vineri, 15 iunie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Dance Walking Fitness Ben Aaron. Time to Dance Walk Baby

Posted: 14 Jun 2012 07:46 PM PDT



Hysterically funny man Ben Aaron shows us the new craze he has developed he calls... DANCE WALKING FITNESS.


Awesome Ideas People Had When They Were High

Posted: 14 Jun 2012 07:18 PM PDT

HighDEAS is a place that people can go to and express whatever they are thinking while high. But are they high or GENIUS?






































































Via Buzzfeed


President Obama on Immigration Announcement

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, June 15, 2012

 

President Obama on Immigration Announcement

This afternoon, President Obama discussed a new Department of Homeland Security policy that will allow certain young people who were brought to the United States as young children, and do not present a risk to national security or public safety, and meet several key criteria to be considered for relief from removal from the country or from entering into removal proceedings.

Find out what President Obama had to say in video remarks today.

West Wing Week 6/15/2012 or "The Fatherhood Buzz"

West Wing Week 6/15/2012 or "The Fatherhood Buzz"

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

Celebrating Flag Day
Yesterday was Flag Day; marking the day in 1777 the Continental Congress adopted the first U.S. flag.

By the Numbers: $3,000
President Obama has proposed a plan that will cut through the red tape that’s keeping millions of responsible homeowners from saving hundreds of dollars each month through refinancing. On average, homeowners who refinance will save $3,000 each year—that’s enough to cover about two years of electric bills for the typical family.

The Future of America’s Partnership with Sub-Saharan Africa
A new Presidential Directive places the United States in a stronger position to help our African partners seize the opportunities and meet the challenges facing the continent.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

11:30 AM: The Vice President delivers remarks to the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:00 PM: Press Briefing by Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs Lael Brainard, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics Mike Froman, and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes to preview the upcoming G20 Summit. WhiteHouse.gov/live

12:00 PM: The President has lunch with winners of a campaign contest

1:15 PM: The President speaks on Immigration WhiteHouse.gov/live

1:45 PM: The Vice President attends a campaign event in Orlando, Florida

5:10 PM: The President hosts a reception to observe LGBT Pride Month WhiteHouse.gov/live

6:00 PM: The First Family departs the White House en route Joint base Andrews

6:15 PM: The First Family departs Joint Base Andrews en route Chicago, Illinois

8:00 PM: The First Family arrives Chicago, Illinois

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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The Difference Between Vendors and Consultants - Whiteboard Friday

The Difference Between Vendors and Consultants - Whiteboard Friday


The Difference Between Vendors and Consultants - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 14 Jun 2012 01:55 PM PDT

Posted by Rhea Drysdale

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we are going to be discussing the differences between vendors and consultants. We are very excited to have Rhea Drysdale in the studio to present on this very insightful topic. Rhea is one of the leaders in SEO consulting services, but she hasn't always been. Nope, she used to be *cough,* a vendor. Now, there's not anything wrong with being a vendor, but if you've always seen yourself as a consultant it can be quite a shock to discover otherwise.

Vendors and consultants play two very different roles and you may soon discover that you are not exactly the one that you thought you were.

Please share your thoughts on these differences in the comments below. Happy Friday everyone! Enjoy!

P.S. Rhea doesn't really talk about herself in the 3rd person. I wrote this ;) - Kenny



Video Transcription

Hi guys. I'm Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media, and we are an internet marketing company that specializes in SEO, reputation management, link development, and social media marketing. I'm here today in the SEOmoz office, because our team is attending SMX Advanced. Many of you probably know of Outspoken Media because we're doing live blog coverage of the conference, and I hope to meet many of you here today.

I want to go ahead and talk a little bit, with this Whiteboard Friday, about the difference between vendors and consultants. For us, that's a really big thing. At Outspoken Media, we've been doing a lot of organizational development over the last couple of months, and it's really turned our entire business model inside out. The reason that we got there is that we were recognizing that there is a lot of turnover with some of our clients, where there's a situation that a middle manager would, perhaps, leave the organization, and in those cases, we would often get replaced. Why did that happen? It usually happened because we were just seen as a vendor. We were basically like the McDonald's of link development, where someone came in and said, "I want X number of links and I want to improve my rankings and that's it."

But for us, we took ourselves much more seriously. Just because the client didn't, there was some communication breakdown that was taking place, and we had to say, "Okay. How do we position ourselves to be much more trusted, establish a long-term relationship, really get to know their business model, and work with them to grow that business, not just meet, link and ranking metrics?"

So with that in mind, we brought on an organizational development consultant ourselves. His name is Shem Cohen, of Change Events. He's phenomenal, and he sat down and said, "Well, you're a vendor." It really struck me, because I said, "No, I'm not a vendor. I'm not a vendor, because we're actually ranking on our site with SEO consulting, and for years we've been calling ourselves SEO consultants." He said, "I hate to tell you, you really are a vendor." Finally I kind of let that settle and admitted it.

