Milind- Hello listeners. Welcome to the show. There are many self proclaimed SEO gurus in this industry. But our guest today is undoubtedly one of the sharpest minds in the Search industry. He is quick witted and is admired by many. Please welcome Dean Bloomfield, popularly known as Digital Ghost.

Dean welcome to the show.

Dean - Google is the premier search engine on the web, they are the gatekeepers. They deliver the traffic, perhaps there is an issue right now with paid links. I like the fact that Google really seems committed to relevancy and that they provide good set of search results. They are not as easy to game as they were in the past. That’s a good thing, it’s good for the industry as well. You know they have to stay relevant or then they will not be the traffic providers, it will fall to someone else.

Dean - Yahoo, mmmm, I like Yahoo because they seem to be a lot more webmaster friendly, they seem to have a bit more transparency. I would say that the quality of their index is almost on par, and in some areas it’s better

MSN - I think they’ve to find the right direction, I don’t think they know where they’re headed yet, or even how to get there. They’re going to be competitors, and then they know they need to be in the search space, but they haven’t found the right combination of either talent or you know direction to get there. I think they can be serious contenders, but it’s going to take them a while.

Milind - Ok they are not quick on their feet as Google or maybe even Yahoo.

Dean - Well to me they are pushing on an area where they are discouraging competitors. Its okay for them to sell Links, they’ve just recently removed the AdWords networker’s ads from SERPS (I think he meant Adsense ads from SERPS). Took them quiet a while to do that, but (1) they’re not going to stop paid links, they are going to make the buyers and sellers become more sophisticated. What they want to do is create a level playing field, what they’re doing is consolidating it even further in favor of the people who stay ahead of the game. It’s much more difficult now for the average webmasters who in the past could go buy some links and create some well optimized (Pages) and actually compete.

Now everything is going to be under the ground and they won’t be able to do that. Its okay to say this is our opinion; by the same token broadcast network can say well it’s our opinion that we don’t like your Ads so you can’t advertise with us. They can’t do that, and Google’s opinion is that they don’t like paid links, that’s fine, fix your algorithm, don’t try to fix people.

Dean -Marketing…. Over the last four years SEO and SEM have become intertwined, I mean you can’t separate the two any longer, if you take on a client you have to market for them as well as take care of their SEO. I do look to see more seo’s pushing the technical aspects because it is getting more technical – for the dynamic sites – they have their own set of problems. You got issues with DNS poisoning, site hijacking and so on and I really look for seo’s to push the technical aspect to what they do.

Small to medium sized enterprises don’t have the time to deal with it, they don’t want to learn it, it’s confusing and it takes time away from what they need to be doing which is running a business.

Dean - I think that comes down to a personal choice, whether you to run your own business, I know that I had to work in affiliate marketing for a while. Personally I would much rather work with client. The sense of satisfaction I get from helping a client, get rankings is much better than if I’m working on my own sites, a lot of my own sites I just have for test purposes so that I can help clients rank.

And affiliate marketing from the very beginning has always been threatened, because now you’ve always got search engines saying look do we need ten thousand people to own these many camp. So it’s changed but it hasn’t changed significantly…

Dean - Okay, I agree with you at that. I think what you’re gonna find is that you are always going to have seo’s that… stay with affiliate marketing, I mean I’ve stayed with it even though it’s not my primary source of income.

Pharmaceutical has become an area that only the top seo’s could ever play in and it remains that way. I really expect to see SEO’s make that decision and they find themselves whether they want to be an SEO or a business owner.

If you’re optimizing your own sites, yeah, you are a seo - but for yourself. You are privately employed – that’s your business. If you’re consulting to other people, it brings a whole different perspective to it. You’re no longer just responsible for yourself, you’ve to take their (client) considerations and make decision based on that. Where I might say okay I can just smoke this domain and I don’t care – your client might not share that considerations … when (the client) might have just spent hundred thousand dollars on…

Dean- Yeah, I tend to shut myself away in my den until I’m finished with the project, I don’t communicate well in that period because until I’m finished with it, to me there is nothing to communicate. Doesn’t do me any good to call and say you know –tell the project lead “Well I’m half finished ok!”.

So I just tend to lock myself away and become a person with a single goal in mind until I complete that project.

So, I think right after I left one corporate environment, I took quite a bit of time and just worked for myself, then went in to another corporate environment and that’s truly when I realized that I don’t fit in the corporate environment, just not me!

Dean - Yeah, Google has several algorithms now, I don’t know they might have hundreds. Oh it is a same set of rules or it can be a complex set of rules. There has been some obvious flaws in Google’s algorithms from the very beginning, when it’s a link based algorithm, we’ve seen that Google finally admitted, hey ok we’ve been gamed we’ve to do something about it. You know that they introduced the no follow, which was a poor solution to that problem. I think when they first came up with the no follow that it was just the way to ease their way in to saying: ‘Hey why don’t you put this on your paid links?’

I think that’s what they openly had in mind from the very beginning. But in the end, it’s not going to solve anything; it’s just going to adversely affect the people that don’t have access to private networks that can’t keep their link buyers secret. Currently, there’s no way for an algorithm to detect a paid link if there is no mention of any words that would trigger a flag - “Sponsored Links,” “Paid Links,” “PageRank,” “Put Your Link Here,” “Free Directory,” “My Landing Page,” — Stay away from the language and you do everything through email, and keep relevant. There’s no way they can detect paid links, they know that, may not ever admit that publicly.

People tend to gave them a lot of credit, it’s almost like they think there is some magic box at Google they get answers to all these difficult challenges, and it just doesn’t work that way. I don’t care how many PhDs they have working on a project, if you know we were in an interview right now and you call me and say, “Hey Dean, I’ll give you a thousand dollar to link on this page and I said yes, and it was relevant, there’s no way in the world though they’ll be ever able to say “hey that’s a paid link – Discount that”.