Thought I would drop in and say hello on this fine Friday.  Looks like you've all kept the Water Cooler in good shape

Thought I would start up a resource thread where we could share resources, people or sites we follow that are essential to our business.

Here's mine in no particular order.  Almost all have newsletters or RSS feeds so you don't have to check in constantly:

Link Building

Wiep - http://wiep.net/
Ontolo - http://ontolo.com/blog
Debra Mastaler - http://www.linkspiel.com/  &  http://searchengineland.com/author/debra-mastaler/
Aaron Wall - http://community.seobook.com/forum.php

Internet Business, Strategy, etc

SEO Book - http://community.seobook.com/forum.php
SugarRae - http://www.sugarrae.com/

A bit light here, would like to expand more if any of you have suggestions


SEO

SearchCap Newsletter from SEL - http://searchengineland.com/
SEO Book - http://community.seobook.com/forum.php
AriOzick - AriOzick - http://www.ariozick.com/ (not updated regularly, some good older articles)
SEO By the Sea - http://www.seobythesea.com/

What would you add to this list?

Need to outsource video creation, mostly software overviews, that kind of crap.

Any experience?

Thought I would start a thread to expose any SE filters you've run into

Me:

2002 launched site, loved by Google tons of pages indexed and traffic, lots of links blah blah

1st filter - tried to get targeted anchor text to an internal category index page using blog comment anchor text like top ranking competitors were using - result was page knocked out of the top 200 for a time for that anchor/keyword and came back to its 70 ish position after a few months

2nd filter - recently bought site wide same targeted anchor text on a blog, looks like it tripped a -30 penalty on that anchor text

If it is that easy to trip filters on yourself, imagine what you could do to competitors (if you were that type of person). I am surprised G is being this aggressive.

Just popped into my email, I haven't used it and their reg tools are expensive but this one is free:

http://ontolo.com/link-building-tools/BacklinkMonitor

QuoteHere's what we monitor for you to see how you're performing against your competitors:

    * Google Backlink Totals
    * Google PageRank
    * SEOMoz MozRank
    * SEOMoz Backlinks
    * SEOMoz Authority
    * SEOMoz Trust

I've been really impressed by the quality of posts and energy here.  Positive attitudes too.  Great start.

I think if we can maintain high post quality, low noise, and a working man's level of expertise, this has a lot of potential.

What are your impressions so far?  Any thoughts to improve?  Thoughts to maintain/increase quality?

I started out with Retired and Writing but retired that one when I found Text Broker which I have used pretty heavily.  However I have run into limitations with Text Broker and looking for options.

I know some of you use Philipino slave labor

Anyone tried People Per Hour?  Other options for high quality, real cheap content writing?  Not sure Craigslist is the way I want to go.

If someone (or someones) would like to take this on I think it would be a very useful contribution to this community

1) Subscribe to SearchCap (SearchEngineLand's newsletter)
2) Read it daily and post about the most useful stuff you find in there. 
3) Avoid general news we don't care about, just post the meat

SearchCap, if you don't know, compiles the best SEO info from a lot of different sources, great service and almost every day there is really helpful stuff in there.

Your post can be as simple as this:

<post>
Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs

SEOMoz lists some good stuff for finding links for blogs including social, guest posting, and search queries to find link opps - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-tips-for-personal-blogs

</post>

Great discussion starter and it saves us all time from having to scan the same source every day.

Anyone up for it?

Wikipedia has been a real PITA in the SERPs this last week after the latest G algo tweak.

Thought we could brainstorm some possible ways to knock off a wikipedia listing:

1) Become a wikipedia writer, rewrite article and while improving, use your ninja thesaurus skills and replace keywords where possible (may knock out some long tail)
2) Negative link building

The pisser is it has such domain authority that it is playing right into where the G algo has been heading.  I am not sure what to do about their dominance on the core head terms except for some really aggressive negative link building to try to knock out external anchors wherever possible.

Thoughts?  Successes?

MS Security Essentials has been getting great reviews in the mainstream PC mags for its free security.  We moved away from AVG paid to this to simplify.  Bad move.

While doing some competitor backlink research I downloaded a trojan just by surfing to a potential backlink provider (.php file).  Didn't click anything but it did its thing and MS Security Essentials couldn't remove it (although it kept catching, trojan kept reinfecting).

