Between the Sweets Review

I was very excited to hear about the new restaurant opening here in my hometown of Coral Springs, Florida. The menu looked very promising and being the fat person that loves all things american and fried I had to stop by for my experience. If you like check them out here.

I decided to go with my good friend Brandon as him and I go to different spots all the time. I told him about the place and the menu and to try a various amount of foods to give the place a chance.

Let the Party Begin

Or so we thought.... we were confused of the concept of getting up to get our own drinks. We thought the concept was interesting but almost made us feel like we were in a Chipoltle concept..... Not to say this was a horrible or the main reason we didn't get to enjoy our experience, we were just confused on the concept. So we got our drinks and began to first open up with an appetizer.

We ordered the Buffalo Pita Nachos. Again the concept seem interesting having fried chicken, buffalo ranch sauce, blue cheese, and pita chips. We first noticed how quick the turn around was and was concerned and impressed. We both said, "cheers" and began our first bite.... and probably last.

The food was needless to say awful. I mean horrible. The blue cheese was raw, sauce was cold, I could go on. How about the fact the pita chips weren't even crispy and tasted doughy still. We immediately decided that it can only get better - right?

We decided not to complain as we wanted to get the full experience possible to see how the rest would go. The thing that confused us was it wasn't busy at all on a weekday at noon. Which gave us a red flag as well. So let's go on to the entree.

Entree Time

Brandon ordered the B-T Avacodo and I did the Super Grilled Cheese to play it on the safe side. Both of us got the chips. Our food again came pretty quickly, when we finished we both described the good and bad of each.

The good - chips were crispy and felt fresh. The grilled cheese was super cheesy and had various flavors. Avocado on the B-T was fresh and tasted good.

The BAD - Oh man, how to go on? Well certain part of the cheese, mainly  the smoked mozzarella was cold and chunky, You would think a grilled cheese would be properly temperature to melt. The bread itself was just not impressive and probably the concept of it being a waffle isn't the best.... But that's just a personal preference and nothing against the food. Brandon explained the sandwich was just too bland and mainly overflowed with the avocado. I wish I could get more into detail but unfortunately I even myself can save the $11 price and just make it at home.... What a joke.

Verdict

The only grace that saved this place was the Smore Dip. I would recommend this place as a desert and highly recommend to rather save your money and at least take it home. Oh and a good note is never EVER take any of this food to go. If you end up placing an order to go, it gets worse. You are better off eating it as fresh as possible as the food just simply tastes awful and soggy taking home, save yourself the trouble.....

Also if you want to know more information on an inspection: (I am not claiming they failed, this is just public information shared freely. I take no responsibility in slandering any company.)

http://data.tallahassee.com/restaurant-inspections/broward/between-the-sweets-inc/sea1623816/6179136/

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Do Social Media Signals Help Rank in SEO?

I have been asked this a lot and I thought it was time to share my thoughts. Before I do, let me present to you what Matt Cutts says about Social Media signals and if they play a role. Well you guessed it, the answer is no. At least from what he says…..

Now let’s put yourselves in his shoes, do you really want to reveal the true works of SEO and any new signals/changes that may help? Of course not! They will spam the hell out of it and make it useless like guest blogging has become over the years. 

If you want to be the  popular search engine, you want to show something we all know is part of SEO, great content. Well what is considered great content? Content that people share and discuss about. Google knows from referall sources where traffic comes from. Even with Share This tools we can see what is or isn’t popular. So for those who think otherwise, that’s fine. I mean Matt Cutts did say it didn’t play a role.

Some interesting findings in my history of this theory was I took two pages with about the same idea and content. I sent one with traffic from referral sources and tactics with Reddit, sharing all my social media channels etc. And the other I just left as is. After about a few days I was able to determine my more popular page was indexed quicker, higher positioned and actually started getting natural comments and shares. Even my rich snippets of authorship were showing. 

For the other content, it was indexed after two days after, no little to any traffic. No rich snippets, and couldn’t be found in the top 10 pages of rankings. So to just say social media doesn’t affect SEO, I can’t say for certain that is true. 

There is however a part in Matt's video that explains in the future he expects Google to be able to better identify who is writing the content and where and place a more importance based on the influence an individual may have. So perhaps Klout score may be some thing to consider as a good source of where you stand. 

 

What kinds of social media signals have you seen on your website or blog? Has the popularity and sharing helped you? Did you see any natural comments or links come to you? Or maybe you feel that social media is just no cooralation to SEO period…. Hey I look at both sides of the fence and totally agree with all the positive and negative thoughts about this.

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Are EDU Backlinks Needed? Internal Case Findings.

I wanted to bring up an important point my fellow employee Daniel Rosenstein wrote earlier in an e-mail for work. I really thought this should be brought up since people today still feel that .edu links are gonna take higher priority than any other back link effort. Let me be honest, the findings Daniel found are incredible, and hopefully you can learn something too. Here are his findings:

Per our discussion about the importance of EDU backlinks. There are good edu backlinks to get, but to help educate everyone on the team, I wanted to point out what some people are doing to get backlinks to EDU’s and things we need to avoid so we avoid getting penalized in the future.

To my point earlier, EDU backlinks can be helpful but it depends on different factors, including the relevancy to our site or page, authority of the school, and what page it is on the site.

