SEO on The Apprentice?

October 1, 2005

in Google/SEO

Over at SEW they noticed that one of the candidates on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart is an SEO. His name is David Karandish. I hope he’s a white-hat. :) Small world–it looks like RobS knows him. Rob, if you see David, please make sure that he doesn’t have domains like current-mortgage-interest-rates-mortgage-amortization-calculator-home-equity-loans.biz or do a bunch of unsavory stuff with his domains. :)

{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }

Steve October 1, 2005 at 11:17 am

Whats wrong with domains with 20+ keywords in them? :)

Jennifer Sullivan October 1, 2005 at 11:42 am

That is very interesting. SEO goes hollywood…weeeeeeeeeee.

Harith October 1, 2005 at 12:14 pm

Hi Matt

glad-to-see-you-posting-again-but-wish-to-see-more-SEO-stuff-and-a-weather-report-if-possible.biz :-)

Have a great weekend!

Robert October 1, 2005 at 3:20 pm

I heard he is Black Hat SEO from someone that talked to him at Webmaster World conference.

c October 1, 2005 at 5:51 pm

Normally I see most google true updates to the algo as benifitual to the consumers/searchers however your recent updated is to the contrary. I do not know what update/filter added to google’s algo but its hurting quality sites. Some of the top sites that I visted through your SE has completly dropped in the rankings and one of my sites have completely dropped in your rankings. These are for non-competitive terms with results in the xxxx-xxxxx.

ModemMike October 1, 2005 at 6:12 pm

Hmmm, at least one person is watching Martha’s apprentice :)

PhilC October 2, 2005 at 7:28 am

“… as the owner and creator of … a mortgage information services company”

I think you got it in one, Matt :)

zen October 2, 2005 at 10:07 am

Talking about SEO, Matt is google doing something about refferal and comment spamers who target Blog. They are stupid SEO and take up huge bandthwidth. All that they want is to get links to increase their page rank! Many people had given up blogging because they can’t and don’t know how to stop these spammer from hitting their blog.
One more question do Blogger.com users has this problem?

Hope this question are not off tropics :p

Joe Hunkins October 2, 2005 at 10:32 am

>

Matt – I hope you’ll take some time to consider the fact that many, many sites have no idea why they’ve been filtered out of Google results despite emails stating “no penalty”. For every blackhat there are probably 10 “confused” whitehat publishers who have had site wide filtering applied.

When I’ve talked to search engineers at conferences it’s clear they have specific ideas about what constitutes “appropriate results”, yet they can’t share those specifics for fear of SEO manipulation. The collateral damage/mystery filtering problem is growing based on WebmasterWorld posts.

David Karandish October 2, 2005 at 1:07 pm

Now Matt, of course I would be white hat. ;-)

Paul Avery October 3, 2005 at 5:05 am

considering his home page (last name +.com) has a PR of ZERO… I would say he has run a fowl of Google. Placing my bet on him being a black hat.

TallTroll October 3, 2005 at 5:20 am

LOL, I hope he’s a blackhat… that’d be funnier, watching him explain to Martha that her Web strategy sucks, because she’s only trying to get the #1 for a big term, not the top 50…

Brian G October 3, 2005 at 10:03 am

Hi Matt,
I saw David’s Bio a few weeks back and also noticed a comment posted over at Aaron Wall’s SEObook.com blog about it. Seems that a lot of SEM’s nowadays have at least one or two of those sketchy domains in their ’skeleton closest.’ However, I don’t see many of those long winded 4 and 5 word phrase domains over the past few Google indexes (thank God). If David had any then perhaps they are deindexed now :)

I was interested to know how any of the Apptrentice candidates still manage their businesses from afar, especially the ones making well into the six figures. My wife kept telling me to interview for the apprentice for the current Apprentice series. I said, “What business owner has the time for that (unless, of course, NBC is paying them a salary)?”

Joseph Morin October 3, 2005 at 11:00 am

Actually Matt,

David is a friend of mine also and had asked me to have you look at one of his sites that is no longer coming up in Google for some reason…

;)

Joe

Mike October 3, 2005 at 11:55 pm

I remember the old days when no one knew what seo meant. Not they’re on TV ;)

Scott Fish - Fish SEO October 5, 2005 at 8:40 pm

As a huge Trump and Apprentice Fan – This is really cool to see!
I really have to wonder how much he knows about marketing the types of things that Martha would have him doing. Maybe he’ll through up some BH pages for Martha Stewart’s site. :)

Rob Snell October 5, 2005 at 11:22 pm

Howdy, Matt! I’ll tell him. I’m actually up in St. Louis in Mr. Karandish’s neck of the woods for a couple more days before I head back to Mississippi.

