Refuge Design

Jim Boykin is the CEO of WeBuildPages, which houses about 50 employees. They are a company that is a SEO for SEO's. Like I've heard of many big named SEO's that outsource to WeBuildPages. In addition to this, Jim Boykin has been known for buying links publicly, yet that were under the radar, so even Matt Cutt's can't find them. Later in other blog posts, he described how he was trying to be one step ahead of the search engines (i.e. Google) by buying links that completely pass through a Googler (an employee of Google) reviewing it. He used to buy banner ads and a text link, or switched it up but now he is throwing in the black hat. Don't get me wrong, black hat isn't bad, it's just risky. Buying links is the way of the web but buying followed links is against Google's TOS, therefore, labeled Black Hat SEO. Continue reading

A Dmoz link right? Yahoo Directory? The paid link you got? No. No. And Yes, just kidding. No to all three. :D I came across a recent study done by MailerMailer and someone's blog post about it. The study talked about how Consumers open less email but ROI is higher. One part of the study was fancintaing for me. That is the part where 1/3 open the email within the first two hours. Then guess what? The next third take 6 months and the last third takes an entire year! Continue reading

Of course, there are no analytics data that is perfect but saying something is free should give you red flags. Being affordable is a whole other story. :) Google Analytics is a free site stats online application that thousand of webmasters use due to budget restraints. Some say their stats are down and out WRONG but uncovering the full of the story was from iMediaConnection. They stated Google willingly, after they bought Urchin, tried to fix a mistake but ended up keeping things the old/incorrect way. Incorrect meaning the stats you get from Google are WRONG. Yes, totally wrong. Purposefully wrong. It's like asking a blind man to see through his left eyes, that's just WRONG! (And cruel might I add :P). Continue reading

Wow. This is more big news. Google launches it's own guide to 'SEO'. Wednesday (11/12/08) last week they wrote on their blog that there is too much information on the Web about SEO, so they decided to write a guide of 'Best Practices'. The guide can be downloaded (warning PDF) and it's about 22 pages with plenty of pictures to understand these concepts fully. The guide starts out showing the difference between 'paid' and 'organic' search results. Paid are typically on the top and right of the search results and organic have #1, #2, etc on them (also the boxes with the Google Map is organic, Youtube videos, and Google Base in-between results are all 'organic'). Sadly enough, Google doesn't state that the results are blended with things other than webpages (video, products [Google base], books, locations of businesses, etc) Continue reading

This just in. Jerry Yang, the co-creator of Yahoo!, is stepping down from CEO. He will be in his former position as Chief Yahoo! and continue being a board member. In his letter, he states 'Yahoo has grown in the past 18 months', and that he will remain with Yahoo in this transition process. This is a shock folks. Yang finally leaves Yahoo as a CEO. Although he will assist in finding a new CEO, the Microsoft and Yahoo deal might be real! That's right. I'm excited, Yahoo might become the powerful search engine it used to be. I used to use Yahoo all the time but now, I habitually use Google because it's so much more relevant than Yahoo now. Yahoo servers up spammy results and if their not spammy, they are totally off in my request. Continue reading

I came across a company that had an auto responder on Twitter saying "for link swap email me at xxx@yyyyy.com subject=TwitterLinkSwap for instructions please". At first, I was like 'oh boy' (face-in-palm) but being the good guy that I am, I notified her of Google's guidelines. She was literally shocked. She had no idea that Google would penalize her for excessive reciprocal linking. Which is what she was doing, by having an auto-responder on Twitter to all new followers saying that (she has ~1,300 followers now). I checked out her site and she had over a f Continue reading