Articles by Ian Lurie

Marketing wasn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game. Your competitor bought a TV commercial, you bought a TV commercial. They bought radio time, you bought radio time. Even if they bought every available second of radio time on one station, you could buy time on another, or go to a completely different medium. That promoted [...]

The University of Washington Web Council invited me to talk about search and internet marketing yesterday. This was my presentation. It steals liberally from lots of great marketers, like Seth Godin, David Ogilvy and John Caples. Oh, and Gary Gygax. I gotta give credit where credit is due. But who can do marketing these days [...]

I’ve talked about data visualization a few times now. Every time, I change the presentation, adding stuff, tweaking it, etc. This is the latest version. It’s not annotated (sorry) but it’s pretty self-explanatory. Have a look: There’s also a growing link bundle here that has all the stuff I reference. Oh, and hey: If you [...]

100% pure ranty Monday goodness: 1: Some of us know what we’re doing It’s true! You can find internet marketers who know what they’re doing with a simple question: “Do you guarantee your work?” If they say yes, flee immediately. If they say no, follow with “Can you do link building for me?” If they [...]

Ever had a massive, life-changing epiphany? Me neither. However, I’ve slowly reached the conclusion that we’re doing SEO all wrong. Not in the do-real-marketing sense, or the we-need-to-change-the-name sense. More in the wow-did-we-ever-screw-the-pooch-this-time sense. After 17+ years of beating my head against walls like IT departments, branding teams and disbelieving CFOs, I’ve figured out why: [...]

I just got off-stage after rambling about machine learning, link building and Penguin reinclusion requests. Nice long blog post coming right here, later, but for now, here are the slides: Machine learning and link spam – how hard can it be? from Ian Lurie And here’s a link to the link bundle: portent.co/machine-spam

When you look at over 250,000 links from Penguin-penalized sites, you learn a thing or two. We put together a report based on an analysis of a lot of links, and found that: While folks like to portray Google as fumbling their anti-spam efforts and missing many offenders, the big G may simply be prioritizing. [...]

Here’s the video from yesterday’s webinar, 30 Tips for Awesome Presentations, in case you missed it and would like to hear my dulcet tones: And the slides: And the audio, for all you podcaster types: I’ll be uploading a transcript on Monday or Tuesday!

Last night I gave a presentation at the Seattle IA/UX meetup. Good pizza, plus I got to say ‘toilet bowl of death,’ which is one of my favorite phrases. IA, UX and SEO from Ian Lurie I know IA/UX and SEO are supposed to hate each other. What I don’t know is why. We’re all [...]

Short version of this article: If you’ve been penalized for unnatural links by Google, either manually or under Penguin, you need to cut deep or you won’t recover. Now, the long version, with examples: Here’s a joke I learned in hebrew school, an unmentionable number of decades ago: Three guys are walking down the sidewalk. [...]