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SEO Tagging – 5 Things About Dustin

I’m not referring to the tagging you may be thinking of. It seems there’s a few friendly games of tag going on in the SEO community (and in the general blog community). I was just tagged by Lyndsay Walker. Seems like games like these have been going on for a decade (mostly in email), but I decided I’ll participate because it gives us SEOs some fun information about eachother (and provides exposure to some of the lesser-known SEO blogs, like my own).

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:

  1. I’ve appeared as an extra three movies: Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me, The 6th Man, and Prefontaine.
  2. My Wife does real-life CSI stuff. She’s a Forensic Scientist and helped with the Green River Killer Case when she first started years ago.
  3. I was the captain for 13 different Intramural sports teams in college. Intramurals were very competitive @ the University of Washington. There are literally hundreds of teams (some featuring Division one athletes), but there is no prize for 2nd place. My team took 2nd place twice in Soccer :(, but finally took the championship in volleyball. 
  4. I have a dead man’s tendon in my knee. I blew out my ACL playing soccer a couple years ago and went through the whole painful ACL surgery/recovery thing. I wonder if I will ever get to learn who the donor was (maybe I don’t want to know).
  5. I like to snorkel in foreign countries. I’ve snorkeled in: Australia, Fiji, Mexico, Venezuela, Cayman Island, and Kauai (I know, not a foreign country, but it felt like it).

My turn to tag 5 bloggers: Sean Mulholland, Shaun Ryan, Wendy Boswell, Bill Tancer and Eric Peterson.

You can track the SEO tag meme here: http://www.soloseo.com/blog-tag-tree.html (hopefully he fixes my last name).

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It’s About Time

Time Magazine‘s “Person of the Year” just came out. In 2004, George Bush took the honors. In 2005, it featured Bill & Melinda Gates, plus Bono. This year, Time Magazine decided to feature me! Or you. Depending on who’s holding up the cover featuring a mylar mirror.  Time person of the year

As I read through the feature (on their site of course–I would never pay for the magazine), I noticed it really shouldn’t say you. It should say “Web Junkies” because when they describe “you,” they talk about video bloggers, Wikipedia editors, Flickr posters, Firefox creators and YouTube founders. Hardly an example of your typical American or Time Magazine subscriber.

Regardless, my first thoughts were: Cool. Someone finally gives recognition to those who have contributed to the growth of the Web. But after reading through all their features, I realized this really was just about recent Web hype.

The cover might as well said “YouTube” instead of “You” as YouTube must have been mentioned a hundred times. YouTube is great, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see YouTube decline in popularity in favor of the next wave of Web 2.0 newcommers. It would almost be the online communities’ way of slapping traditional media back in the face. I can almost hear the public now: “You Don’t Determine Who Is the Person of the Year – We Do!” Because let’s face it, should Time editors really get to determine who the person of the year is? Let’s face it, when Time picks the person of the year, it is all really about Time and not the person they pick.

Okay enough dissing Time. I do appreciate them pickin “us” over political figures or CEOs. Ironically, I’m signing off to go cast my nominations for Webby Person of the Year…

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PubCon Experience

Thought I’d share my thoughts after attending my first Pubcon in November. Overall it was a great experience.

SES vs. Pubcon:
As a more advanced SEO, I must admit I like how SES has advanced level tracks. At PubCon panelists were often answering very basic questions, which I’ll admit are amusing, but of no value to a large percentage of the audience. As with SES, the networking and face-to-face time is what is of most value.

Search Industry
I really love this industry. Despite how competitive search marketers tend to be, people are very welcoming in person. You’d expect most SEOs to keep their strategies or tactics completely secret, but by sharing small nuggets with each other, friendly SEOs become even smarter, which is extremely important in this fast-moving highly complex industry.

Shout Out
I especially enjoyed my time with Neil & Cameron, Matt Tuens, Dave & Sally, Lyndsay, Sara W, Jessica B, Rob Snell and limited time with Rand and Joseph M. It was great to finally meet Todd Malicoat, Eytan, and HLM.

People who I didn’t bump into that I enjoyed spending time with at SES San Jose include: Danny S, Elisabeth O, Matt C., Greg Boser, Vanessa Fox (hopefully I’ll catch all of you at my next conference).

There are dozens of others I shared a meal or brief conversation with. Each conversation was a pleasure!

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PubCon Here I Come

I’ll be attending my first PubCon, starting today! Being trapped in-house doing SEO work, I always look forward to these conferences because they are my only chance to speak SEO with others. I find it valuable to speak to the wide range of people, from Google engineers to out-of-country black-hat search-spammers. Knowing what each is doing can help you build a strategy that will ensure the long-term success of your search placements because many of the algorithms are built in an effort to weed out spam, even at the cost of well-intentioned sites.

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MSN Duplicate Content Oversensitivity Being Exploited

MSN Search, being the newest of the big engines, is still trying to get a handle on search spam and had been slowly chipping away at it, but the problems are now getting worse since the switch to MSN Live.

In particular, MSN’s duplicate content algorithm penalties are too sensitive and too severe, causing a simple hack to be an effective way to remove a competitor’s site from the rankings. Let’s hope MSN fixes this right away and even takes notes as to who threw up content hoping to exploit it once it became known.

Credit to ThreadWatch for the find.