Fake SEO Forum?
Probably didn't think people would notice them about a week after they created their absolutely fake forum, but I did. Web-Advertising-Info = complete garbage... Web-Advertising-Info.com
It is a fake forum set up to push Traffic Power / 1P SEO services. These are the same SEO services that have got many webmasters banned from the search engines.

Web-Advertising-Info.com Forum Facts:

• Only list two category sources of seo news (one of which being me)

• Individually review a bunch of seo websites...as the seo forum categories (not normal)
• Say that I cold called them offering SEO services...based on how much time I spend reading books and posting in forums and stuff... I don't have time to cold call people. In fact I have even called a bunch of other SEOs asking if I could refer people to them...and even yesterday refered away a repeat client sell to a friend.
• They reviewed both of my sites as two of about 14 categories
• Only have categories of sites that have bashed (gave honest feedback out the services of) Traffic Power AND
• Give positive reviews of Traffic Power AND 1P
• Their forum is premoderated. When someone tried leaving a message they couldn't.
• No way that many negative things have been randomly said about me in less than a week in an honest premoderated forum with less than 100 posts.
• Can you say scam?

Avoid that forum like the plague.

Web-Advertising-Info.com Forum Screenshot:
This image of the forum which promotes 1P & Traffic Power shows how they used two of my site names as their categories (to bash me) and also use one of their categories to promote Traffic Power.

Traffic Power & 1P: Using Deceptive Marketing
The fact that they would go to these lengths to try to market their services shows a few things:

• They are pathetic.

• Their services must not be worth using.
• I was gonna let it slide, but this "SEO forum" went overboard. When Traffic Power cold called me asking to help me promote my website the site they wanted to promote this online shopping mall (look at how bad that site is and see for yourself the bad sites and naive webmasters they are actively trying to work for). The site is complete garbage. I made it before I knew anything about the web, marketing, or SEO. Now I use that site as bait site to see what kind of bad stuff there is on the web.
• Traffic power is still the only SEO company that has cold called me and they have also cold called multiple friends of mine.
• On September 23^rd Traffic Power cold called another friend of mine. Here is the email he sent me about the cold call:
  

  guess who I just got off the phone with? A rep from trafficpower!!! She says that paying $3000 will allow me to refer clients to 1p.com and I get like 40% of the service cost. I told her if she is any good, then she should work for herself. I will be in touch with her to see if she has any skill. Just for shits and giggles, I asked her what it would take for her to work for me full time. She said $1000/week. I laughed. She must be getting crumbs over there. If she's worth anything, she's worth ppc management. She seems bright

  ..but she works for crumbs in SEO.

More Placing this Bogus 1P / Traffic Power SEO Forum in Perspective
If you look at the links page on their site:
http://www.web-advertising-info.com/links.php
The second through fifth links on that page point into a site that promotes my ebook on every page of their website and gives it a glowing review.

More Fake SEO Forums Promoting 1P & Traffic Power
Andy Beal just spotted
seo-talk.net &
seo-forum.net

Later someone else noticed
seo-professional-forum.com

All the fake SEO forums promote the same garbage as the other forum I found. On seo-forum.net they ran a poll for my ebook (what real premoderated poles do you know that would use the following language and options)

• It was a waste of money.

• Aaron Wall's writes like a preschooler.
• If this were a real book, I'd wipe my ass with the pages!

The goal of this "clever" advertising bit is to try to make all SEO forums look deceptive and sneaky so that Traffic Power, 1P, and similar companies who had been complained about can be at a level bar with respectable SEO firms.

Basically it is a "our name is in the tank so we want to ruin yours too" type of game...kinda like how politics works. There is something overtly transparent about their forums that would likely turn off any site visitors. They could not have possibly been any more transparent.

Andy Beal has more info about the comment moderation of the fake SEO forums...apparently whoever made the forums was so foolish that they ping Feedster with the hidden moderated comments. Andy has a few of them posted on his blog.

