How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis

Posted by randfish

This week, the SEOmoz crew and I are heading to Pubcon in Las Vegas for one of the search industry’s more advanced conferences. However, before departing, I felt an irresistable urge to do some coverage of a tough competition from the world of search marketing and use it to illustrate how search-savvy analysts can use the engines to get insight about multiple brands in an industry.

The inspiration for this comes from two sources, both worth a read - this interview from Lee Odden with Kevin Ryan & Kevin Heisler from Search Engine Strategies & SearchEngineWatch (respectively - and this one - SEL vs. SEW: And the Winner Is? by Matt McGee. The interview suggests to me that there’s is considerable defensiveness, hubris and contention over the competing conference series, and Matt’s post (along with the water cooler gossip of lots more threads on the subject) tells me the search industry is particularly fascinated by the conflict (no surprise, as our niche has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for drama).

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Complaining about Some Google Missteps

Posted by randfish

I don’t generally like to pick on Google, or anyone else in particular for that matter, but since the search giant is hitting on all cylinders, I think they can probably take a little nudge or two. I’m going to keep this short, sweet and to the point (and also very self-centric, because it’s tough to effectively analyze everything that might have happened on someone else’s site):

• A very popular post I wrote a few weeks back called "Google PageRank Losses for Hundreds of Websites" still hasn’t been indexed. Yahoo! has it. Live has it. Google’s visited it with their spider plenty… What gives? There’s almost 1000 links pointing to it.
• Hey look… We’re back to ranking #2 for "recommended list" after we 301′d our old page to the Marketplace section. I’m going to go with the theory that we got penalized for having too much content in CSS hidden layers because we used drop-downs for the list of companies so the page wouldn’t be huge. I’m trying to make it good for users, Google! Don’t penalize for that!
• SEOmoz’s Toolbar PageRank on our homepage dropped from a 7 to a 6. I had assumed that because it occurred during the normal PR update, and not 2 days beforehand when paid link sites were hit, it was a natural drop. However, logging into Webmaster Tools today, I note that the homepage has gained almost 10,000 new inbound links since I last checked a few months back… Seems awful fishy.
• Speaking of Webmaster Central Tools - what the heck is this?

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Follow-Up: Facebook Wins Face-Book.com

Following on yesterday’s post, seems that Facebook was awarded the domain Face-Book.com.

On ” Identical or Confusingly Similar” the arbitrator writes:

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Better Comments Manager Wordpress Plugin

This blog gets tons of comments everyday. Managing them can be a lot of work. A few months ago, Keith Dsouza from Techie Buzz emailed me saying he created a Wordpress plugin that will allow me to better managed my comments.

The plugin allows you to reply to comments from within the Wordpress admin panel. There was only one problem - it didn’t work with Brian’s threaded comments. I told Keith to give me a shout once he gets the plugin working with threaded comments.

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How to Go Multi-platform and Build a Profitable Borg

A lot of Google’s business strategy makes us angry, but I think as entrepreneurs the correct response isn’t anger, instead we should be learning from them.

When I first started in the game I ignored most forms of internet marketing aside from SEO. Firstly, I was good at SEO, so why go outside my circle of competence, and secondly, I (partially correctly) assumed other channels couldn’t touch the ROI of targeted, free search traffic. I don’t have any regrets that I followed that path: sharp SEO is still my most powerful competitive webmastering weapon, but these days I take a more holistic view.

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SEOMoz - your survey application is broken

I generally avoid taking any surveys and I should have really stuck to that, but somehow email from SEOMoz (or chance of winning iphone?) today convinced me to take their so called ‘SEO Industry Survey’. So what follows is complete waste of time - the survey has around 51 question and when I am through to 35th - SEOMoz survey application breaks apart and kept me showing ‘Recording your answer - please be patient’ message for more than 20 minutes now - effectively wasting all the time taken to reach upto 35 questions.

Live Search’s link: operator turned back on!

MSN removed the option to check on inbound links a while back. My colleague and I stumbled upon the fact that the MSN link operator is back at work. Now, it’s not the typical link operator or as easy as Google, but we’ll take anything.

It took several scenarios to get the results we were looking for, but we have managed to conquer it. We’ve also noticed several ways to form the link operator query, but of course the results were different for each.

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