Who are the real heroes in our hyper competitive industry? Are they those who you see at Search Engine Strategies giving lectures about the latest development in our industry? There are a lot of these people who I have the most respect for. Most of these lecturers have paid their dues and have been good at one time. But today, most of these guys barely do any SEO work. Their focus is more on “big picture” ideas. The dirty work is done by SEO professionals who have been in the industry for 2-5 years.

I don’t have any problem with people getting paid or promoting themselves in these events. What I do have a problem is when these people ask $400-$1000 an hour and deliver the same work that a SEO professional with 2 – 5 years experience can deliver. Sometimes their work is even worse than that. I have personally read a few proposals for the companies that I have worked for from some of these so called “big guys.” To share a story here, one day the SVP of the company that I used to work for asked me to review a proposal from one of the top guys in the industry. The proposal was probably the worst I had seen at the time. But the guy was asking for $500 an hour to do consulting (not doing any work). That’s not what being a SEO professional is all about. Being a SEO professional is all about providing value to clients/customers. So my hates off to the true heroes of our industry.

You have probably heard already that Cuil by ex-Google engineers is finally out and open to public. They claim that they have indexed over 100 billion pages and are the largest search engine on the planet. That is al fine and dandy. But let’s see how Cuil stacks up in design and algorithm:

Design: Simple all black design for Cuil make it look like Black beauty (not the horse). But my experience with black pages shows that they all fail. Does that mean Cuil will fail? Not for this reason but I would’ve preferred a better background color. I guess that’s one way to differentiate yourself.

When you search for a term, the results pages are shown in three columns. The first two columns are basically are your normal results pages while the third column allows you to search by category, which is very neat. Overall, I like the design though it could be too distracting. Reading items one by one is easier for most folks than looking at 3 columns at once.

Algorithm: I picked the term “Federer” to see what I can find on the Swiss genius. To my surprise, Cuil not only shows results for Federer, but also shows a few tabs at the top predicting what I may be looking for (e.g. Federer vs. Sampras, Federer Nike, Nadal vs. Federer). But the same search for UFC showed “ultimated fighting championship and United Fruit Company). Does anyone actually use UFC for united fruit company?

Over all, I don’t see anything that makes me want to drop Google and start using Cuil. It’s nice and cool. It’s different, but no thanks. I’ll stick with Google.

It’s true. Matt Cutts mentioned it a few days back, and now I understand why one of my blogs went from PR of 3 to PR of 0! PageRank is not really as important as it used to be but going from 3 to 0 in a couple of days is depressing. Having said that, some sites have seen improvements. Check yours today!

Well, if you haven’t heard the news yet, then you should know that Google is pretty much close to buying Digg for about $200m (Kevin, can you spare a bother a mil?). So what does it all mean for people who have used Digg to drive traffic to their sites?

It’s tough to say. I don’t think Google with follow no follow links on Digg. Having said that, I still expect sites to get indexed quickly using Diggoogle. But Digg will be in good hands. Google will take care of Digg for now, and I am sure the algorithms will get better and the whole gaming thing that is going on with Digg will diminish. The interesting thing to watch is whether Google finally get the YouTube – Digg integration right.

I am truly glad that the Digg guys are getting paid for all the effort they put in. Not quite Facebooish money but $200 mil isn’t that bad either.

If you know anything about SEO, you know that article submission is a major part of link building campaign for any SEO campaign. Of course, we have link buyers who take a shortcut, but if you have an article handy and submit it to the top article directories, there is a good chance that sites pick it up and give you a link back ( I don’t recommend directories that require reciprocal links). Submitting articles is a tough job because:

• You need to know how to write an article
• Have the patience of Noah to submit articles to some of these directories

The first part can’t really be helped. If you know the basics of SEO and can write English and have something valuable to say, then you are set there. You can also hire ghost writers.

But the second part is tough. So I was going through forums the other day and I saw this discussion about Article Submitter vs. Article Announcer. These tools basically save you time by filling out forms (no, they don’t auto submit). I have personally tried both, and I can say that Article Announcer is a little bit better because it provides you with templates that you can use for articles. It may not look much but using the template can help you come up with more articles in a shorter amount of time.

Now, why am I talking about Article Announcer? The reason is DealDotCom has this item for 50% off for about an hour more before it expires. That’s right. An hour! Here is why you should get it if you can afford it:

• Training: John Reese and his colleagues teach you how to write effective articles
• Templates: The article templates with the package are very handy.
• Software: It has a list of directories that you can submit to. In addition, the software helps you draft emails to e-zine owners.

It’s still a little bit pricey but it saves you about 50% on the time that it take to write and submit an article so it could be well worth it, depending on your niche.