Further Reading on 1P / Traffic Power SEO Services:

• Traffic Power @ Traffic Power Sucks (which is listed in the Allegedly Unethical Firms and Consumer Complaints sections of the Open Directory Project)

• Traffic Power @ JimWorld
• Traffic Power@ Mark Carey
• Traffic Power @ SEO Consultants Directory
• Traffic Power @ SEW Forums
• Traffic Power @ SEO Book.com
• 1P is the new name for Traffic Power @ SEO Book.com

New AdWords Tool:
AdWord Tracker is a new tool which compares where some of your competitors ads are placed over time. Analyzing this data can help you find where some of the advertising sweet spots are (it is not always best to rank at #1). Additionally they collect data such as how many estimated impressions each advertiser is making and what words they are advertising for.

Example AdWord Tracker Date
For keyword phrases such as "flat screen TV" AdWord Tracker will give you:

• businesses advertising in this cateogry

• Adwords with high #of advertisers
• Adwords with lowest #of advertisers
• Advertisers with highest impression
• Advertisers subscribing to maximum AdWords

Most of the keywords you may want to track are likely not going to be in the system off the start. You can sign up to add up to two phrases to the system though.

I am not sure how this data is collected or how accurate it is, but if it is anywhere near accurate then it is dirt cheap competitive analysis. I did not see anywhere on the site where it said specifically how / where it collected the data and if/how it could account for other bots and programs like itself which skew traffic numbers.

AdWord Tracker Price
AdWord Tracker will track a couple AdWords keywords for you for free off the start and then charges either $4.99 for 3 months, $14.99/year.

I have to try it out a bit to see how good it will be, but it could be a useful tool. Google may try to make this data harder to collect if they are collecting good data. Cheap keyword research...come and get it ;-)

I am going to ask the owner how he collects that data and whatnot.

Algorithm Change
Around September 23^rd many webmasters stated they lost a bunch of their traffic from Google.

Google to Change Their Way of Rewarding Linkage Data?
DaveN is a fairly well respected SEO who recently made the following statements at the SEW Forums:

the whole PR / Linkage Game has changed. Just be careful how and where you buy PR these days. ... Last time I spoke to my friends from the plex, they where working on the ability to add - positive and negative weight to links depending on how they looked Via there GUI. ... I have never seen the GUI but from what I can gather it will highlight un natural areas on page, think about where most people put there sold links.

How is Google Fighting Artificial Link Manipulation?
A ton of ways...

• Make SEO itself sound a bit sketchy.

• Show bunk backlinks.
• Not update PageRank.
• Deweighting links from the same C block IP address range. (Google may also use WhoIs lookup data).
• Manually penalize some sites for buying or selling PageRank...or for being in circles that make it seem like you are doing that.
• Prevent certain sites from parsing outbound link popularity.
• Automatically penalize sites for using the same link text too frequently.
• Now they are potentially going to look for ways to not only devalue links, but also potentially make them have negative value based on abnormal linkage patterns.
  
• They are also probably doing a bunch of other things I do not know of or forgot to list.

Anyone who does not believe in the power of link building should ask themselves why Google is putting so much effort into making it harder to do.

Tens of thousands of businesses, large and small, use Google Adwords and Overture Match (from Yahoo!) to advertise their products and services on the Internet. ... There are many variables, but SEM professionals have focused heavily on the importance of "keywords" – to the extent that entire sub-industries have sprung up to show clients how to create lists of keywords! What has been overlooked, in our estimation, is the good old art of copywriting itself – how you write the ad. ... After all, an ad is an ad whether it appears in a newspaper, a magazine, or on Google or Overture. You've got space for a short headline and a brief description – briefer on Google than Overture, but at least Google doesn't truncate your listing, as Overture does. Given how little space you get to work with, and the fact that you have no visual opportunity, it is crucial to create compelling, snappy ads. Unfortunately, the vast majority are nothing of the sort. Most of them look like badly written classified ads – and that's the main reason most of them will deliver poor click through rates and disappointing results. source: BusinessKnowledgeSource.com

Frequently direct ads that are focused on the customers needs and wants use easy to understand language and are the best performing ads. Many classified ads are tested over and over again...against the rain, the day of the week, the season, etc. and they continue to reappear because they provide exactly what the consumer wants. Most flashy magazine or TV type ads are not tested anywhere near as deeply...if they were, more of them would become the boring ads that speak directly to the consumer.

