I've been presented with a business idea for a search engine or Web application that would require the user of the search engine to a pay a fee for the search results. Intuitively, I don't think this could work, but I'm having a hard time actually saying why. Historically, I think most search engines have been funded through advertisements or marketers who purchase profile data on searchers. Is there anything I could point to, such as a case study or an article in a journal or magazine, that would explain why a business model based on getting somebody to pay for the results for a search engine will or won't work?
posted by jonp72
on May 10, 2013 -
29 answers
Fiverr.com is full of people offering various sorts of SEO services (Writing articles, running SeNuke xCR, creating link wheels, keyword analysis, all sorts of crazy stuff). Many of these people have thousands of positive reviews. Is this all garbage, or can I pay $50 to a bunch of people and significantly improve my search rankings?
[more inside]
posted by anonymoose
on Apr 2, 2013 -
17 answers
I'm being offered a sizeable chunk of money to add a link to an article on my blog - what potential downside does it have on the way Google sees my site?
[more inside]
posted by jontyjago
on Nov 8, 2012 -
5 answers
How does the movie "Flight", which was pretty much off the internet radar a couple weeks ago, suddenly dominate the top organic search results for the word "flight"?
[more inside]
posted by davebush
on Nov 2, 2012 -
18 answers
Most Read Articles | Related Articles | Recommended Articles: These kinds of things that you see on news websites, what are they called? Is there an all encompassing UX term for this? How do content managers decide what is placed where? Do users even click on these links or are they just used to make sure search crawlers get to deeper content?
[more inside]
posted by chillmost
on Oct 7, 2012 -
2 answers
I'm wondering if anyone could suggest a tool or website that allows me to see a list of sites that a particular website is pulling news from. I know I can do this manually by looking at articles and noting the sites that are sourced, but I'm wondering if there is an easier way to do it.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
- Michael
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb
on Sep 29, 2012 -
2 answers
Why is google indexing my personal domain "better" than my work's domain - both have WP blogs, but only posts under my personal domain show up in the Google Alert I have for my name. I am responsible for the visibility of my employer's blog and I do not think it's being crawled effectively (or something).
[more inside]
posted by antonymous
on Sep 27, 2012 -
4 answers
My successful small business website is on a subdomain owned by the website template provider. I want to switch providers and domains without loosing my websites search engine rankings. Since a 301 redirect isn't an option, what else can I do to maintain my website's Google rankings?
[more inside]
posted by gwen1234
on Jul 25, 2012 -
3 answers
Though I've been working with web development since the 90's, I have a hands-on knowledge gap when it comes to internet marketing techniques like SEO, Adwords, analytics and the like. What are the best sources, free or paid, to learn more? I've been looking around for good resources, but it looks like this field is dominated by crooks. Any recommendations of books and sites written by reputable professionals is appreciated. I'm also a big fan of video lectures, if you know of any.
posted by falameufilho
on May 18, 2012 -
4 answers
My boss wants to pay an SEO company more than he pays me! Help me convince him otherwise.
[more inside]
posted by anonymous
on Apr 22, 2012 -
15 answers
Replaced an old website with a new (better?) version in Wordpress and traffic went down. Why?
[more inside]
posted by doomtop
on Apr 12, 2012 -
14 answers
What can you actually do to improve your website's pagerank (slowly and steadily is fine)?
[more inside]
posted by sdis
on Apr 1, 2012 -
12 answers
I'm looking for ways to improve my (non-commercial and very new) anonymous online presence-- to make it easy for potential readers to find my personal blog and Twitter account. If this were any other sort of site I would know (or be able to figure out) what to do, but because it's anonymous (and by definition/subject matter a bit vague) I'm not sure where to start.
[more inside]
posted by sockless
on Mar 23, 2012 -
10 answers
What are the best interactive marketing resources available to learn from in a hurry?
[more inside]
posted by anonymous
on Jan 16, 2012 -
2 answers
Help me manage my scandalous past -- or at least figure out how to reduce its prominence on Internet/Google search results! Details within.
