Meet Ken Jurina, the CEO of Epiar. I met him in Vegas, at Pubcon 2009, and interviewed him for the NVI blog. I also got to hang out with him a bit the night before this was shot. Ken is truly a fun loving guy, and I think we all had a good time.

While most of the people that I talked to at Pubcon told me what to do, Ken decided to discuss what not to do — specifically in the world of PPC. He went into the importance of negative keywords when you’re managing a PPC campaign. In addition to sharing how a good negative keyword list will bolster your ROI just as much as a targeted keyword list, he also touched upon a few tricks he uses for coming up with that negative keyword list. Finally, he went into the emergence of Bing and how the new search engine might affect how PPC advertisers deal with negative keywords.

I’ve been in SEM in some form or another for about 5 years now, and there’s always been this guy how SEM peeps have a love-hate relationship with. His name is Matt Cutts, and he’s the head of Google’s Webspam Team.

You see, SEMs love him because he drops subtle hints on how Google might indexing content, but they hate him because it’s his personal mission to make sure that people don’t rank for anything they are not absolutely relevant for. The trouble for us SEMs is that we set out to become the most relevant result by using search engines to first convincing the consumer that we’re the most relevant.

It’s all terribly circular, but sometimes life is illogical that way ;)

Anyway, I recently got to meet Matt for a few minutes at Pubcon 2009. I was vlogging the event for NVI, I happen to stumble on Matt, he was super chill, and so I talked him into a quick interview. In this first half, Matt tells us the story of how he got his new haircut.

In this second half of our chat, Matt gets down to business. He discusses what spammers are up to these days, and how their exploiting open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal to spam the web with dodgy content. He also offers some advice on how to prevent spammers from hacking your site.