The 80 / 20 rule
Well sort of... ComScore search results for July show that 20% of searchers do 68% of the searching.

My Yahoo!
New beta release of My Yahoo!. Allows you to add any RSS feed and other good stuff...Jeremy has the details

Word of the Day: Masala
man that sounds like a crazy word...definition...as it relates to search: it is the name of IBM's new beta corporate search product. starting at only 4K / computer, it can search many filetypes that web based search engines do not. I am thinking of buying a copy of the "unlimited" edition for $125,000 per CPU.

Google News: Conservative Bias?
Many top news sources do not use first names in their headlines. Many second tier news sites do, and thus many right wing articles appear in Google News for John Kerry searches. Everybody wants to make sure they get enough cookies...

Looking Smart?
LookSmart purchases FURL. FURL is a bookmarking / research management software program.

A New Blog
http://sempo-tahoe.blogspot.com/...the blog for SEMPO Tahoo

Atomz Site Search to Add Contextual Ads
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/6698.htm

Google Keyword Insertion
A while ago I posted about how you can dynamically insert the desired search term into the title of AdWords ads. Now you can also send the triggering AdWords keyword in the actual destination URL. Probably not as useful for tracking as the HTTP referer, but it can still be useful perhaps in some affiliate program tracking stuff.

The destination URL looks something like:
http://www.domain.com/?kw={keyword} or
http://www.domain.com/?group=1&kw={keyword}

I have not tried it out yet, but it sounds like an interesting feature.

If the Glove...
Hamburg court finds Google not guilty for allowing advertising on branded keywords

Ask Jeeves...
Serves it Your Way (message not sponsored by Burger King)
Cheesy World Tour Video
Ask is also partnering with Topix to provide news.

Google Toolbar Evil?
Perhaps Daniel Brandt has been right all along? (apparently I am evil too and may soon be featured in Google Watch) ... Toolbar Scripting Vulnerability

Yet Another Keyword Generator Tool
Keyword Lizard

Fresh, New: Search Engine Watch blog

Have it Your Way: Ask Jeeves makeover promoting search personalization?

Half Off: Yahoo! Search results sometimes show 10 results instead of 20

Free Money: A9 goes out of beta & Amazon offers A9 users a discount (which I think is still less than the Amazon associate program payout).

SEO Toolbar: Not from Daniel Brandt, SearchStatus is a new FireFox / Mozilla extension to easily provide search engine related site info.

Intoxicatingly Fun: Thanks to everybody for making SEO Roadshow fun. (including you MR NFFC)

More from SEO Roadshow:
Mike Grehan posted a bunch of pics and there is a SEO Roadshow review thread at SEW Forums.

$160M cash...press release
(thanks to Gary P)

AOL Shopping: AOL to launch In-Store.com comparison shopping service. You can try out the technology at http://www.pinpointshopping.com.

BizRate.com largely developed the Pinpoint Shopping function for AOL in exchange for a share of revenue when customers click on a merchant's product.

Yaho! Blogging: Yahoo! hiring for blogging service related positions

This does not have much to do with SEO, but has a ton to do with marketing any business.

All too often online businesses use the "cheap price" branding / sales angle. There will always be someone else who is cheaper. Cheap is not an effective longterm business strategy for most businesses... especially online.

I have been pricing my ebook at $40 because I wanted to make it cheap and affordable to a maximum number of people. While my sales have well exceeded my expectation many of my friends have been telling me that it is the wrong price point.

Example:
I could try to sell my ebook for $10, but likely most people would not buy it because at that price most people would think it is garbage.

I do understand the concept that it is better to push value than price... I am not really doing anyone a favor if a low price is turning people off. The price is arbitrary. It is the value that is important. A higher price may give a higher perceived value.

