Rumor has it that the Panda update came about from a focus group that Google held.  They had real humans evaluating actual websites and giving their opinions on different metrics.  The results of this group were then translated into a programming algorithm that was encorporated into the ranking calculation engine.

I’ve done a bunch of research and experiments on my own rankings since this update, as well as reading what guys a lot smarter than myself have published, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Domain quality is now important again

In the “May Day” update prior to Panda, a chance was made that allowed individual pages to rank higher on their own merit, regardless of the trust value or strength of their domain.  It looks like with Panda that’s been reversed and now the collective value of ALL pages for a domain is taken into considering.  This is the main reason why EzineArticles rankings dropped and they’ve lost a lot of traffic.

What does this mean to me?

• It’s no longer beneficial to add hundreds or thousands of low-quality content pages, as they’ve drag down the rankings of your entire domain
• It’s better to build backlinks to your home page AND inner pages, rather than just your home page.  This tells Google that many of your pages have value and other sites “like” them.

Sites are evaluated monthly

Websites are evaluated every month.  If you make an on-site or off-site SEO change today, it’ll take about a month for Google to recognize it and adjust your rankings accordingly.

What does this mean to me?

• If you’re experimenting with multiple link building services and techniques at the same time, it’s gonna be nearly impossible to know which ones helped and which ones hurt your rankings.  Also, it’s not productive to try a service for 1 week, assume it doesn’t work, and cancel your membership.  Then 3 weeks later you’ll just be surprised to see your rankings change and not attribute it to the service you had canceled.

• Get Twitter followers
• Get Facebook likes
• Get MySpace followers
• Get StumbleUpon followers
• Get Digg followers
• Get visitors to ANY website

I’ve tried A TON of keyword research tools:  Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai, Word Tracker, Keyword Elite, you name it…I’ve tried ‘em all.

What sets SECockpit apart from its competitors is that it’s ridiculously fast.  Since it’s a web service rather than a local software app, you can run as many queries as you want simultaneously…in fact it can handle 200 fully processed and analyzed keywords per minute.  I’d like to see your current tool do that!

Not only that, but SECockpit uses multiple keyword sources:  Google Adwords, Google Suggest, and Google ‘related search terms’.

Let’s take a look at the SECockpit interface, for this example I used the seed keyword “deals”:

As you can see, it comes packed with tons of useful details for each keyword.  The “Niche” column is the SECockpit evaluation of how “good” the niche is for that keyword.  You can see which domains are available to buy for each keyword, with hyphens and without.  You can see which of the top 10 results are sniper sites or Youtube vids.

And if you double-click on a keyword in the results, you are taken to the top 10 Google results which give you some juicy data such as mozRank, Page Authority, Juice links (count of links that are valuable in determining SE ranking), and a direct link to go to Open Site Explorer.

Pretty slick, eh?

Get SECockpit here.

http://www.webpronews.com/google-ranking-factors-2-2011-06

A few things that stuck out for me:

• Page-level backlink metrics are the top algorithmic factor (compared to domain-level, link authority, social metrics, etc.)
• Diversity of backlinks is greater than raw quantity
• Nofollow backlinks do indeed help with rankings (further evidence to support this post)
• Pages with more content rank better
• Long titles and URLs are bad for SEO
• Using keywords earlier in tags and content seems “wise”
• Facebook may be more influential than Twitter for ranking, but Matt Cutts says Google can’t see Facebook shares so this doesn’t make sense to me
• Google Buzz may be used for indexing (more info here)
• Matt Cutts says in general the more content on the home page, the better, but you can also have too much

If you’re a nerd like me, hopefully you find this data useful too!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/correlation-data-for-seo-and-social-media-analysis-part-2-whiteboard-friday

One of the things we did when we saw no-follow links having a really high correlation was we went, well that’s just weird. Maybe what’s going on here is that no-follow links and followed links have a high correlation with each other, and in fact, they do. If you have lots of no-follow links, you tend to also have lots of followed links. So, that makes sense. All right maybe that’s all that’s causing it. But then there’s this one weird, weird data point – well, there’s several weird ones – but there’s this one weird data point around the percentage of followed links having a negative correlation, kind of a strong negative correlation with rankings, which sounds weird, but it suggests that websites and web pages that don’t have any no-follow links aren’t performing as well as those who have at least some or some reasonable percentage of them.

