I generally say to people there is no blackhat, or white hat , only sustainable activity.

It simply baffles me how many SEO experts will quickly denounce Cloaking as “unethical” or against Google’s TOS or even label it as spam which manipulates search results but then on a daily basis create artificial, manual or software generated backlinks for clients.

If you are distributing countless articles with links or posting on blogs/forums to obtain backlinks or using automated backlinking software, isn’t that also spamming to manipulate search engine results?

What is the difference? It all violates Google’s TOS.

There is also a silly mindset that whitehat SEO is risk free and blackhat is full of risks. Really? How many whitehat sites, that supposedly conformed to all of Google’s TOS, suddenly lose their ranking and all their business when Google decides to do a major algorithm update? Ha! Where is the reward for loyalty from Google?

So does “blackhat” or being “unethical” really exist anymore? Isn’t this really about traffic, conversions and surviving within an ever tightening monopoly created by Google for which we now are left with few other options, unless to line the pockets of Google shareholders.

It would be fantastic if we could have a blog here about link building strategy,

I can not wait to hear your opinion abot this subject.

Please email me directly when you open the debate.

Yahoo “customer service” was non-existent as they either knew nothing about PPC or didn’t bother at all. Funnily enough, as we were running campaigns in Ireland, the UK and the US, no one was taking responsibility and we were usually transferred from Ireland, to the UK and from there to their US operations in order to get some help. Most probably the worst CS ever…

Microsoft/Bing on the other hand offered the friendliest and most reliable service whilst working closely with the big three, which was a nice surprise. They even called you back if they couldn’t provide an answer on the fly, kept calling back until everything was resolved, and sent a short survey about “your experience” after every single ticket opened.

Enough said – Bing wins

From the drop down list you can pick phrases you believe you can rank for.

Before Google Instant it told you the number of competing sites for that phrase.

The https issue certainly is going to be a running sore in SEO and Internet marketing/analytics in general. I wonder, though, whether they have jumped from teh privacy frying pan into the antitrust/monopoly fire? Their stated objective – to organize (or was it control?) the world’s information is pretty much realized. But with control comes responsibility and in many ways, lots of well intensioned Googlers do “good stuff” which conspires unexpectedly into something potentially evil… Google’s own ecosystem is lookin a bit like the starlings in the video wouldn’t you say?

Ultimately, the reach and low cost of WP will win out – see also Apache – and the slog of getting there will ease up. And of course, using SuperCache is the only real way to deploy WP – at which point you’re effectively using the same architectural approach as MT.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Nick, and to everyone who’s chipped in – particularly the insightful note from Dave.

Its a big business culture thing I suppose.

1. The coming WP 3.0 addresses some of the MU complexity issues – it really does work.
2. It’s possible to harden WP versions and installations adequately in order to protect the implementation. You also have to consider the nature of the vulnerabilities – not all are critical to a given installation.
3. From within an enterprise, eg for Intranets, attacks on WP are very limited and there is less of a need to consider the four monthly upgrade cycle.
4. It’s possible to back-port a lot of the fixes. As our Enterprise client base grows we’re looking at offering this as a service, but there’s complexity in managing this that needs to be addressed but we feel we have answers.

What WP needs is a company with an Enterprise focus that can contribute the requirements of Enterprise into the system and/or maintain a fork that fits better. We are that kind of company, but until recently there wasn’t enough interest to justify the expenditure. However, interest has improved dramatically since late 2009 and as a consequence we have plans that will help to make WP something that is far more attractive to the large companies both from an Extranet and an Intranet perspective.

2010 is, I feel, going to be the year where WP starts to hit the Enterprise sweet spot.

I remember speaking with you which must be over a year ago now and you mentioned all of the above.

I plan to take a look at MT over the next few weeks as more to do with learning what else is out there, but want to compare with wordpress.

I agree that I have found wordpress very hard to be scalable and a few of my bigger projects I have had to move from wordpress to custom sites.

I have a lot of blogs and I have yet to automate plugin updates and wordpress upgrades, therefore I have to login into every blog – time consuming and time wasted.

I also think the real story behind this campaign is doing an article on Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, the guy who first met Obama and pulled everything together for him.

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Thanks you your great answer.

By analogy, its why there are still business systems consultants and PR companies.

Thanks for the comment BTW kev

in fact, in about 95% of cases we’ve looked at, our sites are performing somewhere between mildly and dramatically better on Caffeine at this point.

I would agree with you its possibly the death of SEO spam, and article marketing in particular, but that’s far from the death of real SEO.

there is no escape from the fact that all the time webbies keep building $h1t sites, there will always be a need for real SEO.

Thanks for your contribution to WordCampUK – the SEO information you shared is very valuable to me and I got loads to go through from your presentation.

Your input in the Site Surgery session was also of great value – consultations with expertise such as yours is a rare thing… and I also picked up a couple of extra gems in that session too!

I hope you can attend WordCampUK next year and look forward to bumping into you in the future!