Brian Hancock

Internet Marketing Expert

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:39:04 -0700

Internet Marketing Expert

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Does posterous follow links?

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:38:57 -0700

Brian Hancock - Internet Marketing Expert

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Facebook Vanity URLs Present a Duplicate Content Issue?

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:21:52 -0700

As I'm sure you are aware by now, Facebook users frantically logged on at 12:01am ET this morning to snatch up a vanity URL for their name, brand, or a desirable keyword they wanted to target. The old URLs still had the profile name present, i.e. www.facebook.com/people/Brian-Hancock/743482939 but the new vanity URLs leave out all of the extraneous information. Anyway, I stumbled upon a possible issue today. Click the following links:

See how they both resolve and neither redirects to the other. Am I the only one sensing a duplicate content issue on the horizon?

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Internet Marketing Expert on Facebook

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:50:51 -0700

Got the idea to give this a little test today. I setup a fan page on Facebook to promote myself and see if I can get it to show up for a general search. Like anything else on the Internet, it's going to need some inbound links pointing to it, but it's got some great attributes from day 1:

URL with keyword phrase in it: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Internet-Marketing-Expert/83917058869 (even has dashes in it which google sees as spaces)
Authoritative domain: it's Facebook after all, the site has over 189,000,000 pages indexed and 657,000,000 links pointing to it.
Nice title tag: Facebook | Internet Marketing Expert
Nice H1 tag: Internet Marketing Expert
Keyword-rich content: I added my blog feed so above every post it inserts your name, mine being the keyword Internet Marketing Expert...

Time will tell if one can get a Facebook fan page to rank high for a competitive search, but it's certainly worth the test! Help me out and become a fan of my Internet Marketing Expert Facebook page.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Top 10 Surprises at SMX Advanced 2009

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:11:05 -0700

Matt Cutts declaring a change in direction for how Google reads no-follow - Is this really the case, or Google again trying to discourage us from doing things that can potentially ‘game’ their PageRank algorithm.
Sheer number of attendees – yes it was a small conference compared to others I attended, but I had planned on it being even smaller. Between the constant word from SMX that the conference would sell out fast (turned out to be a great marketing pitch) and the small number of people who registered on SMX connect, I was expecting half the audience that was there.
In-house vs. agency – The vast majority of attendees work in-house for companies rather than at agencies. This was really surprising to me. I guess it wasn’t a big surprise for the SMX crew as they had a full day of in-house activities following the closing of the conference.
Amount of ‘grey hat’ techniques discussed – in the more informative sessions there were frequent mentions of tactics that could be done which were obviously not entirely ethical. Of course there were those on the panels that swore that they would never do anything that would even remotely be deemed un-cool by Google or any other party…
Danny Sullivan – great guy, very friendly, entertaining, and knowledgeable. There are a lot of ‘rockstars’ in the Internet Marketing industry, but he really is a veteran with charisma truly fitting of the title.
Marty Weintraub – his sheer craziness comes through in his blog posts and commentary but I now feel like I understand the method to his madness. His session on SEO Ranking Factors 2009 was thoroughly enjoyable and informative. It also left me very curious to know specifics on how he approaches projects, conducts analysis, etc. You could tell that he has a very sophisticated approach which left me wanting to know more.
Google = cheapskate – despite the fact that they virtually control the Internet, and are hugely profitable thanks in large part to this audience, you would think they would give up some cool swag. Garbage as usual. Not a big surprise here, but still worth mentioning.
Bing – looks like a major step forward for Microsoft with some cool features, a catchy name, and a sizable marketing budget. The launch party was great complete with fun appetizers that required several sentences to explain, light-up ice cubes in the drinks, and a ‘poor man’s Cirque de Soleil. Oh, and they actually gave out free t-shirts (unlike the ungrateful crew at Google =/). Despite all of this, you could still feel in the air that people don’t really take Bing seriously or see much coming from it.
No rain in Seattle – the weather was actually gorgeous!
Link juice doesn’t pass through airport security – just for future reference, you can’t pass through airport security with a can of seoMoz Link Juice… =/

Permalink | Leave a comment »

My Review of SMX Advanced

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:59:55 -0700

Why go to a conference like SMX Advanced? I chose to attend primarily because I was looking for a higher level of educational material as well as to do some networking within the community. This event is billed as the place for the top players in the Internet Marketing industry to go and connect and after being disappointed over and over again by the sessions at , I was excited for the opportunity to learn a few things and leave with some nice takeaways.

