Thunder Booms! Our SEO/SMO Favorites for the Week (7/23/10)
Do content farms really bring high quality traffic and lasting rankings to a website? Yahoo! will soon find out. Is SEO a competitive advantage for your business? Rand Fishkin gives compelling evidence that says "Yes!" Need an SEO Job? Danny Dover will show you what you need to get the gig. Need to brush up on your Social [Media] skills? Mashable has put together a list of upcoming conferences and events. This and more in this week’s Thunder Booms!
Every week we research and write-up our analysis of our favorite SEO and SMO news. It helps keep us “fresh” with our knowledge, and gives us a chance to share what we find interesting. We have a good time with Thunder Booms! We hope you enjoy them too!
Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content, a content farm that produces about 10,000 pages per week, this acquisition has boosted Yahoo!'s total content by 10%. Most of the content is mediocre in quality, but ranks well in the search engines based on the overall domain authority of the Yahoo! sites. What does this mean for the smaller industry blogs and publishing sites? It could mean the higher quality posts on niche websites get pushed down in the rankings because there is no way to compete with the link profile of Yahoo.com. I see this becoming a huge issue that Google and others will have to face in the next few years. I almost never find the "answer" on content farms such as about.com, or ehow.com, and tend to look down the SERPs for a blog post or article by industry pros. Will these content farms be obsolete due to click behavior in personalized searches? I guess it depends on the searcher, but I would love to see these monsters disappear from my results page.
For a while now, we at Thunder SEO have been working hard at following the best principles Rand Fishkin mentions in his "Yup, SEO Can Be A Competitive Advantage" blog, posted on 7/21/10. The creation of a content rich site where people come, glean pertinent information and then share it via social media sites and the like takes diligence, but it pays off in the end. Although good SEO results can be seen pretty quickly sometimes, it is not always an overnight process.
Danny Dover is awesome! We met him last year at the SEOmoz Pro Training Series, and I've followed his updates since. He's just a genuinely nice guy that knows his SEO stuff. This week, he took over Whiteboard Fridays again, and talked about how to get a SEO job. It's a subject that's near and dear to our hearts at Thunder, since we've all had to apply at our company at some point. Danny offers great tips like getting an internship at a start-up (check), making an offer they can't resist (check), building test sites (check), leveraging what you already know (check), and getting involved in the community by attending conferences and meetups (check, check). It's worth a watch if you're an aspiring SEO, and once you're a pro, shout us a holler because we're always looking for the next SEO star!
Social media conferences and seminars are a great way to connect with colleagues, learn more about social media marketing practices and expand your knowledge of SEO. Mashable has put together a list of social media tech events that span the globe. With Mashables social media event calendar, you also receive special codes for each event to reduce the prices of registration. So take a look and register for an event near you!
