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Why people should stop being snarky at Bing’s link disavow tool

Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Last week Bing announced their new link disavow tool available in their Bing Webmaster Central, and SEOs immediately got snarky about how and why Bing could possibly need a tool such as this, especially when SEOs were all squirming with delight over the mere possibility that Google might come out with an identical tool, as Matt Cutts hinted at a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, we know in the bigger scheme of things that Bing doesn’t matter nearly as much as Google when it comes to driving traffic to your sites. But once upon a time, Google didn’t matter nearly as much as the search engines back in their early days did either, and look at the immense power Google is rocking it out with these days. Yes, Microsoft is huge, but Bing is still like their annoying little brother that just keeps tagging along. But all the sharp minded SEOs are taking note that Bing’s market share is slowly but steadily taking teeny tiny dents out of Google’s market share.

So Bing launched this awesome tool last week that will allow webmasters to essentially say “hey, we don’t know where those links pointing to our site are, we want nothing to do with them, so please pretend they don’t exist”. Pretty cool tool in this day and age where Google has been penalizing sites with suspected paid or otherwise iffy back link profiles – however, it was Bing that launched the tool and not Google. So while Bing did something great for the webmaster community, it didn’t take long for all kinds of bitchy comments targeting Bing’s new tool to start. It seemed to begin first with a Search Engine Land news story.

Now, doesn’t that title scream of a Rand Fishkin link bait title circa 2005? Since Vanessa Fox is an ex-Googler, it isn’t surprising she came out with a blog post making a not so subtle jabs at Bing, but more so when she does it on the Search Engine Land platform. She built Webmaster Central at Google, so yes, I can see her being someone defensive that Bing launched a cool new tool before her former baby, especially one that webmasters have been begging for. It’s funny how SEL has long had a love/hate relationship with Google, despite the fact that Matt Cutts is usually the keynote speaker at SMX (and it ironically being at SMX Advanced where Matt first hinted at the possibility of offering such a tool). But it just seemed to be very heavy on the “Bing sucks” bias to many readers.

Vanessa’s article continues on with thinly veiled insults where she goes far out of her way to paint Bing in a pretty negative light, pulling out old blog posts and comments to show Bing’s contradictory stance (but hello, Google has it’s own contradictory posts too, which of course she didn’t happen to mention). Ready to dig into her version of events? You can read her blog post here here. And to put it into perspective, their competitor Search Engine Watch did a similar story, but just the facts and quotes from Duane Forrester.

Then of course after the blog post came the obligatory tweet (which was retweeted numerous times).

Now Search Engine Land and Vanessa Fox were far from the only ones who did it, it just happens she was the one who wrote a particularly critical look at it before most others did, and the one everyone was retweeting. And that seemed to give people permission to do their own digs at Bing for launching a link disavow tool too, when really, they shouldn’t be bitter at Bing for doing it first, they should be pissed at Google for not doing it..

At least some of them were pretty clever! But I degress.

What people are missing is the real point of the whole thing. Really, Bing did the biggest favor it could to SEOs, aside from making them look ahead of the game compared to Google. Because now Google is going to have to come up with a response to that, because do they really want Bing to have the tool that all SEOs are stomping their feet to get? Bing got a huge amount of mileage out of the story, and who knows, they might have heard Matt Cutts talk about the fact Google was considering offering the same tool and thought “Damn, we should do this first”, and while Google was pondering the ramifications of it (which could be significant depending on how it is rolled out, because of how spammers could manipulate it for their own good), Bing just went ahead and did it (and to be honest, I am surprised they did!)

While not many SEOs will actually sit down and use the tool for more than testing (unless they have been hit by Google’s penalties), I do hope Bing releases the numbers of how many links were disavowed or how many people are using it, the numbers could be surprising. Bing won’t necessarily get more market share out of this per se, however, it did go a hell of a long way towards providing good will and happy feelings to the non-snarky webmasters.

What should Bing do next? The best possible thing Bing can do right now is get the right people on board and continue building those dream tools that all the Google minded SEOs want, because it not only gets more people using the Bing Webmaster Central but it also puts Google on the defensive to answer with their own tool, or explain why they won’t offer it, but Google has so far been mum on the issue since Bing’s launch.

In other words, game on!

