Sigh… Every few years, there’s a renewed effort in the worlds of shoddy journalism, clickbait, and cheap pageviews to claim the death of SEO. Recently, a few articles, a handful of folks on Twitter, and some presentations I’ve come across have been using this chart to PROVE that this time, SEO really is dying: Google Trends…
The False Narratives We Tell Ourselves
I carry a story around in my head. It’s not a true story. But it’s a story that’s hard to escape. It goes something like this: I started a company with my Mom when I was in my early twenties. We made lots of mistakes and went deeply into debt. We didn’t tell my Dad…
On Being Wrong and Not Knowing the Answer
There’s the naive view of expertise – the one that we all have as young people – where we think that Eddie Vedder must know absolutely everything there is to know about rock music and Peyton Manning must know more than anyone else about the game of American Football. And then, there’s the more nuanced…
The 5 Best Things I [______] this Year
It’s quiet out there on social media. I’m in San Diego with my wife’s family for the holidays, as per usual. And, as per usual, my email’s a little slower than normal, my Twitter feed a little more empty, my Google+ feed likewise. It’s nice. But then, I find myself with 30 minutes on my…
Heresy: Google and SEO Don’t Actually Change that Much
This post is going to sound like clickbait to some, irrational to others, and probably sane to only a handful of practitioners, but I think it’s a frequent and important enough topic to put out there anyway. Almost every time I’m interviewed about SEO or asked about the practice at a conference, I’m asked “how can I keep up…
Negative Self Talk and Self Deprecation
I’m not sure if I can short form blog effectively (like two of my blogging heroes – Brad & Fred), but I’m going to try a little more of that since my time to blog is so limited. While browsing my social streams today, this headline/article caught my attention: via Can You Hack Your Self…
Some Non-Obvious Advice on Thought Leadership
I don’t particularly like the phrase “thought leader” or “thought leadership” for two reasons: 1) just *thinking* about something doesn’t make you a leader, nor does being a leader enable you to simply think about things AND 2) the term has pretentious and sometimes negative associations. When I hear people describe me that way, I have a viscerally…
A Long, Ugly Year of Depression That’s Finally Fading
Yesterday morning I woke up early to speak at the Business of Software conference in Boston. It was my first time there, and it’s an exceptional group. Then, after some meetings, I spoke in the afternoon at Hubspot’s Inbound conference (thankfully just across a long skybridge that connects Boston’s World Trade Center from its Convention…
A Video About Independent Games Provides Surprising Insights into Marketing & the Web
Yesterday, a Mozzer shared this video with the company over an allstaff thread. I started watching, as I usually do, thinking that 1-2 minutes into the video I’d give up and get back to my email. Wrong. For 19 minutes and 5 seconds, I was captivated. The video isn’t lovely or beautifully done, but it…
If Negative SEO is Possible, We Need an Irrefutable, Public Example
There are a tremendous number of claims from across the search marketing world that negative SEO (the practice of knocking someone else’s website/page(s) out of search results by pointing spam links at them) is not only possible, but has been done. One of the most recent and, IMO, most credible came via this SERoundtable post…