Once I recognized what a vendor was, it helped me to see where we had to get to, to become a consultant. So let's talk about that today, because you might find yourself in the same situation as us, or maybe you're the client and you're not quite sure who you should be hiring. What makes more sense for your business?

On the vendor side, there are a couple of things that make you a vendor. With a vendor, you're probably really good at doing something, which is great. However, that something is probably a highly specialized skill, maybe link development or content creation. It's one kind of area. It's not necessarily informing a full business strategy. So with the vendor, you're usually responsible with taking strategy in from the client, and once you have that strategy, it informs the tactics and the tools and the implementation and the reporting that you're going to do for that client. You're responsible for those areas of your business, but the strategy is coming from the client. It's not coming from you. So that's kind of the main, main thing there is that you're not really informing that strategy, except in rare cases. But for the most part, you're kind of there on a project basis. Maybe there are certain rankings they want to achieve. They really want to bulk up the on-page optimization for a certain category or a new product launch. So you're there for kind of a short-term thing, and maybe you actually do have a long-term contract of a year or more, but in those cases, you're still on reporting on links or rankings. You don't have full access to data. You're not there on an executive level. You're not informing the business strategy on their end. You're just kind of managing your project.

So that's kind of the main thing. What the client is typically having to report to you, and as a client you should remember this, you need to be holding the vendor accountable for the metrics that they have in place and for communicating with a single point of contact. Otherwise, things can kind of get a little bit confusing.

Vendors are great because everybody needs someone to get a job done with highly skilled labor. But, again, that vendor doesn't really maybe have that long-term relationship where, if you're a consultancy, you want to have the long-term relationships that you're building up trust with. You can do a lot more in terms of SEO, and I feel better at the end of the day when we're a consultant. So that's a vendor.

Now what makes you a consultant? A consultant is someone who receives the business goals from the client, but then they communicate the strategy back to the client, and say, "What we're hearing from you is this is what you want to achieve, but in order to do that we're recommending that you pursue these different methods, which we're going to help you with or maybe we're going to actually bring on different resources or we're going to help manage resources within your own organization and staff this project."
You're going to manage, potentially, other vendors if you're a consultant. So you might be bringing other people in on projects that you're in charge of, based on the overarching strategy that you've created for the clients.

This is also going to be something that's usually relationship-based. You're probably getting invited to communions for your clients' kids and weddings and anniversaries, and all those things, because you love each other. So that's much more relationship-based.

You're also informing, on the consultant side, the tool selection for the client. What I mean by that is that, with the client and the vendor, the client will usually just go to the vendor and say, "Hey look, this is our CMS and this is what we have to work with." With a consultant, they're saying, "Hey, we're not thinking that our current CMS is working. What do you recommend?" They're asking you to actually tell them that. That's a really powerful place to be, because now you can effect so much more change.

So internal tool selection and then on the ultimate side of the consultant relationship, you're informing business decisions with the client. That's really the most major thing, is that you're changing their business. You're there. You're in this trusting relationship. On the client side, what you have to remember, with the consultant, is that in addition to communicating your business goals and your resources and your time frame and being truly honest and forthcoming with them, you also need to give them access to your different departmental resources and really let them know what you can truly do and what you're capable of. More important, you need to give them access to your data. Sometimes that can be scary, but we can't come up with a strategy or improve your business unless we have full access to that data. It's reliable and we can help, maybe, sculpt that in analytics and choose the right program that's going to give us the data that we need.

Then lastly, there are probably going to be multiple contacts on the clients' side that the consultant is communicating with. We've probably met IT. In my case, I've probably bribed IT with donuts and gone down and visited them. In addition to that, we know your SEO team. We know your community managers. We know the executives. We've been there. In certain organizations, I know Distilled loves to go down and work out of the office. That's a much more, kind of mutually beneficial relationship. Everyone's on the same page. So there are multiple contacts and that's okay, because you're getting paid to do that kind of work.

So that's the real big difference between vendor and consultant, and hopefully that helps give you a better understanding of where you lie in the hemisphere of SEO, from vendor to consultant, and independent consultants and big consultancies. There are all kinds of different terms out there. So let me know what you are, and hopefully this was helpful. Thank you so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Post Penguin Recovery: Link Removal Strategy for Back Link Profile Clean Ups

Post Penguin Recovery: Link Removal Strategy for Back Link Profile Clean Ups

Link to SEOptimise » blog

Post Penguin Recovery: Link Removal Strategy for Back Link Profile Clean Ups

Posted: 14 Jun 2012 04:35 AM PDT

Since the introduction of the Penguin update and what some SEOs like to call the BLOOPER algorithm (Back Link Over Optimisation Penalty Exterminates Rankings), it has become more important than ever to ensure your site has as clean a link profile as possible. Historically, most sites would have at least a few dodgy links, but some may have more than others. This has meant that, sadly, a lot of businesses have been caught in the crossfire with Penguin updates. Part of the update appears to look at the type of sites linking to yours, the anchor text diversity of your profile, and the type of links. For example, an over optimised link profile biased to a number of links for certain anchors could trigger a penalty, so could a number of blog-roll links.

