SEO Book

Matt: This is a lie. I have seen you talk about quality at SMX and it is laughable. These quality guidelines you speak of might pertain to others, but they do not pertain to Google's own content.

1. When I search for a restaurant, 99% of the time Google places shows up before Yelp. So you are telling me that Google places always has better content than Yelp? Look at these reviews for Gary Danko - http://maps.google.com/maps/place?num=100&hl=en&biw=1366&bih=643&gs_upl=3089l3968l0l4550l2l2l0l0l0l0l182l345l0.2l2l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=gary+danko&fb=1&gl=us&hq=gary+danko&cid=12492966685364411262&ei=wx2WTpf0G6eciAL51oDCDQ&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=1&ved=0CGEQ4gkwAA

"love it" and "our favorite restaurant" Does Google Places have much better quality content 99% of the time?

2. Look at http://www.seobook.com/images/google-google-google-google-google-google.gif. A. Look at all of Google's sites in the results. B. What are those Youtube videos doing in these results? Every other result in this set has the words hollywood and cauldron right together(except the leaky-cauldron domain result), but since Youtube is a Google property it shows up. It's funny. Do this search on your own and you will see that the top 40 results have "Hollywood Cauldron" in its title, but the ones in Youtube do not.

So your results are all about quality unless it comes down to your own content. Then, it doesn't matter.

By the way, I can't wait for Google Plus to start hogging…

This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site).

Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?

I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.

Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.

1: https://twitter.com/screamingfrog/status/420165509296844800
2: http://www.seobook.com/spam-big-or-die

I hope this doesn't seem self serving, but seomoz.org has some of the highest quality information you can find on SEO. In addition to that, I'd suggest articles on http://searchengineland.com/ - they offer high quality content and news in the industry. Anything written by Vanessa Fox on SEL is usually great.

Guides like Excel for SEO shows some of the basic stuff we do:
http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/

For high level patent / research based SEO, nobody does it better than http://www.seobythesea.com/ (his URLs are ugly, but his content is great)

For specific beliefs on how the algo works, this is a good resource:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

SEOmoz has webinars and a PRO Q&A. Distilled.net also offers videos of our conferences.

As for books, the best I've read are Art of SEO, which is co-written by Rand, and SEO Secrets by Danny Dover (formerly of SEOmoz, now at AT&T) which talks more about the consulting side. The problem with books is that stuff can go out of date quickly. If you're reading a book that talks about PageRank sculpting, for example, it's dated.

Other great sites:

http://www.seobook.com/ - high level opinions and analysis of industry issues

http://www.seroundtable.com/ - recap of industry news and forums

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ - lots of tactical articles

Things I've written for…

"less than a morning Starbucks trip"

I wouldn't think that a comparison like that would work.

For one thing there are
many people who feel they are pissing away
money on Starbucks, or feel
some guilt (I myself spend about $4.00 per
day and sometimes twice that.
That's at least $1500 per year. I don't want
to be reminded of that, especially when business
is off.)

(So you are making a comparison to a potential
sore spot. You want a positive association. Comparing
to Starbucks but without mentioning price might
be an example but that wouldn't make sense
for your product, right?)

Now, to sell it's product, Starbucks (or any premium
brand) doesn't make comparisons to what other things
costs. They make you feel special in some way
by the product or by the experience or create
some value that justifies the price.

Making comparisons is good though if
you are saving people money.

Have you tried raising the price and offering an unconditional
money back guarantee?

"Cancel at any time and owe nothing".

That seems to work with many things I've seen that cause
people to be fence sitters as long as the price is high enough.

Seo book does that (p1 for seo and search engine optimization)

http://www.seobook.com/

"On the conference call, Ms. Porat noted that mobile cost per clicks continued to strengthen, and that the gap between desktop and mobile is narrowing." (1)

It's no surprise that after the "mobilepocalypse" earlier this year we're seeing mobile profitability grow for Google.

Google effectively forced advertisers hands in bundling their inventory and is agressively raising min CPC in a number of categories (2)

And they are breaking many of their OWN rules about how aggressively one can promote advertising on mobile - excellent, and entertaining breakdown of that here -> http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly

I don't have much of a point other than sharing some of the information behind what's actually driving these earnings, and the major changes I've seen / experienced as a guy that spends a lot with the GOOG.

(1) http://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-results-top-expectations-1437077741

(2) http://searchengineland.com/google-showing-fewer-ads-per-search-219834

(3) http://www.seobook.com/google-goes-mobile-unfriendly

The issue here is that it's still really easy to game SERPs, it just takes more money to do so and a willingness to step in gray hat territory. Search plus your world has the potential to make it very hard if not impossible to game SERPs, however.

The takeaway from the infographic should really be that Aaron Wall (of seobook.com) runs a business that teaches (white hat?) SEO to small business owners. It's in his best interest to make SEO seem incredibly complex, difficult, and full of dangers. Which is relatively true: effective SEO is hard to do. Wall, like any good SEO, keeps up with algorithm changes. He's a smart guy, and he's most likely figured out how to overcome all of the challenges in that infographic (for $X.XX he'll show you!). It's linkbait. And great inbound marketing.

Also, Aaron Wall is a very outspoken critic of Google. There's a post every week or two on his blog about Google's ethics (or lack thereof). It's really fascinating stuff, well worth a read [1].

1. http://www.seobook.com/blog