Jason Calacanis was nice enough to have me on his This Week in Startups show this week, and believe it or not, he admitted I was right “about 50%” of the time (in soccer that’s a win right?)! Also, I’ve also been given the title of “VP of SEO” for Mahalo so I’m sure that will look good on my resume.

No offense to miixxy (the “jayter” to lead off the show) but I’m starting the video at about the 30 minute mark because my segment is over half an hour long and frankly, I kind of doubt you want to watch over an hour of Calacanis and my ugly mug.

Chime in below and let me know how you think I did and whether Jason or myself changed your mind. Enjoy!

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Raven SEO Tools. So naturally, when they published a post earlier today promising a “Big Summer Surprise” I got more than a little curious.

The post promises to “change how you research, monitor and report on site intelligence” and explicitly mentions their partnership with MajesticSEO. Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear research and MajesticSEO in the same sentence, I immediately think link data.

If you combine the idea of link data with the fact that Raven recently announced automatic SERP history for some terms, it doesn’t take long to come up with some pretty impressive ideas of what’s coming.

Well, I did a little more digging, and while I can’t reveal my source, it looks like Raven is most likely working on an Open Site Explorer killer.

And, as long as they do it with the same standard as the rest of their toolset, I think the SEO community will be in for a treat. If you need me, I’ll be counting the days until “summer.”

image source: patries71

I was privileged enough to be asked to speak to a group of small business owners at the Market St. Louis conference yesterday. I was pretty confident they asked me more because of what day it was (April Fools day for the dense ones in the crowd) than because of my expertise in SEO but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

That’s good news for you if you were planning on giving me a horse with bad teeth. You can relax now. You’re in the clear.

In any case, I decided to discuss one of the questions about SEO that I’m asked most frequently, “How do I get more links?”

I’ll tell you right off the bat, for you SEO veterans out there, there’s not much ground breaking material in this deck. But, you may still want to look it over to know whether you can point someone to it the next time they try and get some free consulting time from you by asking this well worn question.

If, on the other hand, you’re a small business owner that wants to rank better in the search engines and receive more organic traffic to your website, this deck is for you!

And I’m such a nice guy that I’ve decided to go ahead & provide you with links to all the tools that I mentioned on slide 23.

• SEObook’s Toolbar
• SEObook Hubfinder
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Open Site Explorer
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Raven SEO Tools
• Majestic SEO
• Linkscape

Enjoy!

image source: ToonRefugee

Raven SEO Tools has launched their second installment of the RavenHunt contest. If you remember, that’s the online scavenger hunt that I won to receive a free Flip Mino HD.

As it turns out, I probably should have held back my enthusiasm because the prize THIS time is an Apple iPad!

But, once again, my loss is your gain. Or at least could be.

Since I’m not eligible to win this time, the field is wide open! Plus, there are a ton of prizes. They include:

• First Place:
  • Apple iPad
  • 1 year Pro subscription to Raven
  • Premium Membership to Search Engine Land
  • Copy of The New Community Rules by Tamar Weinberg
  • Copy of Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik
  • Official RavenHunt t-shirt
• Second Place:
  • 6 month Pro subscription to Raven
  • Official RavenHunt t-shirt
• 3rd-10th
  • Official RavenHunt t-shirt

Now, the first two clues were releases yesterday BUT you can join pretty much any time before Friday and still have a shot at winning.

Each clue is going to give you a letter, and at the end of the week you’ll need to enter the secret phrase to win. It’s a good time (I’m participating this week even though I can’t win a prize) and um… did I mention the iPad?

Here’s the thing though, even if you don’t win, Raven (have I mentioned lately how much I love this company?) has introduced a $19/mo basic plan so it’s not like you have to go broke to use their amazing tools.

Hell, they even have a 30 day free trial that doesn’t require a credit card to sign up!

So what I’m saying is pretty simple. Follow @RavenTools on Twitter, jump into the Raven Hunt for your chance to win an iPad, and for the love of everything holy give Raven SEO Tools a try. There’s just no good reason not to.

Disclaimer: Yes, my links to Raven SEO Tools are all affiliate links. Why? Because if you take my advice and actually USE their tools, an affiliate commission will be the least you can do to thank me for turning you onto such an amazing resource. You’re welcome.

As a way of saying thank you to all the Team Bacon members, Search & Social has provided me with as 10% discount code that anyone can use when registering for the Spring Summit.

The promocode is: vipbacon

If you’re debating whether or not to attend, things just got a bit cheaper. If you’re still on the fence, just take a look at the list of speakers. This conference has been consistently hailed as one of if not THE best in the industry due to it’s small number of allowed registrants.

Basically, you get elite level access to the best minds in the industry for a great price.

There’s a statistic running around that states your income will gradually become the average income of your 5 closest friends. Now I have no idea if it’s true or not, but if it is, these are the people you want to be spending time with. Trust me.

