I was in a meeting the other day with a company who was looking to retain our services. As we got deeper into the discussion, I learned that they were comparing us to other companies, some domestic and some off-shore. That’s fine and is an every day occurrence within our business.

What I found surprising was that several of the competitors were recommending techniques that we would unequivocally consider to be black hat SEO and making promises that were unrealistic. Their logic apparently was to take illicit measures that they felt would boost a client’s rankings in Google, even at the expense of damaging the credibility of their domain. Personally, I don’t think these businesses did an adequate job of explaining the risks involved, but rather sold the upside potential that these tactics may deliver.

I do not pretend to personally understand Google’s algorithm, but I am confident that the brainpower behind it is sufficient to continue to weed out techniques that are considered non-best practices, even if it doesn’t always happen overnight.

SEO should be an ongoing initiative within your organization. Shortcuts are not the answer. Don’t allow your site’s viability to be jeopardized by tactics that are very likely to backfire in the long run.

There has been quite a bit of news circulating within the Search industry lately, and some of this news may have an impact on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.  In case you haven’t heard, below is quick re-cap of two pieces of important information.

Back in August, I wrote a blog about Google’s Caffeine Update.  Recently, it was announced that this update will begin to be rolled out in 2010.  Not to worry, Matt Cutts reassured webmasters in his recent blog post that the improvements to Google’s indexing infrastructure won’t occur prior to January – after the holidays.  They will release Caffeine in one data center for monitoring, prior to the full roll out.

Previously there was a preview of Caffeine available.  This preview has now been removed and this Thank You note was kindly left:

“We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox”.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”
Stay tuned as this Caffeine update approaches!

Another important piece of information is that Matt Cutts announced that Google may be adding a new factor to the over 200 factors that are currently part of their organic ranking algorithm: website load time. If you’re currently an AdWords advertiser, you may be aware that page load time already plays a role in Quality Score. In an effort to improve searchers overall experience, this too may play a role with SEO in the future. If you are interested in finding out more about how to assess your pages’ speed, you can visit: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.

Have you ever wondered why Japanese or Korean sites use Latin extensions in their domain names?
Those sites from countries with non-Latin languages had to use Latin domain names since domain names extensions were implemented from the beginning of the Internet as Latin.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced the inclusion of non-Latin domain name extensions. This gives the opportunity for non-Latin countries to name their sites extensions correspondingly in their own language; this will allow in better SEO opportunities since their domain name extensions will enable users to search information in their corresponding territory or nations. This change to the domain names extensions will cause a significant transformation to the Internet, probably the greatest change it has gone through since it was created.

The nations that would like to obtain their new extensions which reflect their name, will need to send an application to ICANN and will under an evaluation process. If approved they can start accepting registrations from within their country.
ICANN will provide this service beginning on November 19, 2009.