The PIBlog: Internet Marketing Views and Tips
One easy way to recover lost link authority is to 301 redirect broken external links to relevant pages. But, if you’ve got a site with hundreds or thousands of URLs, and dozens of broken external links, doing that correction can be a real headache. Enter Levenshtein Distance. That’s a fancy name for a simple concept: You can find the closest match for a word or phrase (or URL) by calculating how many edits it will take to get from that word or phrase to another test phrase. Levenshtein is used a lot in spell checkers. If I type teh instead
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Continue reading Fixing broken links using Levenshtein Distance: A PHP tool
As I get deeper and deeper into the roles of director and get more involved with the personnel decisions and training, it occurs to me how very little people actually utilize the resources available to them when scoping out a company like Portent. And how those little things are actually applicable to any job or internship, not just Portent or the industry. So for those of you looking to “break into the biz” or curious on what we look for, I’ll lay it right out for you and challenge you to make my job hard. Not in the way where
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Continue reading Applying to Portent
Does it makes sense to move a blog from a http://domain.com/info/ subfolder to a http://domain.com/blog/ subfolder? I like this idea...under the right circumstances. If things are going well, don’t bother. If your blog already has lots of links from different domains or if you receive truckloads of visitors, you have little reason to change your blog’s subfolder. In fact, from a pure SEO perspective, changing the location may have negative SEO consequences. When you switch subfolders, old URLs must be 301 redirected to their new locations. These 301 redirects ensure that visitors will land where they are supposed to. They
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Continue reading Changing a Blog's Location
In AdWords the ability to utilize the product ads option of linking a client’s Google Merchant (otherwise known as Base) account to their AdWords is a oft-used and loved feature by Portent. Google Merchant Center is free and of course, anything you can do in AdWords to stand out on a SERP is a plus- but in order for a site to appear in the Shopping feed, the URL must be verified through Google Webmaster Tools. Which means that things can get complicated. Especially if something or someone needs to be transferred. So here’s the skinny: a Google Merchant Account
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Continue reading Transferring Google Base and Google Webmaster Tools
Before the merge happens completely, it occurred to me that I should be sharing the tips and tricks that I had in my SMX Advanced presentation in June of this year. So you can either check out the full presentation for Test that Ad! below or just keep on reading for some great tidbits of things you can get away with in MSN AdCenter! Use all CAPS in the headline. While you can’t make the entire headline in capital letters- whole words most certainly can be. Check out the screenshot: Use FREE FREE FREE in ad copy. Seriously, you can.
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Continue reading MSN AdCenter Secrets- While They Last!
And so it begins... You may have heard that soon Bing will provide all the paid and non-paid search results in Yahoo. Or you may have heard some twisted version of this because the whole thing is so complicated. Personally, I like the Frankenstein imagery. Although it’s kind of cool to think of a Bing biting a Yahoo and the Yahoo becoming a Bing beneath the full moon. The good thing is we knew this was coming. Yahoo! and Microsoft signed the deal a year ago. In February, the European Commission and US Department of Justice Approved it. Yahoo and
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Continue reading A Flavorful Blend, Yahoo! Organic Search, Now With 25% Bing
We all know what a negative keyword list is- the qualifiers around your keywords that you don’t want associated with your business or ads. Words like free, cheap, download and wholesale are quite popular and there are some great lists out there in the hundreds of common keywords you should be adding. But- when is the last time you really thought about it? Thought about it in weird or almost disturbed or morbid way? You should....here’s some fun stories why: Client A: Account is inherited from back when keyword research in Google allowed you to run a keyword search for
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Continue reading PPC Negative Keyword Tales
Just a quick note, I hated Shakespeare in school. Once I was done with school, it became a fascinating series of life lessons and twisted, timeless comedies. In the battle of sub-folders vs. sub-domains I always fight in the name of sub-folders. Sub-folders have that magical power of creating a unique URL and inheriting the authority of the root domain. Sub-domains on the other hand, do not always inherit the authority or the full authority of their root-domains. Think of it this way, a sub-domain is a child of the root-domain. The children get the benefit of having a parent
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Continue reading To Sub-Domain or Not to Sub-Domain? That is the question.
Well, here we were waiting all winter long for the Green River to crest its’ banks, meet the black wall of sandbags that block the trail from nothing but people (since water goes around things afterall) and our patience was finally rewarded. OK, it’s not THAT bad, but it is rather inconvenient as we are now all banished to working from home (normally that would be great) for the next few days. Of course this is the week that it’s summer in Seattle (we only get one per year) with highs predicted around 90F. Yes, I realize you East Coasters
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Continue reading Portent Floods Finally...From the Inside
Look out it’s coming, the rhymes with “bustercluck” search alliance known as Microhoo. Or as they like to call it “the creation of the unified marketplace.” As we paid search marketers are all aware, October is the intended date in which the Yahoo paid search interface will cease to exist and everything will be managed within the MSN adCenter interface. Information is slow, but forthcoming and it would appear in most cases, the Yahoo reps don’t have that many more details than the paid search community does yet. But, I was able to glean some tidbits and round up
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Continue reading Fun Facts & Tips About AdCenter and Yahoo Paid Search Alliance
