I put my favorite keyword research tools and competitive research tools in a Google Gadget. Thanks to Jay at Widget Waker for making the original version with a sweet design, which I hacked up a bit to add a few more tools at the last minute.

If you use the iGoogle homepage you can add the tool to your homepage by selecting add by URL and then submitting this URL:
http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/keywords.xml Creating tools for Google's platform allows Google to suck down even more of my time and attention. Many others are also hooked on iGoogle and the Google feed reader, to the point where they scream and/or unsubscribe if a channel only uses partial feeds. If Google doesn't lose the farm on copyright, the only way someone is going to beat them is if they come up with a way to make it faster and easier for us to consume information and feed our egos. It is going to be hard to create something sustainable and scaled that does that, largely because scale undermines most communities, and no company will be able to collect as much data as Google does right now without running into legal issues.

I am off to fly in a few hours and haven't packed yet. If you are going to the Domain Roundtable I hope to see you there soon.

Google has long hated publicly on people buying or selling links. Some of the better SEOs have moved beyond just getting a link here or there and have moved into acquiring trusted properties, improved them, scaling them, and marketing them. Google hates the practice though because they would prefer to have crusty dated content or incomplete blog posts ranking, such that anyone searching with a commercial interest is more drawn toward their Google AdWords program.

It is only a matter of time until Google tries to call buying websites and web based businesses a form of spam. They may not do it publicly yet, but it is well known in the SEO underground that they do it privately. It is just something they don't talk about.

Should Google be allowed to profile webmasters and ban them specifically because they are SEOs, even if their content quality is higher than that of the top ranking site? If so, then how can they justify rewriting their relevancy algorithms to feature YouTube more frequently in their search results after they bought the site?

Google is buying marketshare for Google Checkout by profiling merchants who use it, and giving them free high PageRank links from Google sites.

The Google Checkout blog, currently a PageRank 8 site, recently posted about the success of GolfBalls.com on their blog. Not only does that post provide direct links, one one of the links is a deep link with targeted anchor text.
The blog post about GolfBalls.com contains the following passage:

In addition, Google Checkout helps make it even easier for consumers to find us when they search for items like Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls by displaying the Google Checkout badge next to our search results.

They talk about searching for an item, and instead point that link at a product page on GolfBalls.com. That is like me telling you to search Google for something then dropping an eBay affiliate link in the post.

If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I would do it differently than Google is doing it. I would just like to remind Google engineers that they would call me as a spammer if I did the same things they do to make their business model work.

This is a mistake Google has made many times in the past.

How can Google ask webmasters to police paid links then do that kind of crap? What a bunch of hypocritical garbage.

Question: I am reading your book. On page 53 you mention using different search engine optimization strategies for small websites and big websites. How do you classify a site as small or large?

Answer: There are two big things that sort the classification of a site as large or small

• whether your optimization is manual or algorithmically driven

• whether search engines consider your site as spam when it ranks

Within those two ideas I think there are 4 big things that separate a small and large website

• brand awareness, and search engineer's perception of your brand

• ad budget, and how a search engineer will perceive your ad buys
• inbound link profile
• number of pages

Brand Strength:

The more well known your brand is the less likely a search engineer will be to penalize your site for doing shady things. When BMW was caught cloaking they were removed from Google's index for only 1 day. Google also has a whitelist of sites that should not be penalized based on human review:

Here is a non-exhaustive "white list" of the sites whose pages are not to be rated as Offensive (nor as Erroneous):
Kelkoo, Shopping.com, dealtime.com, bizrate.com, bizrate.lycos.com, dooyoo.com;

Notice that not only is Bizrate whitelisted, but so is a Bizrate subdomain on another site. Simply put, big brands should spam.

Ad Budget:

If I buy a link, Google is likely to view it as spam. If I buy a website, Google is likely to view it as spam. If a large established site sponsors a conference or buys other ads that tend to have links in them then they are more likely to get away with it. If a large corporation buys a site and slaps a network-wide footer link to it then Google is fine with that.

A large AdWords ad budget allows you to buy links indirectly. Beyond that, if you have a large Google advertising budget, Google may also offer you the following perks: free SEO advice (this is rarely talked about outside the corporate world), take your feedback on search quality (this is rarely talked about outside the corporate world), and they are more lenient with what you can do to rank (robotic content, anyone?). They are afraid to lose large AdWords ad accounts. Google backed down from eBay after eBay stopped buying AdWords ads.

If you are a large Google AdWords advertiser it is expected for you to buy sites and links at will with no risk. People like me, who do not spend heavily on AdWords, are branded as spammers if we follow those techniques. Going forward, a large AdWords ad budget might be the #1 SEO tool.

Inbound Link Profile:

The cleaner your link profile is the more dirty stuff you can do. The more link equity you have the more pages you can get indexed and the better they will rank. It is all about ratios.

Keep in mind that if you are branded as an SEO, a Google engineer may decide to wipe out your site on principal, even if your content quality is greater than the top ranking website, and you built almost all of your links using non-spammy marketing.

Number of Pages:

As you build authority status some search algorithms will become more lenient. For example, it is easier to rank new content based on site trust (some news sites even get immediate inclusion at the top position) and easier to get around duplicate content filters. If you have many pages (like a large product database) then some of your SEO strategy will need to be automated and formula based. With a smaller website you would create hand crafted content for most of the page titles, meta descriptions, page headings, and on page content for almost every page.

Google's official stance is that they do not want to index search results, but if a site scores decently on the brand front or it gives Google reason to fear forms of blowback they can also be more aggressive with creating automated low value content.

In some cases a small content website that builds a strong brand and amazing link authority can bolt on an offers section, and have that portion of the site treated more like a large site while the day to day brand building content is still treated as though it is a smaller website.

Most search trends typically last more than a day. Since Google integrates news results right in the first page of the search results all a news website needs to do is look at popular searches, Amazon best sellers, top Amazon movers, new items on Amazon, and hot items on eBay, write a vanilla piece of content, throw ads on the page, and cash a check.

Reporters no longer have to research public demand. All they have to do is look up the ad value and write about whatever makes the most money interests them. In some cases publishers may let a robot write the story for them!