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Archives for June 2009

The Purported Death of PageRank Sculpting

June 12, 2009 by 8 Comments

During the recent SMX-Advanced conference in Seattle – which I was not able to attend (I do occasionally have to work for a living) – there was a confusion of reports of comments attributed to Matt Cutts that resulted in the provocative (outlandish even?) conclusion that nofollow no longer works to sculpt PageRank, but in fact now causes PageRank to "evaporate" instead.

Dan Thies was at the show, witnessed the entire sordid ordeal and has editorialized on the matter in the way that only Dan can in a post he calls Operation BENDOVER (Huh? You’ll just have to watch the video!).

Completely lacking as I am in Dan’s sense of humor, not to mention a suitable picture to trump the one he uses of me, I’ve instead resorted to my old standby — Math. So for the real PageRank computations that show why this reported obit just does not "add up" see The Math of PageRank Sculpting. And if you like that kind of thing, you’ll really dig the included PageRank algorithm written in 25 lines of Perl.

Finally, with humor and math taken care of, be sure to read Andy Beard’s take on the death of PageRank Sculpting, but just remember that the real point of most "news" in SEO is the humor.

Filed Under: Web Business Tagged With: , ,

Do People Choose Features or do Features Choose People?

June 4, 2009 by 1 Comment

Classically, we think of product features providing benefits that consumers weigh and contrast relative to competing products in making a buying decision.

What happens when you turn this around? How do your product features act to select the customers you get? Here’s a great case in point.

A couple of good friends and colleagues of mine, Jerry West and David Bullock, are putting on their third seminar in a series they call The SEO Rainmaker. It’s just a couple weeks away and if you can arrange to attend I highly recommend it, but the point of this post is to point out how two features of the event served to pre-select the audience they obtained.

First, the event is on Thursday and Friday, not the weekend. If you guessed that they got push-back on this point … you’d be right! But this also stands to pre-select for people that have already left the J.O.B. and graduated to being the boss. Speaking from that vantage point, I don’t want seminars on the weekend because I already work long enough hours as it is thank you! I view the weekday schedule as a positive, not a negative.

Benefit is just a synonym for "positive feature" and positive is in the eye of the beholder. What is positive for one group may be negative for another and you have decide which group you appealing to.

Second, the day is only scheduled from 10 to 4. Is this positive or negative? For the person that expects to have their butt planted in a chair and their mind fed information then it’s a negative — they want the day scheduled from 9 to 9 to "get their money’s worth". But is that who you want?

At the latest three day StomperNet Live event I had one-on-one meetings with partners and long term StomperNet members booked for so much of the weekend that I missed most of the show. Ask any long-time business person and you will hear the same story — it is the contacts you make and the side conversations you have that make live events pay for the travel.

The value of the instruction you get at these events you could (mostly) get from online delivery. It is the personal interaction you get with the organizers and other attendees can not be had any other way.

By the way, a third friend and colleague, Paul Lemberg is guest speaking for Jerry and David and I may drive up for Friday afternoon just for fun so if you can make it, I’ll see you there, but please don’t "take vacation" to come. 😉

Filed Under: Web Business Tagged With: ,