Below is a EDU that has a bunch of links on it, one of them pointing  to investpedia.com.  The link is a deep link on a subdomain of the site, the page looks spammy (it says on the page, “this site is under construction”, and the url also looks spammy. This page does not look like a trusted page on the site.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/%7Ewidjaja/

This is an example of  bad .edu link to get even though Berkeley is an authority school.

The problem with EDU links is that a number of shady SEO’s in the past have paid webmasters on EDU sites to put their link on the site or created fake EDU online schools to get EDU backlinks. Google knows this and therefore devalued a lot of .EDU links. I doubt many universities watch every page on their site.  For some universities, they allow students or non authority people to create their own pages on the site.

This link even to Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities,  has a redirect in their blog link, http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrick/lowratesauto.html

, really spammy. Their blog either got hacked or their webmaster is getting paid to do a redirect to another link. So getting backlinks from a subdomain or blog that has little editorial review probably has no value.

Here is another example of a  bad .edu link, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lpt/links.htm . This page has thousands of links on it and there isn’t any valuable to this page. Why is the purpose of linking to all these sites? We want to stay away from putting our link on a page that appears spammy and/or has thousands of links on it. We want to stay away on getting on a page that  has thousands of links, it doesn’t look like there was much editorial decision making if any.

Below are examples of .edu backlinks from our competitors.  Majority of competitor links are on resource pages:

I kept this part confidential based in our competitor's and non disclosure agreement.

  

So remember not all EDU backlinks are equal and some are really bad and just because it has a .edu TLD, doesn’t give it special authority because it has an .EDU as the end of the domian. Google says about EDU links are as follows:

“In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get “additional credibility from Google.” Because of that, the whole topic of working especially hard to talk webmasters of these domains into linking to your sites seems a bit problematic…”

Getting .edu links from authority EDU sites that are finance related are good, but a low authority .edu site or an .edu from an agricultural school won’t help us. Getting links from government sites, high authority financial sites like Forbes and high authority news sites like the Wall Street Journal are probably more valuable to us than many .edu links that are out there. I do think that we get backlinks from some of the top business schools main site, will be good.

 

When it comes to backlinks diversity of high authority and diversity are important. We should not just focus on getting EDU links since they are not more important than high authority finance sites. We don’t want to only get the same backlinks over and over otherwise it looks like we are trying to game the system, and Google looks for these type of things and could lead to a penalty. There should be a purpose of people linking to us. Google keeps saying links she be natural from people liking our content, not us trying to force or pay people to put a link on their site. We need to focus more on “link earning” and not “link building” through authority/compelling content and good content promotion. When you check out the bad links mentioned in this email you start to understand why Google has cracked down on link building and nullified the value of many back links out there including EDU links.

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Looks Like T-Mobile & WebDesign.org - Link Buying

As if this wasn't an obvious reasons from Google's Policies, you know that buying and exchanging links are a "no no"....

To have a public back and forth discussion on a social media platform for others to see is so bad! I guess we know someone will be fired soon in their SEO strategies!

What makes it worse Matt Cutts apparently saw this as well. What do you think is going to transpire cause of this? Honestly, I wouldn't be suprised....

There discussion can be found here.



I was able to get in touch with them and bring this up, apparently they are "saddened" and wondering why this is happening. Well I hope Matt Cutts takes this seriously and looks further into this. If companies of this size are trying to do these sneaky tactics, they deserve to be punished like the rest of us regardless of our size or wallets..... Here was our discussion:

Let me know your thoughts about all this, do you feel they deserve punishment? Perhaps because it was an outsource or individual they shouldn't? Till next time!

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Does Mobile Search Results Affect Desktop?

This discussion today on www.seroundtable.com got me thinking and dug into a little bit deeper into the search results. Now I didn't find anything that could really verify any of these beliefs but be sure to give your opinions below.


If you are interested in the discussion, you can read it here.

In other news, I decided to start doing some video blogs about discussions, topics, questions, etc. I want to know your thoughts and always looking to connect in some way. I hope to do some more editing and being able to keep you informed of all things SEO, Paid Search, and Social Media. I do apologize for not writing or being active on my site as much, we just launched debt.com and work is going crazy! Hopefully I can have some more down time. Anyways, enjoy the quick video!

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Great Twitter Program to Build Influencers: Target Pattern

If it’s one particular program I have been invited too and enjoyed recently it’s most certainly this one!

Target Pattern is a great way to build your Twitter audience and actually have the engagement we so desperately want. I can’t express how quickly not only my targeted audience has become but how when I share my ideas and content how it’s shared throughout. 

I have seen an increase of around 30% of my referral traffic from Twitter ever since using this program. I must say I was quite skeptical at first, but was proven wrong!

One of the milestone’s was being followed and actually engaged with one of the most influential social media woman, @SandiKrakowski. She was named the top 20 woman in social media by Forbes Magazine. To be even more excited I been invited to write an article to become a influencer in the Paid search area!

I must say if it wasn’t for Target Pattern I have no idea how my reach couldn’t have made it. I am sure other programs are similar and had some great success, but I wanted to share my thoughts and success with it!

(If it's one thing I cannot stress enough is how SEO will now be about the influence and weight you carry for being a trusted source. If you can build a genuine and organic following of others who are in your industry, who wouldn't want to share your thoughts!? )

The payment plans are most certainly affordable, you can view them here. If you have any questions or maybe you had personal experiences like mine, let me know! Thanks guys!

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