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Hi Garry, You are certainly right - SEO is far from being dead and it has only started getting more interesting. Despite all the buzz about social media marketing and content marketing, search engines still bring in the bulk of the traffic for most sites and is responsible for many of the conversions. If I may add on to the list, the recent introduction of Google Authorship has certainly changed the SEO landscape. It shows that Google is focused on recognising authors for their content. By linking up your articles with your Google+ profile, you would be able to have a snippet of your profile picture and a link to your profile underneath search results that correspond to your articles. Studies have shown that these rich snippets improves the click-through rate, which is why content marketers need to work on setting up their Google Authorship now.

This is FUD marketing. Google does not announce such changes. This is BS

Hi there, From the sounds of it, you have not seen a penalty yet. I've had a lot of calls and emails since my last post. My feeling is that you can either be proactive, and submit a reconsideration request before things go bad, or be reactive and see if anything happens. The latter strategy is better if there are a lot of links that you cannot clean up. In either case, don't do a reconsideration request until you've made a reasonable attempt to clean up the links. Thanks, Carson

There are some bottom-left here: http://www.whois.sc/ I think 123reg have a list of newly purchased domains from themselves somewhere. I just had a look but couldn't find it.

The first step is getting people to open it, I'd head to CopyBlogger and check out there How to Write Headlines articles.

Ok great I understand it would always be great to connected with as many SEO's as possible. Connections for Guest blogs, link building and so on... A message to members to connect in some way socially was what I had in mind but I wouldn't want to rock the SEO moz boat

Hi Garry, I did not perform a full site analysis. You inquired about the rankings for the keyword "T shirts" so I only compared the pages which ranked for that term.

I played with it a little last year, but I didn't make any connections for link exchanges. It hadn't occurred to me to use it like that ... I do like to exchange with highly relevant, quality sites ... shhh, don't tell. ;D.

I have seen the same thing for one of my clients.  They were ranking page 1/2 for 2 different keyword terms and now they are not in the top 50.  Other keyword phrases did not move as much.  I am looking around to see what happened or if there was some sort of update...

Okay will do, thanks for your help!

I hadn't used this and hadn't even seen it before but looks very nice - just installed on my site

Bonus points, that's cute. Best way to get a point is to do this.

spammers work on volume.  Send out a million email messages, and if 1% fall for the hype, it's cost effective.  Over time, it can be profitable due to that volume. Add in the fact that such services still tend to offer some actual results value (less and less every year), and "competing" against such companies is a seemingly monumental challenge.  It's also tempting to want to consider playing the same game. I need to emphasize how insanely complex it is for a company to play in that field and even come close to being viable for a long-term business strategy.  The rules are ALWAYS changing. And just when you think you have a model that works, all it takes is a single algorithm change to wipe out your entire model. Go ahead and play that game if you think you have the smarts to do so.  Personally, I laugh because it's a model based on completely unscrupulous tactics that are ultimately doomed to fail.  So if all you want is a money-grab and have the willingness to do so and still sleep at night, that's a choice you can make, yet it's a choice made by people I have no desire to know or do business with.  Let alone consider equals or friends or peers in this industry. Alternately, by offering superior ethical services (if you rail at the word "ethical" you can stop reading now - you're in that "no desire to know" category), and stand proud on that truth, and promote it, and laud it, you'll find enough business from companies who only want to work with such companies.

I strongly agree with Keri on this topic. If you haven't read Alan's article on the company, take a look: http://searchmarketingwisdom.com/2010/06/topseos-continues-deceptive-practices/ If you have never heard of Alan Bleiweiss before and this is the first article of his you read, then you probably will have a very different opinion of him. He is an extremely knowledgeable, experienced and caring SEO. I have never seen him "go off" except when discussing the topic of TOP SEOs, which is enough to set any good SEO off. Our industry is a cess pool. We are all part of the industry and none of us are above it.  If we each do our part we can work to establish credibility for the industry and help web masters sort through the various scam companies and legitimate SEOs. If you feel joining them has given you a steady flow of new business then I can't argue with that. Otherwise I would suggest you probably don't want to be associated with such an unethical organization.

Maybe then it might be a nice idea to implement a website badge like "I talked to Rand"   (Like "Talk to Chuck")

How can you define an interesting headline.

I have just seen those videos available to purchase . Going to give them a punt they should be well worth the investment.

There is no SEO benefit offered by using the title property for images. I did forget to mention the file name as a factor as well. Provide your images with descriptive titles such as craftsman-wrench.jpg instead of image344213.jpg.

Hey Garry, The best lessons that helped me over the last two years are: -Only analyze the strength of first page of Google results (MOZbar + keyword optimization).  Forget about exact match, intitle, and inurl numbers, etc. -Make a huge list out to the long tail.  Group similar phrases together over time.  It is an ongoing process. -Write more content above all else, insert your long tail phrases all over the place, then analyze.  Let the tools point you towards topics and niches that are working in your market instead of PPC (I don't have that money to waste).  You will be surprised about the route analytics takes you.  Don't corner yourself into thinking about a few topics. -Look in places other than the Adwords Tool since the vast majority of Internet Marketers and SEOs look there.  I like Keyword Optimizer Pro and again, my analytics. Take care, Jared

We know that social signals affect Google rankings, but I wouldn't say that Google's reacting to breaking news is all driven by Twitter or Facebook. If something majorly news making happens, there are going to be tons of articles being published by news sources, which especially the trusted ones, we can pretty much assume are constantly crawled by Googlebots. I'm not entirely sure they do have a massive traffic loss to Facebook and Twitter given that they rule the search market and you use Google differently than Facebook or Twitter. (Just my 2 cents about the current atmosphere.) I think Facebook building a search engine would be interesting. However, it would also expose a lot of their privacy issues. Have you ever Facebook searched for "hangover" on a Monday morning?