How did it measure up?

No question it blows SES away in terms of quality content, and the overall sophistication level of both the audience and speakers. The beauty of an ‘advanced’ conference is the presenters can skip past the basics and cut right to the meat in their presentations. The best sessions moved at a feverish pace where I scribbled down notes, names of tools, or gave up and just wrote ‘download and review powerpoint’. Many of the good ones also exposed ‘grey hat’ tactics I was unfamiliar with. Some were downright technical others were ‘no-brainers’ that I just never thought of before. Whether you want to use tactics like this or not, it’s good to know what competitors may be doing in this regard. The sessions were not perfect however, with some speakers who didn’t really belong and one session in particular that was a major disappointment (Beyond the Usual Link Building). I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, and the posts on Twitter using the #smx hashtag would be frequently saying things like “this is smx ADVANCED”, “getting sleepy”, etc. In a conference as short as this (2 days) with a very limited amount of sessions, it’s extremely disappointing to go to a ‘dud’. It was also clear that a couple of the presenters I encountered did not understand how savvy the audience was, and began presentations with a basic rundown of a topic and continued on as if they were speaking to a group that was new to the topic. One instance of this in particular was Craig Greenfield during the Twitter Tactics & Search Marketing session. His presentation stuck out like a sore thumb and it was very obvious to everyone watching that it was totally out of place. No disrespect to Craig, he holds a top position at Performics and is likely to be extremely savvy with the potential to really ‘wow’ the audience but it was clear that he really missed the boat. Before going to the conference I had read that all presentations were reviewed and discussed ahead of time which made it even more disappointing when these issues occurred.

How about the networking?

Much more networking opportunities were available than the larger conferences due to the small size, organized lunch table sessions, pre-show networking site (SMX connect), and post show parties & mixers. You can really tell that creating these opportunities went into the planning of this conference rather than being an afterthought. Even more powerful was a general sense of community that existed at the show. As I’ve said on this site before, I have never been an aggressive networker and haven’t pushed my face out there in the Internet Marketing community. With that being said, it was nice to meet some of the people in the community I follow or communicate with online and found most people to be very friendly.

I’ll be back

In short, despite a few hiccups with some bad presenters and issues with climate control, seating, etc., the conference was well worth the admission. Danny Sullivan and the SMX crew did an unbelievable job in organizing and running this event, and Danny in particular is a great moderator. His entertaining personality combined with his high level of knowledge helped to keep sessions moving forward, on track, and delivering quality information. I will definitely be attending future SMX Advanced events and will probably check out when it rolls into New York City in October. I left with a nice collection of tips, tricks, & takeaways, some new contacts, and most importantly, moments of inspiration.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

History of Search Engines: A Trip Down Memory Lane

Mon, 18 May 2009 02:37:31 -0700

You mean there was life before Google? It's easy to forget what the search landscape was like before the dot com bubble burst. Lots of players in the space all suffering from the same issues. Search results that weren't relevant, easy to game, and often plagued with porn sites for searches of every kind. Huge investment was made in these companies, lots of which went to expensive television ad campaigns (some even during the Super Bowl), foosball tables, and many other useless pursuits that did nothing to help them establish viable business plans with long term strategies. Anyway, here are a few sources to help you take a trip down memory lane:

- overview of how search has changed in the past 10 years
- nice collection and overview of some of the original search engines that no longer exist
- you can use this tool to see what the homepage of Yahoo and others looked like back in the day ( rel="nofollow"Yahoo homepage in October of 1996)
- cool site from the infamous
- covers history, technology, etc.

