Another SEO Challenge, This Time for Godin

If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, you probably don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.” He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the world.

Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners. I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a strong response.

EBay Pirate Locked Down By DOJ

An Indiana man was sentenced to over two years in prison for selling over $700,000 worth of counterfeit software on eBay, the US Department of Justice announced.

Courtney Smith, 36, of Anderson, Ind., was sentenced in US District Court to 27 months in prison, a two-year supervised release, and will face fines and restitution in excess of $7,000. That’s a pretty stiff penalty considering he only made $4,000 from the sale of pirated Rockwell Automation software.

All is Fair in Love, War & Journalism

The relationship between a reporter and a company he (or she) is trying to write about is… well, complicated.
In some cases, it’s like two hostile nations trying to meet at Camp David, with each side compiling as much information — secret and otherwise — about their adversary, and each side trying to read between the lines to find out what the other party really meant. And sometimes those files get leaked, as they did in the case of Wired writer Fred Vogelstein.

Patel’s Calacanis Challenge Update

On Monday I blogged about the Jason Calacanis challenge and how he received a 21% increase in traffic with only 10% of the changes being made so far. Many people have been wondering what the 10% of the changes were and some have even blogged that it could have been a fluke.
Just to give everyone a better understanding of how I calculated the 21% increase, I first took the 6 days before SEO was done and compared it to 6 other days roughly 20 days after SEO was implemented. The data before SEO was done was a bit biased because on one of the days his traffic doubled because he wrote on the Oscars and the following day his traffic returned to normal. On that Monday, if he had normal traffic and did not blog on the Oscars his search traffic due to SEO would have increased by over 40%.

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