Had to resort to Norton Internet Security to deal with it (which also found a keystroke logger entry in the registry - not sure how long that had been there).  Have been pleasantly surprised by Norton's move away from bloatware/resource hogging.  Been a nice tool for the last couple weeks.

FYI

From the Google Webmaster Blog.  Not that any of you would use this service but more interesting is to observe what Google is interested in.  Here's a few quotes:

(delinked to avoid referral) googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-help-google-identify-web-spam.html

Basically we only really care if it makes us look stupid to a lot of people:

Quote"Spam reports are prioritized by looking at how much visibility a potentially spammy site has in our search results, in order to help us focus on high-impact sites in a timely manner. For instance, we're likely to prioritize the investigation of a site that regularly ranks on the first or second page over that of a site that only gets a few search impressions per month. A spam report for a page that is almost never seen by users is less likely to be reviewed compared to higher-impact pages or sites. "

Redirects, generally speaking, aren't an issue:

QuoteThe same applies to redirecting legitimate sites from one top level domain to another, e.g. example.de redirecting to example.com/de. As long as the content presented is not spammy, the technique of redirecting one domain to another does not automatically violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Algo learning vs. immediate hand edit:

QuoteWe generally use spam reports to help improve our algorithms so that we can not only recognize and handle this particular site, but also cover any similar sites. In a few cases, we may additionally choose to immediately remove or otherwise take action on a site.

Mostly wanting notification of content issues that is slipping by the algo.  Paid link reporting (as if anyone can prove a link is paid) goes through another form.

Quotethese would be good reasons to report a site through the spam report form:

    * the cached version contains significantly different (often keyword-rich) content from the live version
    * you're redirected to a completely different domain with off-topic, commercial content
    * the site is filled with auto-generated or keyword-stuffed content that seems to make no sense

If you care about this kind of thing, it might be worthwhile checking the demographic makeup of your competitor traffic before launching.  I took a quick trip over to Quantcast to look up the top 10 ranked sites for core keyword in a new industry we are getting into.  I was surprised to see it skew female - very different from my first impression.

That doesn't mean I am going to make the site pink, but it may determine who I hire to write the content.

Set up alerts that will tell you when and who caused traffic spikes:

QuoteNow, as you can see underneath that Custom Alert there is a new sub-section called "Major Contributors." When Google Analytics detects causes to a major change in traffic, this section will display up to 5 segments that have contributed to that particular change.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/11/major-new-features-added-to.html

Some interesting possibilities for webmasters.

Now think about how Google can use this data for their own benefit....

....especially if you are planning military maneuvers

QuoteA Nicaraguan military commander, relying on Google Maps, moved troops into an area near San Juan Lake along the border between his country and Costa Rica. The troops are accused of setting up camp there, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag, doing work to clean up a nearby river, and dumping the sediment in Costa Rican territory.

http://searchengineland.com/nicaragua-raids-costa-rica-blames-google-maps-54885

If this sticks, could have massive implications:

http://www.seobook.com/google-ranking-internal-pages-rather-home-pages

I had a sense a few months back we were on the verge of some massive signal changes, things seemed very "stale".  I don't think I remember a time when there have been so many rapid changes in such a short period of time, a bit shocked by the barrage.  Possibly timed to steal press from Bing/Yahoo?

Think there is just one Google algorithm?  Well you are right and wrong.  Google has confirmed that different parts of the Google algo apply to different sites at different times:

QuoteVarious parts of our algorithms can apply to sites at different times, depending on what our algorithms find. While we initially rolled out this change earlier this year, the web changes, sites change, and with that, our algorithms will continually adapt to the current state on the web, on those sites. While it might be confusing to see these changes at the same time as this issue, they really aren't related, nor is this a general algorithm change (so if other sites have seen changes recently, it probably doesn't apply to them as well).

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=61b28e6184e66255&hl=en

Commentary here:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023150.html

That is why in some serps you may see a strong anchor text relationship with ranking while in another you may see domain authority win out with very little anchor text match to the query.

Rich Skrenta's Blekko has finally launched with a very transparent algo and seo data available.

Conduct any search and under the site listing you will see links to seo | links and my favorite - adsense.  Click on the "adsense" link and just look at what it gives you back

There are ways to hide your IP and adsense code from Blekko, we are working on it.  I HIGHLY recommend you do that if you are an adsense publisher with many sites linked to one code/account.  IP may not be a big deal to you.