SEARCHENGINES

David Melamed About The Earlier Days Of Search Marketing & The Immense Sharing In The Industry

Published

2 years ago

March 14, 2022

David Melamed, who I’ve known for about 15 years or so, has been in the space for about that long or even longer. David Melamed is now a search marketing consultant for many companies. You can learn more about him on his website at davidmelamed.com. David and I worked on some projects together early on and we were discussing some new projects, since he was in town and I convinced him to do a vlog with me. The batteries on one of the cameras died, so we ended talking at some point, otherwise we probably would have gone on for hours and hours.

We spoke about how David entered the search marketing space, first leveraging Metacrawler, one of the early search engines from 1995. We spoke about some of the early SEO conferences, SES and where we met. I checked my emails after we spoke and I think we first emailed back in 2008 or so but we probably met in 2007 at the conference.

David said search was his first love and his dream was to do marketing, specifically Super Bowl commercials. He grew up without a TV (sounds horrible to me) but he says that kind of fueled his desire to do marketing. Between that and his dad being a programmer, he really dived right into search marketing.

He sees every marketing problem through the lens of search, the intent level is a layer on the world he said.

We then spoke about some of his work history in search marketing space. This includes how he interviewed for his first SEO job and he was rejected. But he begged them to reinterview him, he learned SEO in a couple weeks through Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, so he credits Aaron Wall for his success in this space. David explained that it is hard to know who to trust in search marketing and he said he often feels like he personally does not know enough himself.

We spoke also about how the SEM industry is one of the most sharing industry, he believes because we all wanted links, so we shared as much as possible just to get links. He said he loved the old Stuntdubl blog from Todd Malicoat – but it is not updated as much.

And this continues to be important, write great stuff that people want to link to and Google will rank it well.

You can learn more about David Melamed on his website at davidmelamed.com.

You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.

Forum discussion at YouTube.

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Google Won’t Change The 301 Signals For Ranking & SEO

Published

6 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.

Nikola Minkov quoted Gary Illyes as saying, “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal,” when asked if a 301 redirect not working is a myth. Honestly, I am not sure the context of this question, as it is not clear from the post on X, but here it is:

More from @methode:
– 301 redirect not working is a myth. “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal”.#SERPConf2024 #SERPConf2024International
— Nikola Minkov (@n_minkov) April 19, 2024

We’ve covered 301 redirects here countless times – but I never saw a myth that Google does not use 301 redirects as a signal for canonicalization or for passing signals from an old URL to the redirected URL.

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.

SEARCHENGINES

Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages

Published

1 day ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.

In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”

John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”

Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:

It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).

Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.

Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.

Here are those new posts in context:

I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024

Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
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It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:

I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024

And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.

SEARCHENGINES

Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important

Published

2 days ago

April 22, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”

Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”

I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:

I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024

Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.

Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.

Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.

Forum discussion at X and image credit to @n_minkov.