Contracting out to Elance

Finding subcontractors on Elance isn't always easy

Contracting out to Elance

Contracting out your SEO work to Elance is an extremely risky business. Chose the wrong contractor and they could get up to all sorts of shenanigans that lead to Google penalties and bans.

Generally for search engine optimization wholesale I wouldn’t recommend Elance unless the contractor can provide fully verifiable references that you follow up in order to ensure they are:

not ghost companies and websites created by the SEO company in order to provide references,
not websites that the SEO company actually has nothing to do with.

Can the SEO community be too hysterical when reacting to Google's actions?

The hysteria around Google’s actions

I came across this in my unpublished blog posts and thought it was a good reminder about how the SEO community sometimes reacts with hysteria to Google’s actions but when the dust dies there really isn’t any meat in the frantic responses.

The story surrounds a Google ban of Doc Sheldon’s blog (Doc Sheldon being one of the more respected people in the SEO world) earlier this year.

Yelp reviews for sale on fiverr.com

Yelp is a fundamentally flawed review service being kept afloat by investors desperately figuring out a way to make the platform profitable. Overrun with spammed content its filtering attempts have turned things from bad to worse, alienating businesses and users alike, while it is bogged down in extortion scandals and court battles.

There is no doubt that right now Yelp can help bring in the business, or get rid of it, but I always question spending time and resource invested in a platform that may not be around for the long term. And there are plenty of reasons why Yelp may be another internet also-ran.

Amazon’s new seller fees – greedy or clever?

Amazon has been rolling out new minimum fees on products that individuals and companies sell on the service. Are they being greedy or will this improve the service?

What are the new fees?

Website design now has to take into account different devices and different screen sizes

Google issues with dynamic website design

Responsive and dynamic websites are all the rage and rightly so. But dynamic content has revealed a major flaw in how Google crawls and caches the internet. One that leaves webmasters creating content which isn’t indexed and scammers with an open door.

Before I explain the flaw in Google Iﾒll briefly cover what dynamic website design is as this will explain how search engines are missing content while some webmasters could use techniques to fool search engine crawlers.

Big SEO names get hit by Google so who can you trust?

March 2014 was a seismic month with at least two well known names in the world of search engine optimisation being hit by Google penalties. So who can you trust to do your SEO?

The whirlwind really began when rumour started to speculate that Ann Smarty’s MyBlogGuest website had been removed from Google’s index. In reality it had just been ranked to lower in the search results but that’s academic really. It was out. For my opinion on why see the post Why Google banned MyBlogGuest.

Why Google banned MyBlogGuest

MBG helped blogger and guest blogger get together and it was one of those services that made you say, ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ So why has Google banned it?

Google has hit one of the largest blogging networks

Not only has it got its very own manual penalty, many publishers who were using it have started receiving the same.

Spam, ban, thank you Ma’am

Most of the time I talk about how to do SEO and avoid being penalized by Google but today I’m going to show you three cases where spamming and getting banned really benefited the websites involved.

JC Penny, InterFlora and Rap Genius are big brand names that were hit by Google for violating its terms of use. It didn’t take them long to make amends and the result for all three was a much improved backlink profile.

The end of monthly SEO packages?

I haven’t offered monthly SEO packages for years but I see many companies still advertising the concept. That ‘6 guest blogs, 1 press release, 1 video, etc. for $x per month’ type of thing.

I can see why they are so attractive to many website owners, they are quantifiable and you can actually see that work is being done ﾖ even if rankings don’t move. I don’t do them because every website turns on its merits, it is an individual case that has its own unique needs and requirements.

Hummingbird has been released, but it hasn't been unleashed ...

SEO post Google Hummingbird

Hummingbird is Googleﾒs new algorithm for indexing the web. Launched in late 2013 there was no noticeable difference to the search results. This is because we are not talking about what Hummingbird is, but what it can do and will be doing as we go through 2014.

Panda and Penguin were about removing the real dross from search results and they will continue to do so. But Hummingbird is about trying to sort out what is left in a more accurate way.

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