Interview with Andrew Shotland

Today I get to interview one of my favorite reads in the SEO blogoshpere, Andrew Shotland. Andrew runs the Local SEO Guide blog and has graciously taken some of his time to share with us his thoughts on Local SEO.

Mark Cuban's Mahalo Wants Your Blood (And Gets it TOO!)

Mark Cuban recently talked about how search engines and content aggregators are vampires.

There is no reason to be indexed in Google.

Slow & Steady vs Hype, Crash & Burn

HOPE is perhaps the single most lucrative thing to sell.

There are so many people in need of direction, while so few actually want to do the work required to achieve the end goal.

More PROOF Jason Calacanis is a ____

Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).

Why Mahalo (and Other Content Scrapers) Render Google's Spam Team Flaccid

I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media's CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: "what if google decides they don't like you anymore?"

Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam.

Starving Artists in the Age of Cesspool Content

On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model

Let's use a different industry to illustrate what is happening.

I Turned the Google Toolbar Off, But It Kept Spying On Me...

Ben Edelman: "Although I had asked that the Google Toolbar be "disable[d]," and although the Google Toolbar disappeared from view, my network monitor revealed that Google Toolbar continued to transmit my browsing to its toolbarqueries.

Google AdWords Tax Calculator

Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system...optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google's yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don't yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.

All Shades of Gray

Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads?

The short answer is no.

Open Site Explorer is Pretty Slick

From a marketing and a public relations standpoint this tool is brilliant. Rand just put up a full in-depth review here.