Plus, just like joining Team Bacon, you can help me win a trip to the conference myself. Only this time, it’s an all expenses paid prize.

%10 off (which amounts to over $50) AND you get to help me out? Does it get better than that? No, of course not. So go register.

image source: chapendra

Over the past few years popular marketers have realized that the SEO crowd is a) pretty easy to stir up and b) ready to link to anything at a moment’s notice.

That combination makes them ripe for link bait, flame bait, hate bait, whatever you want to call it. The easiest (read as: laziest) method is stating that SEO is dead, worthless, a scam, etc. If that sounds familiar it’s because there’s a long list of people that have used this method recently.

Jason Calacanis, Robert Scobel, Derrek Powazek and Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) have all gone to this well at various times with decent results if measured in terms of link bait. Today it seems, Shoemoney is back for seconds with his post saying 2009 Sucked for Most SEOs.

Now, Danny Sullivan, Lisa Barone, Jill Whalen, Aaron Wall & just about every other SEO blogger has taken on this issue at some point in the recent past. To be honest, nothing much has changed. The usual sequence of events is that a popular personality claims SEO is dead, they are beaten into submission by the SEO masses, admit that SEO does have it’s place and explain how that’s not QUITE what they meant.

Whatever. The cycle bores me. So, rather than rehashing the same old song & dance, I simply tweeted my thoughts. Unfortunately it sounds like Shoemoney doesn’t like it when people disagree with him or ask him to backup statements he claims as facts.

Don’t worry, Shoe. Calling me a dipshit definitely makes up for the fact that you have absolutely NO support for the statements you make in the post.

But hey, at least you maintained your reputation as the classiest guy around.

SEOmoz caused a stir this week by publishing a “study” that allegedly showed NoFollow tags were still effective in sculpting the flow of PageRank.

This of course flies in the face of what Matt Cutts has said on the issue, and the data in the study doesn’t seem to actually be all that solid. But hey, why let that get in the way of a good link bait post, right?

Now, those of you who know me or have been around the SEO industry for a while probably know that I have a history of disagreeing with Rand and the SEOmoz crew. But contrary to what I’m sure some commentors will say, I don’t hate Rand & I don’t go out of my way looking for reasons to criticize SEOmoz. In fact, I’ve spoken with Rand several times and those interactions have been nothing but friendly.

Then again, I like Matt Cutts too, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop thinking Google is a monolithic monopoly that must be stopped before they turn us all into the Borg.

I digress.

While reading through the long string of comments on the aforementioned SEOmoz post, I noticed the tell-tale pattern of behavior emerging. SEOmoz creates controversy, they clarify and apologize, all the while enjoying the traffic and links that come from a good piece of linkbait.

This pattern has been discussed before by myself and several others in the SEO community, but until today, I never realized it was actually a part of a written plan! I mean you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across SEOmoz’s official decision making flowchart for their blog. (Note: No of course this isn’t ACTUALLY an official SEOmoz document. It’s called satire you twits!)

Naturally this is too monumental of a discovery for me to keep to myself so I’ve attached the flow chart below. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, I fully plan on following this flow chart should I begin to receive criticism for this post

As a fellow link-whore, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say feel free to republish the chart as long as you provide a link back to the source. Cheers!

Update: Digg implemented changes earlier this week which drastically improves the Diggbar. Users who are not logged in to Digg (most importantly search engines) will no longer see the Diggbar, they will instead encounter a 301 redirect which is the SEO friendly way to redirect pages.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com does a videocast called Diggnation and just a couple weeks back he discovered that someone was framing HIS content. His reaction?

“Why is Truveo doing this? Holy shit they’re framing… oooh someone’s taking your shit”

(skip to 32:00)

In light of the much publicized release of the Diggbar, which essentially places a Digg frame around your content, the discussion beginning at the 32 minute would seem to be a bit embarrassing for the Digg founder.

A politician caught in this type of public hypocrisy would come up with some sort of “misremembered” excuse, but unfortunately for Mr. Rose, Digg would have already been working on the Diggbar (aka a framing tool of their own) when this video was filmed. That’s going to make it tough for Kevin to argue that his opinion has changed since then, or that he didn’t realize how beneficial framing can be, or some other BS excuse.

In light of this video, Rose is left with only one justification for his actions…

Money

I understand Digg is a company and they’re out to make money. I don’t fault them for that. What I DO fault them for is making money by, as Mr. Rose puts it, “taking your shit.” To have the audacity to then wrap it up as an experiment designed to improve user experience or claim that they’re doing it in an SEO friendly manner is simply unacceptable.

If you take care to not damage my door while breaking into my house to steal my property, you’re still a theif. And while Kevin certainly seems to be trying to implement the Diggbar the “right” way, the end effect is still the same… Digg is “taking your shit.”

hat tip to Clint Ecker of Officially Lucky