Image by Warhammer-historical.com

When I first started the internet marketing business in 2000; there were very few of us in this business. When I switched from marketing to SEO; there were still very few. I remember SEOs saying; the internet is large we can teach every one and there will be space for more.

Now a herd of unemployed are like the Barbarian herd waiting outside the walls of Roman Empire waiting to invade. “Make Money Online” is the slogan. Professional SEO agencies just like the many factions in the Roman empire at the time are fighting each other through price wars and “outings”. The end is near for any agency who becomes afraid and loses the discipline and the professionalism that is required to succeed. The name of the game is “Building Processes”. Without creating preset systems, innovation and a hunger to train staff; you will never survive.

A great SEO is the one that can see through what is propoganda and what is real.  Thank you Mike showing us through the Google fog that most do not see.

Chicago Tribune/WGN faced its first challenge on a web mobilization assault by Barack Obama. I donot doubt a second that Republicans are liars about the “lipstick on a pig” issue. They have lied over and over again on the offense in almost every presidential campaign playing with people’s emotions. Obama has only one weapon to fight this in defense: His massive email database is in his disposal to quiet any “lies”. The problem comes at that point. His weapon is used to quiet any dissenting opinions through emailing his supporters to tell his side of story to overrun lobby the TV channels and radio stations about having “controversial” guests who are “liars” with phone calls and emails. The noise created by both the Republicans and Democrats in a political campaign are overwhelming. At last the internet became the last fighting ground of this background noise. I am afraid, in the long run, the power of these online databases will create an oppression of the big government (especially in less democratic countries) through its supporters to create consistent localized peer pressure on the part of the population that does not agree with its policies. Again the name of the party behind such a government is truly not important. Internet is truly becoming a scary weapon against our future. I truly fear for our first amendment and the constitution.

Marissa Mayer (Google)

Marissa Mayer is the Vice President, Search Products & User Experience in Google. She has written probably the most important article about the Search Engine Optimization field in the last 10 years.

Marissa wrote about the future of search not from a Matt Cutts point of view but a user point of view. The future she sees (not a distant one) is the future of an evolved SEO. All the petty talk about paid link controversies and nofollow tag implementations come to a screeching halt when you realize the future from the dimension of user experience. The future to me clearly is going towards online Public Relations (PR), digital asset optimization and syndication networks. The true pirate hunter is not Matt Cutts but Marrissa Mayer.

P.S. Yes she is the hottest VP in America.

[expand title=Discussions on the web about Marissa Mayer & Google]

• Marissa Mayer Demos Google’s New Online Newspaper Archive Search
• TechCrunch50 Session 1: Youth and Culture
• Ä°nternetten köşeyi dönenler

[/expand]

I, Mert Sahinoglu (I still donot know who that lady is on that search result (I am a guy) as my picture) protest Cuil who claims to have billions of pages indexed for not indexing my PR4 blog, Metroseo

But hey at least they indexed Falcon Living (my real estate site).

OK, why am I doing the one thing I hate-sending links to search engine results pages which are “usually” robots.txt blocked??? Because this awesome machine after 33 million dollars in venture capital, forgot to put a robots.txt. (as of July 28, 2008). Spammers should have a feast. I know why people made such a big deal of this site; but a new search engine would probably need 330 million not 33 to even have a shot at Google (if this is what comes out of 33 million).

Update (Still july 28) Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz just poined out to me the cannonicalization between cuil.com and cuill.com even though cuill.com home page is redirected to cuil.com. As of July 28, 2008 I can do the above search queries with Cuill.com

Update (Aug 4) Cuil realized both errors (hopefully thanks to this blog (which still does not show up in their search engine index for my name) and added a robots.txt as well as fixing the redirect. May be just may be there is a glimmer of hope (but not really). They still do not pay attention.

This is my take on the noindex controversy started by Google. Let’s just say I am a small legal firm that has info that is confidential but choose to outsource my webdesign. I tell my webdesigner in India. Hey I have stuff that is confidential make sure google does not get into it. Webdesigner reads the Google commands about noindex so it uses noindex. A year down the road Google drops the policy, and the info becomes public. Guess who the owner is going to sue….. Not the designer in India but Google of course. Google makes a written instruction which goes on as a promise. Google makes money indirectly from the user content so any written promise can be seen as a binding contract. Google should keep its promises..

This move was a brilliant move by Rand and Co. who are trying to become the center of the SEO Universe. Their recent influx of money through Venture Capital was the right step that allows them to create cornerpieces of their SEO resource empire which began with a great blog, premium membership for SEO tips and tools, and now even the job center.

Here are the only weaknesses, I have found with the Marketplace. Having an SEOmoz recommended list is a turn off for most independent SEOs who dont mingle with SEOmoz crowd in the A-list and probably just as good as the recommended sites (if not social).

The other issue is that most listed companies claim to be doing a service for everything that is listed. How about limiting the selections of services to 5 as if to say we do these five things best rather than I am a single consultant/company doing all categories great which simply is not possible.

Beyond that, I think SEO world just saw the birth of a true SEO giant. Rand already has received a lot of fire from many members of the SEO community including some of the top SEOs, even though he is known to be the friendliest and most helpful guy in the SEO circles, for simply publicizing too many magician tricks. As SEOs carry their love/hate relationship with their breadmaker/nemesis Google, I wonder if the same will apply to the other end of the spectrum which is turning out to be SEOmoz.