This paragraph caught my attention enormously, mostly because I’ve always been of the opinion that natural backlinking from a variety of sources is the best way to do off-page SEO.  I’ve always thought that a healthy mixture of noFollow and doFollow links were important, otherwise it’s pretty frickin’ easy for search engines to notice that you’re trying to “game” your rankings.  This is also why my automated social media service, SocialAdr uses a mixture of noFollow and doFollow social media sites.

Aaron @ SEOmoz sums it up well when he adds:

What I think that’s happening is that people who do natural things, normal websites, this is not normal. It is not normal to have a website that only has followed links. It’s almost like, man, you must be doing something funny because normal websites earn links from no-follows. They get linked to on Wikipedia, which is no-follow. They have blog comments that people leave and point to them. Those are no-follow. They have social media profiles. Almost all of those are no-follow. People tweet about them. Those are no-follow. There are all of these no-follow links that exist from sort of good places on the Web where you would naturally be mentioned if you’re a good website.

Thoughts?

Here’s what the order form looks like:

Like I said, super simple.

1. Use the top slider to select how many backlinks you’d like (the more you want, the cheaper they get per link).
2. Optionally choose radio buttons for “indexed links only”, “dofollow only”, or “PR1+”, keeping in mind that each option costs extra
3. Enter your keywords
4. Enter your URLs

Done!

Once you’ve placed an order and its been completed (mine took about 20 minutes), you can view the data on your “Complete Projects” page:

As you can see even though I paid for 2000 links I received 2420 of ‘em and the Indexation rate was 45%.

The “download links” hyperlink lets you download a CSV file that contains, for each link:

• URL
• PR
• Indexed (yes, no)
• DoFollow (yes, no)
• Keyword
• Target URL

This spreadsheet is super handy for loading into other link building systems to further boost the SEO-juice of your new One Hour Backlinks.

WINNING.

Below is a table which outlines the common features and functionality of each of the popular email marketing solutions.  Hopefully this is plenty of information to help you make the right choice.

Company	Cost per Month (10k Subscribers)	Free Trial	Delivery Rate	Client Retention	Analytics	Split Testing	Custom Segments	Conversion Tracking	Social Media Integration	Surveys
AWeber	$50		>90%	89%
Benchmark Email	$60		>90%	81%
Constant Contact	$75		>85%	83%
GetResponse	$65		>95%	82%
iContact	$74		>90%	85%
MailChimp	$75		>95%	90%
Stream Send	$40		>95%	86%
VerticalResponse	$120		>95%	76%
Imnica Mail	$17	$1	>80%	80%
Mad Mimi	$36		>80%	83%

Some additional info on these companies

MailChimp

• Has a Free account for under 2,000 subscribers!

AWeber

• Won’t allow you to import a list from a spreadsheet, requires all subscribers to confirm AGAIN. This is a huge pain for people moving from one email marketing company to another.

Why use an email marketing company?

If you’re just getting your online business going and are unaware of why an email marketing company would be useful for you, here’s a list of potential reasons:

• Deliverability guarantees – Email marketing services have agreements with popular email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail so there’s less of a chance that your emails will be flagged as “spam”
• System performance – You won’t need to worry about making sure your server can handle sending 10,000 emails at once.  Believe it or not but this can be a big problem; I’ve had to deal with it myself.
• Analytics – Easily track metrics like # of messages delivered, # of messages marked as spam, and even how many of the links were clicked
• Split Testing – Get the best results from your email campaigns by testing it first! Typically the email marketing service will allow you to create multiple versions of messages (subject and body) and then will test each version for you by sending each to a subset of your list. The version with the best “open rate” and “link-click rate” will be selected for the remaining subscribers. This process takes only minutes and can save you a lot of money!
• Custom Segments – Quickly and easily group your subscribers based on metrics like email activity, geography, and profile data collected from surveys and web forms. Choose the perfect mix of criteria to create and send the right messages to the right people at the right time. This will allow you to increase customer engagement, retention, and campaign ROI more efficiently than ever.

