hard would it have been to ask a few questions of the right people first? Oh, that’s right, you don’t know any of them.
It seems that 2007 will be the year of the inaugral SEO World Championship. The target phrase has yet to be announced (that’ll be on Jan 15th, 2007), and the contest is open only to domains registered after the contest opens.
Curiosly, although the contest is scored across Google, Yahoo! and MSN, it’s Googles webmaster guidelines that will be used to determine whether a given SEO technique is permitted or not. The actual wording reads :
Website will not use SEO methods which are clearly not approved by Search Engine Guidelines for example: doorway pages, etc.
I’m sincerely glad it’s not me making those adjudications…
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Whilst having a quick poke around at Todd’s place, I noticed that the “tagline” for his very impressive collection of social bookmarking buttons is “Share and Enjoy” - which, as any true Adams fan will know, is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division.
So, if you read this Todd, “Go stick your head in a pig!”
In a deal reportedly worth £6.7m, ValueClick has acquired the Shopping.net group of sites. Not only do the existing sites have a decent slab of traffic of their own (approx 2m UV / month), but their integration into the ValueClick Europe empire should help them significantly improve earnings per UV.
2006 still has some surprises in store for us it seems - consolidation has been a theme running throughout the whole year, and the pace seems to be accelerating as we approach 2007. There could potentially be some MAJOR scalps won next year (anyone noticed how many Yahoo execs are jumping ship recently?).
Who’s got the popcorn?
UPDATE : I found some more reliable figures
Not exactly bleeding edge news, considering the coverage this story has had in the industry… Danny has made his last post at SEW, and his new toy Search Engine Land is prepping for launch.
He’s got some pretty interesting content already, and he’s still a week from the formal “go” date. I’ve also heard on the grapevine that he may be involved in one or two interesting projects next year - nothing I can really talk about, since it’s not my gig, but announcements will be made in the fullness of time, I’m sure.
Congrats, Danny, it looks like the new toy is a success already, and already on the way to becoming required reading in the SEO / search industry.