This means that the SEO industry needs to make sure it has an up-to-date link removal strategy in case disaster strikes. Below is outlined a brief strategy to get you started on this process. It will get you to consider the different levels of information you should be looking at, show you how to acquire the information you don't have, and give you a few tips on some removal strategies and reconsideration requests.

Getting Started

The first thing to do is run an extract from all your available sources, such as:

Once these have been collated, you need to look into your own link building efforts, or work carried out by agencies or freelancers on your behalf, ensuring you go as far back as possible. The aim is to have your entire link building data in one area, so that correlation and computation can happen at once.

Hopefully, most of the links you have built are pre-classified into directories, guest blogs, widget links, syndicated content, paid links (!), etc. Get as much of this classification data as possible.

A few notes:

  1. OSE data is typically 2-3 months old, but sometimes it captures things you may not have through other tools.
  2. Majestic is a great tool – the data is much more fresh but the hidden win is the volume of information that it provides.
  3. Ahrefs and Blekko are good for verification but don't use them as your sole source of information; think of them as being supplemental.
  4. Webmaster Tools are key here. A link highlighted in there means Google is telling you explicitly "We know about this link". Every other link you may have may be important, but these are THE most important to action.
  5. Links you have physically built are useful to have records of, and if you haven't kept a rolling record, its time you started. It is easier to get a link removed if you have placed it – there is a contact trail, payment trail etc.

Starting Work

The first steps are to take all the backlink data that you've gathered from various sources and put them into one large spreadsheet. This will allow you to:

  • De-dupe links from various tools – giving you a single view
  • Create a master reference sheet
  • Allow you to compare links and link types

If you have them (and there's no reason why you shouldn't!) you should cross reference all the links you and/or your SEO team have acquired in the last X years, going back as far as possible. These should also be highlighted.

As part of this exercise, the next step would be to highlight all the links that appear in my master list, AND on Google Webmaster Tools. As mentioned earlier, these are all the links Google says they know about explicitly, which means that these should form a large part of your clean up focus. However before you start actioning those links, you need to dig a bit deeper into the data and isolate links into groups. One of the common classifications that should be easy to run in your master sheet would be:

  1. Links from free website facilities, such as wordpress, blogger, weebly etc.
  2. Site wide links – easy to spot if you have too many of the same anchor links to the same page on your site from another site.
  3. Image based links – especially hot linked images or banner placements
  4. Links you have acquired yourself, paid, begged or guest blogged
  5. Directory links – (when cross referenced against your own directory submission lists if you have them)
  6. Highlight non common domain extensions – .edu .ac.uk and other country specific extensions
  7. Majestic has a unique IP report – highlight links on similar IPs

Micro analysing

Sometimes it is difficult to micro analyse your links – especially if you have thousands of root domains. However, with some of the steps above you would have hopefully classified a large portion if not all; but, if you get stuck, you don't need to despair.

Ideally the kind of information you would want for each link you didn't place would be:

  1. Type of site
  2. Type of Link (here you have to set some qualitative targets – explain what a network site looks like for example)
  3. Contact details- on site contact form
  4. Contact details – via who is
  5. Contact details – hosting company
  6. Any advertising information on the site such as "advertise with us"
  7. Details on trademark policy, DMCA policy etc if they exist

There might be further classifications that you require in order to understand your links better, but that depends on how much information you would need if a removal was necessary.

Once you've outlined the details you need per link, you then ought to isolate all the links you need extra information on and compile a new list. This new list would form the basis of a "task" that you could send to a remote worker (who can be hired through a number of means, such as Odesk).

Why use a remote working service? To start with, this is a very manual process and could take a few days. As such, it makes more sense to split it across multiple workers who would cost a lot less than UK / US manpower would. (TIP: if you are an SEO company, you may want to develop a custom scraping tool that compiles a lot of this info together for you!)
Once you have carried this exercise out you are ready to roll (i.e. have as much information as possible to get a link removed)!

