A Blog by a career In-House SEO for all the SEO Pros and Wannabes…

This morning I routinely went on Sphinn to check out the hottest news and ideas in the search marketing industry, and was amazed to see no less than 4 most popular items on the homepage talking about Shoemaker’s “SEO has no future” comment and a similar statement from Marketing Pilgrim’s Greg Howlett. Am I surprised about the reaction? Not really, and I believe most SEOs would disagree with that the “no future” statement as well. So here’s my thoughts on this whole concept, as usual, with an in-house spin on it.

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Recently, I have been engaged into a huge debate about whether to report black hat SEO tactics and borderline SEO activities conducted by our competitors. You know, things like paid links, link farms, etc.

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This is just a short update.

So yesterday while I was checking this blog to see if anything major happened or broke, I realized that the PageRank has been updated from the gray bar to… zero! Yay? Nothing worth for a celebration, as I’m not really expecting huge amount of traffic or high ranking since I haven’t had much time to update the blog or write any post in the last couple of weeks, but it’s nice to see that the site is making progress since its inception about three weeks ago.

I don’t know about you, but I have often been asked the question about the best method to geo-target content to different countries or regions. Most of the time it comes down to either use country specific TLDs, or create subdomains and set a geo preference in the Google Webmaster Tools console, and as a third alternative, we can always use sub-folders in a similar fashion to the subdomain method.

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It is a known fact that many websites are getting away with black hat SEO tactics like buying links, cloaking and spamming, and you would believe that, in a perfect world, Google is really serious about swinging its ban stick at sites that violate the rules.

After all, there are plenty of horrific stories about Google penalizing legitimate sites for various marginal or wrong reasons. Yet, there are miraculous stories like this one about an insurance site not only running black hat tactics under the nose of Google, but also rising to the first page in a short period of time. It really makes you wonder if Google is colour blind?

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As reported by a few webmasters in many SEO forums, Google has updated the sitelinks for many websites. I haven’t heard a complaint about the new update as it seems to able to provide better anchors and destination pages.

On my end, the sitelinks for the company I worked for have disappeared since Google introduced the search box a few weeks ago, but they have resurfaced once again. I believe the update happened during late morning as the sitelinks were still missing this morning, but now it has reappeared.

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On Monday, Google LatLong announced that the search company has added a new feature to incorporate YouTube Videos into the Google Maps Results. This is great news for those small businesses that are having a tough time to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack.

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Since having worked at AOL Canada as a search engine optimization specialist for over a year before I joined another company earlier this year, I find the report at SearchengineLand about Yahoo! and AOL closing in on a deal that would combine the two corporations intriguing.

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Why do some SEO-oriented companies still fail to achieve the best potential results? We are talking about businesses that have strong focus on SEO and are willing to invest to create strong SEO functionalities within the organizations here, not just any company that barely know that there is something called SEO that could bring in free traffic.

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Is it still safe to use subdomains or is it better off to use a separate domains all-together? There was a lot of buzz regarding Google’s supposed change in their SERP to treat sub-domains as sub-folders of the same domain a few months ago. Some people loved the idea and some thought the sky was going to fall for them, and I was closely monitoring the situation at the time as basically all of my sites were using subdomains for good reasons. Well, it seems like nothing much has changed since then, as Hugo Guzman at Zeta Interactive pointed out in his post about subdomains still dominate the SERPs for major brand names.

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