? Competing online is not an easy task these-days but having a strong web development team to work with is more than half the battle!

? More in this network of renewed websites to follow in the coming weeks!

www.EndOfLifeVehicles.com

I have noticed that many of the job advertisements are asking for a slew of qualifications that are often not found together. Many are asking for 5+ years of digital marketing experience along with expert knowledge of HTML, PHP, Photoshop and project management. This is like looking for an expert plumber but asking that they also be a professional electrician and have experience as an architect.

Digital marketing as a career is less than a decade old and has only been taught in most higher education settings for half that time. It takes a large commitment to become an expert and certainly leaves little time to conquer a programming language or two along the way. The PetValu position has been posted on and off for at least a year now, I had a gentleman from a recruiting agency try very hard to coax me into an interview. I asked some questions, really more curious than anything else and I found out that the job entailed a lot of responsibility – expert digital marketing and people management skills but only paid a maximum of $85k, while this is likely in the 70th percentile or higher of remuneration for this job title, it is certainly much lower than would be needed to find someone with the skills and experience to handle the job.

Actually, SEO job availability in general has been up! This is good news for newer graduates looking to break into the job market.

I guess only time will help but I would love to see human resource departments get a better handle on how to hire for this type of position and with competition this fierce I would expect salaries to rise.

Content creation is on the rise and everyone seems to be finally realizing that in order to rank in the search engines these days you not only need optimized content but it actually has to be interesting to read for human eyes! Thankfully the search engines are figuring out how to read past computer algorithm regurgitated junk content.

The secret of digital marketing is starting to filter down from the mega corporations.  Medium and small business are realizing if they don’t have their content optimized and move their advertising budget to the online arena they will be left behind.  It will be an upward swing in the years to come as the importance of digital marketing continues to rise.

With countless companies in the usa taking visits in cash flow, there may be one that will be in fact booming and supporting individuals save money concurrently. The auto these recycling marketplace isn’t getting smaller, its expanding and there are many main reasons driving this increase in business. A vey important just one requires salvaging the average consumer a considerable amount of money car repairs.

Just brutal and why any company would want their website or brand associated with an article like this is beyond me.

Here are the results so far

The website usually gets 200-300 visits a day.  The 86k requests I could not serve kinda sucks but I was not really expecting this to go as viral as it did.  I will update this after the 24 hour mark.

30 hour update!

Referers.

It seems the gossip around the blogesphere is mixed, many think Schmit did a good job at deflection the accusations and many more think Google is going to be facing an official inquiry by the FTC shortly.  My personal belief is that Google will come up with a proposal to self-regulate because they definitely don’t want the government dictating what they can do.

Forbes had a good article that was mostly against Google and some of the statements were very powerful, like this one:

The grand disconnect at the Google hearing was that Google was oblivious to the concern that they represented their business as non-threatening with no competitive conflict of interest in order to gain content owners trust and business, the bait, and then they violated that trust by flipping their business model mid-game and switching to be the most serious competitive threat these companies could face – all while publicly denying that they are now competitors at all.

Full article here http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2011/09/22/googles-bait-switch-deception-exposed-at-hearing/

This whole bait and switch conspiracy might be a tad far-reaching but there are lots of factual examples to back it up.  I think Google would be smart to make a move to bury this whole thing before it reaches the general population because soon the pitch-forks will come out.

Read the full submission by Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp here.

Around a year and a half ago Google unleashed its’ wrath on general web directories.  With bolts of lightning (not quite but just as painful to the directory owners) it struck down the page rank of some of the best know directories for buying links.  Let’s see how they have faired 18 months later.

http://www.ewebpages.org/ still sitting at page rank 0

http://cdhnow.com/ stuck on page rank 0

http://www.dirspace.com/ zero it is

http://www.linkforever.net/ zero page rank bar love

and it goes on and on….it seems that almost all of these directories have remained in Google’s ‘bad’ list and in addition to having their page rank stipped they also don’t rank for their domain names.

I thought it might be fun to take a look at where they are now?

http://www.ewebpages.org is sitting with a healthy PR4 and is looking like it gets regular traffic

http://cdhnow.com/ is also back up to a PR4 and it looks somewhat active

http://www.dirspace.com/ also has a PR4 but is looking mildly neglected

http://www.linkforever.net/ chimes in with a PR2 and seems to get the odd submission

A quick peek at my first directory (I don’t own it anymore) www.2ListNow.com and it is still holding on with PR3 but the details pages seem broken.

All in all it looks like web directories have made it through the storm and I still think they have some limited value in building backlinks.