Extreme SEO panel Q&A at A4Uexpo 2009

 

Who was there?
Dave Naylor (Bronco)
Ciaran Norris (altogetherdigital)

Marcus Tandler (Mediadonis)

Joost de Valk (Orange Valley)

Dixon Jones (Receptional)

Bob Rains

 

Who talked more than anyone?
Dave Naylor (of course!) and Dixon

 

What were the highlights?

* Dixon is in favor of Yahoo! answers as a free links source that is well indexed by Google.

* have just bought some expired domain? Dave recommends not to change anything  (content, design, hosting company etc) right away but to do it gradually, after a couple of months, otherwise search engines realize that something is happening.

*Black hat is:
- Messing up with someone else’s site (Dixon).
- Buying even a single link from authority site like newspapers website.

* Canonical Tag:
- Works better than 301 at the time (Joost).
- Doesn’t work in cross domains (Dave).

* Google knows almost everything so don’t use the same IP or PC to login for different accounts.

* Using Wikipedia for SEO can work only after participating (writing articles, adding comments etc) and joining the Wiki spam team (Joost).

* Although the links on Wikipedia are nofollowed, removing them can hurt the site’s ranking (Marcus).

* Mobile search is important when advertising offline simply because this is when people tend to use their mobile for search. Ciaran said that he saw an ad of Samsung on a train station that said: “Search for any deal on Google” but once he did a search about it he found all of Samsung competitors on the search results but not Samsung. J

* Use http://www.majesticseo.com to check the links that lead to your competitors and then try to get those links to yourself.

 

Google Music Search

I guess I’m a late waker (I blame the lack of time behind the 24 hours limit) , but only today I’ve noticed the option of Music Search by Google and was really thrilled by it.
I know that the vertical search is “live and kicking” and yet I haven’t noticed this “search music” button and / or link until now.
God bless whoever it was that created the music and at the same time pat Larry Page and Sergey Brinand on their shoulder for their Google’s music search feature.

How can you get into Google Music Search?
You just need to search for the name of a singer or a band, say Britney Spears, and you’ll see the blue link of “Music” on the bluish top bar, just right below the search box.

Clicking the “Music” link will get you into a deeper search results page in which you can browse several categories such as artists, albums and songs.

Clicking on the artist name will send you into a page with a list of all albums that can be sorted by popularity or by release date.

Clicking on specific album will give you the name of the artist, album and the year it was released plus the full list of  tracks and links to online shops where you can buy the album. Below the album’s image you can find links to related web-pages such as the artist website, photos and latest news.

Clicking on specific song we’ll give you the name of the artist, the name of the album, other performers, song length, a link to all other versions of the song, its lyrics and an option to buy the song via iTunes.

Very nice, you must admit it!

Looking for other music websites? Check the following
(and please feel free to keep me posted on others I don’t know):

Free Music Listening Sites:
Soundpedia – Music discovery community. Great thing is that you can listen to full albums and get suggestions for other artists and bands of the same genre.
Bandcamp - The place for artists to offer their music, including full albums, for free or for money.
Deezer- Free music platform in which you can create lists of your favorite music.
Pandora - Free internet radio.
Last.fm – Free music listening (internet radio) plus music catalogue.

For those who are into reading about music and artists, check the following music portals:

Musicpedia - Your favorite music in pictures.
Mog - Discover people through music and music through people.
Yahoo! music portal – info, downloads, videos and much more.
All music – All about music – reviews, new releases and artists biography.