SEO Headlines 02/20/2008

A Lesson In Ethics From Darren Rowse

A hilarious, yet somewhat depressing read from Darren Rowse over at Problogger today. Darren posts an email exchange with an underground link seller. The conversation consisted of several emails being sent back and forth where aforementioned link seller tries to get Darren to insert some for-pay links into specific parts of his Web site for a disclosed price. The real comedy comes as the link seller keeps upping his price and testing Darren’s moral sound. Because Darren is a stand up guy, he rejects the offer, even when it’s up to $400 a link!

Friends, do yourself a favor and take a lesson from Darren here. We all get these requests in our inboxes where Link Seller X wants to pay us $100 to hide a link to their site on one of your pages. The offer may sound appealing at first, but compromising your site (and self worth) for a measly hundred bucks, or even a couple hundred bucks, isn’t worth it. If that person is sending you those emails, he’s probably sending them to other people as well. Why would you voluntarily walk into an obvious linking ring? So that Google can sniff it out and then put you on their Troublemaker List. (That’s the list Michael Gray currently tops.)

New AdWords Display URL Policy Takes Effect April 1

The Google AdWords blog informs us about an update to their display URL policy that will take effect on April 1st. Under the new rules, advertisers will no longer be able to use redirects or vanity URLs in their ad. The display URL must be the actual URL of the landing page. Google hopes this will provide a better, more relevant experience for users.

Here’s a snippet from Google:

For example, if your destination URL is www.google.com, your display URL must also be www.google.com. The following would not be acceptable display URLs for an ad for www.google.com:

• www.google.co.uk – because this URL leads to a different site
• www.gogle.com – even though this URL simply redirects to www.google.com it is still not acceptable
• www.gooogle.com – because this URL leads to a page showing content identical to www.google.com

In the case of tracking URLs, as long as the URL of your landing page matches the URL that is displayed in the ad, you’re clear. If your ad campaigns are affected, make sure you fix them before April rolls around. You’ve been warned.

Fun Finds

Copyblogger’s Brian Clark delivers a 5-part guide to keyword research for bloggers. It’s a bit long, but a definite Must Read.

Lee Odden has a stellar video interview with Adam Lasnik. Lee gets Adam to open up about how to optimize a site using Flash, duplicate content issues, using the nofollow to “sculpt PageRank”, and more. Check it out.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.