I am sure you have already heard of the idea of searching socially. In essence, companies such as Scour allow you to search for what you are looking for, but on the SERPs you get a chance to vote for the results. It’s a very good idea on the surface. In essence, by being part of the community and voting on the provided results, you can help others find what they are looking for faster. But here are the major issues that I see with the current platform:

• Gaming Web 2.0 service is a serious business: Believe it or not people make a living out of gaming Web 2.0 services such as Digg. So it would not be a surprise to me if they did the same to these so called “social” search engines. Sites such as Digg change their algorithms everyday to fight spammers, but there are just too many people trying to spam others.
• Social concept has flaws: Not everyone thinks alike when searching for even the most specific terms. Let’s say I am searching for Chase Credit Cards. I could be thinking about finding a selection of chase credit cards to apply for or trying to find out the latest news about chase products. So a site that has received 30 thumbs up for that keyword could be extremely useful to one person and somewhat useless to another.
• N dimension-based systems work better than N-1 dimension based systems: The system that takes into account only two factors for ranking search results pages is inferior to a system that takes in account 4 factors. Now you may say that voting could add a whole other dimension to search, and make it more effective. While true, the current systems are not perfect, and a binary vote for a results page cannot truly indicate the usefulness of a listing. So in essence, you add more unpredictability to your search pages by taking into account people’s vote.

The social search is exciting and everybody wants to jump on the social bandwagon these days. But in the end, social search can not stand on its own, which leads us to a hybrid social semantic search engine. But we are supposed to get there evenutally…

That’s the million dollar question. What happens if you Digg your own article? According to Digg, you are free to submit your own articles. But in general, it’s a good idea to your readers submit your articles to Digg. Now I did submit my article to Digg a couple of months ago and in 3 days my site was completely dropped from Google. I am by no means suggesting that had anything to do with my ranking drop, but it’s interesting that it has happened to a bunch of other people as well. What’s your experience with Digg? Have you experienced such an issue?

Now that Google is trying very hard to make Flash readable to its bots, should you invest in a flash website in hope that it will be readable to Google in the future? My answer is a quick no at this point. Google’s announcement was great for our industry. Flash sites do look better in general than heavy text sites. I think it would work brilliantly for landing pages that are right now not quite readable to Google.

Google, however, has just started working on this whole project. There is a long way to go before Google can claim this project as a 100% success (read the piece on SitePoint about potential problems). Google will get it right finally, but the time is not now. Here are the reasons you shouldn’t invest money in Flash website right now:

• Flash looks good but is not completely indexable yet.
• Technologies such as SiFR can help but text always works better.
• Text sites are in general more search engine friendly and have less load.
• AJAXification can compete with Flashification.
• Flex is still not where it needs to be (lots of unresolved issues).
• Flash sites won’t have any advantage over text sites as far as search engines are concerned.
• It’s all about content!!

Need I say more?

If you have worked in the SEO industry for even just a little bit, you know the reputation that search engine optimization professional have in other industries. Many think of SEO professionals as gamers: a group of folks who spend days and nights figuring out shortcuts to the top of the SERPs. In fact, many SEOs consider themselves to be gamers. But is it really true? Are we all just a bunch of folks who have nothing better to do than figure out what tricks Google in putting us at the top?

For some people the answer is yes. The Blackhats are certainly gamers, and there is no question about that. I don’t care if you are putting hidden text on your pages or you are using color schemes to trick engines, you are gaming the system.

But BlackHat SEOs are not the only ones who are giving us a bad name. Some white hats, especially those who love to buy links and use reciprocal linking aggressively are to blame here as well. I have been in the same room with SEOs who claim that they like to live on “the edge.” These are the people who give us honest whitehats a bad name. When I do SEO for people, I always think about the ways to improve their content and improve ranking positions by implementing the best practices. Not everyone is familiar with the importance of title tags. Not everyone knows who exactly the search engines work. Showing people how to target the right keyword is different than changing your whole content around a couple of keywords and repeating it a million times throughout your content.

So no. SEO is not gaming search engines. It’s about learning the rules and maximizing value to your readers. Nothing more or less.

Here is an update on the post that we made about Worio tag-based search engine. At the time, Worio was under construction, but now Worio Beta is live. I’ll write a full review of this service in the upcoming days. However, Worio’s tag based approach is very interesting. When you search for a keyword, you basically get two tabs:

1. Search Results

2. Tag Recommendations

You can also vote sites up and down which I think could work well for search engines but also backfire (due to the fact that we have a lot of marketers who are good at gaming these features). Worio takes a little bit of time getting used to, but it’s a very approach.