Looking for an SEO service that won’t get you banned?

How Not to Suck as an SEO

Posted: 05 Jul 2012 06:45 AM PDT

For every one kick ass SEO in the industry, there are three or four horrendously awful SEOs and at least a dozen wannabe SEOs. While horrendously awful tend to burn their bridges in the industry (and get sites penalized) before they make it, wannabe SEOs can tend to make something of themselves if they work their asses off, which will again separate the wheat from the chaffe in the SEO world. Wanting to put the time and effort into being a good SEO? Here are some things you should do to NOT suck as an SEO.

Fact Check
Unless you have been in the industry for several years, are constantly reading on the topic, and pretty much eat, sleep and breathe SEO, take the time to fact check everything before you post or tweet. You want to amaze people with your brilliance not cause people to question it because you said something as fact that is false or were spouting out outdated information. After all, there was a time when it was considered a fairly safe practice to buy links, provided they weren’t from link farms or spammy sites. So make sure your facts are coming from trustworthy sources (link to ppl to follow on twitter) and current. If you can’t find a date on a blog post (like many do these days, to combat the appearance that some content is stale) find a second source.

Not a Jack of All Trades
Don’t be afraid to admit something is out of your expertise. Not all of us can be amazing writers or amazing link builders. Some are stronger technically while others are strong designers. Not everyone can be a jack of all trades in this industry, which is why many of us work with teams instead. If something isn’t your strong suit, suggest someone to your client that would be better suited to that particular aspect of their needs. It is better to have the client think you are awesome in your strong areas than for them to think you are only mediocre because your writing skills or your design skills were pretty lacklustre.

Take time to smell the roses
If you are looking at your analytics for less than five minutes a day, you are doing it wrong. Period. Whatever flavor of analytics you are using (although Google Analytics does offer a pretty awesome and comprehensive free analytics program) you can find out immense things about your visitors. Do you know what percentage of your traffic is from mobile devices? If not, you better look and see if you are missing the boat on offering a mobile-friendly website. What is your top landing page after your index page? What social media sends the most traffic? What forums have been linking to your site this week? What pages in your top ten have a higher than average bounce rate and what can you do to fix that?

Know your keywords
It is all fine and dandy to ranking number one for a 5 word keyword phrase, but if only one person searches for that a month, why does it matter? Make sure you are focusing on the keywords that can bring you in the most traffic and the most conversions because bragging to anyone about your #1 ranking for an obscure keyword combination will make you look like a clueless idiot.

Bigger picture tools
Especially if you are learning or not quite “an old hat” at SEO yet, tools can be your new best friend. There are plenty of tools out there, if you know them and can find them, that are designed to give SEOs an advantage either in time or scope. They can help you see the bigger picture of all kinds of data, then as you get more experienced you can drill down to what things are most important for each specific client or website. And then don’t forget to use the tools. We have all signed up for some cool tool and then barely used it for whatever reason.

Network
Sure you might be writing the most brilliant blog posts of the year on your personal SEO blog. But if you only have three people reading it, chances are almost certain that anyone who really matters in the industry will never see it. So follow – and more importantly, interact – with people on Twitter. Guest blog at one of the many industry blogs that take guest posts. Pitch for conferences, even the smaller ones that might not have as many pitches. You want to do whatever you can to get your name out there and noticed, but get noticed in a good way of course! Which brings me to my next point.

My bad
We all screw up occasionally. Fortunately, some of us do it with only a couple people knowing, while others will screw up so royally that it will generate hundreds or thousands of tweets about it. If you screw up, particularly in a humiliating way that results in people calling you out and talking about it, fess up. Whether you are saying “my bad”, or have to release a full fledged apology on your blog, do it and do it quick. The worst thing you can do is fuck up and then be not willing to admit it, because people will remember.

So if you are stuck in that wannabe or “no quite an expert” SEO rut, consider adding things things to your daily “to do” list. Send out a guest blog proposal every day; make a point of @reply an industry expert daily; add a few new SEO blogs to your RSS reader; sign up for a new tool every week, even if it is just a free trial – and then use it. For every expert SEO you see, you can pretty much guarantee they did their time in the trenches doing all these things while building their reputation and client base.

Now, ready, set, GO! And don’t suck