May Boston SEO Meetup Recap

This month’s SEO Meetup was hosted at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge. The guest speaker, David McBee of Text Link Ads, gave a highly informative presentation called Paid Links: A look at the Truth and the Disinformation.

David McBee made the case that all links, in one way or another, are paid links. Either one site owner pays another directly for a link, or a site owner pays an SEO professional to go out and build links for them.  He explained that there is a teeter-totter of links (total garbage vs. good) and the issue isn’t whether paid links are good or bad for SEO, it’s what kind of paid links are you getting.

McBee explained what kind of link building activities (paid or unpaid) that might trip Google’s filter:

• Links on sites are that unrelated.
• Sites that acquire too many links too quickly.
• Too many links on sites with high PageRank.
• Anchor text is over optimized.
• Not enough branded links.
• Not enough variety in kind of links.
• Too many links pointing to the homepage.
• Bad “neighbor” links
• Too many Do Follow links

He went on to explain that some sites may think they have penalized by a Google update (like Penguin), when in reality their “bad” links were devalued by the update, making their link portfolio much less useful. In essence, Google “out gamed” the site owners that were trying to manipulate the search rankings with low quality and easy-win links.

When one of the attendees asked which back link tool was the most useful for investigating the value of each of their inbound links, McBee pointed out that SEOMoz and Majestic were probably the best two available, but even they aren’t capable of crawling the entire web, only Google is. Back link tools that grade your link portfolio can only see a percentage of the web, so while the numbers are a good indication of the overall health of your link portfolio, it isn’t 100% accurate.

McBee also outlined a few best practice tips for link building:

• Acquire links on relevant websites.
• Build links slowly and consistently.
• Acquire links of varying PageRank.
• Vary anchor text and focus on branded anchor text (The best performing sites since the Penguin update have 50%+ branded anchor text)
• Get links from a variety of sources.
• Point a percentage of your links to internal pages.
• Pay attention to neighborhood links.

There was some discussion over the idea of negative SEO. Could a competitor buy a large amount of bad links and point them towards a competitor’s site in order to get that competitor flagged by Google for webspam? McBee pointed out that Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz says that cries of negative SEO are really just an excuse; site owners got caught and are trying to escape blame and penalty for their bad behavior. McBee hypothesized that even if negative SEO were true, Google couldn’t let it go on–it would just create a bigger problem then the one they were trying to solve.

Brick Marketing was the food sponsor of the event.

May SEO Meetup in One Week!

We are back! And we’ve got an interesting and provocative topic next Tuesday, 5/15: Paid Links: The Truth and the Disinformation.

We all know that links are critical to search rankings, and that “paid links” are generally considered to be a bad practice by search engines. We will explore and unpack the definition of paid links, and when they might be a legitimate and effective tactic. It is sure to be a lively presentation and discussion.

Pizza, and a door prize for a lucky attendee provided by Text  Link Ads.

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March Boston SEO Meetup Event Recap

The March Boston SEO Meetup was held last night (March 19, 2012) at the Arlington Library. It featured guest speaker Sam Schwartz, a Boston area marketing specialist and full-time SEO at Edvisors.

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January Boston SEO Meetup Event Recap

The first Boston SEO Meetup of 2012 was held January 30th. The event featured a case study about how to attract attention to your brand and build awareness and links. It also featured guest speaker Vitaly Bulgakov, senior software engineer, Ph.D. Bulgakov has created a keyword recommendation tool.
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Next 3 Meetups Booked & Marketing Open House to Win MacBook Air, iPad 2 or Kindle Fire !!

Next 3 Boston SEO Meet Ups Scheduled for 2012!

RSVP Now for, Monday Jan 30th, Monday Feb 27th OR Monday March 19th

All hosted at the Arlington Public Library in the community room down stairs

+ Sponsored Event on Jan. 17th

ZoomInfo.com Marketing Open House to Win MacBook Air, iPad 2 or Kindle Fire !!

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November Boston SEO Meetup Event Recap

On Monday, November 14^th, the Boston SEO Meetup event was held at the Arlington Library. Due to a last minute cancellation by the evening’s scheduled speaker, the event switched into SEO roundtable mode, with SEO veterans answering the questions of several new attendees, swapping SEO success stories and discussing the state of SEO in general. Read more

October Boston SEO Meetup Event Recap

The October Boston SEO Meetup event (held on Monday October 24, 2011) featured guest speaker Andreas Goeldi, CTO at Pixability. Andreas’ presentation, “The Art (and Science) of Video SEO”, provided attendees with key insights regarding integration of video marketing efforts and SEO efforts.
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Win a iPad, $1k or 2k @ ZoomInfo Marketing Open House

We have two great events planned for tomorrow & in November.

But we also hope you can attend this upcoming ZoomInfo sponsored event that made a recent donation to help us organizer these future Boston SEO marketing networking events. So now is the time to cash in on a few of your best Internet marketing campaign case studies to win an iPad for 3rd place, $1k for 2nd place to $2k for first place. Plus land a potential new marketing career at ZoomInfo. Read more

August Boston SEO Roundtable Event Recap

Since the August Boston SEO Meetup event (held August 2^nd, 2011) lacked a guest speaker, the night’s event turned into an open, roundtable discussion on SEO. Attendees took the time to introduce themselves and offered some of their best advice, recent success stories and recent insights into the world of SEO and online marketing. Read more

July Boston SEO Meetup Event Recap

The July Boston SEO Meetup event (held on Tuesday July 12, 2011) featured guest speaker Jesse Friedman, Director of Web Development at Neal Advertising.  Jesse has been developing websites for ten years and in addition to the work that he does at Neal Advertising, he is also an adjunct professor of web development at Johnson and Wales University and has spoken about web development at conferences and contributed content to web design publications. Read more

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