As a Vice President of Engineering, Udi is responsible for core search. Before joining Google early in 2006, Udi was CEO of A9.com, a Senior VP at Amazon.com, and Yahoo’s Chief Scientist. He started working on search algorithms in 1989 with the invention of Suffix Arrays (with Gene Myers) while he was a professor at […]
Digital Marketing
Google VP Search Quality, Udi Manber
Just last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Google’s VP of Search Quality, Udi Manber. We focused our conversation on various aspects of search quality, Google’s algorithms, and Google’s development processes. Understandably, Udi was not going to provide a tremendous amount of detail about these things, because these are areas that Google considers […]
Page Rank, and Query Specific Page Rank
Page Rank gets a bad rap sometimes. It’s easy to understand why. People got obsessed with Page Rank a few years back, and for a long time, people would not let go of the notion that Page Rank was the only thing you needed to worry about in SEO. For that reason, many really smart […]
Vanessa Fox talks about Webmaster Tools and Duplicate Content
In what may have been her last interview before leaving Google, I sat down with Vanessa Fox, and we talked about Google Webmaster Tools, and we also spent some time digging into duplicate content. When at Google, Vanessa Fox created and developed Google Webmaster Central, which provides tools and information to help site owners understand […]
Vanessa Fox’s Last Google Interview?
Shortly before she left Google, I spoke to Vanessa Fox about what’s going on with Google Webmaster Tools, and, we also spoke for a while about duplicate content problems. While I was working on polishing up the interview transcript Vanessa left Google. So I may have had the last real interview she did while at […]
Dynamically Built Google Custom Search Engines
Google continues to roll out new features in its Custom Search Engines (CSEs). One of the most interesting ones is the implementation of “Linked CSEs”. What this feature does is allows applications to be built that can dynamically build a CSE. To whet your appetite for this feature, let me provide you with an example […]
Eric Enge interviews Seth Godin on June 8, 2007
Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and agent of change. Godin is the author of seven books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. The titles of these books are: Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez, Survival is Not Enough, […]
Interview with Seth Godin
A little over a week ago, I caught up with Seth Godin to talk about the great success of Squidoo. As you might expect, the conversation included a lot of discussion about what makes the web great, and strategies and tactics for making something go viral. Much of Seth’s focus with Squidoo was just that […]
12 Ways Webmasters Create Duplicate Content
At the recent SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle, one of the big sessions was on duplicate content. There is a great blow by blow coverage in posts by Vanessa Fox and by Matt McGhee. You can also see an older post about dupe content here by Chris Boggs. At the start of this session, the […]
Matt Cutts and Tim Mayer – tidbits from SMX
While I was out at SMX Advanced, I sat through the penalty box summit. As always, Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts had a few interesting things to say. Tim Mayer started by noting that Yahoo! remains committed to the search. Evidently, there was a rumor floating around in the industry that Yahoo! was going to […]
15 Methods for Paid Link Detection
Many major SEO firms make it a standard practice to recommend the purchasing of links to their clients. The search engines actively discourage this practice and do their level best to detect those paid links. Here are 15 things they can use as signals that a link is possibly a paid link: Links Labelled as […]
Adam Lasnik Explains How NoFollow Works
As I wrote about recently, one of the things we need to realize about the web is that content lives forever. An example of this is an old thread at Jill Whalen’s HighRankings Forum (a great forum by the way), which talks about the NoFollow attribute. Note that the posting is dated in January of […]