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Hard-core topics include SEO Ranking Factors for 2009, Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy, Twisted Twitter Tactics, Video SEO and Extreme Local SEO Tactics.

For marketing and agency people, we also have topics such as See the Big and the Small Picture using Web Analytics, How to Measure Online Media Values, 20 Ways to Build Your Brand Online, and How to Run a Successful Internet Marketing Agency.

For webmasters and forum owners, we have topics on how to manage huge sites. Jedi Dancel will share the success story behind Tsikot.com.

Just like the previous two conferences, we will also have site clinics. The Macalua, RJ of Sulit.com.ph, Hans Koch and I will be in this panel giving delegates tons of tips and recommendations on how to improve and efficiently manage their sites.

If you want to register or learn more about the conference, please call Fiera de Manila at the following numbers: (02) 896.06.39, / 896.06.37 and 899.62.16 or email fiera@info.com.ph or semcon@imvsolutions.com. Venue is at the Hotel Intercontinental, Makati City.

Registration is Php9,500 for two days, inclusive of meals and conference kits but if you sign up before end of the month, we have a 10% discount (group discount is 4 + 1 free). For students, inquire about our academic discounts.

SemCon 2009 is brought to you by IMVSolutions, Fiera de Manila and YugaTech.

I’ll be giving away free tickets to this conference to several bloggers via a blog contest/giveaway. Watch out for that next week.

Follow us on Twitter: @SemConPH

Follow YugaTech on Twitter: http://twitter.com/abeolandres

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They’ve got this person leaving multiple comments on my travel blog with their keywords on it.

flowers philippines
http://www.flowersexpress.com.ph | bjdenise516@gmail.com | 124.158.44.240

Excellent entry! I’m been looking for topics as interesting as this. Looking forward to your next post.Good post. I never thought of it that way. Thanks for this entry.

-bjdenise-

From Baguio Flower Festival Blooms Anew, 2008/12/05 at 2:57 PM

I usually just flag them as spam but this one had about a dozen comments posted already — all the same comments — and I have this feeling it’s not going to be the last.

Update: MyOptimind, the SEO company doing the work for Flowers Express apologized and blogged about it.

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Take for example YouTube. When it was not yet bought by Google, you don’t see videos in the search results. But now, just look at the Google search results:

So, let’s just say that Youtube video for the keyword “thriller” is appropriate in the results. Why not put videos from Revver or Metacafe too? Why just YouTube? Does Google have a preferential bias towards its own? Looks like it.

How about Blogger? Just this afternoon, one of my workshop participants, Joaquin Vocos, used Blogger instead of WordPress.com for his blog. A few hours later (about 3 hours), he was already ranking in the Google search results for his name.

The other blog posts and pages that had his name published on an earlier date on WordPress.com are nowhere to be found. All of the results are coming from BlogSpot.

The lesson — if you wanna be indexed very quickly, use BlogSpot. Because Google loves its own. But don’t you think it’s a little unfair?

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Well, a lot of SEO people and bloggers have pointed out this page — Mini Customer Success Stories. How do you get listed on that PR7 page? Well, just get yourself a Google Appliance, and submit your testimonial and link on that page.

The Google Mini Search Appliance delivers Google search for your public website or internal search, including the ability to control how frequently your content is indexed and include both public and private content in search results. It starts at $1,995 for search across 50,000 documents.

The service costs a mere $1,995 a year or about $5 a day. Actually, the Google Custom Search Business Edition only costs $100 for 5,000 documents. That’s even cheaper. So anybody who wants a non-nofollowed PR7 link straight from Google just needs to show up with the cash and submit their links to be listed.

Of course, Google is not really into the paid links business (except for the AdWords/AdSense tandem) and the one mentioned above is an indirect benefit but hey, you still get that raw link juice from them right. But wait, aren’t marketplaces like TLA and ReviewMe also advertise that those links are for traffic and not to pass PageRank? And no, I don’t think Google should put a PageRank penalty on itself for those paid raw links.