Oh, and this is a great collection of some of the commercials search engines were running back in 1998

Permalink | Leave a comment »

More on the Great Google Crash of 2009!

Sat, 16 May 2009 17:54:17 -0700

[caption id="attachment_35" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="When 5% of the Internet Dissapears: c/o Arbor Networks"]

[/caption] The graph above shows average traffic from ten top North American ISPs sending data to Google’s network. It comes via , a company who's network monitoring system spans over 100 ISPs across 17 countries. The Google Crash, which they blamed on a rouing issue that sent all of their traffic to Asia, lasted about 2 hours didn't just cause mass panic when people couldn't access their Google services like search and Gmail. It also caused transaction times at online retailers like Target.com to slow to a grinding halt (as much as 81 second load times) likely causing them to lose out on serious revenue. More on the Great Google Crash of 2009:

Permalink | Leave a comment »

What did we learn from the Google outage?

Fri, 15 May 2009 03:41:15 -0700

[caption id="attachment_39" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Google Fail Whale"]

[/caption] It sucks having all of our eggs in one basket, that's what! The general public has no idea just how dependent the web as a whole is on Google services and today was a great example of just how much sites rely on Google. So search is down. Well, that means that site owners will lose out on potential traffic and resulting leads/sales/advertising dollars during that downtime, as well as the potential future business from those clients. Google loses out on all the paid search revenue from searchers not clicking on their sponsored ads in search results (let's keep it simple and forget for a minute that Google can and will deviate from a paid campaign's daily budget to make up for the shortfall). Is this where the problem ends? Unfortunately not... A large portion of sites on the Interwebs not only rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, they also rely on Google services to generate revenue (Google Adsense) and analyze the activity on their sites (Google Analytics). Now if Google's down, these applications are of course down which means site owners can't use them. So what's the big deal? The bigger problem is these applications are executed when these non-Google websites are loaded, thus when Google's down, these sites are down. Most sites put Google Analytics code at the bottom of their pages right before the closing body tag, but Adsense code is all over sites, top, middle, bottom, etc. During today's outage, many popular sites wouldn't even load! These are just some of the things that effected site owners, but what about all of the other services we rely on Google for:

Gmail for email
YouTube for videos
Google Docs for online document storage/collaboration
Google News
Google Reader
iGoogle Homepage
Google Apps
etc. etc. etc.

Things were so crazy today that people had to resist the urge to 'Google' the issue. I went to Yahoo and did a search for 'Google Outage' and 'Google Down' with no avail. Then I used my noggin and did a search on Twitter and confirmed that I wasn't the only person experiencing an issue. Needless to say, their realtime search for 'Google Down' had tens to hundreds of updates every minute of more and more people Tweeting about the issues they were experiencing. Getting back to the issue at hand, yes, the web as a whole relies on Google way too much at this point. From site owners, to marketers, to the general users, we're all drinking the Google Kool Aid and loving every sip. Unless they keep having issues, things will continue in this fashion. However, a couple of hours of outages a year is very small in the scheme of things (greater than the 99.99% uptime most web hosts promise and more reliable than a typical corporate LAN) and with some of the most sophisticated data centers on Earth, I doubt Google will continue to experience too many hiccups...

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Google Analytics API

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:46:56 -0700

Google made the long awaited Google Analytics API publicly available to all analytics users! More info:

I really think this is a game changer for the analytics community. Expect a slew of apps to quickly become available that will give us new ways to access date, view it, and present it!

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Time to claim my name - I am Brian Hancock!

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:54:20 -0700

The new release of Google Profiles in search results inspired me to not only create my Google Profile, but also to finally create a presence on brian-hancock.com to get this site appearing in search results as well. I stupidly let my name.com without the dash expire a long time ago so I registered this last year. At least it will still rank well for my name as Google sees dashes in URLs as spaces. Anyway, I plan to update this blog occasionally with informative articles related to Internet Marketing. In the meantime, let's get this new site indexed Google!

Permalink | Leave a comment »