They have secured the services of Andy Rodriguez, a big-time US affiliate manager, and the first outsourced program manager in the industry to spearhead the US invasion, which will immediately put them into the “player” category. 12 months of solid growth could easily put them in a strong position to make high profile account wins in the US marketplace, and shake up the incubment “big networks”.
A new SEO event wouldn’t normally rate much of a mention, but seodays.com might just be different… it’s being run by David Naylor, Greg Boser and Jennifer Slegg. That’s quite an internet marketing supergroup.
As well as 2 day conference events, they also offer Website Health Check Seodays - essentially a day long version of an SEO conference Site Clinic Session, and for the webmaster with SERIOUS training requirements, even personalised, just-for you, Exclusive SEO days.
Interesting that they’ve chosen to go the smaller, more personal route. With more large scale conferences popping up in the Internet Marketing sector, this kind of small, personalised attention and high quality advice could make the difference to a business with big ambitions, regardless of their current size.
I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t care enough about the whole Did-it / “SEO is bullshit” thing to want to comment. But then I saw that yet another Did-it VP has seen fit to contribute to the debate, with a yet-more-transparent pitch to Marketing Managers everywhere to spend those precious dollars on PPC rather than SEO.
In the process of course, he’s kindly taken the time to point out how “The Search Engines Are Killing SEO” - a few choice examples for your delectation :
They’ve also learned to recognize spamming tactics like cloaking and excessive keyword stuffing.
Yup, when it’s rubbed in their faces. Seen the current #1 for “cheap viagra” (my07boxster.siamforum.com at time of writing, YMMV)? Once you’ve looked beyond the second head element, there’s about 3 pages of auto-gen, keyword stuffed rubbish - old skool stuff (note to self :- do SE’s STILL fall for that “inappropriate element wrapper” stuff? Hmmmm)
The endgame for all of this is a world in which SEO doesn’t matter. The engines won’t need you to tell them how relevant your page actually is, because they’ll understand on their own
Really? Well, when you’ve got HAL working over there, guys, maybe it can tell me what the most “relevant” site for the query “lost ginger cat” is? Or the query “bread and butter side loop”? Or maybe, just maybe, human input and interpretation will pretty much always be necessary for certain things. PowerSet’s lofty goals notwithstanding, I don’t think I’ll live to see a truly intelligent machine, capable of grasping all the nuance present in human language. A fair number of humans, with all that grey computing power between the ears, have severe trouble understanding the WWW - how the hell is a poor dumb machine expected to cope?
*UPDATE* Sadly, the links I was pointing to in this post are gone, so I’ve removed the anchors. If you don’t know who Jason is, or what 302 ‘jacking is, this post therefore makes no sense. Sorry about that
Jason has a slightly brain-bending post on the re-occurence of an SE issue that seemed to have been put to bed - the302 hijack. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it’s an interesting read if you can keep your brain from melting.
Following on from Shoemoneys comments about Google using an interstitial page to warn users about malware on pussy.org, it seems that someone at the ‘Plex took note, and made changes to how such events are handled, by converting the interstitial to a note in the actual SERP, thus :
(NB Sorry about the dodgy image quality : I’ll try and find a better place to host this one)
I don’t wish to retread the now well-trampled ground concerning the whole SES / SEW / Danny Sullivan / Chris Sherman / SEL / SMX / Incisive / whatever thing, but I did spot something interesting on my LinkedIn dashboard this morning.
People in your network are hiring:
Conferences Programming Director at Search Engine Strategies
Interestingly, the job is marked as a “LinkedIn exclusive”. I couldn’t find any other references to the post elsewhere, but I can’t say I looked all that hard, and it was only posted this morning in any case, so presumably they are still quite early in the hiring cycle. This may be an interesting test of the power (or not) of LinkedIn too - it got the job opening in front of my face, and although I’m nowhere near qualified to even consider applying, I am at least in roughly the right market sector.