Those who’ve expressed that all these is unfair and us smalltime publishers (bloggers creating quality content and making a small living on non-AdSense ads) are suffering from it will need to realize that like any other company Google is running a business. Services like TLA, TLB, PPP are somewhat directly competing with AdWords and the right way to legitimize Google’s foothold is to go back to the basics — desensitizing the SERPs. And yes, it’s far easier for them to do this hand-job than actually go and kill off comment spammers, webspam, scrapers and content thieves. Those aren’t as serious a threat (to their business) as link buying/selling.

This post was inspired by:

Aaron Wall: How To Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google.
Douglas Karr: What if Bloggers went on Strike?
Robert Clough: Composing the Perfect Letter of Surrender
Philipp Lenssen: Google Owns an SEO Company

And oh, Google is just getting started. Wait ’til it gets its hands on memes, link exchanges, seo contests, writing projects, link campaigns and anything that involves people making use of links for cash, prizes, gaining PageRank, and manipulating search engine results.

Yup, the operative word here is manipulation. And Google has just been granted that patent.

Disclosure: Ok, I admit. This post was partly influenced by the fact that starting next month, I would lose over $1,000 a month from link ads.

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According to the revised Webmaster Help Center, SEJ points us to this official Google statement:

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.

I’ve highlighted the part where Google mentions “selling links” and “can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results“.

So, we’re all sure now that it’s not gonna be just your PR that will be affected but your placements in the search results as well. Anybody remembered the -30 and -90 penalty before. Changes to this statement was first spotted by Blogoscoped.

This Google crusade for paid links is just getting crazier than ever. Brace yourselves for the next storm guys. Maybe it’s also time to drop AdSense?

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Here’s a long list of very popular and trusted sites been drastically affected by the recent PageRank update.

http://www.downloadsquad.com PR5 -> PR4
http://www.autoblog.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.engadget.com PR7 -> PR5
http://www.problogger.net PR6 -> PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.joystiq.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.tuaw.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 -> PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 -> PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com PR6 -> PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.seroundtable.com PR7 -> PR4
http://www.blogherald.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.washingtonpost.com PR7 -> PR5
http://www.washingtontimes.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.forbes.com PR7 -> PR5
http://www.sfgate.com PR7 -> PR5
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com PR6 -> PR4

This is what Google has been announced recently — sites selling raw link for PR juice will be penalized.

So, did the recent update affected your blogs/websites?

It is also possible that this recent update is screwed in some way. If you remember some 6 months ago when that PR update was so screwed some sites easily get PR6 and even on blog I owned for 6 months got a PR8 page. Maybe this time, it’s the other way around.

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On the same note, I got a call from Michael Rogers (commonly known in the local SEO circles as seoluv) pointing me to a similar case he wrote on his blog accusing SEO World Champion Benj Arriola of willfully distributing WordPress themes with PHP codes that pulls out hidden links when search engines visit blogs that uses his free themes.

The infected WP themes include the Transformers Fans, among others. I have not checked all the other themes if there were other PHP codes inserted in them. These themes will spew out several hidden links to the goglobalwarmingawareness2007.com. On top of this, Michael Rogers is also accusing Aileen Apolo of conniving with Benjie Arriola to rank for the keyword “Google Country Consultant”. Here’s the screenshot of the codes with links to the respective keywords.

Janet Torral called me a while ago so I could explain to her what this fuss is all about. Apparently, she was also contacted by Michael Rogers to expose this story in her column in the newspaper (SunStar). He quoted Janet getting feedback about this story to Aileen, which the latter vehemently denied. It is still uncertain whether Aileen knows about this Black Hat SEO technique which Benj implemented for her blog using his freely distributed WordPress themes.

I believe this issue is more geared towards the WordPress community as WP Founder Matt Mulleweg announced on his blog earlier. As to the issue of black hat SEO, my take on it is that if you wanted backlinks in exchange for the free themes you are distributing, just put them right there for every theme user to see and let them decide to retain it or not. Putting them via hidden links so only the search engines can see (term used is cloaking) is just plain no-no. Benj might want to explain why he implemented this experiment.

