Matt Cutts made an appearance at the Google IO Conference, May 27 – 28th, 2009 , and did live site reviews talking about ranking factors, as well as usability factors. A few revelations: Google considers you more reputable if you link out to reputable sites – Microsoft and Yahoo don’t like deep directory structures, but Google doesn’t care – and some great insights into how the duplicate content filter works. Matt’s presentation is an hour long, but there’s a lot of good information included.

Some highlights:

• provide mulitple ways to get to a page – static html links
• Google can crawl through JavaScript – not every search engine can
• URL’s should be static and easily crawled

Check out the full presentation here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-site-reviews/

There is an article out right now that’s sending companies around the world into a frenzy.  The article covers accounts of company websites with the default Google Analytics implementation script, being replaced with a string of characters that do not belong. Read More…

Yahoo! announced a few days ago that they are supporting the “Common” tag, a microformatting tag that is much like the meta keywords tag, except far more difficult to implement.  Why would Yahoo! support something as cumbersome and easily exploited as this?  Read More…

Is your site being easily abused by hackers? It turns out, some insecure web software allows people to freely use a website with open redirects to mask their hacking attacks.

Open redirects are one way for hackers to take advantage of your website as it allows them to manipulate the functionality of a website, rather than one tiny security-related flaw.  The hacker will use your site as a “landing page” and use links pointing to your site to redirect them to their site instead. This may have a negative effect on SEO for your website if the link the hacker uses is coming from a “bad linking neighborhood”, which you do not want your site associated with. Read More…

The cart’s almost done and race day is fast approaching and now it’s time for us to ask you for your help! We’re no where near our fundraising target and need your help to reach our $5000 goal. All donations will be used by the Canary Foundation of Canada to support early cancer detection research. The Canary Foundation of Canada is supporting this work at the BC Cancer Agency, right here in Vancouver. Please consider making a donation to our team to help reach our fundraising goal of $5,000.

Way’s to support the 6S Marketing Canary Derby team.

1. Visit our fundrasing page on the Canary Derby website. This is perfect for any personal donations!
2. Sponsor us. Yes you heard that right. Always wanted to see your company logo on a Nascar but never knew how to get it there? Well now’s your chance. Imagine how awesome your logo would look flying down Deer Lake Park being driven by a Princess while decked out like Mario Kart. This sponsorship space can be yours for a $500 donation. Want a bigger logo? We can do that too. Become a premium sponsor for $1000. Please email me at jlowther@6smarketing.com for team sponsorship opportunities.

6S Marketing was interviewed today by Techvibes, an online community for technology professionals, about their participation in the upcoming Canary Derby. The derby is taking place on June 27th, at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby.

The Canary Derby is a “soap box” derby for the Vancouver Technology Community to help the Canary Foundation and BC Cancer Foundation raise money to support early detection of cancer research within BC. Read More…

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has really ramped up development lately especially on the Adwords side of things. The new Adwords interface provides a number of great new options that increase productivity and general ease-of-use. Here’s our top 5:

5. The New Adwords Network Tab

Google’s new interface makes managing ad performance across the search and content networks much easier with the introduction of the network tab. The network tabs generates the Placement Performance report directly into the adwords interface. Broken up by your automatic and managed placements, the table looks exactly like the Placement Performance report and most importantly is easy to use.

Directly from the new interface you can add a URL into your managed placements or exclude the placement all together. Once added to the managed placements list a green Added icon will appear beside the site URL.

Read More…

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Commodore last night and made the third Ideas on Tap a great event! The largest Ideas on Tap so far, attendance was in the range of 600 – 700 techies who came out to hear the 5 guest speakers do their 60 second elevator pitches. Read More…

This Friday, June 12th, Facebook is opening up Vanity URL’s to everyone – on a “first come, first served” basis. Read More…

In March Google updated the way in which Analytics tracks cost data. An email sent out by Google informed users that it will now only display Clicks/CPC Source/Paid Keyword Traffic if either the cost Data is applied or auto tagging is turned off and you manually tag your CPC ads.

This wasn’t a huge change but if you didn’t understand what it meant it could bring up some interesting changes in your reports. A lot of people use the filter described in this blog post – http://tiny.cc/IyI22 to focus on their CPC traffic and keyword referrals. In order to have this filter work properly you will need to ensure that the cost source data from your AdWords is applied to the profile. Google will no longer automatically tag the referrals from your AdWords account. In most cases you won’t even notice the difference as this option is defaulted on when you set up a new profile. However profiles set up previous to the change will not have this on unless you specified it and you may see some strange data in your reports.

Read More…

The wait is finally over for web-savvy consumers, the Android phone has arrived in Canada!

Rogers Wireless unveiled two Android powered phones today, the HTC Dream and HTC Magic. Both come fully integrated with Google services such as Google Search, Maps, Gmail and YouTube.

So How Will The Android Change Local Search?

There are two main features in the Android phones that are going to change the way Google Maps are used: Read More…

Big news out of Indianapolis today.  ExactTarget has secured $70M from three venture capital firms, the largest amount in the US this year.  It’s great to see that venture capitalists are continuing to invest in the online marketing industry despite the economic downturn – illustrating the strength of the industry. Read More…

Although I often stress that rankings are not the be-all of SEO, they remain a very important indicator of SEO success. Ranking trends, as opposed to short-term fluctuations, are very important to keep an eye on as an SEO strategist. However, Google has long had very clear guidelines against the use of automated rank checking tools – and who can really blame them? The fact that Google doesn’t want every SEO in the world pinging their database 5,000 times a day is not exactly surprising.

Internet Marketing firms have had a tough choice in the past of either toughing it out with the captchas and potential punishments from Google for using Webposition-like programs, or to rely on manual spot-checking. There have been a few attempts to create a hosted solution for search engine rank checking, but none have seemed to include the right features, or have agency-level capabilities. Authoritylabs.com has a service that seems bent on changing our expectations.

Read More…

Have you implemented Google Analytics filters to track Universal Search traffic, and wonder what all of those “oi” parameters mean?  So did we.  That’s why we’ve put together this handy reference for all the ones we’ve come across.

Have some other “oi” parameters to add?  Drop a note in the comments.

Read More…

We’ve just signed up for the 2009 Vancouver Canary Derby!

On June 27th, a team from 6S Marketing will be racing down Deer Lake Park in Burnaby to help raise funds for the Canary Foundation and the BC Cancer Foundation.

Stay tuned for updates on fundraising events and race car construction. Read More…