A couple other SEO ebooks are selling at higher price points ($67 or $97). A bunch of my friends stated that I should price my ebook at $67 and a few think I should charge $97 and an ongoing subscription fee.

I will likely raise the price of my ebook soon, but I am going to wait until after I talk to that cool cat NFFC from SEO Roadshow.

A couple good threads / articles / books on the concept of branding and / or price points:

• Kick ass post by NFFC

• Branding & Generic Dot Com Business Models - article by John Scott. Fun and slightly offensive to some, but 100% honest good advice.
• Wikipedia: Price Points
• The Revenge of Brand X - my favorite branding book.
• Purple Cow - book about being remarkable / different.

Google has recently updated their backlinks again. You can view your backlinks at 216.239.51.105

(thanks for the scoop )

Just a reminder to everyone about the upcoming SEO Roadshow conference in London. It is free, but by invite only.

If you can make it to London next week, need an invite, and are super cool just send me an email and I will see if I can invite a few more people.

The PageRank Checksum algorithm has been cracked and available free for months. Google has not been updating visual PageRank display. Those ideas may or may not have anything to do with one another, but Google recently changed the toolbar checksum algorithm.

Open Sourced Search:
Scalable Top-Based Open Source Search Engine

I am Begining to See The Light:
The Velvet Underground - cool...
Poynter Online Homepage Visual Paterns - interesting...

Cod Wa no Ichi
If Ichi means "good flavor" then the title is accurate.
My roommate cooked it tonight. Not a dish I recommend. :(

Yahoo! stated that tonight they will be opening a new travel service at FareChase using their SmartSort technology. (Currently that site is password protected).

Another recent travel company now in beta is Kayak.

Thanks to SEW forums.

Starting in October, we're introducing "Budget smoothing", another new feature in which the Overture system makes adjustments to the frequency in which your listings are displayed based on the depletion of your specified budget amount. For example, if you have budgeted €100,00 a day, our system will display your listings just enough so that you receive clicks that will total approximately €100,00 for the day. The smoothing feature also regulates the display of your listings so that you receive clicks throughout the day, rather than burning through your budgeted amount in just a few hours.

From Overture Germany (not yet sure when the global rollout will occur. Will likely know soon...)

thanks to AussieWebmaster @ SEW forums

If Google and Overture (which is owned by Yahoo!) are held liable in this case their margins will drop sharply because of:

• Payout to Geico.

• Others will likely soon sue them.
• Search engines will be forced to police trademark laws (which will be time consuming and expensive).
• Search engines will have less ad space they can sell.

In my opinion selling an ad next to search results is like selling an ad next to an article in newspapers. I am no judge though but hopefully they are found not guilty.

Jim at WeBuildPages recently created a free link analysis tool. It looks up the top 10 ranking sites for a keyword and returns:

• Pages indexed by Google & Yanoo!

• Yahoo! Backlinks (Page)
• Yahoo! Backlinks (Domain)
• Google PageRank
• Yahoo! WebRank
• Google allinanchor position
• Body KW Density
• & Link KW Density

The layout looks a bit like the layout of a tool I would make, but unlike a tool I would make ;) it actually works.

another SEO conference...SEM Live is ran by Andy Beal and his other WebSourced buds...

Date: October 26th, 2004.
Location: Raleigh, NC
Registration Cost:
North Carolina Residents
$99.00 before September 30th
$199.00 after September 30th
All Other Residents
$199.00 before September 30th
$299.00 after September 30th
More Info: SEM Live

other SEO conferences this fall / winter

Cost per Influence
Ross Mayfield has an interesting ad concept by the name of cost per influence. Using cost per influence advertising niche specific publishers will be able to start running interesting ads that they see on other sites.

So long as the account associated with funding that ad has money in it the idea spreads. Once the money runs out the ads die. If ads are productive then they will be continually fed more money until they are no longer productive.

This is a similar concept to how many newspaper classified ads are ran except with this the relevant ad locations pick themselves out for you. Interesting idea perhaps best described as viral affiliate marketing.

John Battelle also followed up with an in depth post titled "Sell Side Advertising."