[more inside]
posted by anonymous
on Sep 18, 2011 -
11 answers
Calling SEO/Google Experts: I have a bloglike site for a new company (on Wordpress) and I am trying to make it SEO friendly. Hypothetically, lets assume that the site is about flying lizards and I have named it 'liz.ly'. Every day, new and well written content is added to this site so hopefully in the next few months it will start showing up at a respectable rank on google. BUT:
[more inside]
posted by london302
on Sep 14, 2011 -
9 answers
I'm seeing a weird drop in August in search-related traffic to my company's site. What's odd is it is for searches of the company's name, domain name or URL.
[more inside]
posted by ao4047
on Sep 14, 2011 -
17 answers
Redesigning a website and need to explain to supervisors and other departments all the aspects of redesigning a site that is optimized to current best standards. Is there a map for that? (pls click for more details)
[more inside]
posted by xicana63
on Jun 6, 2011 -
3 answers
I'd like to be able to embed a grid of thumbnails of products either scraped by search terms or manually entered - products from, ideally, multiple sites with affiliate programs, but barring that just Amazon would do - onto a web page.
[more inside]
posted by luriete
on Apr 8, 2011 -
5 answers
I promised something I couldn't deliver on. If I break my promise, I could lose all my other work. Please advise on how to approach this..
[more inside]
posted by audio
on Apr 5, 2011 -
10 answers
SEO Fliter: My blog recently got pharmahacked and my page-rank has died. Anything I can do to hasten recovery? Or am I permanently hosed?
[more inside]
posted by jlunar
on Feb 23, 2011 -
7 answers
Has anyone used the firm, Brafton "Custom News Marketing" for their website's blog & news article needs?
[more inside]
posted by lorebella
on Oct 11, 2010 -
6 answers
Need to get up to par in 2010 web training--social media, mobile devices, SEO/SEM...where in Chicago can I get this minus a degree?
[more inside]
posted by stormpooper
on Sep 24, 2010 -
4 answers
I'd like to capture the PageRank of every page that's part of a single, large site (~5000 pages), preferably as a .csv covering page title, URL and PageRank. Is there a reliable service, free or pay, that does that?
posted by boombot
on Aug 20, 2010 -
3 answers
If you were selling a product at (fictional example) socialnetworkmarketing.com, would you buy facebookmarketing.com and twittermarketing.com to just redirect to socialnetworkmarketing.com?
[more inside]
posted by smersh
on Aug 3, 2010 -
4 answers
Is using hundreds of domain names to redirect to a dozen or so identical sites (under a dozen or so different domain names) an effective method of SEO?
[more inside]
posted by iknowizbirfmark
on Jul 8, 2010 -
14 answers
I am interested in learning more about legitimate old-school marketing applied to the web, including how it relates to SEO, web analytics, usability testing, email campaigns, social media, etc. I'm looking for books and other resources to help me learn the basics of both technology and philosophy.
[more inside]
posted by joshrholloway
on May 29, 2010 -
2 answers
I've optimized my Wordpress permalink. Does it hurt/help me when it comes to SEO cos all my backlinks are to the old URL?
[more inside]
posted by friedbeef
on May 2, 2010 -
3 answers
To SEO people out there ... is it possible to manipulate a small business website to push the business up Google's rankings and get it onto the first page of results?
[more inside]
posted by chairish
on Apr 27, 2010 -
22 answers
I've got an SEO consultant telling me to inject H1-tagged phrases into copy on a website. Is there any evidence that this either works or hurts?
[more inside]
posted by lodurr
on Apr 21, 2010 -
16 answers
I have a job opportunity that involves, among other things, SEO. I am fairly sure that this is the spammy sort of SEO, but the person was not really clear enough about the technical matters, and it's not something I know all that much about. That said, some parts of this seem good.
[more inside]
posted by anonymous
on Feb 22, 2010 -
9 answers