Risk Analysis

There are no hard and fast tools and rules for a decent back link risk analysis that. However you should prioritise these attributes of a link as a potential investigation for removal:

  1. It's indicated in Google Web Master tools
  2. Too many links from the same domain
  3. Too many links from the same IP
  4. Authority Domain extensions such as EDU
  5. Spam Domain extensions such as .info / .co / .cc
  6. *Free* hosted sites such as wordpress subdomains, weebly etc
  7. Sites with narrow match anchor texts
  8. Sites with obvious "advertise with us" footprints

Removal Tips

  1. Be Polite. Be respectful. Take the human approach first – and start with links you have identified as high risk.
  2. You may not want to remove all links. You could:
    • Ask for a No Follow added to the link (preserving any referral traffic)
    • Ask for the anchor to be changed if you had gone for anchor abuse historically
  3. Allocate a budget. Some site owners will charge you for a link removal. Be prepared for that and don't be shocked – make sure you negotiate though.
  4. Any blogger / WordPress / Weebly / Squidoo link can, in most cases, be blown with a single complaint. Just make sure that your complaint is justified, and ensure you point out that the subdomain or site is built for SEO purposes, which is hurting your business.
  5. Image links. See if they are using any Trade Mark images, use that as a good contact point – "please remove any unauthorised images and links" If that doesn't work, then consider hitting them with a DMCA.
  6. Check those authority links. In most cases, a UK site has NO reason to have EDU links. Commercial sites have no reason to have .ac.uk links. Be realistic; if those links have been placed, you want to keep them in your high risk category.
  7. Check your IP referrers. If there is a high volume in one particular 513 subnet (majestic is great for this data by the way), chances are a bunch are held by a link network. Try and get these checked. If those sites are still indexed, they are high risk.
  8. Some sites will have "advertising" pages on them which are obviously paid for. Say you want to advertise, but tell them to remove their current link.
  9. Redirects (again, Majestic excels at providing redirected domains inbound data). If they are domains that your clients don't own, contact the registrar. Explain the situation.

Building a case for reconsideration

The more detailed and informative your re-inclusion request is, the higher your chances of the webspam team looking at it favourably. The party line is they want to see "a good faith effort". This means:

  1. Give as much information as possible
  2. Actually try and get offending links removed
  3. Prove that you have taken as much action possible to remove those links and will continue to do so

If you have already gone as far as a reconsideration request, you would probably have done some of the above. But remember to:

  1. Record a spreadsheet saved on Google docs with your efforts at removal and successful removals. Share that link in your reconsideration.
  2. Take screenshots of emails sent to links you were unsuccessful at removing. Host these on Google Drive and give the webspam team access to them.
  3. If you have used networks etc that you can't get the links removed off make sure you outline them.
    As long as you can prove that you have taken every pain and effort necessary to remove those links, you should be in better stead for trying to start reviving your rankings.

Summary

  • Collate all back link data
  • Classify back link data
  • Identify and isolate high risk links
  • Start contacts and record
  • Submit re-inclusion
  • Sit back and wait for response
  • Rinse and repeat

Image credit: cnystrom

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Post Penguin Recovery: Link Removal Strategy for Back Link Profile Clean Ups

Related posts:

  1. How to clean up your act and your timeline on Twitter
  2. Post Panda: Affiliates Guide to Surviving Google – a4uexpo London 2011
  3. The Ultimate Resource Guide for Link Builders from Distilled LinkLove 2012

Backlink Diver Release -- you can't miss our introductory offer!

Hi,

I'm glad to notify you about the official release of G-Lock Backlink Diver.

With our Backlink Diver you get powerful 4-in-1 SEO software including Backlink Verifier, PageRank Checker, Index Checker and Proxy Checker with harvester.

Here is exactly what Backlink Diver can do for you:

- verify if your backlinks are still alive;

- determine the link type (dofollow, nofollow):

- determine the PageRank of the domain and page linking to your site;

- determine if the linking page is indexed or not;

- provide a detailed anchor text analysis;

- harvest, check and use proxy servers to check linking pages for PageRank and index.

You can download Backlink Diver v1.1 at this page:


Don't miss our introductory offer!

After the official release Backlink Diver is not free anymore. You can use the downloaded version for free for 14 days. After the 14-day trial period you must buy the license to unlock Backlink Diver for 1 year.

If you buy now, you will get Your One Year license for only $20 (full support and program updates included).


Get this before it's too late!

Our introductory price -- $20/year -- is valid till July 31, 2012.

Then you'll pay $39 for the 1st year and $20/year for the license renewal.

Thank you for your time!

My Photo
Julia Gulevich
G-Lock Software
julia@glocksoft.com

P.S To learn how to use Backlink Diver and benefit from it, check our tutorials here.

 
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Seth's Blog : Amplify the positive outliers

Amplify the positive outliers

The most efficient way to get the behavior you're looking for is to find positive deviants and give them a platform, a microphone and public praise.

The tribe is hyper-aware of what's being celebrated, and when you celebrate those that are moving in the right direction, you create a powerful push in that direction. It's tempting to spend your time extinguishing bad behaviors, but in fact, spreading the word about the superstars is far more likely to change the culture of your market.



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