Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums Thursday & Friday (I was offline two days), through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
- 60% Read Link Exchange Emails & 40% Don't
About a month ago, I asked if link exchanges are dead. I covered a WebmasterWorld thread that had discussion about how valuable these link exchange emails are. To my surprise, 60% of the SEOs out there (at least the ones who read here) actually read link exchange email requests. 40% don't and I am part of those 40%. Of the 284 responses, here is the breakdown: 32% Delete Them Without Reading29% Read Them All But - Billable SEO Time Survey Results
Many SEOs bill by the hour or offer monthly pricing plans. I asked the SEO industry months ago how much of your time is billable. I wanted to share the breakdown of the 140 results we collected. How Much Of Your SEO Time Is Billable? Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forums. Note: This post was scheduled to be automatically posted today. - Switching To A New Domain & Google Passed All PageRank In Days?
There is an interesting WebmasterWorld thread where a webmaster said he did a site move to a new domain and the PageRank funneled within days. Specifically, he had a discussion forum and store on a .com, he bought a .net recently and moved the forum to the .net. The .com domain kept the PageRank, which makes sense but the .net picked up PageRank within over a "few days" time. Normally, Google PageRank does not flow - Most SEOs Think Competitors Can Hurt Them With Links
Time after time, Google has said spam links can't hurt you. Google said it a bunch of times, competitors can't hurt you, but most SEOs do not believe that. So I decided to run a new poll asking Can Spam Links By Competitors Hurt You In Google? I wanted to share those results with you. We had a nice number of responses, 284 to be exact and most said - spam links from competitors can - Over Linking: Many Say It Can Hurt Your SEO Efforts
Imagine you go slap happy with the internal linking on your site. You try to make sure you effectively link all important keywords on your pages to the appropriate internal pages but you go overboard. Can it hurt you? We asked this question less than a month ago, after reading a WebmasterWorld thread. And most SEOs believe you can indeed hurt your SEO efforts by over linking to internal pages. Of the 182 responses, 60% - SEOs Can't Agree on On-Page vs. Off-Page SEO Factors
Anyone reading this site for the past years or so know the typical on-page vs off-page SEO debate. One SEO school of thought is "content is king" and the other is "links are supreme." If you can spend your time on one element, on-page or off-page what would it be. If you can do both, which do you think is the most important of the two? I ran a poll asking this question and we - Only 20% Find Traffic an Important Factor in Link Building
I am a bit shocked to learn that most link builders and SEOs don't find traffic to be all that important in buying or acquiring links from sites. I ran a poll a few months ago asking How Important Is Traffic Metrics In Link Buying? The 106 results, yea - not many responses, were broken down as follows: 42% said Somewhat Important 25% said Little Importance20% said Very Important11% said Not Important Only 20% said - Most AdSense Publishers Happy With Google Revenue Share
A few months ago we ran a poll asking if they find the Google AdSense revenue share percentage to be fair or not. I wanted to share those results with you. We had a total of 126 votes from Google AdSense publishers. 47% said the share is "Just Right" 32% said the share is actually "High"20% said the share is "Low" Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld. Note: This post was scheduled to be automatically posted - SEOs Tell Newspapers To Stay Out of SEO Business
Remember how the starving newspapers began to try to revitalize their dying businesses by offering SEO services? Well, we ran a poll asking our readers if newspapers should sell SEO services. The results are not that surprising. Most SEOs don't want the newspapers to get involved in SEO. Some for competitive reasons, some for professional integrity reasons and some for other reasons. But some surprisingly don't care, they find more competition useful. 64% said they - Google Instant: Predictions Were Right
Who doesn't love saying, "told you so"? My predictions and examples of search as you type were dead on. Google announced the launch of Google Instant. Here is a quick video I made: Tons and tons of coverage on the announcement. Key things for webmasters, SEOs and advertisers? (1) SEO is not dead despite what some people say. Google is still showing search results, SEOs will work with that. (2) Paying for AdWords has changed - Programming Note: September 9 & 10
I wanted to give you a heads up that tomorrow, September 9th and 10th, I won't be providing normal coverage here. I have about five poll results scheduled to be posted each day, many with very interesting results that many of you have been waiting to see for a month or more now. So keep an eye out for those polls. We may have some guests posts or may not. I am personally going offline
