Go To Search Engine Forums Than Pay For Incompetent SEOs

If you think the title is an apparent swipe at certain search engine optimization professionals who make money by charging fees yet resort to online forums and ask SEO questions, then you got it right buddy. There’s a story about one SEO guy named Gary from Manchester going to Google Webmaster forums and asked questions about ranking issues for a website. I believe there is nothing wrong with that, as forums avenues to seek opinions and answers.

Photo credit: ajsteppenwolf

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Learning from Langham Hotels Social Media Experience

It’s unfortunate that Langham Hotels’ Big Deal social media marketing campaign was supposed to generate buzz and positive spin but yielded catastrophic results. Initial reaction was good, as claimed by organizers, but turned sour and generated uproar among certain groups in Hong Kong, claiming the campaign was executed to promote the hotel at the expense of Hong Kong’s local people and culture. Eventually, the whole campaign had to be phased out.

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How Not To Project Your Brand Online

Reputation can be a key to success or ruin the whole business. If we have a website, we better ensure it does us a favor and not blemish our image. Especially if we try to preach otherwise.

This is what could happen to a website of a marketing company in Hong Kong that aims to promote its services online. How can we persuade clients to give us business when they see our website have the following “features”:

1 Display spelling and grammar errors
As humans, we are not perfect but let’s not try to show how easy it is to make mistakes.

2 Waste people’s time
Splash pages are so old fashioned and serves one constant purpose: waste your visitors’ time.

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Hyves: Strange Way To Check Google Penalty

Mediadonis reports that there is a new way, albeit strange, weird (or whatever you may call it), to check if a site is penalized or banned by Google.

To find out just use the word “hyves” as a subdomain of your website so that if you manage example.com, enter hyves.example.com. Yes, you’d say that it doesn’t exist and therefore should have no PageRank. But Google displays that non existent page’s PageRank value.

Based on a few tests, it was theorized that PageRank values, as shown in Google Toolbar, mean something:

* PageRank 7 – Site is doing fine in front of the eyes of Google
* PageRank 4 – Site got penalized by Google
* PageRank 0 – Site got banned by Google

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Importance of Google Sitemaps

One of a client I am working now is a brochure site of a popular electronics brand. Within its product pages are several URLs that represent various colors of a certain model. Instead of displaying a page that features JavaScript-powered color selector, several pages belong to one specific product model. The way URLs were structured raises duplicate issues where search engines are sometimes left to guess (actually, they have methodologies to refer to) which among the available URLs should be indexed. Since we are certain which pages we want to rank, we shouldn’t leave search engines to do the guess work.

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