One of the advantages of working at Google is that you get to see neat products and features before the rest of the world does. But that can also be a disadvantage. Sometimes I’d like to talk about a fun Gmail Lab or a new Calendar feature but I’m honestly not sure whether the outside world can see the new feature. I don’t want to leak something that the outside world can’t see, so I usually I play it safe and end up not talking about any Gmail Labs, for example. I’d enjoy giving more Gmail tips but I also don’t want to show my actual email that might contain secret stuff.
I think I’ve figured out a way to solve this issue. I’ve created a new Gmail account, siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com. Let’s say it belongs to John Q Public, a power user living in Silicon Valley. Feel free to send […]

Original post by Matt Cutts

by Sage Lewis

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has some pretty extreme views for the business world. I think he might be looking in the mirror too closely when he talks about the business world as a whole.
Check out our small business news site.

Original post by Pete

The world may be all a-Twitter, but it seems the inordinate amount of time now spent there is costing other places traffic. Given the social aspect of Twitter, it could be a forum killer long before it becomes a serious threat to Google. …

Original post by Pete

Posted by great scott!
Crawling and Indexing. Without them you can’t rank. If you can’t rank, you can’t get search traffic. If you can’t get search traffic, your online marketing efforts are going to suffer; and in our industry that is a colossal FAIL.
This seems like simple stuff we all take for granted, but it’s critically important to understand what you must do–and avoid–to make sure your site is regularly crawled and then maintained in the primary index of each of the major engines. Even if you think you know it all, take a few minutes to watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday…you may just realize you’ve been ignoring some critical ranking factors.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Crawling & Indexing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
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Original post by great scott!

Google’s new rules affecting PageRank sculpting bring us back to high school. Instead of letting us vouch for our cool friends and disavow the geeks who want to hang out with us, Google is now punishing us for being one of the cool kids. …

Original post by Pete

Posted by randfish
I’m not always a fan of Guy Kawasaki’s work, but really enjoyed his post on the OPEN Forum - A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs. I thought I’d take a stab at replicating it with some of my biggest warnings for those in our field.
For the list below, the word "clients" is interchangeable with "marketing manager" or "executive team" for in-house SEOs.

Don’t Create False Expectations
Clients are just like everyone else - when you exceed their expectations, they love you. When you disappoint, they’re angry. Make it easy for yourself and don’t oversell. If anything, undersell your abilities to do great things and let them be surprised. It’s a hard thing to do, particularly in a competitive bidding environment, but humility and hard work often shine through in presentations and good clients will see that and honor it.
_
Don’t Ignore Analytics
[…]

Original post by randfish

Posted by randfish
I’m not always a fan of Guy Kawasaki’s work, but really enjoyed his post on the OPEN Forum - A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs. I thought I’d take a stab at replicating it with some of my biggest warnings for those in our field.
For the list below, the word "clients" is interchangeable with "marketing manager" or "executive team" for in-house SEOs.

Don’t Create False Expectations
Clients are just like everyone else - when you exceed their expectations, they love you. When you disappoint, they’re angry. Make it easy for yourself and don’t oversell. If anything, undersell your abilities to do great things and let them be surprised. It’s a hard thing to do, particularly in a competitive bidding environment, but humility and hard work often shine through in presentations and good clients will see that and honor it.
_
Don’t Ignore Analytics
[…]

Original post by randfish

The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there.
Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new?

Original post by Matt Cutts

On a daily basis, paid search managers must balance efficiency and volume in an effort to meet the goals of the campaign. There is no right or wrong decision; there is only what is right for your business at that time. …

Original post by Pete

Posted by RobOusbey
We all like links from big sites right?
Whether it’s in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it’s great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it’s on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it’s strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it’s unlikely to have a great crawl rate.
The front pages of sites, on the other hand, tend to have a much greater diversity of domains pointing to them and a good crawl rate. Furthermore, Google is likely to look with suspicion at an old article that suddenly gains a new link, compared to site front pages which have new links added to them more often, and legitimately.
So, this suggests that a link from the front page of […]

Original post by RobOusbey