Question: Were your ears burning last Friday about 1:30 pm PT? I was a guest presenter in San Francisco doing my SEO / PPC / Conversion Rate Show & Tell to a bunch of Y! Store owners at Mike & Istvan’s RTML course and I was talking about you. I think I said something like “Even if Matt Cutts was standing right around that corner, I’d still tell you to link {blah blah blah}…” and then I get all these emails today. Funny!

I think my point was to make sure retailers used internal anchor text extremely well between related and/or competing products to make sure the engines knew EXACTLY what a site is all about, and someone was asking if it was too aggressive to have more than one link on a site to a product page, and, well, I said what I said.

BTW Please tell your UK Wildcats to take easy on my MSU Bullpups when SEC basketball fires up this spring.

— Rob

Irishwonder October 8, 2005 at 9:15 am

And just how would it hurt you personally, Matt, if he was a black hat? Please explain yourself.

little webmaster October 10, 2005 at 3:35 pm

I agree with Joe that for each black hat seo there are 10 confused seo who are not aware why their site was filtered. This confusion does not come from ignorance all the time. But it also comes from many irregular things happening at google. You never know at which point of time this is a filter at work or a loss of data.

Walkman October 11, 2005 at 5:17 pm

Matt,
how about an entry about supplemental pages and if they effect ranks or not. Essentially, are penalties based on what shows on suppl. pages too ?

If so, you guys should revise that on the algo. It’s simply not fair to be penalized for dupes, or ROS links if Google decides to bring them up from a year ago.

Please take a look. Seems like many at WMW are worried too

Avi Wilensky October 23, 2005 at 8:20 am

Creative Marketing Buzz!

A success for both Karandish and I!

It was actually me who leaked the news of David Karandish to the SEO/SEM Press ;-) . My sister, who met David at WW – New Orleans, and chatted up a conversation with him – recognized him instantly on the first episode. She called me immediately, all excited.

I confirmed it, and dropped Danny Sullivan and a few others a note. Of course they all blogged the news. Voila – instant relevant & quality links to both Karanish’s and my own site, from the strongest SEO/SEM sites in the biz!

Marc October 27, 2005 at 2:10 am

I didnt realise that having keywords in your domain is a bad thing?

my site http://www.vitamins-herbs-nutrition.com

Surely there is nothing wrong with that, it explains exactly what I want my site to cover?

Or is it sites that have like cheap-mortgage-loans-payday-loans.com

??

Where is the line drawn?

Luis Alberto Barandiaran October 27, 2005 at 10:16 am

I didn’t watched the episode so now I’m confused… was he dismissed for saying that Martha S. wasn’t on the top results, or was it for something entirely else?

In any case, congrats to David and best of luck in all your endeavours!

Luis Alberto

paisley October 27, 2005 at 12:19 pm

i smell a lot of bullshit…

i.e. drives a ‘94 Dodge Shadow as of Oct. 1st.
http://auto.consumerguide.com/Auto/Used/reviews/full/index.cfm/id/2027/act/usedcarreviewphotos/

From NBC website:
“The American Mensa member now earns six figures as the owner and creator of an internet advertising company and a mortgage information services company”

mortgage website down…
encore-designs.com – no where.

lendingexpo.net… as of Thursday July 10, 2003 PR 0
see http://parks.wustl.edu/google/dkecongoogle.html
as of today PR 0

has anyone looked at lendingexpo.net? sooo f’ing spammy…

so the kid got on the apprentice.. congrats!
please don’t compare legitmate business people in the Internet marketing industry with this punk.

bullshit? or is it just that my nose is clogged up and I think I smell bullshit?

oh.. and for the kids… Webcrawler was the old google.. some of us have been doing this since 95.

Web Site Hosting Directory October 27, 2005 at 1:08 pm

votes for Davids…

Adam Boalt October 29, 2005 at 8:09 pm

does anyone know the name of the internet advertising company that David Karandish owns?

Did you see this? March 27, 2006 at 10:46 am

I saw this on another site as a link. To funny..

http://www.mattcuttsisapunk.com

Leave a Comment

If you have a question about your site specifically or a general question about search, your best bet is to post in our Webmaster Help Forum linked from http://google.com/webmasters

If you comment, please use your personal name, not your business name. Business names can sound salesy or spammy, and I would like to try people leaving their actual name instead.

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post:

Next post: