The Core

That's very cool.  I wonder if Google will follow suit?

I'm in! Super low key though, can't do much with weights, but I walked for 50 min's today and played soccer at the beach for about 20

Oh and doing a ridiculous gallbladder cleanse - radish and beet juice for breadkfast and lunch, apple/celery green juice for dinner.  Down 4 lbs in 3 days and counting.  5 more to go.

Hey guys! Good to see everyone is still here Just spoke to Littleman who reminded me so I could jump back on The Core.  I'm happy to see you all and at your service!

SO very dry and hot here, I'm in North LA County near Magic Mountain, and it's BLISTERING.

Ergo, we're hoping to get to Yosemite this summer, if we go I'll let you know, maybe we can have a drink.

Love the shoffice, I work out of my dining room table, I'd die for a shoffice, one far far away where I couldn't be disturbed by kids.  I was trying to close a deal the other day (first time in years I haven't taken a new client in over 5 years) and all of a sudden my 2 year old daughter starts yelling and banging on the door screaming that she has to go potty.  Gotta love it.

What a fantastic idea I've been looking for something like that for years.

Chunkford - thank you for traumatizing me 

Before Penguin, things were going pretty good.  I was doing a great job for the same 5 or so clients that I'd had for about 6+ years, making decent money for almost no work.  I would buy links, switch about 10% of the links out every 6 weeks, and buy low quality links to beef up their numbers.  Then, collect nice monthly checks.

Penguin hit, and all my sites were decimated, with all of the clients cancelling.  My fiancee's business also tumbled as he runs a link brokerage firm.

When I first posted here about 2 months ago, I was out in the cold.  Had no idea what Penguin was about, how to move forward, or how to get back in the game.  The same day Penguin hit we closed the deal on a new property with 3+ acres, a 5k sq ft. house, and a 2k sq ft guest house.  It's a fixer which needs a TON of work to even be habitable.  So you can imagine my shock to find myself with "The Money Pit," 3 kids, and my revenue streams out cold.

So I got to work reinventing myself.  I haven't kept up with social media or new developments in the industry, so I had to start from scratch figure it all out.  Twitter?  What the heck is that? Why in the world would I pin anything?  I'd dabbled but didn't know much.

But I got to work figuring out.  I resuscitated all my old social profiles.  Create a bunch of new ones, including Google+.  Met a guy on Google+ who was kind enough to throw me a few bones and help me along in the discovery process.  Started writing a ton and guest blogging to gain visibility.  Started adding people I'd met back in the days and reading/following their stuff. 

Well, on Friday, I got my very first phone call.  Someone that I'd added on Facebook had come across my profile, went through my site, liked what I'd been writing, and wanted to pass on a couple of clients that he doesn't have time to take on.

I'm still kinda in shock, I was starting to think all that social media stuff was nothing buy hype and I was wasting my time.  I spent the weekend writing proposals and hoping to get back in the game.

I'm writing this because I had to share my excitement.  Nobody really understands how cool this stuff is, and to actually see it work is awesome.

Also, I wanted to put myself out there.  If you guys have any leads that you don't have the time or interest to take, let me know.  By now I have a pretty sweet inventory of sites that accept guest blogs and have gotten about 60 blogs published in sites with great inbound links and social engagement.  I've also got a good handle on the social stuff and can integrate that with SEO type services.  Also have a great team of writers that I work with to produce content for web 2.0 and guest blogging sites.

I have to confess my passion for the industry has been rekindled.  It's been YEARS since I've been excited about SEO.  It had gotten so dry and boring.  To do SEO now requires imagination and creativity and I love that.  It's nice to be excited to work and to wonder what discoveries that day is going to bring.  I know you can still do SEO without social and there are still ways where you don't have to rely on content but I am enjoying doing it this way, and I think in the long run, it's the way to go.

Anyways, thanks for listening, and wish me luck!

So in my spare (!!)  time I like to help out a network of meditation centers.  I was hoping you guys could help me out as I'm not too well versed in IP targetting and Geolocation issues.

Here's the scenario.  This is for their book publishing site. 

"Currently, the site is setup with the following format:

    tharpa.com/country/book

Which means that right now Tharpas UK & US need unique URLs to promote common book content.

However, we'd like one common URL for publicity and promotion purposes that would lead people to their respective country (i.e. UK or US). For example, we could have a URL such as tharpa.com/esh (for Eight Steps to Happiness) and then when people typed this in they would automatically be redirected to tharpa.com/uk/esh or tharpa.com/us/esh.

Therefore, tharpa.com/esh would have lots of content (videos, etc) and we would widely promote that URL in social media, SEO, press releases, Adwords, etc, but that page would be a redirect only. The question is: from an SEO perspective, will Google recognize our backlinks, keywords, etc, etc that point to a redirect-only page and give Tharpa credit for the content??"

The reason for doing it this way is that, to order a book, a customer must first select the country office that will fulfill the order. 

"We don't want to send people to a static stand-alone page, we want to send them to a fully functioning website. And the website only really functions if people see prices in their currency, etc. If they have to choose their country, it's not seemless or ideal."

I would really appreciate any info/heads up/leads you guys could offer.  Thanks!

Have you guys seen this?

http://www.seonitro.com/easyblog/entry/pandapenguin-case-study-analysis

Pretty impressive and summarizes everything I've been seeing too.