If you know of a good tool that failed to make my list, or if any of the data in the above table is incorrect, please let me know!

Linklicious

Instead of wasting hours building RSS feeds and pinging the feeds hoping for crawls, Linklicious eliminates all of the guesswork by providing a guaranteed 100% crawl rate.   It comes with a WordPress plugin so every post is added to an RSS feed, auto-shortened, pinged, and tracked so you can see exactly when your links were spidered.

Linklicious is quite affordable too:  they have a free account and the most feature-packed paid account is only $54/mo.

Here’s a chart that shows the improved crawl late with and without using Linklicious:

Link Pushing

I was looking for a completely automated, hands-off service that combined multiple backlinking techniques.   So I headed over to the Warrior Forum and a quick search brought me to this WSO.

Here’s what the “Link Pushing” service offers:

1. User enters their information; a 2 minute process.
2. System grabs an article from a random article directory.
3. System spins the article using The Best Spinner.
4. System submits the articles to Web 2.0 Properties and Auto-Approve Article directories backlinking to the money site.
5. System then submits to various Doc share sites splitting the backlinks randomly to the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve articles.
6. System then submits to microblog sites with links randomly split between the money site, the Web 2.0s and the Auto Approve Article sites.
7. System then submits spun articles to non-auto approval article sites with backlinks to the Web 2.0s and the auto approved article sites.

I had a couple questions before signing up and was super impressed with how quickly and professionally Greg (one of the owners) responded to me.  Although this service is in its infancy, so far I really like how easy it is to use and it seems like these dudes have some great features planned in the next release.  I don’t have enough data on its effectiveness to improve SERPs yet but I’ll post an update when I do.

Why?  I have no frickin’ idea, but it’s a bit ridiculous.  This means that if you have Skype installed on your laptop, desktop, and cell phone, there’s 3 different versions of your conversations stored…one on each device…that you can only access locally.  If your laptop is stolen, there goes all those conversations, never to be seen again.  And if you decide to reformat your computer, reinstall the O/S and Skype, good luck retrieving your conversations, even if you backed up the encrypted files.  There’s not even a tool available to unencrypt the files.

Hopefully you’re familiar with Gmail and its kickass archiving, labeling, searching, and cloud-access functionality.

Well, the good news is I’ve found a Skype plugin that will save all your Skype conversations (both text and voice) to your Gmail account.  This means you’ll never lose anything, you can access your history from any computer, anywhere in the world, and everything is super easy to search.

How much will this cost ya?  Well a couple months ago I paid $24.99 (one-time fee), but for the next 5 days it’s available for only $14.99.  Heckuva deal if ya ask me!

• Mom makes a post on my wall describing her planned activities for the day.
• Mom comments on a photo of me that a friend posted to tell me that she’s glad I have friends.
• Mom sends private messages to several of my friends to say they seem like good people.

So…all of these hilarious events prompted me to write up a quick list of Facebook Etiquette points for my mom…

Your own wall

Post something about yourself or about life in general that you want all your friends to read and comment on.  Only comment on your own wall post if other people have already commented.  It isn’t meant to be used as a monologue or a journal.

Your friend’s wall

Post something related to your friend that you want all their friends to read and possibly comment on.  Don’t post things that are only about yourself, because their friends will be like “who are you and who the heck cares?”.

Private messages

Send something that is private and that only the specific friend (or friends) should receive.

Photo comments

Only write something that pertains to the picture.  Don’t talk about the weather or what you ate for lunch or a synopsis of the latest Twilight movie.