Comments on: Top SEO Expert Aaron Wall Speaks Out About SEO’s Bleeding Edge

By: Donovan Roddy

Donovan Roddy — Tue, 13 May 2008 06:20:16 +0000

This was a great interview Marketmou!

By: SEO Bloggers Parade Their Best | SEO Blog - Marketmou

SEO Bloggers Parade Their Best | SEO Blog - Marketmou — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:18:36 +0000

[...] me bring up the rear with my favorite from my own posts, Top SEO Expert Aaron Wall Speaks Out. This was a hugely successful post for me, thanks to Aaron who gave such informative answers to my [...]

By: Hamlet Batista

Hamlet Batista — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:07:18 +0000

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your comment. I am really glad to know you were not targeting me directly

I hope you get a chance to try RankSense and tell me what you think.

Cheers

Hamlet Batista’s last blog post..Baiting and Beseeching — Obtaining the right mix of chasing links and getting them to chase you

By: Denver Rental Homes

Denver Rental Homes — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:40:35 +0000

Great interview. It is always interesting to hear the view of SEO experts like Aaron regarding Google practices. When it comes to SEO for your site, gaining knowledge from those in the field has been a better investment than hiring a SEO company. While initially Google search was very daunting, 2 years later I have cracked the top ten for some very competitive search results thanks to Aaron and his peers. My only problem now is maintaining that top ten ranking.

By: Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:20:40 +0000

Great interview. Lot’s of interesting insights. I particularly liked this summary thought: “The rules and guidelines keep changing. Ultimately if you want to create a real sustainable business your value add should be far beyond the lower threshold of whatever the engines aim to clean up.” I strongly agree with this viewpoint. Currently the web is visibly filled with enormous volumes of very low quality content (even the term “content” is being charitable in many cases). I cannot believe will continue to be the case a decade from now.

Eventually, market forces will diminish the incentives to crank out thousands of pages of low quality knockoffs and worse (pure nonsense that only a search engine crawler could enjoy “reading”.) Or, at least this part of the web will become less visible, and it will have less influence on the overall market.

The problem is that currently the incentives are heavily skewed in favor of business plans that rely on skillful SEO and high volume “content” creation with very little reward for higher quality. Fundamentally, this is because the search engines are focusing too much on “relevance” and “importance/popularity” and too little on quality, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. It’s hard for an automated process to detect quality differences, and the payoff for the search engines isn’t all that great, so this isn’t where they are putting their emphasis.

Nevertheless, for those who are taking the long view, I believe it’s important to work hard at creating true value for your users/readers, because ultimately the situation will shift in favor of higher quality — and those who have a multi-year track record of creating high quality content will be the first to benefit from this shift (when it finally occurs).

By: Links For Today | comunicação empresarial

Links For Today | comunicação empresarial — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:06:54 +0000

[...] Blogs, Marketing for Blogs, an António Dias reading of an Aaron Wall’s interview. [PT] [...]

By: [2008.04.15] | Comunicação Empresarial

[2008.04.15] | Comunicação Empresarial — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:06:59 +0000

[...] Por fim, o António Dias a explicar que um blogue, ferramenta de marketing, precisa, também ele, de marketing. Coisa tiradade uma entrevista de Aaron Wall. [...]

By: Pamela Egan

Pamela Egan — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:11:43 +0000

Thanks for this insightful interview. I found the part about the balance between link-building and content generation to be particularly interesting.

Also, the equating of black hat practitioners to “the worst of spammers” could not be any more on-the-mark. The search engines really should implement a way to crack down on black hats and SEO saboteurs (negative SEO’s).

By: Patricia Skinner

Patricia Skinner — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:38:05 +0000

Aaron, thank YOU.

True there are a lot of snake oil salesmen in the software world. Unfortunately.

Hamlet is well known for his integrity. Personally I admire his work (and use his tools).

By: aaron wall

aaron wall — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:40:22 +0000

Thanks for the interview Patricia

Hi Hamlet
I have not tried your tool yet and was not talking about you specifically. Please note I also recommend a number of SEO tools…so I was not saying all tools are bad, but that if you can’t afford any education materials then you probably want to stick with the free tools too.

For every honest original valuable tool out there a 100 or 1000 people sell garbage software that does monthly search engine submissions, spammy link exchange directories, or other 0 value (and sometimes negative) stuff.

>Methinks this is the inevitable path Google will take - using click-thru and engagement data to validate the SERPs. Of course this will lead to armies of eastern european ‘engagement spammers’ clickinghow about a list of your favorite books and articles on Seobook.com?<

I list a lot of em near the bottom of our about page at seo book.