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Only two days after I rebooted this blog with a new theme and change the permalink structure, I’m already seeing the results of the search engines re-indexing my blog. Now, I think I have the answer to this. See results after the jump.

I 301′ed the old links to the new custom permalinks using a WordPress plugin called Permalink Redirect by Scott Young. I also dug into the archives that cross-linked the other posts in the blog as well as other blogs/forums/websites I control that references specific URLS here.

This is what I’m seeing in the SERPs (search engine results page) now for Google:

I was also surprised that the SEs are also showing indented results (when Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it) which I think is good. If you look closely, the same page are ranking in the search results, with the new permalinks taking the first listing followed by the old permalink as an indented result.

Yahoo is also showing the same behavior.

I reckon that the indented listings will disappear once the search engines have fully re-indexed the site and recognized the redirects to the new permalinks. What I failed to completely document thru the course of this migration is the effect in the page rankings. I could not be 100% certain that the new permalinks have contribute to higher search rankings but I think the one for “xbox 360 recall” had a bit of a boost. It used to be in the 5 or 6 a week ago but is now showing at #’s 3 & 4 (indented).

This will pan out in the coming days or weeks and I’ll hopefully see the overall effect in amount of traffic by next month. For the meantime, the blog is enjoying a slight increase in click-thru’s from the search engines because of the double listing.

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He shares (starts at 2:05 mins) that this guy got kicked-out from the company that he’s working for after they found out he had cancer. Considering that cancer treatments are very expensive, the company might have wanted to avoid such costly work benefits for this employee.

Out of work, out of luck and stuck at home, G Man went to the dark side and was able to recover from his illness after months of therapy and medication. Rand adds that this guy was earning somewhere in excess of $175,000 a year from his black hat activities.

An inspirational story to some people in the seo industry and a true testament that dark side has it’s benefits. *hehehe*

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I’ve been blogging since 2000, right after I learned how to code in basic HTML or how to resize or crop a picture in Photoshop. I discovered blogging out of passion to learn new and exciting stuff and everyday there was something new to discover. I wasn’t compensated for it. Even on my first job, I would sneak in a post or two during work hours and redesign my blog instead of re-designing the company website (yeah, it was one of the signs that I suck as an employee).

Every post was made for my personal consumption or some very select friends, but mostly for me alone. The hundreds or thousands of posts in those archives bring memories of youth and countless heartaches. Then, my mother discovered my blog (and she didn’t even know how to use a computer — darn those friendly net cafe watchers). That’s the time when I realized personal blogging (or online journals) is not good for me. Anyway, I digress.

Going back to the topic. I kept that archive online but hidden to most people. I moved it elsewhere. It’s still intact but I’d rather that I’m the only one who knows about it. It’s not password protected or anything but one could not find it if they searched far and wide. In short, I didn’t need SEO for it.

• I don’t need link-building. No other site or domain links to it.
• I don’t need good permalinks. The urls are in numerical format (domain.com/number/number/).
• No titles. The old Blogger didn’t support one so when I migrated to WP, they didn’t have any except for numerical fingerprints.
• I don’t use any analytics tools. Goodbye Google Analytics, Feedburner, etc.
• Quality content? Un-checked! 90% of those posts are pure rants and one-liners.
• Do I promote it? Un-checked. Except for very close and trusted friends who begged to see the archives, I’d be scared if someone else discovers it.

In short, I don’t want anybody else to know that blog. So, why do I need SEO again?

And I’m sure there’s a reason why some platforms like LJ are closed to the public and requires membership before a friend can read their entries.

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He used to run linkback contests such as the “Make Money Online” Googlebomb. Well, his link back promotion got him a Google penalty. Yep, that “review me and I’ll post a link back to your blog” has actually backfired. Now, if you search for the name “John Chow” on Google, his blog will not even show on the frontpage. See John’s explanation on this here.

So, a fair warning to fellow bloggers who join or are actually doing the same strategy. This example might have answered Andrew’s earlier post on link trains and such.

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However, the general knowledge is that if your web pages are in the Supplemental results, these pages are least likely to show on regular search results and thus will get you little to no traffic at all. So, imagine if you have 1,000 entries in your blog and 400 of them are in the supplemental results. That means only the other 600 pages will get to attract more traffic while they’re buried in your archives.

How do you know how much of your blog or website are in the supplemental results, then?

To check all of your pages indexed by Google, type “site:www.domain.com” in Google search.

To check all of the pages in the supplemental results of Google, type “site:www.domain.com *** -sjpked” in Google search

(Note: replace domain.com with your full blog URL, e.g. www.yugatech.com/blog/)

Here’s how it would look like in Google:

What could cause these pages to go into the supplemental results?

1.) Internal linking structure (not enough links pointing to these pages)
2.) Duplicate content (monthly archive pages, category pages, paged comments can cause duplicate contents). Same is true with duplicate content outside of your blog/website on another domain.
3.) Excessive link exchanges, especially with irrelevant websites/blogs

I also pointed out some canonical issues before and you can also check this tip on an SEO-friendly WordPress setup.

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Not only does Benj gets the bragging rights as a kick-ass SEO champ, he also gets to take home a brand new car — a Citroen C2. Read all about Benj’s thank you speech here. *hehe* The complete list of contest winners can be found here.

And that kick-ass Citroen C2 prize is not a brand of bottled ice tea but a car.

Benj has these 3 tips to share:

1. Content is still king! Good content keep people stay, comeback and spread the news in a natural manner.
2. Design is still important, not that is has to be really superb, but at least it does not look bad that people will not trust you nor the content of your website. Make it clean and presentable to help drive more traffic, world-of-mouth and more effective website link baiting.
3. And SEO is a pay-it-forward type of industry. The more help you give out to other people, the more help you receive when you need it.

Congratulations to Benj for uplifting the name of Philippines in the world of SEO. Hat tip to Abel for emailing me.

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Anyway, thanks to Eric Salas for emailing me this link from SEOMoz (didn’t have much time to check my feeds):

Top 10 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

The survey represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. You can read details and the comments here.

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PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E). {source: wikipedia}

Evil Matt Cutts blogs and asks “Where does PageRank come from?“.

… assuming you must have PageRank to give it, where does the original first page rank come from? Does every site start out with a basic miniscule amount of page rank contributing to the entire Internet sum of PageRank?

Newton could have answered that with his 4th Law of Finite PageRank and it would have been stated this way:

“PageRank is neither created nor destroyed. It is only transfered from one web page to another, either given freely, traded or bought. PageRank is finite and it does not increase as the total volume of indexable pages grow.”

There’s a finite sum of PageRank, otherwise with the constant growth of the world wide web would spread the PR too thin. If every new site or webpage created had an initial non-zero PageRank value, one can artificially amass PageRank by registering new domains or generating more webpages.

But what about the theory of the Alpha Page Rank Site?

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Use regional and geographical domains in line with their purpose.

First, a sidenote for the Western webmasters: some Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia have so-called regional or geographical domains. Imagine that all the states in the U.S. had their official second level domain and if you wanted to open your webshop delivering to Kentucky, you could do it cheap or for free on eg. ky.us. This could help Google serve geographically relevant search results. In case you wish to sell organic soaps to people in Szczecin, do open your webshop on szczecin.pl. If you are from Kalmykia and would like to show the world the beauty of your area, go ahead and set up your Kalmyki travel site on kalmykia.ru. If you like a region, support it by hosting your site on the related regional or geographical domain. Be aware that webspam on these regional domains violates the correct use of them and prevents the development of your country’s web culture.

So, if all else being equal, a .com.ph will rank higher than the .com when the user/searcher is in the Philippines.

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